“Professor Reinhardt has developed a design to double that, but we can’t retrofit ships to it,” Isaac admitted. His understanding of the science and physics was limited, but he trusted Lyle Reinhardt completely. “We have five new warships under construction that will be able to get to the target in seventy days, but even that…may not be enough.”
“There are…a small number of freighters under construction that we may be able to implement the latest-generation warp drives in,” Linton pointed out. “I will have to check with my people, but we can definitely have at least one ship completed at the same time as the new Vigil.
“But any evacuation mission will require vastly more ships,” he continued. “We only have forty freighters, total. All are leftovers from the original Exile Fleet, and we’ve only retrofitted ten of them with warp drives.”
“The math is not in favor of our being able to save these people,” Rodriguez said bluntly. “A two-hundred-and-eighty-day round trip to bring those people here—and then we find ourselves sharing our world with a complete unknown.”
“We cannot leave an entire race to die!” James snapped.
“Petrov, I would far rather not do so,” the Don replied. “But this isn’t our fault—and do we even have the time to save anyone? We don’t have enough information to even judge if there will be anyone left in a hundred and forty days!”
“We will get updates from Scorpion shortly,” Isaac told them, cutting off the argument. “Captain Catalan is going through the first-contact protocols as we speak. Hopefully, he will be able to communicate with the locals in short order, which should enable us to make a more informed decision.”
He looked down at his hands and considered his next words carefully.
“Unfortunately, Carlos isn’t wrong,” he told them. “I think we must act, but we must also realize that evacuating to Exilium is only likely to get us a single load of refugees out. The ships we have equipped with warp drives aren’t colony ships. I believe we can readily retrofit them for passenger transport, but we’re talking about moving a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people, depending on their environmental needs.
“That’s it,” he said bluntly. “With the resources available to us, we may be able to extract enough of them to preserve their species, but the vast majority of even the current survivors will die.”
“We have to do something,” James replied. “Shankara, how quickly can we get the faster ships online?”
“Two months,” the other Minister said instantly. “I can accelerate Vigil and the strike cruisers that much and get at least one freighter built for that time. I think we can up-size the freighter in question, too. Perhaps set it up to carry as many as sixty thousand souls.”
That was faster than Isaac had been expecting. His new flagship—the original Vigil was long gone, her surviving components sacrificed to repair her sister, Dante—hadn’t been scheduled to even begin trials for another four months.
This meant, of course, that they’d be skipping trials completely for all of the new ships. That could come back to haunt him.
“If we send an expedition of the one-twenty-eight ships right now, the two-fifty-six ships will catch up,” he told them. “And before you ask, James, we will not suspend construction of the new warships. We cannot assume that the Rogues will not be back before we can evacuate the populace.”
James snorted.
“The thought has crossed my mind…but you’re not wrong,” he conceded. “These people need a shield as much as a way out.”
“That’s our best chance, then,” Isaac said, but he glanced at his wife. “Amelie? If we commit to this, we are bending the entire resources of our Republic to this.”
“I’ve been listening,” she told him. With a deep breath, Amelie leaned forward and studied her Cabinet.
“I think we have established what the best we can do is,” she continued. “And we will need to do all of that. I will not permit a species to pass into extinction while Exilium has the hands to intervene.
“But as Rodriguez has pointed out, this wasn’t our fault. Scorpion’s intervention is the only reason these people survived at all, but the Rogues would have exterminated them otherwise. It was the Matrices’ actions that doomed these people.
“Set your plans into motion, gentlemen, ladies,” she instructed. “But this damn mess is the Matrices’ fault and they are going to help fix it.”
7
Amelie Lestroud had found over the last few years—she’d been President of Exilium for four years and the leader of the Exilium colony and Exile Fleet for a year before that—that letting her advisors argue things out often left her with a pretty good solution.
It also meant that when they were wrong as group, the former actress occasionally wanted a hammer to break through their collective skulls, but that was rare enough. Not everyone in her Cabinet was necessarily a good person, but she trusted them all to act in Exilium’s best interests.
She even trusted Isaac to argue with her when she was wrong. That alone made her husband worth more than gold—and the thought of Amelie Lestroud being married to the son of the woman she’d organized a multi-system revolution against still surprised her.
He walked with her in silence as they left the Cabinet meeting, letting her organize her thoughts as they headed toward the shuttle pad near the Republic’s administration center.
“You’re heading back to orbit?” she asked him finally. A quick glance at the trio of bodyguards following her sent them dissolving back into the distance, leaving the First Couple to speak in private.
“Regardless of whether Linton can get me Vigil early, I need to start planning for a long-distance evacuation mission,” he told her. “Ten freighters and a few escorts aren’t much, Amelie. Even if we pull off miracles to get the new ships in commission, we’re going to fail many of these people.”
“It’s not our fault,” she reminded him. “We’ll do everything we can. I know you will.”
“A world burned because of me once,” Isaac said quietly. “I’ll be damned if I’ll stand by and watch it happen again.”
