Refuge

by Glynn Stewart

  “I didn’t say XR-13-9 was intact,” Octavio corrected. “They, and the other Regional Matrices they are in contact with, have established a procedure for verifying the memories and core intelligences of themselves and their sub-Matrices after punching. They lost a lot before they did so, though.

  “For example, you are the first Assini that XR-13-9-D has in its memory banks. They forgot you, Director Reletan-dai. They didn’t know where ‘home’ was. They only knew they were supposed to keep going in a given direction and Construct the worlds along the way.”

  Reletan-dai closed his eyes.

  “You know my name, but do you know who I am?” he finally asked.

  “We know nothing about you,” Octavio said. “Shezarim’s memory was damaged by the AI’s self-destruct, and then your active crew wiped it to protect you and the other passengers in stasis.”

  The Assini’s eyes stayed closed.

  “Oh, Asuran-ko,” he murmured. “So brave, my old friend.”

  Octavio waited.

  “I presume you have access to this ship’s food and other supplies?” Reletan-dai asked. “Let me eat and dress, then I think we must make time for a long conversation. Are we still at relativistic speeds?”

  “It’s complicated,” Octavio admitted. “For what you really mean, though, we are running at real time with regards to the greater universe. More detail than that might get confusing.”

  “I am not easily confused,” the Assini director said as he opened his eyes to study Octavio. “But I am hungry. Four years of nutrients pumped into my veins did not fill my stomachs.”

  Thirty minutes later, Reletan-dai had finished demolishing his third plate of what appeared to be freeze-dried and cryo-stored vegetables. The Assini now wore an outfit that would have passed for a human’s white lab scrubs…if it didn’t have four legs in a set of “pants” that otherwise bore an eerie resemblance to a horse blanket.

  “Thank you,” he said to Octavio—and to the Marine who’d managed to get the kitchen they’d found to disgorge food on the third attempt with coaching from D.

  “It’s your ship, Director,” Octavio pointed out. “All we did was remove the hunter-killer drones. Our Matrices…well, they had forgotten their Creators. Given the opportunity to meet you, they were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths.”

  “If there are any of the Construction Matrices left with honest minds, then we failed even more horribly than we knew,” Reletan-dai told him. “I asked if you knew who I was, Captain. You do not, since that information would now only be found in Shezarim’s cold storage, and REN-63-KAL would have made certain no AI could find that information.”

  “That was Shezarim’s AI?” Octavio asked.

  “Yes. They terminated themselves to protect us, but that is getting ahead of myself. You have questions, Captain, but I think they may best be answered by beginning at the source of the river. May I?”

  “We know how at least part of the story ends,” the human Captain replied. “We don’t know how any of this began.”

  “Thank you.” Reletan-dai was silent, considering his words. “Shezarim was named for the creator of the artificial intelligence Matrix, Shezarim-ko. That was only the beginning of their great work.

  “They took the ability to build the AI Matrices and combined it with old concepts from our science fiction and the mostly useless technology of the tachyon-punch engine. First, the Matrix Reconnaissance Program was born. We used intelligent AI ships to survey the star systems near us and be certain we were safe and alone.

  “Our world had been unified for a long time, but we were prey once and we never forgot,” Reletan-dai admitted. “We already had a small fleet of semi-autonomous drones to protect our home system. The Recon Matrices established the safety of our local region, but there were no colonizable worlds in that space.

  “We’d already Constructed a world in our star system to provide more living space. Shezarim-ko suggested that we could standardize that technology and use Matrix-controlled warships to find and Construct worlds for our residence.

  “Combined with self-replication, they could prepare swaths of our galaxy for our use. What we had missed with the reconnaissance missions was that those Matrices were only making two punches.”

  “Their memory banks weren’t severely damaged,” Octavio guessed.

  “Exactly. We knew organic life couldn’t survive, so we provided the Construction Matrices with cloning facilities and massive quantities of starting embryos. The loss rates would be high, but enough would survive to create seedstock for the cloning.

  “It was a brilliant concept and one that set Shezarim-ko’s name in history. They died before the flaw became apparent.”

  “How long until the first colony went wrong?” Octavio asked.

  “In an optimal case, the Construction process takes about forty-five years,” Reletan-dai told him. “Our first colony ship departed five years before the process would complete on their target world. Traveling at eight-elevenths of lightspeed, it took them seventeen years to reach their destination.

  “Everything seemed perfect. The world had been Constructed as planned; everything was registering as the paradise it was meant to be. The colony ship carried one point seven million Assini and a small fleet of Matrix defense ships.”

  The exact number was on Octavio’s tattoo-comp, and he realized it was eleven to the power of six—exactly. A quick glance confirmed his suspicion: the Assini had six fingers on his left hand and five on his right. Eleven digits, base eleven math. That was almost as fascinating as the story Reletan-dai was telling.

  “Those ships were never meant to fight against the combat platform designs we’d included in the Construction Matrices’ files. We never expected the Matrices to even build those ships; they were an emergency protocol in case the Matrices were attacked by an unknown force.

  “Instead, six of them attacked our colony ship without warning. They barely managed to get off a transmission before they were destroyed.”

