Refuge

by Glynn Stewart

  “You don’t have to keep going, you know,” the Captain replied. “There are dozens of Constructed Worlds inside XR-13-9’s region, and those Matrices will protect you at any cost.”

  “The thought is pleasant,” the Assini told him. “But even if I adjusted their programming to allow them to fight the Escorts, they would be outmatched and there wouldn’t be enough time to upgrade their systems.”

  “You can adjust their programming?” Octavio asked. If Reletan-dai could reprogram the Rogues, that created many options…

  Reletan-dai made a fluttering gesture with his lesser hand.

  “To some degree. Not as much as we would like. Shezarim-ko was brilliant in their security measures, and the Construction Matrices’ core software is protected by a quantum encryption sequence that we have never successfully broken.

  “Logically, there is a key to unlock that sequence, but it appears Shezarim-ko took that key to their funeral pyre.”

  “But you said…?”

  “I cannot change that their code restricts them from attacking other Matrices,” Reletan-dai replied. “I could encode an overlay that more narrowly defines ‘other Matrices,’ allowing them to engage the Escorts, but I cannot change their core protocols.”

  Octavio nodded and leaned against one of the consoles in the cryo-bay.

  “That might be enough, you know,” he told the alien.

  Reletan-dai was silent for a few seconds.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have a full battle group in the Vistans’ star system. The Rogues tried to Construct their world. We bought them time but did not save their planet—we are in the process of evacuating them to a Constructed World and have significant forces in place to protect them.

  “They have their own defenses, and XR-13-9 has deployed their own units to help with fabrication and secondary security. We have multiple units designed and optimized to fight Rogue combat platforms, and we also have loyal combat platforms of our own.

  “Plus fixed defenses. You’re not going to find a more heavily defended safe harbor anywhere in the galaxy, I don’t think. If there is anywhere that we can stand and fight your Escort Matrices, it’s there.”

  The Assini was silent again, then turned his head back toward the console.

  “I will not ask your people to fight for us,” he said finally. “We cannot fight for ourselves. Violence is…contrary to our nature and has been for over thirteen hundred and thirty-one years. We were herd creatures and we built ever-greater herds. There was violence in our past, but it was so far behind us that when we faced our fears of the dark, robots were the only tool we could embrace.

  “We could not fight, so we built robots to fight for us. And in so doing, we damned untold billions.”

  Reletan-dai continued to stare at the controls.

  “Our fate is of our own making. We earned it in every way possible.”

  “And if we left you to it, would your Escorts simply pass us by? We who boarded this ship and could easily transfer your people to our vessel?” Octavio snorted. “Hell, if they will just pass by, we should probably consider doing just that.”

  The Assini didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound other than his slow breathing for at least fifteen seconds.

  “I hadn’t considered that possibility,” he finally admitted. “The Escorts are following Shezarim via a firmware-level tachyon-communicator link. It’s supposed to be their verification process, but that has failed completely. Instead, it means they can never lose this ship. All we can do is run and hope they eventually stop chasing. Punch degradation of the Matrices is the only hope for them doing so.

  “At this point, though, it is still quite likely that they retain enough intelligence to make that connection. Depending on what they have decided to do—whether they are simply trying to destroy Shezarim or destroy her passengers—they may well pursue you.”

  Octavio realized that Reletan-dai had balled his hands into fists. The Assini had even less in terms of fingernails than humans, but the alien’s dark flesh was turning pale under the pressure.

  “You can’t run forever, Director Reletan-dai,” the human Captain said softly. “They can refuel and keep coming. They can cover the distance you travel in a year in two and a half hours. They can spare the time to exterminate anyone they think might have rescued you. They can repair themselves. They can build more of themselves.”

  Reletan-dai released one of his fists to raise a hand in objection. Apparently, the Assini shared that gesture.

  “The Escort Matrices cannot self-replicate,” he noted. “We never gave any Matrix unit that capability after the Construction Matrices went so wrong. But they can repair and refuel; you are correct. They could even use each other as templates to slow the degradation of their core intelligences. We calculated that it would take between twenty-six hundred and fifty-two hundred years for them to degrade sufficiently to cease chasing us. Hence a targeted seven-thousand-light-year journey.”

  “They already got hunter-killer drones aboard your ship,” Octavio pointed out. “What’s to stop them from simply punching one of their ships in front of Shezarim? It would make for one hell of a light show.”

  “Their core protocols prevent intentional self-destruction,” Reletan-dai pointed out.

  “The protocols stored in that core intelligence you’re hoping degrades enough for you to escape?” the human asked.

  There was another long silence.

  “Exactly,” the Assini finally said. “We are fucked, aren’t we?”

  Apparently, some profanity crossed species.

  “If you keep running, yes,” Octavio agreed. “Or we can stand and fight. We’re currently traveling faster than light. With a few adjustments, I can bring us up to full speed and arrive at Hearthfire in about eight days. There’s a way I can use our warp drive to bring us out into real space at zero velocity, but it will send lethal radiation through any ship not prepared for it.”

  “This ship was built to—and did—survive a major solar flare, Captain Catalan. I’d be more concerned for your vessel,” Reletan-dai pointed out.

