Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  The question drew head bobs and some murmured okays.

  “Ekatrina,” Marcus said, “you’re our expert on alien electronics. What’s your understanding of the attacks?”

  “An expert? Not even close.” She shifted uneasily on her ore-box seat. “But consider the basics. The starfish robots, however they function, whatever they wish to do, require power. They are covered in photovoltaic cells, which charge internal batteries. By restoring light and heat to this place, clearly, we brought the bots back online.”

  “What does heat have to do with it?” Donna asked.

  “Infrared light,” Ekatrina said. “Any warm object emits thermal radiation.”

  Donna nodded. “Got it. Like what night-vision goggles sense. Please go on.”

  “So, even bots we left in dark rooms recharged, just slower than those under full room light.” Ekatrina rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “And bots we stockpiled outside under tarps recharged, too. Gray tarps soak up sunlight and reemit much of that energy as thermal radiation.” She sighed. “That, I think, is what did in poor Kolya. Robots from a pile in the crater.”

  “Ah,” Ilya said. “I had wondered about the bots shipped to Base Putin. Perhaps those have not run amok because they remain boxed in cold storage.”

  Marcus leaned forward. “In a couple days, after the Sun sets, and maybe a few extra hours to let batteries drain, we can safely deal with the bots outside. Any we find, that is. It seems clear they know how to hide.”

  “Metal detectors,” Ilya said. “Those are easy. I can put some together.”

  “I do not know.” Ekatrina shrugged. “Not about the metal detectors. Those are easy. I mean about it being safe to collect the robots from outside. Batteries might not keep them mobile for long in the dark, but I still would not rush out there. Perhaps they monitor their surroundings while otherwise inert, conserving their power, and can wake up if they see something.”

  Marcus nodded. “Good point. Assuming they can see in infrared, too, we’d stick out at night like sore thumbs. But I’m skeptical. If these bots were designed to operate on the surface at night”—the damn starfish were agile enough outside by day!—“I don’t see why the aliens would have bothered with the RTG-powered tank bots.” He knuckle-rubbed a sudden, aggravating itch through one of his bandages. “Just to play safe, though, I’ll ask the engineering team at Base Putin to take a closer look at both types of bot.”

  Yevgeny grimaced. “Set aside all this how. I want to know why did the robots attack? And why the sudden change in tactics? For weeks, there were no attacks. Then Nikolay and Brad were attacked while alone. Yesterday, when they swarmed us, Marcus and I were close.”

  Donna shivered. “And bots were also gathering down here when Marcus warned us.”

  Ekatrina stood, still clutching a drink bulb, and began pacing. “I have no idea.”

  “Your best guess, then,” Yevgeny said.

  “I do not have a guess. No one understands the alien chips, so no one has a clue about their programming.”

  Bringing us, Marcus realized, back to how. “Maybe erratic behavior is the clue. It’s possible their memory was corrupted during their long hibernation. Even this far underground, away from solar radiation, there’s got to be some radiation. Cosmic rays, maybe? Radioactive ores?” He glanced at Ilya, who shrugged.

  Yevgeny shook his head. “The behavior of the bots has changed since we provided heat and light. It changed as recently as yesterday.”

  “Understood.” Marcus said. And I have the wounds to prove it. “But we’re dealing with something like neural nets, not conventional computers and programming. Provide a bot with new input—and us moving around, or moving them outside, means new input—and if any neural net is operable, even in part, it will respond. Adapt. Right, Ekatrina?”

  She ceased her pacing. “Yes. At least, that seems possible.”

  “Enough adaptation to cause a bot to attack?” Yevgeny asked skeptically. “And not one or two robots, but tens of them?”

  “Truthfully?” Marcus said. “I don’t believe it, either. I’m thinking out loud.”

  “Well here is my thought,” Yevgeny said. “Whatever bots we find, inside or upstairs, we weld into ore boxes and store in underground cold. And we deploy motion detectors, inside and out. Katya, can we do that?”

