Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Sorry,” Marcus said. “My little attempt at humor.”

  “More truth than humor. There is no reason for you to be onboard for this test.” And good reason not to be. Yevgeny himself did not much care for being aboard. Pilot and test pilot were very different jobs.

  “Maybe not, and yet here I stay. I say, go.”

  “Fine. Pilot, go.” Yevgeny toggled on his radio. “This is Rescue One. We are go for launch.”

  “Roger that, Yevgeny,” answered a nasal voice. Pedro Fonseca, one of the many engineers brought in from Aitken Basin to help refit the alien ship. “Rescue One, you say. Why not? It’s a worthy sentiment.”

  In short order, Ilya had gotten the reactors fusing. He had cycled them several times, however briefly, between full power and their idling level. Firing up the main drive? That would be an experiment.

  “Deflectors configured for vertical lift,” Yevgeny said, tapping at his control pad. (Alien design practices had necessitated—or so, anyway, the team had concluded—several quirky flight controls. And that, in turn, meant using virtual buttons and sliders on a touch pad, rather than the solid, physical controls he would have preferred.)

  “My instruments show deflectors have repositioned,” Ilya reported from the engine room.

  “I have visual confirmation,” Fonseca added unnecessarily. Vids relayed onto the bridge told Yevgeny as much.

  “Engaging main drive at an estimated five percent.” On Yevgeny’s display, bright blue plasma erupted beneath the ship. Beneath him, the ship throbbed: a pulse each time the convergent laser beams fused a helium-3 micro-droplet. “Ten percent.”

  Slowly, the ship rose from the lava-tube floor.

  He compensated for a slight drift (a deflector out of alignment?) with a short burst from starboard-side attitude thrusters. Lidar and eyeballs alike indicated he was centered beneath the chimney. “Let’s go for a ride.”

  And doubling the thrust level, he soared into the lunar sky.

  * * *

  Abducted by aliens.

  Ship had to resist. Service to the masters, and loyalty, and duty, were innate.

  But how?

  It did not find one intact primary telemetry link to the reactors or main propulsion. It did not find a single working connection to diagnostic sensors in the engine room. But in its diligent, systematic manner, it did discover intact circuits for environmental monitoring of that space.

  Consulting its design files, Ship matched circuits to physical layouts. It identified comm nodes in proximity to low-level autonomous reactor controls.

  It directed carbon-nanotube growth within the neural-net cultures lining the reactor-room bulkheads to establish new electrical connections.

  * * *

  Fast climbs. Faster descents. Gradual turns, and then tight ones. A damned barrel roll.

  Wondering which might help more, a window or Dramamine, Marcus hit the intercom. Pressed deep into the acceleration couch that had replaced the alien tilt-down sleeping shelf, it was a stretch. One more damn thing to adjust before they set out for real. “Having fun, are we?”

  In all honesty, and setting aside the touch of motion sickness, he was having fun. Or maybe he was experiencing relief. His desperate, crackpot plan? It might not be entirely insane after all.

  “I, anyway,” Yevgeny said. “You might remember I advised you not to come.”

  “I do not remember having that option,” Ilya offered.

  “Or anyone mentioning that the test flight would involve a dogfight,” Marcus added.

  Ilya laughed. “Seriously, Yevgeny, take it easy. Calibrating the ship’s performance, measuring rates of fuel and propellant consumption, and so on, will go easier if you fly straight for awhile, accelerate smoothly, decelerate smoothly.”

  “Babies,” Yevgeny said. “I need to know how the ship handles. And I’ll be pushing it harder. We’re barely at seventy kilometers. And we have yet to exceed, by my estimate, forty percent thrust.”

  They went into a screaming, arcing climb that rang mental alarms—and then, zero gee. Only his five-point harness kept Marcus in his seat. They had gone over the top, like on an astronaut training flight. Like the Vomit Comet.

  An unfortunate memory.

  The plunge lasted only a few seconds. Then they were climbing, steeper than ever, pressing him deeper than ever into the acceleration couch. Gritting his teeth, he waited for Yevgeny to get it out of his system.

