by Terry Mixon
His words obviously distressed the princess. “Can’t you just check me out remotely and see if they’ve put something inside me? If they have, I want it out. I have enough problems just accepting the implants and nanites that I already have.
“That was a big step, Carl. I don’t know if I can take something like this. You don’t know how my people feel about this kind of thing. It petrifies me.”
“I’ll do what I can, but I can’t make any promises,” he said soothingly. “One step at a time.”
She sighed and headed over to the hatch. It was already open, so even though the machine moved to follow her, she closed the hatch before it could make its way through.
Carl watched the machine with interest. How was it going to get past the locking mechanism?
It brought two of its legs up to where the lock was and seemed to poke at it. Seconds later, the locked and sealed hatch slid open. As soon as there was enough space, the robot went through and joined Elise.
Once he was confident that it was safe, Carl joined them. The two marines that were assigned to keep an eye on the robot followed him through.
Elise seemed dejected. “There has to be something inside of me. The interface came up.”
“That’s not necessarily the end of the world,” he consoled her. “Whatever it is, it’s possible that we can undo it and take it back out.”
Carl gestured toward one of the tables in the room. “If you could sit on top of the table, I’ll bring over a portable scanner, and we’ll see if we can detect anything inside you. I might not be able to tell what it does, but if there’s something there that I don’t expect to see, we’ll know.”
It only took a minute to gather the equipment, and he quickly began running the scanning wand across her. Using his implants, he could interface with the data stream and start interpreting the results immediately.
He could see her cranial implants and the Marine Raider nanogenerator that Lily had implanted. Other than that, he didn’t see anything at a level above nanites.
Time to look deeper. He dialed up the sensitivity until he could see the nanites moving through her body and was able to quickly identify those generated by her Marine Raider gear.
By eliminating those from the readings, he was left with an unpleasant truth: there were alien nanites in her system. Somehow, those had to be responsible for what she was seeing. The question was, what else were they doing?
There weren’t nearly as many of the alien nanites inside of her as their Marine Raider counterparts, but he also couldn’t determine where they were coming from. He also didn’t know if this was going to be the final population of the things. It was far too early to assume that.
It wasn’t going to be easy telling her what he’d discovered, and before he did, he wanted to see if it was even possible to filter them out of her system. They weren’t just in her bloodstream. They were in her brain and other tissues.
They didn’t seem to be in conflict with the Marine Raider nanites, though he wasn’t sure why. The medical nanites should’ve been trying to screen the foreign ones out of her system.
He isolated one of the Marine Raider nanites and brought it up in as much detail as possible. The little machines had their own operational code written into them, and he was able to pull it off of the nanite without any difficulty.
Somehow, portions of the control code had been altered to ignore the alien nanites while continuing to perform their original function. The code changes were strangely done but syntactically correct. Somehow, the alien devices had deciphered the Imperial programming language and altered it inside a machine that was not designed to be changed.
That scared the hell out of him.
Carl scanned the Marine Raider nanogenerator and quickly determined that its programming had also been altered in the same way. Other than instructing the nanites to ignore their alien cousins, no further modifications had been made to the code.
He scanned the unborn children inside Elise and discovered that they had the alien nanites inside them too. The Marine Raider nanites were not inside the children, but that was by design. Their presence would interfere with the developing life, so they were banned from being present.
He’d need to work with Lily and figure out what implications this had for the children. Whatever the answer was, neither Elise nor the admiral would be happy, and neither was he.
With a sigh, he cranked up the sensitivity as much as he could so that he could get all details possible before he tried to capture one of the little things to dissect. That was when he chanced across something exciting.
There were smaller machines inside of the princess’s body. The sensitivity of his equipment was far greater than that of a standard medical scanner so that he could map molecular structures fully, and that allowed him to see—just barely—that there were machines at the pico level.
That was a game changer.
Carl widened the scope of his scanning field and was surprised to see that they were also present in the air around Elise, as were the nanites. He stepped back even farther and began waving the wand around to scan the room itself.