  “Interceptor will be fine,” the human told him. “It’s not safe, it’s not particularly wise, but I can bring us out in the Hearthfire System at roughly zero velocity. What I can’t do is warn our people we’re coming.

  “How long will it take for you provide the Matrices that overlay…and how long will it take the Escorts to catch up?”

  The Assini looked back at the cryo-bay computers.

  “It will take three hours for the Escorts to localize Shezarim’s new location if we are moving multiple light-years away. After that, well…how far are we going?”

  “Six light-years, give or take,” Octavio replied.

  “Two hours a light-year, Captain,” Reletan-dai told him. “They’re faster than the Construction Matrices…so twelve hours, plus three for them to localize Shezarim. You’ll have fifteen hours to be ready.

  “Can you do that?”

  “If you can get the Matrices ready to fight by our side in fifteen hours, I think so,” Octavio told him.

  The Assini clacked his beak in what the human thought was determination. Possibly humor. Potentially both.

  “I was the greatest AI specialist of our time, Captain Catalan…and my team is in these cryo-chambers. If I wake up the right people, I can have your Matrices ready to fight in fifteen minutes.”

  “Then I guess we should start waking people up...If you’re ready to stop running.”

  “My people don’t know how to do anything else,” Reletan-dai admitted. “But yes, Captain. Somehow…I am ready to stop running.”

  60

  Twelve days.

  It had been twelve days since Interceptor had vanished from the sensors of the recon node watching for interception—a recon node that had been rapidly forced to flee as the Creator vessel’s pursuers had tried to attack it.

  Isaac Lestroud didn’t know what Captain Catalan had been up to fo
r those twelve days, but he doubted it had been knitting doilies. Possibly building secret super-weapons—the man was an engineer, after all—but probably digging through a ship built to travel at a near-impossible speed.

  It wasn’t like they hadn’t been busy in the Hearthfire System. Less than two hundred million Vistans remained on the surface, and the eight hundred million now living in space stations had been moved well away from their homeworld.

  Whatever happened now, the Vistan people were going to survive. A new round of freighters would be deployed from the shipyards in a couple of weeks. Once they were online, a million people would be on the every-sixteen-day convoys of two-fifty-six ships.

  Almost five million people had been sent to Refuge, enough that this latest round of freighters would be bringing the first fruits of the colony’s crops when they came back. Two hundred and forty days since impact, multiple Rogue Matrix attacks…and it looked like everything was finally coming together as smoothly as possible.

  Isaac didn’t trust it as far as he could throw Vigil. The Rogue Regional Matrix was still out there, and the pattern of tachyon pulses around where Interceptor had vanished wasn’t reassuring.

  Something was hunting the Creator ship, and he doubted they were friendly.

  “Sir, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters wishes to speak with you,” Connor told him from the entrance, his operations officer not quite entering the office through the open door. “I’m guessing it has to do with the guardships.”

  “Any problems there?” Isaac asked.

  “None I’m aware of. All six new ships are undergoing trials today,” Connor replied. “She might just be calling to say thank you.”

  Isaac snorted.

  “Unlikely but possible,” he conceded. “Sings is exceedingly polite. Have coms link her through.”

  Connor saluted and withdrew, and a waiting icon appeared above Isaac’s desk. A few moments later, it was replaced by the grayscale hologram he was slowly getting used to.

  “First-Among-Singers,” he greeted the Vistan officer. “How may I help you?”

  “You can remind me that my guardships are still worth crewing, even if they are toys to your warships,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters told him, the translator picking up her chirps and converting them into a grumpy tone. “Even upgraded, they have a tenth of your acceleration and inferior arms and armor.”

  “I’ll give you the armor and the acceleration,” Isaac agreed. “Though the sheer mass of rock you build them out of gives you more advantages than you might think. Your X-ray laser systems, though, aren’t that inferior.

  “And the pulse-gun batteries we’ve given you are fully on par with our own. I have no hesitation going into battle with your guardships at my back, First-Among-Singers. They may not be what we wish you had, not yet, but we have them today.”

  You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.

  The quote would be meaningless to Sings, but it summed up their situation.

  The Vistans now had eight guardships again, the ships built into and out of half-kilometer asteroids. Combined with his own fleet and the minefields the Matrices had been building, he was starting to feel confident about standing off the Rogues when they came back.

  “That is true.” Sings sighed. “I wish we had time to engineer a true Vistan warship based on the technology you have shared with us. I still dread what may swim out of the dark waters toward us.”

  “Something’s coming,” he agreed, glancing at the screen behind her hologram with the tachyon signatures around Interceptor’s last known location.

  “I can only hope we’re ready.”

  “The latest batch of graser mines have been turned over to us,” Sings noted. “That brings us up to a thousand platforms. I wish they were more mobile, but we have secured the obvious areas.”

  Three hundred remote-controlled one-shot platforms orbited Vista herself. Another five hundred were positioned by the five clusters of space habitats. The last two hundred guarded the shipyards producing the freighters—the yards that would, soon enough, start laying the keels for another eight freighters…and two cruisers to form the core of a new Vistan fleet.

