Annihilation (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  I hesitated before I told Marvin to open the channel. Hoon was in a much better position than we were to know what had happened down there. Very possibly, Marvin had turned the suction effect up a notch, shifting the controls to high.

  “Aren’t you going to talk to him, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Open the channel and start translating, Marvin.”

  “Channel open.”

  “Professor Hoon,” I said, doing my best to sound upbeat. “We’ve made some preliminary tests, and—”

  “I’m astounded,” said Hoon, interrupting me. “All of my academic staff have been forced to reevaluate your ratings. It’s obvious to me that our screening systems are inadequate. We’ve misjudged you by a startling margin.”

  “Well,” I began, uncertain where he was going with this, “I can safely tell you I’ve been misjudged more than once.”

  “Yes. Your seemingly simplistic, emotional responses to stimuli had us fooled. Despite measuring at a nearly bestial level of reasoning, your species has performed a miraculous feat of engineering. We’re trying to explain it, and would like your help in investigating the matter.”

  “Um, okay. We can do that. But first let me ask: the results are positive?”

  There was a hesitation on the channel of several seconds.

  “You’re response casts suspicion on your accomplishments, Colonel Riggs. It indicates a lack of confidence in the results, which in turn indicates a lack of competency in the instigator.”

  “Look,” I said, becoming annoyed again despite my intentions. “We’ve performed an experimental attempt to improve your conditions. We don’t have the same level of equipment at the scene to measure the results. I’m just asking you for confirmation.”

  “But you omitted a key element of the confirmation query. You have not asked us to confirm a specific change in the situation. I’m afraid this is a familiar pattern. When an apprentice queries his master in this fashion, it often indicates one of two possibilities: either he cheated, or he got lucky.”

  I looked at Marvin. The Lobsters had nailed it this time. If we had solved their problem, we’d both cheated and gotten lucky. I didn’t want to tell them that, however. For one thing, this race bugged the hell out of me. But also, they might be less grateful and willing to work with us if they knew the truth.

  “Professor Hoon,” I said sternly, “we in Star Force are unaccustomed to accusations of incompetence. Let’s review the facts: you’ve been dealing with a catastrophic technical problem for an extended period of time. You failed to solve the problem or to mitigate it in any significant way. You called us for help, we arrived to render assistance, and you attacked us.”

  “We’ve explained our reasoning. Repetition of points previously made is not customary for our species.”

  “I’m not asking you to repeat anything. I’m making a point. Despite your failures and your thoughtless attack, we’ve managed to fix your technical problems within hours. After all this, your prejudice against Star Force has led you to yet another folly: Rather than graciously assuming the role of the student at his master’s feet, you’ve persisted in coming up with fantasies. Here at Star Force, we deal in measurable facts. Now, as the Principal Investigator in this experiment, I’ve requested twice for confirmation of critical data.”

  “You’ve not specified what data you are looking for.”

  “I want a raw report. Specifying what we expect to see will bias your input.”

  “Ah,” said Professor Hoon, as if in sudden understanding. “I apologize. We’ve misconstrued your intentions. I apologize again for our suspicious line of questioning. You are correct. In this situation we must assume the lowly role of apprentice, despite the fact we’re unaccustomed to it. Perhaps there is bias in our system. Interesting. I will demand a full analysis of our entire interchange later today—but never mind that now. The key fact is that the ring in the bottom of our sea is no longer transferring liquid mass off-planet.”

  I smiled, and everyone around me smiled. Only Kwon leaned back in his chair, bored. The rest of them were breathing sighs of relief.

  Sandra got up out of her chair, walked to Marvin and hugged his chassis.

  “You pulled it off, you crazy robot,” she said.

  Surprised, Marvin lofted his cameras and viewed her from every angle, but he didn’t flinch away. I chuckled. It was probably his first hug from a real, live girl.

  “You really do like nerds, don’t you?” Kwon asked her.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so I ignored it. I considered the situation with Hoon. It was time to press for concessions from him, I decided. When would it be a better time? We’d just saved a third of their population.

  “Professor Hoon,” I said officiously. “Now that the current crisis has been averted, I would ask you to consider another matter.”

  “I’m very busy, but I’ll allow the interruption on this occasion.”

  “You’ll be glad you took time from your busy schedule to listen to this, Hoon. I’m offering you a golden opportunity, right here, right now. Switch allegiances. Leave the service of the Macros and join our federation of worlds. Star Force will be officially obliged to protect you once you do so. Cast off your people’s chains. Be a free biotic species. What do you say?”

  “An odd appeal,” Hoon said. “We are currently at peace with the machines. Why would we declare war on them by allying with your organization?”

  “Because the machines are traitors. They turned on that ring and drained your oceans, you realize that, don’t you?”

  “Obviously. Star Force lacks the intellectual and technical capacity to have managed this achievement.”

  I almost pointed out to him that if we’d just turned it off, we might have been the ones to turn it on, but stopped myself. I decided that wouldn’t help my argument.