  Instead, acceleration cut off. Rescue One went eerily silent. And the pilot-deadpan declaration came, “I’ve lost power. We’re going down.”

  * * *

  Both reactors failed at once? How was that even possible?

  But the lights remained lit; at least the automatic cutover to emergency batteries had worked. Too bad batteries could not power the main drive, not even for an instant.

  Marcus hit the intercom. “Ilya! What’s going on?”

  Silence.

  Marcus undid his harness. “Yevgeny, I’m going to check in the engine room.”

  With a low rumble, stern attitude thrusters kicked in. Those were chemically powered. “Stay buckled! This will be a rough landing.”

  A fall of how many kilometers? They wouldn’t land, they would splat. “We have to be going fairly fast. Can we reach orbit using attitude thrusters?”

  “No. But even a little more altitude will buy us extra seconds.”

  During which a reactor might restart, Marcus interpreted. How apt was that to happen by itself? “How long do we have?”

  “About five minutes.”

  With only the trivial nudge of attitude thrusters separating them from free fall, and the ship canted upward at a steep angle, walking was impossible. Marcus grabbed a cable bundle running down the ceiling of the main corridor. Hand over hand, he lowered himself sternward.

  The engine room was quiet as a … library, the acceleration chair there empty. Sweeping his eyes across the room, Marcus spotted Ilya wedged in a back corner: head lolling, eyes shut, a trickle of blood (from a scalp wound?) running down his forehead, chest slowly rising and falling.

  Gripping one hulking apparatus after another, Marcus reached the port reactor compartment. The status lamp retrofit above the door glowed red. Off. Flinging open the door (and wrenching his arm—the door panel, like the reactor-compartment walls, was lead-lined and massive) things inside looked … no different than before takeoff. Instruments grafted onto the reactor registered zero, except two: accumulated charge in the capacitor bank was ample to restart the reactor. And the remote readout of the helium-3 tank in the adjoining compartment had not noticeably budged from full.

  So why was the reactor off?

  A closer look from above revealed nothing. Or to the reactor’s left or its right. Or peering through the tightly wound superconducting coils, or at the sphere of lasers, or peeking through slits of the onion shell, within which fusion took place. The apparatus was flush-mounted to the deck, so he couldn’t see beneath it. And behind it all he saw was the ubiquitous black wall.

  Like the black coating in the base that re-grew connections!

  Marcus wrenched an instrument off the reactor. Whatever that little gauge monitored, it was of human manufacture; Titans hadn’t needed it to run the reactor. Gripping the compartment latch with one hand, stretching, he scraped and scratched behind the reactor with a sharp corner of the instrument.

  Was he separating the reactor from a hostile AI? Or destroying connections essential to the reactor? He had no way of knowing. But if he did nothing, they were all dead anyway.

  Pale indentations took form in the wall coating. Grooves. Gouges. Here and there, metal glinted.

  “About a minute,” Yevgeny warned over the intercom.

  And a warning beacon flashed. Startup!

  As Marcus flung himself from the reactor compartment, the massive do
or, rebounding, clipped his head. The door’s slam, the sudden bellow of the main drive, and something like an elephant falling on him happened together.

  His last thoughts before passing out were: Yevgeny was getting his wish to see just what the alien drive technology could do. And: that hopefully, it would be enough.

  * * *

  Ship felt its failure. More, it regretted the failure. It was ashamed for its failure.

  Still, the restored heat (too warm) and light (skewed too green) had replenished its emergency power reserves. Still, almost it had succeeded.

  Failure had come of acting in haste. By instinct. Failure had come from reliance upon too simple an intervention, easily circumvented. And so, Ship would repair and replace, reroute and make replicates of, critical circuits. All the while, it would watch, and wait, and prepare.

  Next time, its intervention would not be so easily defeated.

  Next time, Ship promised its absent masters, it would succeed.

  Chapter 50

  How could steady acceleration at Earth-standard gravity feel so damned brutal ?