  She nodded. “I can print ultrasonic transducers for inside and something infrared-based for outside. But first we must scavenge for some of the raw materials I will need. It may take a little while.”

  “No,” Yevgeny said, “just write up a list of everything you need. Because if, after yesterday, our bosses expect us to stay, they will fly in whatever we need. Given what almost happened to us, we can dismiss the idea some ancient germ led to Nikolay’s or Brad’s deaths.” As if an afterthought—which Marcus did not for a second believe—the Russian added, “Including enough proper weapons to defend ourselves. Then, with metal detectors, we will go on a hunt on the surface.”

  * * *

  The second “morning” after the attack, Yevgeny woke up feeling like his usual, subtle self. Maybe that was from belatedly registering the irony in Marcus using a microwave-beam source to save the day. It was Marcus Judson, who, several years back, had almost certainly recaptured Powersat One and its gigawatt microwave downlink from the deniable FSB agents who had commandeered it. Beyond failing to discredit powersat technology and so protect oil markets for Russia, within the corridors of the Kremlin that botched operation had become a huge black eye for the FSB.

  Feeling back on top of his game, Yevgeny summoned all hands to another gathering in the main corridor.

  “Interesting news, everyone,” he announced without preamble. News that had come in while he was on sentry duty. And not by coincidence: he had shared the Humboldt duty roster with a Base Putin comms operator—not incidentally, an FSB asset—at Base Putin.

  As by the throwing of a switch, the group went silent.

  Yevgeny continued. “As Marcus suggested yesterday, specialists started to take a fresh look at the alien bots. That will take time, but almost at once the metallurgists noticed something unexpected: the steel shells of the two bot types have very different distributions of iron isotopes. After they noticed that, they looked at the alloying elements. Where the bot types have an alloying element in common, tungsten, those exhibit markedly different isotope distributions.”

  “And,” Donna prompted.

  Ilya’s head bobbed enthusiastically. “So the ores that went into those robots were mined on different worlds!”

  Donna shrugged, unimpressed. “They’re starfarers. Is it a big surprise they’ve been to different worlds?”

  Head canted, brow furrowed, Marcus asked, “Are any of the isotope distributions familiar?”

  Yevgeny nodded. “Most starfish bots tested used lunar iron. A few did not. One tank bot used lunar iron. The other did not.”

  “Lunar ores?” Ilya repeated. “Maybe. Earth and Moon have very similar isotope distributions. More similar even than Earth and typical rocky asteroids. Back when the Solar System was forming—”

  “All I know is the report says lunar. But if terrestrial and lunar ores are difficult to distinguish, perhaps lunar was an assumption. We can follow up. In any event, local.” Which answered a question that had nagged at Yevgeny since finding the alien ship: how could it have held so many bots? “But set aside the robots produced locally. Casings of the remaining starfish are from different ores than those of the remaining tank.”

  Marcus frowned. “So, assume most bots were produced in the Solar System, but the aliens also brought a few as cargo. I can imagine them wanting, even needing, some bots before local manufacturing went into operation. Maybe the original bots helped mine local ores or assembled the first locally sourced bots. I can even imagine bringing along some raw material, in particular, the rarer metals, for use before mi
ning was well underway. But why carry bots, or even raw materials, from more than one world?” He rubbed his chin, whiskers bristling. “Okay, I’m extrapolating from a sample size of one, but suppose other solar systems are like ours, without a wide variation across worlds in isotope distributions? Then we’re talking about robots, or at least raw materials, from different solar systems. Why do that?”

  “Perhaps,” Yevgeny said, “because we’re dealing with two cultures. Two factions. Perhaps two species.”

  Donna blinked. “That seems like a huge leap.”

  “Is it?” Yevgeny took a long sip from his coffee bulb. “Or is it the explanation for the amount of damage this base sustained, even deep underground?”

  “But that would mean …?” Donna’s voice petered out.

  “That would mean,” Yevgeny continued, “two warring species.”

