Swarm

by B. V. Larson

  “Just keep moving, follow the tests they talk about on TV,” I shouted up, cupping my hands. “There’s no one left to fight at the end. You’ll be okay.”

  I wondered what the ship would do if there was no one aboard to fight. Would the basic tests suffice to have it accept him as commander? Or would the ship cage him and use him to test others? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if he’d heard my advice.

  I walked through the park for a few minutes. Summer in Virginia, at night. There was no one around, unsurprisingly. A few yellow-green fireflies glimmered hauntingly in the bushes.

  I remembered days in the park like this, summer evening walks with the kids—and with my wife Donna. They were all dead, gone. Sometimes that weighs on a man. Sometimes, I felt I had been charged with saving the world that had taken everything I’d ever loved from me.

  I didn’t call the Alamo for a few minutes. I knew Sandra was probably worried to death, but I just wanted to walk on the Earth’s crust again. It felt good under my feet. I thought about Pierre’s voice—I’d never met the tricky, pompous man in person. I thought about Esmeralda’s face, her true face, the one that had erased her tough snarl at the end. She’d been much more human than I felt myself to be, in her final moments.

  This dreamy walk in the park only lasted a few minutes. I’m not good at introspection or self-pity. I had a war to fight. Like it or not, I was a Commander of Star Force. Never mind that a few nobodies had made the organization up just days ago. It had all become increasingly real to me. I recalled something a sergeant had told a scared recruit in an old war movie. When asked why us? The sergeant had replied because we are here, and nobody else. That seemed to sum up my situation. Why was I, of all people, fighting assassins and aliens? Because the Alamo had chosen me. It had to be someone—and this time it was my turn.

  Alamo, come pick me up, I thought.

  ETA ninety seconds.

  I didn’t hear the ship’s approach. The Nano ships were amazingly quiet as they stalked the night skies. There was a crack or two of branches breaking as the thick, black arm snaked down into the park, damaging trees behind me. I didn’t turn around or even look up. The whipping, finger-like cables grabbed me around the middle and hauled me up into the ship’s belly, swallowing me whole.

  As I rode back up into the Alamo I kept breathing in fresh air, as much as I could suck into my lungs. I listened to the muted sounds of the night and looked around at every tree, bench and streetlight. Standing in the cargo bay a moment later, I felt something in my hair. I reached back and found a leaf. It was big, and looked like it had belonged to a sycamore tree.

  I walked onto the bridge. Sandra made a happy whoop when she saw me.

  She hurried toward me, smiling. Then her face fell. She saw my mood, and the rips in my skin—and possibly the metal gleaming from beneath that torn skin.

  I put my hand to my face, covering my left eye. That area had seemed the most upsetting to Esmeralda, so I tried to hide it from Sandra.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “Yeah. I’m sure the nanites will fix it. I can feel them working on it right now, knitting my cells back together.”

  “Did you get your butt kicked?” she asked.

  I tried to force a smile. “Something like that,” I said. “Here, I brought you a present.”

  I held out the green sycamore leaf. She took it, and smiled at it. Such a small gesture, but she seemed to soften. She came to me and hugged me. We embraced for a while. She put her head against my right shoulder, keeping her eyes far away from my face and especially my left eye.

  I touched her as gently as I could, as if I held the wings of a butterfly between pinched fingertips. I watched for any signs of pain, but she gave none. This relaxed me a fraction. I had wanted her to be free of the ship’s shackles, and now she was. The ship had no leash on her, nothing snaked around her waist or ankles to keep her away from me. But if I’d still been unable to touch her for fear of hurting her…. Well, that would have been worse.

  It occurred to me that we might have trouble in the future if we wanted to be—intimate. There were times in the throes of passion for any man when he’s not himself. Human women were tough enough for a normal male, but what about an enhanced male such as myself? What if I’d had a few beers maybe, then moved too quickly—and tore her apart? It was a grim thought, and it made me move very cautiously around her. I think she knew I was holding back, barely touching her. I think it turned her on, too.

  Before things proceeded further, however, she spoiled the mood by having an important thought. “Oh, I almost forgot. Crow has been calling for you. I couldn’t answer—the Alamo won’t listen to me at all, not even when you are gone. She’s such a bitchy computer—or a billion little bitchy computers, I guess. Anyway, Crow doesn’t know what happened to you. All he knows is that first Pierre vanished and then he lost contact with you. Kyle, you should call him.”

  I agreed and told my ship to make the connection. Crow answered with no delays.

  “Riggs? Is that really you, Kyle?”

  “Yes sir,” I said to the walls. Sandra and I had moved to our new couch and settled ourselves there. That arrangement worked better for me. I could sit and relax, and she could sit close beside me or prod at my wounds if she wanted. She did both, seeming to get over the weirdness of seeing metallic glints shining through nearly bloodless rips in my skin. She got out the medical kits we had picked up while ‘shopping’ and taped together the worst wounds.