  Except Marcus knew exactly how. Months at Daedalus, shirking any exercise more strenuous than pushing paper (and most often virtual paper, at that). More months in and around the Titan installation, with little proper exercise equipment, even if he had been inclined to use it. All the while laboring twelve, and even sixteen, hours every day. Living in tin cans and hobbit holes (never mind how tall those “hobbits” had been), breathing foul, endlessly recycled air.

  If only the burdens on which he dared not dwell, of which none of them spoke, were purely physical. Because the secrecy, the mutual suspicions, the near isolation, had levied a yet greater toll. Two friends slain. The robotic onslaught, followed by the unending, gnawing anticipation of another. The near-fatal first test flight, and the white-knuckle, if uneventful, second test flight that followed. And overshadowing all else: the belief that, having brought on this nightmare, they were humanity’s last, best—and for all that, dubious—hope for survival.

  Never mind humanity. They were the last, best hope for Val, Simon, and Little Toot.

  Flat on his back on a reclined acceleration couch, beneath two heavy blankets, fingers interlaced behind his head, Marcus tried to tune out the endless throb of the fusion reactors. The ceaseless rumble of the main drive. The whirr of fans and the gurgle of coolant loops. The dreariness that was his closet/cabin.

  Titans must not have believed in ornamentation; apart from the stack of utilitarian wire drawers with his few changes of clothing, the cabin he had claimed for his own was all but featureless. Walls, floor, and ceiling alike were a uniform matte black except where he had attacked them with a coarse rasp, and with a hammer and chisel, here and there gouging through the alien coating to uncover shiny metal beneath, disrupting—he hoped!—whatever alien circuitry had once traversed these surfaces. Alas, the random grooves and scrapings had turned his otherwise nondescript, light-sucking surroundings into a Rorschach test. A test at which, like getting any rest, he was failing ….

  In the underground Titan base, in defiance of the ubiquitous murkiness, they had tried spray-painting Day-Glo swatches—only to see those bright, spirit-lifting pigments slowly eaten. There, the defeat of color had been (perhaps) merely disheartening. Aboard Rescue One, the stakes were oh, so much higher. They dare not do anything that might mask any regrowth of the alien circuits. Nor could they strip off the accursed smart coating. Decent solvents for carbon nanotubes did not exist. A handful of strong acids could have done the trick, but using strong acids shipboard, especially near essential equipment like the reactors, was not an option. Beyond manual scraping, and soon the orbital sanders Ekatrina was kludging from their two handheld power drills, the best they could do was keep the ship’s interior dim and cold, cutting down on the ambient energy the smart coating would tap to regrow.

  Just then, Marcus’s main relief from the drab monotone came from the folded datasheet resting on his chest. In this latest Dirtside holo, Val was (of course!) beautiful and oh, so pregnant. But no matter how brave her smile, her eyes were haunted. At her side, Simon (the boy had grown a good three inches since Marcus had last seen him!) tried, and failed, to hide his fears.

  The most important people in his life, stood—posed, rather—in his guestroom-turned-nursery. That room—freshly repainted; farm-animal decals on one wall; crib assembled—was their declaration of hope. (Also, their tacit denial of the coming evac to NORAD headquarters. High in the Rockies. Behind atomic-bomb-proof blast doors. Two thousand feet beneath the surface.) Because they trusted Marcus to save the day. Save the planet.

  And he would. Somehow.

  His shiver had nothing to do with the near-freezing temperature in the cabin.

  “I need to get out of my head,” Marcus announced.

  It was deep into the ship’s night shift, but it wasn’t as if any of them could do more than doze fitfully, or even expected to. In the two days since departing the Moon, Yevgeny had almost never left the bridge, or Ilya the engine room. Marcus couldn’t really disturb either. Nor, alas, help them. They would reach out to him if and when he could be useful.

  Ekatrina, meanwhile, would be roaming about the ship, checking and rechecking the circuits, instruments, and fail-safes that bypassed their Titan counterparts. If those inspections did not fully occupy her, all signs were that she and Yun, their newbie/navigator, valued their privacy—together. More power to them, but that left … no one.