  “The machines aren’t at peace with you, not really. They have an agreement with you, and will stick to the letter of it, but not the spirit. They will try with regularity to circumvent it and destroy your population, even while demanding you fight their wars for them. We’ve beaten the machines time and again, including doing great harm to your forces. If you’re in this war anyway, why not join the winning side?”

  “There are compelling points to your arguments, Colonel. But I’m afraid we must deny your request.”

  “Just like that? Don’t you have a committee to report to, or something? Shouldn’t the others be consulted? I’m surprised you have the unilateral power to make such a high level policy decision.”

  “I don’t. Not as an individual. But it was previously determined you were likely to make this type of request at some point, as you’ve made it before. At our committee hearings days ago, before we summoned you to aid us, it was decided to refuse your offer. The vote was unanimous, by the way.”

  I rested my chin on my hands. These people were tiring to deal with. “Can I at least hear your reasoning for the decision?”

  “Certainly, although be forewarned, we aren’t interested in pleas. The decision is final. We’ve carefully examined the size of your fleet, and judged it to be inadequate to stop the next Macro wave of ships.”

  “What about our battle station?” I asked. “We’ve built it up and the fortification can withstand an assault even bigger than the last one.”

  “Agreed,” Hoon said. “Unfortunately, that does not help us or alter our calculus. The battle station protects the Eden system, but does nothing to stop a Macro invasion of the Thor system.”

  He was right, I knew. He was making the same argument Miklos had made to me days ago. We’d built a tremendous bulwark at a critical bottleneck, but it didn’t solve all our problems. The fortress couldn’t move. If a fight occurred somewhere else, it would be useless.

  “All right,” I said. “I understand your reasoning. But if matters should change, if there should be a clear change in the balance of power, I would strongly suggest
you reconsider. Star Force doesn’t want to go to war with your people again. That’s why we’re out here saving your bacon today.”

  “‘Saving our bacon’ is an odd and potentially offensive reference. That portion of your comments has been deleted from your statement to make it more comprehensible.”

  “It’s an idiom,” I explained. “If you witness shifts in the balance of power in the near future, I want to you to reconsider our offer. Make your decisions very carefully.”

  “We always do.”

  The conversation went on for a minute or two, but the critical elements had been covered. We’d saved their world, but they weren’t ready to join us despite the fact their current allies were trying to kill them.

  I understood their reasoning, to a degree. They knew they were weak militarily and what they really wanted was some kind of neutrality. Unfortunately for them, neither

  Star Force nor the Macros were in a peace-loving mood.

  As the crisis seemed at least temporarily averted, I headed for the mess hall to eat the first real meal I’d had in days. Then I had a shower and flopped onto my bunk.

  Sandra joined me a while later and we had celebratory sex. Today hadn’t gone the way I’d thought it might, and I was happy about that. So was she. Somehow, she figured I was a hero now, and Marvin was an even bigger hero.

  “That robot is the strangest thing,” she said. “He’s a traitor one minute and a savior of billions the next. I really don’t know what to think of him.”

  “Well, you’re probably trying to understand him as a human personality. He really isn’t one of us. That’s not entirely a bad thing, but you can never forget it while dealing with him. His motivations are his alone. He’s effectively a species of one.”

  “When you talk like that, it makes me think we should quietly turn him off.”

  I looked at her in surprise. Her head was resting on my chest, and her eyes looked up at me seriously. I could tell she meant it.

  “Why?” I asked. “You just got done telling me he was a big hero.”

  “Sometimes he is, but sometimes he’s evil. Remember what he did when experimenting on the Centaurs? On their young ones?”

  “I try not to think about that.”

  “Yeah, me too. But something you said forced me to start thinking: You said he was as species of one. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. What if he decides to reproduce? To copy himself? What if there were a thousand Marvins—or even a million? He’s much smarter than the Nanos or the Macros. An army of Marvins might kill us all, if they decided it was for the best. Maybe they’d do it just for curiosity’s sake, for the fun of cutting us up and poking around in our guts.”

  We both fell silent after that. A few minutes later, Sandra fell asleep with her head still resting on my chest. It was a nice feeling, and I was very tired, but I found I couldn’t let go and relax.

  I laid there for the next hour, listening to her soft, rhythmic breathing. My thoughts didn’t let sleep come. Her words had disturbed me.

  -10-

  Our ships spent two more full days hanging over Yale. Captain Sarin had joined us with her carrier, and the fighters patrolled constantly. I was impressed by her carefully maintained vigilance.

  We watched the ring in the seabed that Marvin had somehow switched off. For the first day or so, we were nervous, waiting for something bad to happen. But nothing did and by the end of the second day, I began to feel confident that we’d solved the problem.

  Below us, the oceans settled and the storm clouds dissipated. It was going to take years for the climate to reorganize itself. The planet had lost about three percent of its mass, and that translated into about four miles of ocean depth gone down the drain. There were spots of land now on a world that had previously been covered by seamless ocean.

  The new lands were alien-looking. The freshly revealed sea floor was white and rocky. The newly revealed lands formed islands which dotted the surface of Yale. These islands steamed and were covered in rotting seaweeds and dead fish. Seen from above, they reminded me of the jagged teeth of an ancient leviathan, revealed for the first time in a billion years.