  I explained recent events to Crow. He’d known Pierre was dead, but hadn’t figured out that I’d gone over to fix matters personally.

  “So you actually did it, mate?” he asked, whistling. “You took the injections? What are they like?”

  I described the sensations briefly. “I thought you had already done it, sir,” I said when finished.

  “No,” he said. “I said it was nasty because I’d heard from another fleet member that it was, but I never had the guts.”

  “Who was the other guy?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We lost him in space during the first Macro attack. Poor bloke. He must be dead now. I truly hope the nanites aren’t reviving him out there in the frozen void over and over again.” He laughed.

  I didn’t share in the joke. Sometimes, Crow’s sense of humor bordered on the macabre. “So, who else has done it?” I asked.

  “No one, to my knowledge. We are survivalists, not heroic, experimental types. You are, as far as I know, the only living person full of nanites.”

  We talked further, but Crow was busy. He told me to contact the Senator again, and demand an explanation. We decided we would only allow known officials aboard our ships from now on, people we’d seen in the news. That should cut down on assassination attempts.

  “Are we going to even try anymore?” asked Sandra. “They’ve shown themselves to be vicious and untrustworthy.”

  “Right you are,” said Crow, “but we still have to work with them. What nation has ever arisen in history without having to defend itself? It’s only natural for them to consider us rebels, terrorists, vigilantes. To become worthy of diplomacy, any group must prove it is strong enough to be independent. I think we’ve just taken a step down that road. We can act huffy about it, of course. We can demand apologies and the like, but after a while we will have to deal with them. Neither side has any real choice unless they can conquer the other.”

  At length, Crow put me in charge of diplomatic affairs. I was the least likely to be assassinated, and I was the only person in the fleet who could get out of my ship if I wanted to. Previously, I had been in charge of tactical combat, but right now the Macros were keeping quiet and hadn’t made any further space attacks on Earth.

  After we broke off the communication, Sandra kissed me several times.

  “I want to apologize, she said. “I’m sorry I recoiled from you when you first came—home.”

  “It’s okay. My looks freaked out the assassin, too.”

&
nbsp; “One thing is bothering me,” said Sandra, finishing with her ministrations. My face was taped up and slathered with antibiotics. “What about the aliens you fought when you first boarded these ships? The centaur people? Why weren’t they full of nanites and invincible to us?”

  I thought about it and couldn’t come up with an answer. But I thought I knew who might have one.

  “Alamo, did the… ah… the biotics that were aboard this ship when I was first picked up undertake the injections at some point?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how could I beat them? They didn’t seem especially fast or strong or full of a metal coating under the skin.”

  “They were not as you describe.”

  “So, the nanites left them? You reversed the process of the injections?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they failed in their mission.”

  I felt a chill. Sandra and I looked at each other. Perhaps they would see fit to turn off my nanite population someday, cutting me off as well.

  “How did they fail, Alamo?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  “Their species failed. Their planet was overrun by the Macros. They are extinct now.”

  “Aren’t there a few of them left alive on the ships that still roam around looking for command personnel?”

  “Yes.”

  Sandra tapped at me. “We’ve got to stop them. We can’t kill the last members of a race of people like us! They are fighting us to prevent their own extinction.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it. What could I do?

  “Maybe we could capture them,” said Sandra, thinking aloud.

  “I could try to board one ships and beat them unconscious or something,” I said thoughtfully. “If we could at least get a few breeding pairs off the ships, they might not all die.”

  Sandra frowned, suddenly not liking the whole idea. “I don’t want you to do it. You’ve got about a dozen other missions. We have to defend Earth first.”

  I looked at her. “A minute ago, you wanted me to save the centaurs.”

  Her face took on a hard look. “If we can—I do. But I don’t want to see you do it personally. You’ve done enough. I—I guess I’m getting attached to you.”

  I stared at her. There was an almond-shape to her eyes. She had the kind of eyes that didn’t even need makeup. She was lovely. I thought about the legendary professor and his formula for predicting the longevity of such relationships. I didn’t even bother to try arguing myself out of it. I figured whatever we had would fail in the end, but that didn’t matter. When an unattached man in his thirties meets a hot girl in her twenties and she shows strong interest.... Well, there’s no hope for the guy.

  I sighed internally. At least it would be a very nice two years.

  -20-

  When I learned the method by which Pierre had been conducting diplomacy, I almost laughed aloud. He had been doing it via the internet, using a voice system that allowed two-way communication. I knew the software well, my students had used it to communicate with other people worldwide—mostly for online gaming purposes.

  It did have advantages, I had to admit. By using a cellular internet hook-up and software for voice transmission, you didn’t have to call people and know their phone numbers. It was a little harder to trace, as well. But mostly I thought it was amusing because I was sure it was the same type of system that Pierre had previously used to con people out of money. E-mails to get them hooked, then a faceless, untraceable, cost-free voice coming over the internet to talk them into the scam. He’d naturally taken the same approach when dealing with foreign governments. I had to wonder if he’d done something else he shouldn’t—something that had pissed off the wrong people and gotten him killed.