“That wasn’t your fault either,” Amelie said firmly. Isaac had defeated a terrorist attack on a space station with fifty thousand indentured workers aboard. Unfortunately, in doing so, he’d revealed a secret colony built by enemies of his mother.
One of Adrienne Gallant’s oh-so-brave flag officers had opened “negotiations” around reintegrating that colony with demonstration orbital strikes.
“What do you think LOK can give us?” Isaac finally asked.
LOK-XR-01 was the Inter-Sapient Relations Matrix that XR-13-9 had built when the AI had finally found the protocols and designs for a diplomatic unit in its immense and fragmented databanks.
The Matrices used an FTL drive called the tachyon punch. It provided instantaneous travel across a significant range. Cooldown time between punches meant that it averaged about two and a half hours to cover a light-year.
It also was fatal to conscious intelligent life, highly destructive to even the cloned frozen embryos that the Matrices used to build new ecosystems…and shredded AI memory on repeated use.
That problem had created the Rogues and it had also left XR-13-9 lacking a lot of context or indices for their files. XR-13-9 and its associated sub-Matrices didn’t even truly know what their creators had looked like. They now used tachyon communicators to validate memories after punches and repair the missing chunks, but they hadn’t implemented that until after they’d forgotten far too much.
“LOK has a lot of flexibility,” Amelie told him finally as she stopped, studying the shuttle waiting for her husband. “They haven’t been able to trade us weapons, but we’ve bought a lot of useful tech from the machine—and I’m not going to pretend they aren’t trading with us at charity rates.
“But we don’t need tech from him this time,” she said grimly. “This time, we need the Matrices to act. They can get assets from here to Scorpion in five days
. They can’t fight the damn Rogues, I can live with that…but they can help their victims.”
The Matrices’ core protocols were inflexible and dangerous. The AIs couldn’t attack their fellows. If they were in a system where the Rogues were destroying the locals, the Matrices Amelie and her people worked with would be forced to sit and watch.
Fighting the Rogues for them was the key value Exilium brought to their alliance.
This time, however, the Matrices were going to do something. Amelie Lestroud was going to make certain of that.
LOK-XR-01 was a hundred-and-eleven-meter disk that orbited Exilium with the ESF. It was a sign of the relationship between Exilium and the Matrices that the upgraded destroyer escorting LOK was in a defensive posture. The Republic would protect LOK like one of their own.
Since midsized spaceships didn’t fit in conference rooms, however, when Amelie summoned LOK to meet her, the AI sent a remote.
It was smaller than the refitted terraformer repair units the Matrices had used before they’d built LOK, but had much the same shape. It was a four-legged robot that was roughly two meters a side.
From its size and the presence of two definitive arms—missing in the repair units used before, those had possessed an entire toolbox of various manipulators—Amelie guessed that the remote approximated the actual form factor of the Creators the Matrices had lost records of.
Unfortunately, despite the smaller form of the diplomatic AI’s remote compared to the improvised ones used before, LOK’s remote still didn’t fit in their usual conference rooms. They’d rededicated a garage to talk to the Matrices once, and it continued to see use.
“Greetings, President Amelie Lestroud,” the remote told her. The artificial voice the Matrices used to talk to humans was far from perfect, but it at least no longer automatically triggered migraines in half of the humans around them.
“We were not expecting to meet with you in person again for two hundred forty-six hours. What has changed?”
The “garage conference room” had been refitted heavily over the years of its use. Amelie had a comfortable desk with full datanet access. If she needed to, she could bring in a dozen aides without crowding the robot.
Most of their communications still took place electronically. “Face-to-face” was a strange concept when dealing with AIs whose true bodies consisted of roughly fifteen hundred cubic meters of electronics.
“We received updates from Captain Octavio Catalan aboard Scorpion,” Amelie told the AI. “My people have prepared a data package, but since this information is critical to our future relations, I wanted to speak with you as soon as you’d uploaded the data.”
“Scorpion’s mission is approximately fifty light-years from Exilium,” LOK pointed out. “No sub-Matrix of XR-13-9 is active in that region.”
Amelie tapped a command and leveled her best “hardened commander” glare on the AI. It was meaningless to the robot, she was sure, but pulling on the personas she’d trained to project as an actress still helped her.
She waited while the robot uploaded and reviewed the information. It took less than a second.
“It was a high-order probability that additional unverified construction nodes existed,” LOK said calmly. “Verification of this was expected but unfortunate. Further scouting missions would be beneficial to both of us.
“Your intervention to protect the local sentient civilization from Construction is appreciated. Some technological compensation will be arranged. Further actions against this new unverified construction node will also be compen—”
“No.” Amelie cut the robot off and enjoyed the fact that it allowed itself to be interrupted, stopping and waiting to see what she said next.
“You have dribbled out bits of tech here and there to keep us able to fight your enemy, but right now, I don’t care about fighting this new Rogue Matrix,” she told LOK. “We’ll do it, and we’ll take your compensation, but that was presumed, LOK.
“But this world? These people?”
A hologram appeared in front of her. They didn’t have a name for the sentient species that Catalan had encountered. Hell, they didn’t even know what they looked like.