  Octavio shivered at the thought. The colonists would have known they reached a paradise…and then died at the hands of the Matrices who’d built it.

  “Over fifty colony ships were already in motion at that point—and none of them had the fuel to reverse the current and return home,” Reletan-dai continued grimly. “A hundred million souls were wiped out. Our greatest achievement had turned into a nightmare.

  “Research and testing followed, resulting in the Sentinel Matrix Program. They have a tachyon com–based verification process, making sure their code remains unblemished by the tachyon punches.

  “We used them to clear the Construction Matrices from systems close enough to represent a threat, but we also used them to confirm our absolute worst fears: the self-replication protocols had continued to work perfectly.

  “Six Regional Construction Matrices had become dozens, and we feared—we knew, based on the ones we encountered—that they were all mad. How the ones you have met are sane, I do not know. It raises questions, but…” Reletan-dai trailed off, staring into space. “They are not part of this river of time.

  “We purged the space around us of Construction Matrices, clearing worlds to safely colonize…but it became clear that we would need Sentinel Matrices to guard our worlds. We were preparing for that task when astronomers presented us with worse news: our star was dying.

  “Stars die on immense time scales, and we would not see our world consumed by our star within a hundred years or even a thousand, but we knew that massive flares and other problems would rise in probability.

  “Evacuation became a priority. A hundred and twenty-one ships like Shezarim were laid down, with plans for a fleet of thousands. The current ‘passengers’ aboard Shezarim were the construction crews…and one team of scientists and AI specialists working at a special laboratory amongst the ships.”

  “You were working on the colony-ship AIs, I’m guessing?” Octavio asked. “And some form of escort?”

  “E
xactly. REN-63-KAL was the only colony ship AI completed, but we expected them to provide immense value both to the crews flying the ships and to the colony long-term. We’d also assembled the Escort Matrices. Other teams had designed their combat systems, but we built their AIs. They were double-verified, loyal, sane.”

  Reletan-dai was silent for ten seconds at least before he shook his head and clicked his beak.

  “Something went wrong,” he finally said. “A solar flare occurred twenty-two years before our earliest expected major flare. A bad one, far beyond our worst predictions. Our homeworld was wiped out. Our Constructed second world, doomed to annihilation within hours.

  “Shezarim and REN-63-KAL were the only hope for the survivors. As the senior official present, I ordered the construction crews and my own lab staff aboard Shezarim with the intent of taking her to the surviving world and loading the survivors. We didn’t have a full set of cryo-stasis tubes, but we could hold and feed a lot of people while we fabricated them.

  “We had barely got everyone aboard when the Escort Matrices attacked. Their primary verification node was on the homeworld, and in the gap between it being corrupted by radiation and destroyed by the solar ejecta, it verified them incorrectly and downloaded flawed data to all of my ships.

  “The AIs I had helped design with my own hands went mad. They attacked us and we were forced to abandon our world, and any other survivors, and run. REN-63-KAL helped us do so, but the mad AIs were carrying out constant cyber-attacks on it.

  “It didn’t even think they were intentional. The tachyon-com verification system was broken. I suggested that we separate the Matrix core from the ship’s computer systems, but REN-63-KAL refused to let us take the risk. It suicided to prevent itself from becoming a threat to us.”

  The alien was staring at the wall again.

  “And our Escorts, a fleet of ships meant to protect us against the threats of the galaxy, are now our doom,” Relatan-dai concluded. “If we slow down, they will use their tachyon punches to intercept and destroy us. My only hope is to outlast them, that enough tachyon punches will destroy their minds sufficiently that they will fail.

  “So, you see, Captain Catalan, I do not doubt that your problems are of our creation. Even without knowing what your questions are, I fear we cannot help you. If we were to attempt to stop to do so, we would only unleash worse monsters upon you and yours.”

  59

  There were no seats anywhere aboard Shezarim that would comfortably fit a human. Assini “chairs” looked more like cupped stools, and while they worked brilliantly for a four-legged creature with a horizontal torso, they were basically useless for humans.

  Instead, Octavio was leaning against the wall in what had been an office, studying a holographic projection from his tattoo-comp.

  They still hadn’t found Shezarim’s cold-storage databanks—Reletan-dai knew where they had been, but apparently the crew had shifted them after REN-63-KAL had committed suicide.

  With no one alive knowing where the backups were, searching the three-kilometer-long starship would take Octavio’s depleted boarding teams a lot of time. Days, at least. Days he was relatively sure were worth spending, but…

  “You know, you should probably be doing your thinking aboard Interceptor,” Chen told him, the Marine stepping into the office without knocking, and dropping herself onto the floor beside him.

  “Probably. But my questions and my answers all revolve around this ship, so it seemed like I should stay here,” he replied.

  “What question is there?” she asked. “Reletan-dai was pretty clear: if we try to keep Shezarim, the escort AIs will come for us. So, we find the databanks, take a copy, and leave the Assini to their journey.”

  “Or we take the databanks and the Assini and leave Shezarim to its journey,” Octavio pointed out. “Or we say to hell with it, since Shezarim would help us jump a century or two technologically on its own, and I’m not sure we can safely move the Assini over to Interceptor.”