  I sat and thought for a while with Pierre’s tiny computer in my hands. Before I tried to talk to the government people—the same people, I reminded myself, that had killed our last ambassador—I felt I needed an edge of some kind. I need a bargaining chip. It would be one thing to get online and make them squirm, calling them assassins and fascists and the like. But I was a big boy. I knew the score. They might be embarrassed, but when the survival of the world was at stake, they were playing for keeps. Fortunately, so was I.

  I waited until Sandra left me. She had gone exploring the ship. She did that a lot, as it was one of the few things the Alamo would let her do. I had done a bit of it, but not as much as she had over the past week. Inside, the ship had several levels and dozens of rooms of various sizes on each deck. There was a lot of strange equipment on the upper decks, the purposes of which were still a mystery to us.

  “Alamo, I want to talk to you.”

  The ship didn’t respond. There was no need. I could have opted to transmit my thoughts silently, but that still didn’t feel natural to me.

  “Alamo, what if this ship is damaged? Can it repair itself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can it repair the macro systems aboard the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of the big components? Even the drive systems and the weaponry?”

  “Yes.”

  I made a happy sound and leaned back in my chair. This was what I had been hoping for. If the ship could repair a laser weapon, could it not build a brand new one, given the materials? If it could make an engine, why couldn’t it build more engines? Even more importantly, what component aboard the ship had the job of constructing engines or lasers? What if that repair unit could make a copy of itself?

  “Alamo, do you have some kind of repair chamber?”

  “There is a repair unit for macro equipment.”

  “If it was damaged, could it repair itself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could it duplicate itself?”

  A hesitation. “Possibly.”

  “Why not definitely?”

  “Some of the raw materials are exceedingly rare.”

  I nodded, thinking hard. “Alamo, lead me to this repair unit.”

  A door opened in the bridge wall. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think that particular spot had ever opened before. I walked through, and had to duck to get inside. The ceiling here was lower. The room was oddly-shaped as well, resembling a pyramid laid on its side.

  I walked in, sliding around on the converging metal walls. It was like being on a slanted steel roof. This turned out not to be the repair chamber itself. Instead, the ship led me through a series of strangely-curved rooms. I went up a level, then another. I thought that I was probably up high inside the ship, up close to the top laser turret. Over the preceding week, we’d gotten a better idea of the ship’s design and structure due to the many carefully considered studies the humans were making. Little else was on TV or the internet these days. It was all documentaries and news articles about Nanos and Macros, all day long. We’d learned that there were two primary weapons systems on these ships, which were all identical in design. The lasers were mounted on the top and on the bottom of the ships, and each mount could swivel around with a wide field of fire.

  I finally came to a spot with tubes that led down from the prow of the ship. The tubes led to a central spheroid of dull, non-reflective metal. The spheroid was about ten feet in diameter. The Alamo indicated this was the machine. It didn’t look like much.

  “What’s inside these tubes?”

  “Nothing.”

  I sighed. “What is inside these tubes when the machine is operating?”

  “Raw materials.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding. “So the tubes open on the outside of the ship?”

  “When it is in use, yes.”

  “And the big arm feeds it the appropriate materials?”

  “Yes.”

  I fooled with it, tapping on the tubes and crawling around the cramped space, looking for an exit point, but there was none. This was unsurprising. The Nanos made their own openings in things whenever they felt the need.

  “Alamo, this is v
ery interesting. I need you to make something for me with this machine.”

  “Permission denied.”

  “Alamo, I am command personnel.”

  “You are command personnel,” the ship agreed.

  “I need to save this planet. That is my mission. Change the permissions so I can complete my mission.”

  Hesitation. “Permissions not changed.”

  “I can’t change the permissions on this unit?” I asked, thinking hard like a hacker.

  “You do not have the authority to change the permissions on this unit.”

  “Alamo,” I said thoughtfully. “Your mission is to stop the Macros, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mission is also to stop the Macros. Using this repair unit will allow me to complete my mission and allow you to complete your mission as well. You will change the permissions on your own authority. Change the permissions so we may both complete our missions.”

  Hesitation. “Permissions changed.”

  I clapped my hands together. Like every complex system, there was usually a work-around.

  “I need you to construct something small for me. I need a hand-held version of the lasers that arm this ship.”

  “Request insufficiently specific.”

  “Okay,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. It had begun to ache from being in this cramped spot.

  “Just make a miniature version of the lasers that arm this ship. Make it one tenth—no one twentieth—the scale.”

  “Raw materials needed.”

  “Proceed to get the raw materials. But don’t kill anyone!” I added hastily.

  “Program executing.”

  “Estimated time of completion?”

  “Unknown.”

  “What part of the process is the greatest variable?”

  “Locating and securing raw materials of the correct size and shape.”

  “Okay... if you had the raw materials right now, how long would it take to produce the weapon?”