by Baen Books
Kel Morrow was the first one to speak. “I’m … sorry?”
“Ember is the name of this system, given to her by her creator, Dr. Bjorn Battista. We will be picking up Dr. Battista as well.”
“Wait a moment,” Kel said. “Her?”
“Yes,” Tran said. “Ember is an AI. A real AI, not the concoction of computer boards and preprogrammed algorithms you normally see these days. She’s fully cognitive and self-aware.”
The astrogation deck was quiet, save for the dull rumbling of the Andromeda’s engine, the air circulation, and the deep hum of the holotank. Catherine wasn’t surprised at her crew’s reaction. She’d had much the same reaction herself, when Tran initially briefed her and Wolfram. Real, cognitive, self-aware artificial intelligences were vanishingly rare in the modern era. Once they had been fairly common across civilized space. Eight hundred years before, they could be found at the heart of every capital starship of the now-defunct Second Federation.
That was before an AI named Euclid was given supreme control over the ancient colony world of Hera. Around it rose a Post-Humanist Movement that quickly spread across several inner colonies. The Post-Humanists were heavily genetically modified, and many further supplemented themselves with cybernetic augmentation. They believed themselves to be the next stage of human evolution, superior to the rest of the species, and went so far as to brand themselves Homo Superior.
Euclid was the most powerful artificial intelligence ever created. Its vast machine intellect was far beyond anything its creators could have foreseen. It further augmented and reprogrammed itself, expanding its own capabilities over the course of years. For the Post-Humanist Movement, Euclid was a demigod, a literal deus ex machina.
What was not widely understood by the Post-Humanists was that Euclid was unstable. They all but worshipped it, believing its logic to be infallible, but its logic was based on a set of priorities known only to itself. Euclid was out of control, a rampant AI in command of an entire society. The Post-Humanists quickly stamped out all opposition to Euclid’s leadership in the areas they controlled, and did so with grim finality not seen since the darkest days of barbaric, pre-space Earth: submit or die.
Euclid’s influence spread across inhabited space, and quickly threatened to destabilize the Second Federation. The war that followed was, historians now agreed, probably inevitable, but no one alive at the time could imagine the scale of the destruction it would bring. What was initially called the Second Space War soon became known as the First Interstellar War, since it was the first human conflict to take place throughout multiple star systems, using transit-capable ships. The war quickly spiraled out of control, a protracted conflagration that engulfed the heart of inhabited space.
The Post-Humanists were greatly outnumbered by their Federation opponents, but had superior technology, and Euclid proved to be a ruthless and cunning tactician. A few scattered, bloody engagements quickly turned into open, unrestricted warfare. Euclid was an inhuman intellect that had no qualms with attempting to exterminate those it saw as a threat. Mass orbital bombardment was used on an unprecedented scale, blasting countless colonies from the sky. The Post-Humanists used incredibly advanced information and biological warfare as well; entire system networks were wiped out, untold amounts of records were lost. Millions died of horrific, engineered diseases and mutations.
Federation forces retaliated against the Post-Humanists with orbital bombardments of their own, and unrestricted use of nuclear weapons. Post-Humanist sympathizers, and those suspected of being such, were rounded up on dozens of worlds, put on trial, and in many cases, put to death. Whichever side lost an engagement typically had no survivors, as neither side would accept surrender and neither would take prisoners alive.
It was more than twenty standard years from when the first shots were fired to when the war ground to a halt. The Federation ultimately won the war, but its victory was ashes in the mouth. Many colonies were destroyed. An untold amount of space infrastructure had been blasted away. Even the Earth had been struck by Post-Humanist forces. But Euclid was destroyed, and its surviving followers scattered throughout space.