  “Do we have space for them?” Chen asked.

  “Not conscious. We might be able to load the stasis tubes aboard, but that would require us establishing compatible data and power linkages—and Shezarim’s data links, especially, are intentionally incapable of interfacing with the systems the Construction Matrices have.

  “The other problem is that we don’t know how the Escorts will react to us leaving after boarding Shezarim. They may well jump us anyway as soon as they see us leave her. If we slow down in real space, with or without Shezarim, we’re in danger.”

  “I thought they were hunting the ship,” his Marine CO replied.

  “They are. But even Reletan-dai doesn’t know exactly what they are thinking. Three hundred years of tachyon punches.” Octavio shook his head. “They might not even be thinking anymore. We might be able to pull everything off Shezarim and let the ship go on its way, but remember that we don’t get a second chance at this.

  “Interceptor’s warp ring only has a fifty percent chance of surviving shut down. I want to err on the side of conservatism, which would be bringing Shezarim home regardless of what Reletan-dai thinks…except for these guys.”

  He gestured at the hologram. Twenty-six egg-like black shapes hung in the air, numbers and specifications rippling past them.

  The Escort Matrices had been intended to latch on to Shezarim and her sisters, six to a ship. Octavio didn’t know how many had been built, but Shezarim’s sensor logs had allowed them to get a solid number on her pursuers.

  They might not have had Shezarim’s files, but Reletan-dai had filled them in on the capabilities of the Escort ships, too. Three zetta-lasers. Dozens of pulse guns even more advanced than the ones the Construction Matrices used.

  They didn’t have missiles, at least. They’d been intended to run off their internal resources indefinitely. Unlike Shezarim, the Escort Matrices had even been able to stop and refuel along the way.

  After all, their reactionless drives “only” sustained fifteen percent of lightspeed. Keeping up with the c-fractional colony ship had required them to make repeated tachyon punches.

  “A best-case scenario would be using the warp drive to repeatedly shed portions of our velocity.” He shook his head. “That wouldn’t have us in real space long enough for the Escort Matrices to catch up, and it might help us confuse them. It would also allow us to dump the radiation that coming out of warped space at a different velocity creates.”

  The need to come out of warped space at the entrance velocity caused all sorts of entertainment when moving between star systems that were also moving relative to one another. Any difference created a radiation pulse along the emergence vector.

  That pulse was weak for small velocity differences. For a velocity change of almost a full cee…it would not be weak. Doing it in chunks would both weaken the pulse and make it easier to fire that pulse into empty space.

  “So, what’s the problem?” Chen asked, then snorted. “Right, the warp drive only has a fifty percent chance of turning back on.”

  “And shedding velocity like that is damned dangerous for anything inside the bubble, too,” Octavio confirmed. “Plus, well, at that point we’re kidnapping Reletan-dai and his people.

  “Doing it in one pulse is even more dangerous for us but is the only way we can guarantee we can get back into real space without being jumped by the Escorts before we reach any safe harbor.”

  “That also means that said safe harbor is going to end up facing the Escorts without much warning,” his Marine CO pointed out.

  “Exactly.” Octavio sighed. “I know Admiral Lestroud will be as ready as anyone for that possibility, and Hearthfire is the single largest concentration of firepower we know about, but…it’s not like our Matrices can fight the Escorts any more than they could fight the Rogues—and the Escorts specifically don’t have that limitation.”

  They had, after all, been built to defend the Assini from their first generation of robot warships. The fact that the As
sini had kept building better robot warships to defend themselves from the last set of robots that had gone mad wasn’t lost on Octavio, either.

  “I need to talk to Reletan-dai again,” he concluded. “The decision about what we do is mine, but I’d rather not kidnap him and his people.”

  “Honestly, sir?” Chen rose with easy grace and offered him her arm. “If the Escorts are likely to come after us either way, I say we bring the Assini home. Better for them to settle somewhere now, here where they have potential friends, than somewhere else seven thousand light-years away from anything.

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” Octavio admitted, realizing he’d been dancing around a decision he’d already made. “But I won’t force Reletan-dai to come with us. So, I guess the final answer is his.”

  His Marine CO chuckled.

  “And that’s why you’re in charge, sir,” she admitted. “I’d be informing him, not asking him.”

  “If I did that, Admiral Lestroud would cashier me,” Octavio told her. “And he’d be right.”

  Octavio found the Assini official in the cryo-bay. A pair of armored Vistan Spears guarded the entrance, and he gestured for his Marines to join them as he entered the space.

  It had seemed appropriate to leave the Assini alone with the frozen people who were his responsibility. And it seemed equally appropriate to have this discussion there.

  “Director Reletan-dai,” Octavio greeted the alien with a crisp salute. “May I impose on your time for a few minutes?”

  “You’re already here, Captain,” Reletan-dai pointed out. “I’m just…facing the impossible mountains of choice. I must pick people to awaken to help me check over the ship, but half of my people are shipyard hands. I am both spoiled for choice…and loath to awaken anyone to face the long quiet ahead of us.”