There was a pause in D’s conversation as the remote’s camera came around a corner and found itself facing the barrels of a dozen firearms.
“Sorry, Big D,” the Marine Sergeant in charge said after a moment. “After today, we’re a bit twitchy about robots.”
“You did not shoot me, Sergeant Argall,” D replied. “I am entirely comfortable with weapons being pointed at me in the name of safety, so long as they are not fired.”
The remote’s camera zoomed in on the massive door the Marines had found. This was probably not the main loading doors—those would be on the outside, covered by layers of armor—but they were large and intimidating enough. Five meters tall, they were over twice the height of a human and almost three times the height of the Creator bodies they’d seen.
Paneling slid open in answer to D’s careful ministrations, and the remote interfaced itself in the system.
“This door is local on its own,” the AI reported. “It is not connected to the ship or to the computers inside the bay. It was secured by a physical key card and a genetic lock. The genetic sequence is…very broad.”
“How broad?” Octavio asked.
“So long as you were a Creator in possession of the key, the door would open,” D said. “It would not open for any robot, regardless of possession of the key. There appear to have been several individuals the door would have opened for without the key, but my analysis suggests five at most.”
The door slid open. The room beyond was dark.
“I thought you said this place was consuming half the ship’s power,” Argall asked.
“It is,” D stated. “It is clearly not using that power for light. My scans suggest a control center a hundred meters from here, in the approximate center of the bay.”
Shadowy shapes loomed in the space, stacked cylinders that defied definition in the Marines’ infrared flashlights. The Vistans were far more capable of navigating, but they seemed equally confused on what they were surrounded by.
As they approached the control center, there were four more Creator bodies. Like the bridge crew, these appeared to have committed suicide by chemical—probably after severing the bay from the rest of the ship to keep the hunter-killer drones out.
“I am linking in,” D reported. “Let’s have some light.”
Lights positioned through the chamber lit up brilliantly, far more brightly than any other lights aboard the ship, and Octavio took a shocked breath at what he was looking at.
The cylinders were tubes with transparent fronts, thousands of them. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them, each linked to power and various other pipelines. Several massive tanks were feeding something to all of the tubes.
Sergeant Argall clearly had the same guess that Octavio did. He crossed to the nearest tube and checked for some kind of window…and was not disappointed. Inside, the bird-like face of a Creator stared out at him…frozen.
“This bay is filled with cryogenic stasis tubes tailored specifically to the Creators’ biology,” D explained calmly, clearly unaware of the humans checking on the tubes around them. “I estimate this bay alone contains three hundred and twenty-two thousand stasis tubes.”
It was a colony ship, all right. Where they’d been struggling to fit a hundred thousand people onto a ship six hundred meters long, the Creators had set up one ship to carry three and a half million.
And something had gone wrong, because ten bays that should have been full of stasis tubes were unpowered.
“All of the tubes are receiving power, cryogenic fluid, and nutrient supplies,” D continued. “However, only one point five five percent of the tubes have occupants. I estimate approximately five thousand Creators are aboard this ship.”
The AI paused.
“Those five thousand are the only surviving members of the crew and passengers of this vessel. Given its damage and the clear lack of completed preparations, I hypothesize a medium-order probability that these are the only surviving Creators.”
57
The group that gathered in the meeting room attached to Interceptor’s bridge was a somber crowd. Octavio’s senior officers had all heard D’s “hypothesis” now, and the state of the colony ship they’d latched on to lent it weight.
“All right,” Octavio said sharply, looking around. Das, Chen, Tran and Daniel all looked back at him. His senior officers made up a small group, but these were the women who’d managed a physical intercept of a ship traveling at 99.99 percent of lightspeed and fought past a swarm of killer robots to take control of it.
“D, can you lay out what we know about this ship?” he asked.
“Less than we should,” the AI told them all. “There was no manual ship’s log function. The recording of the ship’s actions for posterity was left to the onboard AI. Worse, even the regular memory banks of the core computer appear to have been purged when the crew cut the cryo-bay off to protect their passengers.
“This ship is Shezarim, a name which translates as Brightest Star. Neither I nor the remnants of Shezarim’s memory banks include any information on who they were, but they were important enough that a colony ship was named after them.
“As is clear from its state and lack of passengers, Shezarim launched early. We do have partial logs for most of the sensors, so we can postulate why Shezarim launched: there was a massive solar flare wherever she was being constructed. The colony ship herself survived intact, but it is possible that her construction slip did not.”
Octavio shivered. He guessed that the ship had been built as an evacuation vessel of some kind—and it sounded like whatever they’d been trying to evacuate from had triggered early.
“We also have some fragmentary sensor information that suggests that Shezarim came under weapons fire around this time as well,” D noted. “This vessel is extremely well armored and withstood multiple hits from zetta-laser weapons before accelerating out of reach of her pursuers.”
“Where’d the hunter drones come from?” Chen asked. “They don’t seem like something they’d loose into their own corridors, after all.”
“From what I can establish from the limited data available, the passengers entered cryo-stasis over the two months following their launch. According to the cryo-bay systems, a designated crew was supposed to be cycled in and out of stasis…but that function was disabled by the active crew once the vessel was boarded.”