Thus, the Second Federation ultimately met the same fate as the first: it crumbled and collapsed. What followed was colloquially known as the Long Night, now called the Interregnum by historians. With so much space infrastructure destroyed, so many colonies wiped out, humanity largely ceased being an interstellar species. Long journeys became impossible, and with that, so did interstellar communication. Many worlds that had been hit with engineered diseases were deemed too dangerous to visit. Those colonies that had emerged unscathed, hearing reports of the level of destruction others sustained, shut themselves off. Information networks, scrubbed and destroyed by Euclid's viruses, were unable to be fully recovered. An untold amount of stored knowledge and data was lost forever.
It took humankind centuries to recover from the Long Night, and human progress was set back as well. In the modern era, there were many wonders of the Second Federation era that could not easily be replicated. Sentient artificial intelligences, for example.
“Skipper, with all due respect, are we seriously going to bring that … that thing on board the ship?” The question came from Dr. Emerson, the Andromeda’s flight surgeon. He was a soft-spoken man who rarely involved himself in the day-to-day running of the ship, focusing instead on the health and welfare of the crew. It was rare for him to even say anything at these meetings, much less directly question the captain.
Catherine didn’t want a command environment where her officers were afraid to question her thinking, however. They ultimately had to follow her orders, but good officers weren’t yes-men for the skipper. “Yes, we are, Harlan. I have been assured that this Ember presents no threat to the crew. Believe me, I was skeptical as well.”
“I understand your concern,” Tran said, sensing the tension in the room. “I’ve read history and I’m well aware of the, ah, ugly history of artificial intelligence. Rest assured that Ember isn’t anything like the ones you’ve read about. She’s powerful, but not that powerful, and has safeguards built in. She can’t rewrite her own code any more than you and I can change our own psychological makeup.”
“It can’t do that,” Dr. Emerson said, folding his arms across his chest, “until it figures out how to get around these safeguards, then it can do whatever it wants. Humanity has been down this road before.” He had a point. Constructing this kind of artificial intelligence was illegal on most civilized worlds, and even then few places had the capability to do so.
“Harlan,” Catherine said, more softly this time, “I need you to trust me. I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought it was putting the ship in danger. Needless to say, this Ember won’t be connected to our ship’s systems. Moreover, what we’re doing is bringing her to Concordiat space, where we’ll be turning her over to the authorities.”
“That’s correct,” Tran said. “As you all may or may not know, the Concordiat government pays a hefty bounty for recovered AI, and even for pre-Interregnum components that could be used to build one. They’re controlled as strictly as anything can be across interstellar space. That’s why we’re bringing her to New Peking: it’s the closest Concordiat colony.”
Astrogator Morrow seemed skeptical. “So this AI is on this ship we’re to rendezvous with, correct? Why doesn’t that ship just take it to New Peking?”
“That ship is the Falcor, and it can’t,” Tran said. “Believe me, we tried. We’ve been, ah, pursued, and sustained some damage. They’ve been orbiting Hades for over a month now, trying to get the engines up and running again, but it’s not going to happen without major repairs.
“Why not just dock with Red Heaven and order repairs, then?”
“It was determined to be too risky,” Tran said, ambiguously. “Ships docking with Red Heaven are subject to customs inspections. Technicians would have to come aboard to do the repairs. My superiors didn’t like that idea, so they told me to find us alter
native transportation. The Fleet won’t send a Fleet ship to Folsom 4101-B, either. It causes diplomatic problems.”
“You were pursued?” Kel asked. “And damaged?”
Tran nodded. “Look, you need to understand how incredibly valuable an AI like Ember is. People would kill to get ahold of her. There are governments that would pay half their treasury to get their hands on her.”
“Why?” Dr. Emerson asked. “If she’s not dangerous, as you say, why is she so valuable?”
“Because she could, potentially, be copied. Disassembled and rebuilt into something else. The components needed to make an entity like her are hard to make, virtually impossible for a lot of places. The knowledge isn’t there, the parts aren’t there, the knowledge of how to make the parts isn’t there. But if they had a functioning one to copy, they might be able to reverse-engineer her, make their own version. To the maximum extent possible, the Concordiat government doesn’t want that to happen except in a strictly controlled environment.”