  Even with the two-light-second range of the graser mines, they were still immobile mines. Minefields in space were only valuable if you could lure someone into them.

  “We can’t do any more. Those mines will be an ugly surprise for the Rogues if they try to sneak past us.”

  “I can only hope.” Sings shivered. “This has been a year of horrors and wonders, Admiral Lestroud. I must admit that I miss your Captain Catalan. He was a guide through much of it…and is a friend.”

  “I know,” Isaac allowed. “He’s a protégé of mine. I’ll be glad when we hear from him again and know he’s safe.”

  “I also wish I could convince the Great High Mother to go to Refuge,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters noted. “She is a stubborn Mother. Worse, she is right.”

  “I’m familiar with that type of argument,” Isaac agreed with a chuckle. His conversation with Amelie over how much technology he’d given the Vistans had been…awkward.

  She was less angry at him for doing it than for not telling her. Which was fair, but he’d done it to protect her.

  Amelie hadn’t appreciated it…and, as Sings said about her monarch, Amelie was probably right.

  “We haven’t seen anything to suggest the Rogues are in the area yet,” he said, changing the subject slightly. “We have time to prepare still.”

  Sings chirped amusement.

  “We’ve never had warning before,” she noted. “Why would we expect it this time?”

  Isaac was halfway to the flag deck when alert lights starting flashing along the base of the corridor. The orange color and lack of a klaxon told him it was a Status Two alert—doubling up shifts without calling every crew member to their battle stations.

  His tattoo-comp buzzed at the same time.

  “Lestroud,” he answered it.

  “Admiral, this is Connor,” his operations officer told him swiftly. “We just had a huge—and I mean literally off the charts—radiation surge at ten light-minutes. It’s at a seventy-degree angle from the ecliptic plane and extremely directional.”

  “Pointed away from anything that might get damaged,” Isaac concluded. “Any sign of a vessel?”

  “Radiation is still too intense, but it does look like a warp-drive emergence with a velocity differential, yes,” Connor confirmed Isaac’s unspoken question. “Turned up to about eleven. If it’s Interceptor, they just dumped ninety-five percent of lightspeed in one warp transition.”

  “I’m already on my way to the flag deck,” Isaac replied. “Even in the scenario Captain Catalan gave me, he was only planning on dumping fifty percent of lightspeed and coming in at least two light-days out.

  “If he came in that hard and that close, we have a problem.”

  “Captain Alstairs ordered the fleet to Status Two on his own authority,” Connor told him. “I’m guessing he agrees with you.”

  “I’ll be on the flag deck in less than a minute. Start pulling together status reports,” Isaac ordered. “If it has engines and a weapons system, I want to know where it is and what it’s doing in five minutes.”

  “On it.”

  Isaac closed the channel and doubled his pace. If Octavio Catalan had decided to make that risky a translation from warped space, he thought they were in serious trouble. And Isaac Lestroud trusted Catalan’s judgment.

  “We have that report, sir,” Connor told him as he finished bringing up his command seat’s screens. The operations officer was still working as he spoke, his hands flying across his own console—but the ops officer’s console was within easy speaking distance of the Admiral’s seat for a reason.

  “Flip it to my console and summarize.”

  “The Vistans have eight guardships, three hundred and twenty bombers and roughly fifteen hundred of their laser cartridges they’ve converted to mines.
They’ve doubled up everywhere we and the Matrices had placed the graser platforms.”

  “Smart,” Isaac agreed. “I missed them doing that.”

  “I think it was mostly a software change on their side, but they only started deploying them a few days ago,” Connor replied. “I was aware of the deployment flights but hadn’t realized it was in addition to the graser platforms.

  “Speaking of which, we have a thousand graser platforms positioned to cover our critical infrastructure. They’re under Vistan control.”

  They were, in fact, running on Vistan software. That had been the answer to the problem in the end: the Matrices could build the weapons and turn them over, but if they were running Matrix targeting software, they’d still fail to fire on Rogues.

  So, the humans and Vistans had wiped the computers and built new code for them. Isaac was only so confident in the new software’s accuracy, but at least it could shoot at the enemy.

  “Our own task force has all reported in at one hundred percent readiness. Vigil, the three strike cruisers, Galahad and four Icicles.”

  Nine warships didn’t seem like much, but Isaac knew the new ships could go toe-to-toe with Matrix combat platforms. So could Galahad, though the odds were against her if she did so—which was why Admiral Giannovi had the destroyers.

  “What about the Matrices?” Isaac asked when he realized that Connor had gone silent, his focus back on the main sensor screen.

  “Sorry, sir. Radiation is still dispersing, but we have confirmed that the source of the radiation was Interceptor. She’s attached to the Creator vessel and they have begun deceleration. We’re attempting to establish tachyon-communication links, but that pulse is still screwing with everything.”

  “I’m surprised they survived,” Isaac murmured. He suspected that the fact that both ships were designed for relativistic velocities was the only thing allowing that.

  “The Matrices, Commander?” he finally repeated.

  “They’re back up to six combat platforms. Four recon and security units, fifteen recon nodes. Four of the construction ships are armed equivalently to the recon and security ships, but they’re bigger and slower.