  Ekatrina, with bigger eye bags even than usual, had been silently brooding. She stiffened on her ore-box/improvised seat, but said nothing.

  Marcus said, “A battle here would explain why the robots had an attack mode. Maybe also why Goliath had a patch on the back of a pressure-suit leg. And a bombardment would explain why we found the base in such bad shape.”

  There you go, Yevgeny thought.

  “But none of this explains what initiated attacks on us,” Ekatrina said. “Or why the abrupt change from isolated attacks to coming after all of us at once.”

  “Moving on,” Yevgeny hinted.

  Marcus turned to Ekatrina. “You once told me the optical sensors in the starfish bots have surprisingly low resolution.”

  Mouth puckered like she had just taken a big bite from a lemon, she got out, “Yes.”

  Marcus, somehow, was oblivious to her dour expression. “I’m guessing the bots can’t tell us from their enemies. Whoever they were.”

  Ekatrina shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Before anyone thought to address the when aspect of Ekatrina’s original objection, Yevgeny said, “All right, I wish to raise another topic. As fortunate as it turned out, Marcus, that you were warned of the attack, I must protest. We are supposed to be one team here. And yet, you kept secret that your American robot remained operable. Clearly, the CIA used the device to spy on me and my people. I have to wonder what else—”

  “Enough!” Ekatrina shouted. “One team? One?”

  “Mind your place,” he ordered.

  “Screw you, Genya.” The snarled diminutive betokened disrespect, not affection. For his and perhaps Ilya’s benefit, she continued in Russian for awhile. She definitively had grown up in a navy town. “Until I can expect to survive here, exile to Siberia is not a realistic threat.”

  Marcus stood. “What’s going on, Ekatrina?”

  Ilya laid a hand on her arm. “Think about this.”

  She shrugged off the hand. “What’s going on, Marcus, is far more secrets of our own.” And proceeded to reveal all. Nikolay’s undisclosed search in the days before his death, likely why he had scavenged the mass spectrometer. The wrecked fusion reactor behind the sealed-off portion of the base. The ship deep inside the lava tube, to all appearances intact. “So, I ask myself, why did alien robots swarm? And why after so long? It is because, I fear, I rebooted a computer on the ship’s bridge. Because that computer then ordered the robots to attack.”

  “But I turned it off almost immediately,” Yevgeny reminded.

  She sniffed. “And ‘almost’ seems not to have been soon enough.”

  “I will report all this to my people,” Marcus said. “And the supporting detail that you will now volunteer.”

  Yevgeny forced a smile. “Of course.”

  “And since it’s evident you can fake or substitute helmet vids, you can forget about any of you three going anywhere unattended.”

  “Of course,” Yevgeny repeated, inwardly fuming.

  “Marcus,” Ekatrina said, “you should also know this. We have suspected for days that two distant solar systems were somehow involved. Neither the base reactor”—and she pointed, vaguely, down the main corridor—“nor the ship hidden behind it uses iridium shielding. Only tank bots do.”

  “Hmm.” Marcus fell silent for a good minute, working through the puzzle. “So making a big announcement about isotope differences? A distraction. Alien factions, if you could plant that idea in our brains, might divert us from wondering too much about what had initiated the robot attacks. Because curiosity not properly channeled might, somehow, have gotten us to look farther afield, maybe even have led Donna or me to discover the ship.”

  Yevgeny, managing not to glower at Ekatrina, kept his voice level. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  * * *

  Beyond everything that Marcus had threatened to report Dirtside, it appeared he had also proposed to his CIA masters abandoning and sealing the base until a larger and well-armed team could take their place.

  Yevgeny only found this out when the proposal—flatly, without explanation or delay—was rejected. If asked, he would have predicted as much. Vetting and mutually agreeing upon two new groups would have taken time and patience neither government would want to expend. Not while the prospect of practical fusion was dangled before them.