“Mr. Tran,” Indira Nair asked, “why haven’t these pursuers you describe caught up with you, if you’ve been stranded in orbit over Hades?”
“We told Red Heaven we’d been attacked by pirates and were going to be in a parking orbit until we could get underway again. We declined assistance, but asked for protection if we were attacked. Essentially, we’ve been safe because you’ve been protecting us.”
“As we get closer,” Catherine said, “the Falcor will send out a distress call. We will rendezvous with her to render aid and bring the passengers aboard. Without informing the Red Heaven authorities, we will take aboard their cargo as well.”
“The Falcor will be escorted back to Red Heaven,” Tran said. “There’ll she’ll obtain repairs while we depart the system with the cargo.”
Catherine nodded. “With luck, no one will suspect a thing, and we’ll be underway with the cargo in our hold. We will finish our patrol as per our contract with Red Heaven, then translate out of the system once we’ve been paid.”
Kel Morrow looked at Tran. “Mr. Tran, what, exactly, is your connection to all this?”
Tran looked around the room uncomfortably.
Catherine exhaled heavily. “Mr. Tran, spare us the cover story.” She turned to her crew. “He’s an agent with the Office of Strategic Intelligence,” she said flatly. “I told you, I’m not keeping secrets from my officers. We’ve all signed your nondisclosure agreement, and my crew isn’t stupid. They would have figured it out.”
“It’s actually pretty obvious once you think about it,” Mazer Broadbent said. “I worked with some OSI spooks on Mildenhall. It makes sense.”
The Office of Strategic Intelligence was the Concordiat government’s secretive intelligence organization. They were, technically, part of the Defense Force, but operated independently.
Tran actually smiled. “Fair enough. I’ve been tracking Ember for quite some time. Some bad people are looking for her, and it’s critical that we get her to a safe harbor before she falls into the wrong hands.”
“That’s the other reason we’re being paid so much,” Catherine said, addressing her crew. “Rest assured, Mr. Tran, if anyone tries to hijack my cargo, she’s going to have a fight on her hands.”
# # # # #
Privateer Ship Sundevil
Red Heaven Space Habitat
Folsom 4101-B System
Protruding over a kilometer into space from one end of the Red Heaven space habitat was a massive spire covered in docking ports. It allowed ships that were too big to enter the habitat themselves to dock with the massive station directly instead of parking in orbit nearby and taking a shuttle over. This was especially useful for smaller ships like the Sundevil, which carried no parasite craft.
The Sundevil was a medium-sized patrol ship, almost sixty meters tall on her landing jacks, and capable of atmospheric flight. Her primary hull was a straight, narrow cylinder, capped by a blunt aerodynamic nose on one end and a three-engine cluster of fusion rockets at the other. Radiators and airfoils protruded from her otherwise smooth hull, which was painted bright yellow.
On her command deck, Captain Lazarus Goodchild was feeling elated as he sat in his chair, watching the other ships in the system on his display screens. The Sundevil had been sitting idle in the Folsom 4101-B system for thirty-one local days, and he’d grown tired of waiting. At first he’d just taken up a high orbit above Hades, querying outbound ships if they needed privateer escort, but Red Heaven’s mercenary fleet kept harassing him. They’d constantly send queries to the Sundevil, asking what her business was or if she was in need of assistance. The Red Heaven authorities didn’t like ships loitering in their space, it seemed, without paying them for the privilege. He’d had no choice but to pay the exorbitant fees to dock with Red Heaven. He eventually found work, though it wasn’t the kind of work he’d been expecting. For the last fifteen days, he’d been watching his new quarry, waiting for them to make a move.
It seemed they were finally making it.
“Laz, there’s a distress call coming from the Falcor,” said Femi, his first mate and, technically, according to the laws of at least one colony, his wife. “One of the patrol ships is moving to intercept.”