“Sorry, boarded? Someone else managed to board the thing at its speed?” Octavio asked.
“Their pursuers, whoever they are, appear to be limited to about point one five c in real space but equipped with tachyon punches,” D explained. “They punched ahead of the ship and fired specially designed boarding torpedoes to intercept Shezarim and deliver the hunter-killer drones.
“Given the hit likelihood, the four torpedoes that did successfully hit Shezarim likely represent the survivors of over four thousand such weapons. The ship’s crew was unarmed, apparently, and Shezarim’s internal defense systems were AI remotes.”
“And their AI had already killed itself,” Octavio said slowly. “Do we know why? I don’t suppose there’s any more information in the cryo-bay computers?”
“The cryo-bay computers weren’t wiped, but they were only ever intended to run the stasis systems,” D replied. “There may be cold-storage backups of the ship’s main files somewhere, but if so, they were specifically hidden from AI scans. We won’t find them without physically searching the entire ship.”
“Which, I suppose, brings us to the passengers,” Das said with a glance at her Captain. “What do we know about them, D?”
“They are the Creators of the Construction Matrices,” D said instantly. “Their computer-system architecture and other technology are an evolution of those used to build us, and their physical appearance registers…familiarity against our files, even if we can no longer identify them easily.
“Comparing the fragments of Shezarim’s memory banks to my own damaged databanks has given me some information. They are the Assini,
the Wandering People. The senior Assini on this ship is a scientist, a Reletan-dai.”
“He’s alive?” Octavio asked, checking his tattoo-comp for the translation of the name: Sunwarmed Grass-He. At least they could pronounce Assini words, unlike the Vistan language.
“He might be able to answer some of our questions.”
“That is why I mentioned him,” D confirmed. “There was another official in command of the ship when they were boarded. That official made the decision to seal the cryo-bay and leave the passengers in stasis until they reached their destination.”
“What was their destination?”
“There isn’t one in the system. The wake-up programmed in for Reletan-dai and his command crew was approximately one century after launch. I believe the active crew expected the drones to run out of power by then.”
“A hundred years’ subjective time?” Octavio checked. “They’d have been in transit for over seven thousand years real-time.”
“And well beyond where the Matrices would have reached,” Das noted. “They were pretty determined to run away from the problem they’d created, weren’t they?”
“If the crew believed they were the last survivors of their species, an excessive degree of caution would be justified,” D pointed out.
“We’d go pretty far if humanity’s survival was on the line,” Chen agreed softly. The Marine looked over at her lover. “They’re definitely responsible for all of this, but I can’t bring myself to be mad that the last survivors made a run for it.”
“Plus, they’d only be, what, a tenth of the way to the Confederacy by then?” Octavio asked. “We came a lot further, even it was less voluntary.
“We need to talk to this Reletan-dai,” he continued. “Unless you think you can pull together why they’re running and what’s chasing them from the data we have, D?”
“Any hypothesis I could construct would be a low-order probability at best,” the AI replied. “Shezarim’s memory banks were damaged by the AI’s self-destruct and then manually purged by the crew to protect the cryo-bay after the drones arrived. I do not have enough data to extrapolate what led to Shezarim’s state or to project what happened to the main Assini population base.
“It seems a high-order probability that Reletan-dai can answer all of these questions.”
“Can we wake him up safely?” Octavio asked. “The last thing I want to do is accidentally kill the person we want to talk to.”
“It won’t be a problem,” D assured him. “There are facilities aboard Shezarim for just that purpose. We would be optimally served by having my remote carry out the procedures.”
“Of course.” Octavio considered. “I think Chen and I will need to be there when he wakes up,” he concluded. “I need to hear what Reletan-dai has to say myself.”
Any decision as to what happened next, after all, was going to be Octavio’s and Octavio’s alone.
He’d never regretted the fact that tachyon coms couldn’t call out of warped space more.
58
Marines surrounded Octavio from the moment he left Interceptor. The six-Marine escort party that took him to the medical chamber aboard Shezarim was roughly a quarter of the surviving human Marines, but they were apparently taking no risks with their Captain.
He didn’t argue. Chen was leading the escort herself, and all six of his bodyguards were back in full power armor. He wore only his uniform with an additional air tank attached to the waist. The air aboard Shezarim had been confirmed to be perfectly safe, but the ability to deploy his uniform’s emergency helmet and make it back to Interceptor without using the alien vessel’s air was reassuring.
It had also been another one of Chen’s requirements. Whether Interceptor was technically an ESF ship or not, Chen was definitely Octavio’s Marine CO, and he wasn’t going to argue with her claim on that role’s prerogatives of keeping the Captain safe.
“Captain Catalan, Lieutenant Chen, in here,” D’s voice said from one of Shezarim’s speakers as they approached a door.
The accessway required the Marines to duck. The Assini were much bulkier than humans but also notably shorter on average. Their doors were sufficient for Octavio to fit through but had a problem with two-meter-plus suits of armor.