“Our best guess is that over seventy-five percent of their population was wiped out,” Amelie told LOK. “That leaves billions—and I doubt you can reprogram the two terraformers that made it through to undo the damage from their landing without killing anyone left.”
“The terraformers are designed to work on a barren planet,” LOK finally said. “Any base ecosystem would be destroyed incidentally by the deployment process, as you see here.”
“We need to save these people, LOK,” she said calmly. “You need to save these people—Rogue Matrices doomed them. I can’t save them—but your Matrices may be able to.”
LOK was silent for several seconds. In a human, she’d have thought they were thinking. In the Matrix’s case, however, she knew it was “phoning home,” using the tachyon communicator to ask questions of XR-13-9 itself.
“Regional Construction Matrix XR-13-9 wishes to hear your suggestion,” LOK finally told her. “We cannot transport organics safely. We cannot engage unverified nodes. We might be able to remove the terraforming nodes, but the damage to the planetary ecosystem is done. Those nodes are the best chance for long-term repair, but you are correct. The local population will not survive.”
For all of the vast capacities of the alien artificial intelligences Amelie had found herself working with, they were sometimes very naïve and often not overly creative. They weren’t incapable of creativity—XR-13-9 had developed the verification process that allowed it to be sure its sub-Matrices were surviving their tachyon punches with their minds intact—but they worked best with a problem in front of them.
And this was a new problem for them. They’d arrived long after the destruction of the other civilizations the Rogues had killed. They’d have to consider this problem.
Given time, they’d almost certainly come to a solution. It might even be a better solution than the ones Amelie had come up with—but for all of the vast intelligence and processing capacity of the Matrices, it might not be in time to save the people the Rogues had damned.
“They need to be evacuated,” Amelie told LOK. “Which means they need somewhere to go. Exilium is too far. We need to take them somewhere closer, somewhere we can shuttle between in days or weeks, not months.
“We need you to turn a Constructed World over to them.”
The Constructed Worlds were the Matrices’ entire reason for existence. Their task was to terraform worlds for the Creators who were supposed to be following in sublight colony ships. Giving up one of them was a big ask, but it was the least Amelie needed from them.
“Then you need to build ships for them,” she continued. “Warp drive–capable ships that can ferry them to that Constructed World. We will give you the technology if you use it for this.”
The warp drives had been one of the few technologies Exilium had that the Matrices wanted. It wasn’t like the engines would be hugely valuable to a ship with a tachyon punch, but an option that wouldn’t melt their mechanical brains had use. Amelie had kept their most advanced designs away from the Matrices for just that reason.
LOK’s optical receptors focused on her face for several long seconds.
“There is a Constructed World six light-years from the system in question,” it noted. “It was not constructed by sub-Matrices of XR-13-9, but there is a 92.6 plus/minus 3.4% probability that we can assume control of the surveillance nodes in the system without the unverified nodes becoming aware. A Final Preparation node will be dispatched to secure the system and begin construction of a colony site.
“Construction of warp drive–capable vessels for them will not be possible,” LOK continued. “That would require commitment of a Sub-Regional Construction Matrix, and XR-13-9 only has three such units. All are occupied in tasks that cannot currently be suspended without violating core or near-core protocols, and fa
brication of a new unit would require nine thousand one hundred thirty-eight hours. Secondary construction units could assist in establishing shipyards but would require significant assistance from either Exilium or the local sentients.”
Over a year. Amelie could do that math in her head now. The translation software the Matrices used had apparently decided that English time units only went up to hours, and that hadn’t changed in over three years.
“There isn’t enough time,” she agreed, desperately trying to think of an answer. Over a hundred days to get any ships to the damaged planet. Having a closer destination for the evacuation would help, but it wasn’t enough. Not when they’d only be able to haul a few hundred thousand people a trip.
“We see a potential solution,” LOK told her. “A synergy of the resources of all. We cannot transport your crews, but we can transport your ships. If you are willing to give them up, we can use the tachyon punch to move as many as fifteen warp-capable freighters from Exilium to the damaged world.”
And Amelie hadn’t thought they could come up with a solution themselves!
“We have ten such ships that will be refitted for passenger transport in a few days,” she told LOK. “If you can move them to the target system, that would work…but who would fly them?”
“Experimentation will be required. It is possible that a Matrix remote can be interfaced with their systems to provide central control. There will be a Recon and Security flotilla deployed to Exilium in one hundred six hours.
“Once your freighters are ready for transport, those nodes will proceed to the damaged system. If the local population is willing to work with us, evacuation should commence within four hundred plus/minus thirty hours.”
“It will work,” Amelie breathed. “It will work.”
If she could have hugged the robot, she would have.
8
“Well, Torborg?” Octavio asked as his ship limped into a high orbit of the planet. Both the Captain and the engineer in him felt his ship’s wounds as his own. The Captain wanted them fixed yesterday—but the engineer knew it would be weeks. And that Tran was doing everything humanly possible. Almost as important, though…
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