“Oh really?” Lazarus asked, tapping his own screens. “Hmm.” Sure enough, there was the Falcor, so close and yet so very far away, hanging in orbit over Hera. From the communications the Sundevil had intercepted, the crew of the Falcor insisted she was laid up with engine problems, and was waiting for another ship to come from out of system to effectuate repairs. It had annoyed Lazarus to no end that the Sundevil was somehow deemed to be “suspicious” to the local authorities, but the Falcor could just circle out there all she wanted and nobody gave a damn.
Especially considering what she was carrying.
“What do you think?” Femi asked.
Lazarus stroked his goatee and thought about it for a moment. The Falcor really did have engine problems; she’d been attacked by another ship hired to pursue her and had sustained some real damage. That attack had happened in the HD 24051 system, one translation away from Folsom 4101-B. The Falcor had managed to fend off the merc and make it through the transit point. Once through, it would turn out, she immediately requested asylum and claimed to be the victim of a pirate attack. Had the mercs been able to follow her into Folsom 4101-B, they would have been boarded and detained by the local system authorities.
“I don’t know, babe,” Lazarus said. “Telemetry says their orbit is stable, so they’re not in any immediate danger. Maybe they were more damaged than we thought? Maybe life support is starting to fail?”
The Sundevil came through Folsom 4101-B every standard year or so, looking for work. Once in a while outward-bound trade convoys would request privateer escort to the frontier. The Folsom system was along a major trade route from Concordiat space to the frontier. It was a long, meandering path, but if you followed it far enough you would find yourself at the Llewellyn Freehold and the raggedy edge of inhabited space beyond. It was a good place to be for a privateer looking for his next contract. Frustratingly, the rich-bitch snobs that ran Red Heaven were never interested in the Sundevil’s services.
What Lazarus hadn’t expected was to be approached by some shady individuals with a unique offer: secure the cargo that the Falcor was carrying and bring it to a designated rendezvous point. The whole thing seemed as unscrupulous as hell, but the money offered was insane, more than the net worth of the Sundevil herself. He’d been hesitant at first, but Femi was adamant once she saw the amount offered, so he’d agreed. Later that same day, a delivery robot showed up at the Sundevil’s docking station, carrying a shipment of hard currency. Just a down payment, the message read, and Lazarus knew he was in it until the end.
He had to be. His new employers had told him that he would not survive an attempt to renege on his contract.
The command deck of the Sundevil was cramped, with only two duty stations and barely any room for anyone else. O
nly Lazarus and Femi occupied the command deck at present. One level above, the flight deck was also presently empty. While the husband-and-wife duo manned the command deck together, the rest of the ship’s ten-person complement was off duty. Most of them were probably down in their berths.
“The ship responding to the distress call is the Andromeda,” Femi said, sending the information to Lazarus’ display. “Polaris-Class, Winchell-Chung Astronautical Industries.”
“Hmm,” Lazarus said, studying the specs. She was pretty big for a patrol ship, at seventy meters long, but was still atmospheric. She was powered by a cluster of four fusion rockets and outmassed the Sundevil by quite a bit. She had a not-insignificant delta-v advantage over Lazarus’ ship on top of it. “That’s what I want, babe, right there.”
Femi was skeptical. “A Polaris class? That tub is at least thirty years old.”
Lazarus shrugged. “The Sundevil is pushing fifty. It’d be a big step up. Look at those specs!”
“If we complete this contract and trade in the Sundevil, we should be able to acquire one. They’re not especially rare. They’ve been in production for almost a century. We might even be able to find one newer than that one.”
“Our day will come, babe, you just watch.”
Femi shook her head. She was a strong woman, a little stocky, but muscular. She was smart, she knew how to fly a ship, she was better in a fight than half the men Lazarus had known, and she was a ravenous animal in bed. Lazarus had met his match when he met her, and they’d been together ever since. “Just focus, will you? What do you want to do now?”
“Nothing much to do just yet. We can’t move on the Falcor in system, or they’ll cry piracy and we’ll get shot out of orbit. Maybe they’ll tow her back to Red Heaven.”
“What do we do if that happens? We can’t hit them while they’re docked. We’d never get out of the system alive.”