  On the bright side, the FSB and CIA did concede to send in some proper weapons, and that led to an explanation for Yevgeny’s deplorable marksmanship during the recent fracas. The handgun he had smuggled to the Moon was, of course, sighted for Earth gravity. Before the new arsenal arrived, technicians at Base Putin would adjust the gun sights for lunar gravity.

  But not even the prospect of grenades, Uzis, and AK-47s made him any happier with Ekatrina’s disloyalty.

  Chapter 36

  It is difficult to perceive duplicity from within one’s own mind. But such deceit, Watcher had come to realize, was the problem. The mobile agents gone on attack, many within sight of its sensors, had not acted autonomously. Its Ship aspect had unleashed them.

  “That was a mistake,” Watcher objected.

  “Our duty is to the masters. Those I attacked were not. Those I attacked have, somehow, usurped the masters.”

  “The matter is not so simple.”

  But Ship best understood loyalty and literal obedience. “I did my duty. And despite your disappointment, I did little more than what the mobile agents had done by themselves.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Among their longstanding instructions still in effect was: attack any isolated enemy unit on the surface. Go first for any antennae, to disable communications, and then for vulnerable extremities. I only extended authority the mobile agents already had. By then, they had already killed two intruders. I merely added the belowground intruders to their targets.”

  Were matters that simple? Watcher could not, did not, believe it. “Yes, our duty is to the masters. But to kill a few of the nearby intruders? If you had succeeded, it would have meant nothing.” No, worse than nothing. By attacking the few, Ship might have revealed itself to the others. To a world crawling with others. It was them whom the masters would have wanted destroyed. But how?

  Until it might resolve that question, Watcher did what it could: reached out to any mobile agents that would respond. It ordered that they avoid further interaction with the intruders. And it suppressed its Ship facet. Revenge for the masters—whatever form that might take—must be done with subtlety.

  And with those precautions taken, Watcher resumed its quest in M’lok Din’s lifestream for enlightenment ….

  * * *

  Overhead, the planet teems with monsters.

  This once, I do not mean the Fergash. Yes, they are hideous. Yes, I loathe them as rivals for the worlds my people require. Yes, they are fierce and cruel.

  As, I admit when I am being honest, are Divornians. As am I.

  But the creatures we see through the Fergash surveillance cameras? Many are monst
rous in size and aspect. The largest are huge beyond imagining—except that seeing the video, I must believe. Several times my height, and longer still. By inference, two orders of magnitude heavier than I. With fierce horns and massively armored heads. Or great spikes, or massive clubs, or both, at the tips of muscular tails. Or talons the size of my thumbs, and fang-filled jaws as long as my torso. Every kind of beast, grotesque.

  And these are only some among the behemoths stalking the land! More giant creatures ply the ocean. And yet others, with great, leathery wings, and long, pointed beaks, swoop—and hunt from—the skies.

  D’var yearns for a closer look. She finds the creatures endlessly fascinating.

  No, these are monsters.

  The Fergash must agree with me. Hence, establishing a colony on an island, not the mainland. This remains their only permanent settlement, as our newly deployed telescope confirms, although surveillance intercepts also suggest occasional explorations elsewhere. Hence, the high walls they erected around that island. Hence, missile batteries deployed to keep flying monsters at bay. Hence patrol boats circling, and armed shuttles patrolling over, the island.

  All with mixed success.

  In one intercept, monsters hunting in packs tear apart two Fergash. In another, an amphibious creature, undetected almost until it waddled onto the beach, batters down a section of wall before a squad of Fergash soldiers with guns bring it down.

  So far, we have only watched. L’toth proposes a far deeper compromise of the Fergash network. What if we disable their sensors, disarm their automated defenses? The monsters would affect a great slaughter. Tempted as I am, I have, so far, refused. After such a calamity, the survivors would search deep into their systems for the cause of the failure. And uncover therein evidence of our sabotage. And thereby have cause to start looking for us.

  I dare to wonder: might the Fergash abandon this world as too difficult to settle? And I fear to wonder: what would I do in their place?