The room on the other side somehow managed to be both distinctly alien and very clearly a medical space. Some aspects of that purpose were universal, at least to beings with similar visual and auditory ranges.
There were status lights, screens with various icons and charts that Octavio couldn’t have read if they were in English, beds sized for a four-legged alien…and a giant silver tube.
“Lieutenant Chen’s people helped my remote move the stasis tube,” D told Octavio, the voice coming from the remote working away next to the device in question. “They are very efficiently designed, with an onboard supply of power, cryo-fluid and nutrients.
“I began the process of waking Director Reletan-dai up ninety-two minutes ago. We will be able to open the tube in five minutes, plus/minus thirty-five seconds.”
“Any idea how functional he’ll be once he wakes up?” Octavio asked.
“None. My databanks only cover the uses of this technology to store seeds and cloned animal embryos,” D replied brightly. “I would anticipate some grogginess and disorientation, similar to a human being unexpectedly woken from sleep. Otherwise, he should adapt quite quickly. What information I do have on the Director states that he is an extraordinary individual, at the top of the range for intelligence and adaptability for an Assini.”
“Good to know,” Octavio murmured. So, the alien they were waking from a four-year frozen sleep—or a three-century frozen sleep, depending on how you calculated it—was probably going to find this meeting less confusing than he was.
“Once I open the tube, I will transfer the Director to a recovery bed,” D explained as the remote started undoing latches on the stasis tube. “It should take no more than five minutes for him to awaken at that point.”
The last latch opened, and the remote paused as the AI checked all of the indicators again in silence.
“All status signals are clear. I am opening the tube.”
The silver tube cracked along its entire length and then appeared to almost dissolve. Octavio was watching it, and he barely saw the thousands of small scales that made up the exterior separate and slide down into the base of the tube. Some form of semi-mobile support layer was clearly at work, but it vanished with the rest of the top half of the stasis tube.
D’s remote was into the tube even before the top had finished dissolving. Metal arms wrapped around the still form of the alien, scooping him up and shifting him over the bed next to the stasis tube.
The tube turned out to have been placed on a cradle that automatically slid away from the bed, clearing space for D’s remote to attach several new sensors to Reletan-dai. The scanners, roughly the size of a human thumb, were placed at key points across the Assini’s centaur-like form to pick up pulse, oxygen levels, brain waves and the dozen other critical pieces of information on the alien’s health that the tube had provided a moment before.
D had barely finished attaching the seventh sensor when Reletan-dai’s eyes opened. The first thing the Assini saw was a Construction Matrix remote, and he spasmed away in fear, a terrible keening coming from his throat.
It wasn’t entirely a fear reaction, either. The spasming away brought him around to clear his back legs, and he kicked with enough force to rock the heavy robot backward.
“D, get out of the room,” Octavio snapped. “He knows what you are, and it’s terrifying him.”
The remote was already moving when Octavio gave the order. D pulled it out of the room and the door smoothly slid shut, leaving Octavio and Chen alone with the Assini.
Reletan-dai was calmer now, but he was clearly using the bed D had put him on as cover as he studied Octavio and Chen.
“Sapients, interesting,” he said rapidly, his tone clear that he was speaking
to himself. “Bipedal, armor on one…headset on the other. Translator?”
“I can understand you, yes,” Octavio told the Assini, tapping the headset the alien was referring to. A speaker on his shoulder echoed his words with a string of syllables that he could almost pick out distinct sounds from.
“Can you understand the translation?” he asked.
“Dialect archaic, concurrent with the Construction Matrix deployment,” Reletan-dai replied. “Yes, I understand you. Do you understand what that robot is? What you have allowed onto my ship?” He glanced around. “I am correct in presuming this is still my ship, yes?”
“We are still aboard Shezarim, yes,” Octavio confirmed. “I am Captain Octavio Catalan of the Exilium Space Force. At the request of the Regional Construction Matrix allied to us, we assembled and deployed a special-built vessel to intercept Shezarim.
“You have been in transit for four subjective years, almost three centuries real-time,” he continued. “Unfortunately, your ship was boarded by hunter-killer drones, and the active crew suspended your wake-up protocols and sealed the cryo-bay before they were killed.
“We have secured Shezarim against the drones. You are safe, but…we have questions.”
“So do I,” Reletan-dai replied. His body language was shifting rapidly, and Octavio couldn’t read it anyway. The alien definitely seemed to be adapting to the situation even faster than he’d dared hope. “And I come back to my first one. Do you know what kind of monster you’ve allied yourself with? The Construction Matrices were our greatest creation and our greatest mistake.”
“XR-13-9-D is a direct clone of the intelligence of Regional Construction Matrix XR-13-9,” Octavio told the Assini. “So far as we can tell, XR-13-9 retains the full core protocols around the preservation of non-Assini sentient life. We have certainly encountered other Matrices that we would class as monsters, but XR-13-9 has proven a valuable and true ally.”
The room was silent.
“There’s a Regional Construction Matrix with an intact mind?” Reletan-dai asked. “That’s…incredible. If true, which seems unlikely. The tachyon punch rapidly degrades electro-neuronic systems and molecular data storage.”
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