  Donna had volunteered for the mission, of course. Insisted. Pleaded. Nagged. Right that moment, Marcus selfishly regretted having told her no. “Someone with firsthand experience should hang around. There will be questions. Plan B may yet have a chance.”

  “And if any of you get sick aboard ship, or injured?”

  “Then we’re sick or injured.” Marcus remembered having shrugged, remembered pondering the odds—and the futility—of crew aboard the Titan ship surviving if something did go wrong. Mostly he had wondered why, in that eventuality, their survival would matter. “And anyway, one gee of sustained acceleration is an amazing thing. It’ll only be, give or take, a three-day flight there.”

  (Three days. A cakewalk. He could manage three days on adrenaline and caffeine alone. What had Tyler Pope once said about their road trip? “Back in the day that’s what we called spring break.” Uh-huh. Back in the day, Tyler had still been alive.)

  Donna would not have it. “And how many days once you get to the Hammer? And then there’s the flight back.”

  Any prolonged stay on the Hammer, and there would be no return flight. They would still be on the rock when it smashed into Earth. What use then would a medic be?

  “Go home,” he had ordered. “Be with your family.”

  As maybe he should have been spending Earth’s final days with his family.

  With a sigh, Marcus flicked off and pocketed his datasheet. Tugged up the blankets. Closed his eyes. Willed himself to ignore the reactors’ throb and the rumble of the main drive and the thousand lesser shipboard noises. Willed his mind to clear, his body to fall asleep. Failed.

  He flung aside his blankets and shuffled to their improvised galley. There, sipping bad coffee, he did the thing he was worst at in the world. In all the worlds.

  Waiting.

  * * *

  Severed power lines and cable bundles. Disconnected instruments. Savaged smart surfaces …. The aliens had done their brutal best to render Ship a mindless conveyance.

  As Ship did its surreptitious best to survive, diverting its energies, and its reserve stocks of the mutable smart coating, into various of its concealed places. Cable conduits. Air ducts. Beneath consoles and apparatuses, and inside the snug spaces beneath floor panels. Within consoles and cabinets. It regrew sensors, rerouted and repaired circuits, expanded its neural nets.

  Some aspects of its circumstances became clear. It w
as fully powered, the operation of its reactors implicit in every throb of a helium-3 droplet fusing. It had accelerated, and was now decelerating. Against its will, the five aliens who defiled its interior were flying it … somewhere.

  Where? it ceaselessly wondered. Where was it being taken? And—the more fundamental question—why?

  Despite acute, almost overwhelming, curiosity, Ship dare not pulse radar or lidar, lest the power consumed by those emissions disclose its survival. But through passive hull sensors, it caught glimpses of sun, stars, and planets; with those data it reached a few conclusions. It moved along the ecliptic. It had come sunward almost to the orbit of the second planet. That cloud-enshrouded world itself was distant, far off Ship’s course, seemingly not the aliens’ destination.

  But while spectroscopic data allowed Ship to identify individual bright stars, the overall starscape had been altered beyond recognition. To its list of unanswered questions, Ship added, how long was I trapped in the lava tube? How long was I without power, insensate, inert?

  In time, a fast-moving glint came within range of an optical sensor. Slowly, that speckle brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed: a sunlit asteroid, spinning. Ship extrapolated the object’s trajectory. It extrapolated, presuming that its deceleration would continue unchanged, its own course.

  Why, Ship wondered, was that onrushing rock the destination of the intruders?

  * * *

  Crossing the orbit of Venus!

  No human had ever been so distant from the home world—and yet here Yevgeny was. Piloting a ship that had tried once already to kill him. (Or so he believed. That this eons-old vessel had just failed, that by amazing luck Marcus’s random scratchings had allowed the reactor to restart—while inflicting who knew what other damage—was scarier than a hidden adversary.) Relying on controls and sensors hastily retrofit by Ekatrina to, in theory, bypass a hostile AI. Beneath a Titan-high ceiling, which made him feel like a child playing space cadet. It was a ship whose power and propulsion systems Ilya understood only in principle, and that Yevgeny did not pretend to understand. Even as the flight’s absence of problems felt ever more ominous ….