  We sent down probes to the ring when the currents and storms had subsided. But when the probes went through the ring, which was still under a thousand feet of water, they simply found the seabed on the far side. They weren’t transported anywhere. As far as we could tell, the ring had truly been switched off.

  I was about to give orders for Star Force personnel to land and investigate the region on foot, when a message came in from Miklos, who I’d left in charge of the Eden system. A communique from Earth had been received at Shadowguard.

  The rings allowed for more or less instantaneous communication between star systems, but we rarely heard from Earth these days and when we did I had left explicit instructions: I was to be immediately alerted. I took the hardcopy to my office and read it over twice.

  The message was from General Kerr, who had commanded the last fleet from Earth and who had personally led the attack against Eden. Despite a long history of conflict, Kerr and I had always been able to talk man-to-man. Essentially, the message said he was coming out for a visit, and that he wanted to discuss normalizing relations between Crow’s Empire and Star Force.

  I was elated, but the rest of my staff was hostile.

  “He’s coming out here to spy!” declared Kwon with absolute certitude. “Trust me, Colonel Riggs. I’ve known my share of dictators. Crow is just like the rest. Dictators only send out ambassadors to do two things: to spy, or to get free stuff. Don’t let General Kerr anywhere near Eden.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but didn’t get the words out before the next objection came out of Sandra.

  “Kwon’s right,” she said. “But I would handle it differently. When he gets here, let’s capture him and make him a prisoner. That will give them one less good commander for their side. We can tell them he had an accident aboard his ship, and his people were all lost.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “Remind me never to put you in charge of diplomacy,” I told her.

  She crossed her arms, sat back in her chair and glared at me.

  “Possibly,” Captain Sarin said, “we could be more diplomatic. But I don’t trust Kerr any more than the rest of this group. It’s my suggestion we meet with him in the Helios system on a neutral ship in neutral space. That way, he can’t learn anything of our operational strength.”

  “Well, I’m glad no one here feels restrained when airing their opinions,” I said. “But I’m going to let them in.”

  There was a chorus of complaints and warnings. I lifted my hands and waved for quiet.

  “Don’t freak out,” I said. “I’m not a fool. I’m not going to give them the ten-dollar tour. They will see exactly what I want them to see.”

  “May I speak?” Sandra asked angrily.

  “Be my guest.”

  “The moment their ship crosses into our space it will be cataloguing and counting every gun we have. That has got to be at least part of the purpose of this effort.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “But their ship won’t be coming into our space. We’ll meet them at the doorstep, in the Helios system on the far side of the ring from the Eden system. We’ll take their committee off their ship and transport them into our space under our control.”

  “I like that idea,” Kwon said. “They can’t see much from the window of a spaceship. When I look out these windows, all I see is the sun, maybe not even that. Not even the planets are big enough to see without instruments.”

  “Exactly,” I said nodding to Kwon. I could always count on him to see logic. He almost always took my side.

  “I still don’t like it,” Sandra said. “He’s up to something. They’ll bring something in. Something in their personal baggage. A spying tool or a bomb, maybe.”

  “I have to agree,” Captain Sarin said. “We can’t trust them. Remember Marvelena.”

  I winced at the mention
ing of that name. Marvelena had been a lovely, voluptuous spy who had attempted to assassinate me. She’d done rather poorly, and had paid for her failure with her life.

  “I understand your concerns and I share them,” I said. “But they can’t have a scanner small enough to fit on their person which would be capable of reading much about our fleets.”

  “What about weapons, Kyle?” Sandra asked. “What about assassination?”

  I shrugged. “The moment they cross into our space, we’ll do a body scan and make sure they’re clean. Remember, they aren’t nanotized. They won’t be much of a match for our people, even if they’re armed. But don’t worry, I’ll keep them under guard anyway.”

  I could tell none of them were really happy about it, but the decision had been made, and they all knew it. I wasn’t known for changing my mind when it was made up, so they quickly gave up trying. Still, I could tell they were unconvinced, except possibly for Kwon.

  “All right,” I said. I was annoyed with them, but I managed to keep my irritation out of my voice. “I know you all think I’m making a rash move. But the stakes are very high. Let me explain my own thinking: We need to reconnect with Earth. The possible benefits for Star Force and all humanity are immeasurable. We could become trading partners, and inevitably there would be immigration. We need people out here. There are barely forty thousand humans in the Eden System, not enough to fill these lovely worlds for a thousand years. Most importantly, this is a chance to ally with Earth for the next round with the Macros. Every member of our species must come together to stand against the machines. Divided, we’ll fall eventually.”

  Jasmine leaned forward, frowning. “I think our primary worry is Crow himself,” she said. “We all know him. We know what he’s capable of. I think he’s grown worse and worse as time has passed. He’s become a megalomaniac. I was there, Kyle. I’ve seen him as Emperor Crow.”

  “I know Jack Crow very well. I agree, he’s not the man I flew with in the beginning—or maybe he is, but he has changed for the worse. Still, we’ve always been able to come to some kind of arrangement in the past. I’m willing to give him another chance.”