There were devices in the air out to about fifteen meters from the princess. The population density fell off rapidly the farther they got from her body, but they were there.
Out of an abundance of caution, he checked himself for alien nanites. He doubted the things were infecting everyone they met, but it wouldn’t hurt to check. He heaved a sigh of relief when he discovered he was clean. One less problem to worry about.
“I’m afraid that I’ve got some unsettling news,” he told her as he set the scanning wand down.
23
Kelsey entered the science station as carefully as she could. They’d docked the pinnace to the outer hull and made their way to a disused auxiliary maintenance airlock leading into a section of the station that wasn’t typically pressurized.
They had no word on how the other pinnace was doing, but there’d been no indication that they’d been detected. They’d just have to hope that that situation held and that they’d make their way to the master AI without being caught.
The maintenance section they’d gotten into—once they’d bypassed any detection systems that might’ve been attached to the airlock—was starkly quiet, as one would expect of an area in vacuum. They’d sent remotes ahead of them, looking for automated defenses, but saw nothing that indicated potential trouble ahead.
If it’d been her, she’d have placed scanner units near every single potential entry point to warn her of a breach. This was a computer, after all. It could monitor every single thing that happened on the station with just a portion of its attention.
That was what Marcus did on board Invincible, Fiona did aboard Persephone, and Harrison did at Boxer Station. It only made good sense to keep an eye on one’s surroundings.
Yet they’d found no indication of monitoring. No scanner units and no automated weapon systems to fend off attackers. Could the master AI really believe that it would have all the warning in the world when someone attacked? Or did it think itself invulnerable?
The thing was obviously crazy, so there was no telling what was driving its decision making. Whatever core rules the Singularity had slipped into the thing, they had to be at war with the core rules that had already been there. That was like having a split personality, and that didn’t make for rational decision making.
Once the entire platoon was aboard, Kelsey made a hand gesture to Angela, and they began advancing toward where they’d picked to enter the habitable section of the station. As it was far away from any external airlocks, she was hoping that it wasn’t going to be monitored, but that wasn’t something that they could take for granted.
Perversely, the fact that the master AI wasn’t monitoring the external airlocks might mean that it was watching the habitable area far more closely. After all, it was worried about humans, wasn’t it? They’d have to be doubly careful.
Using the grav units built
into their armor, they glided along with just small touches of control that sent them safely through the entire area without touching a single thing. It took less than twenty minutes to reach the airlock leading into the habitable section, and she set their electronics expert to verifying it was bypassed entirely before they even started working to gain access.
“This one’s monitored,” Corporal DJ Fontana sent over the short-range com. “It’s just a tap checking the power cycling system. I’m bypassing it now. Whoever’s watching won’t see anything once we’re done.”
“Don’t assume that’s the only thing in the system,” Kelsey warned. “It would be just like them to have a backup monitoring system just in case.”
The man nodded and continued his work. A couple of minutes later, he nodded again.
“You’re right, Colonel. There’s another tap in the system looking at the atmospheric level inside the airlock. I’ve bypassed it as well. I’ll make one final pass through looking for anything else. Hell, I’m just going to bypass every single thing and assume that it’s all a trap.”
Doing that took five more minutes, but when they were finished, the airlock opened without any indication that it would be detected.
That didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a scanner right on the other side of the airlock just waiting for them. Or that there wouldn’t be one of those automated weapons systems ready to open fire. This was where things got hairy.
A heavy combat squad went through first. It was a small chamber, so only two of the Raiders could pass at a time. Once they entered the habitable zone, unless they were fired upon, they wouldn’t use the com system.
Kelsey waited for the alert that they’d come under fire, but there was nothing. That indicated that things were proceeding smoothly.
She’d have gone through next, but Angela wouldn’t hear of it. “You’re too important to this mission to lead from the front. If we run into trouble, it’ll be those codes in your head that get us out. You’re going to have to be happy running things from the rear.”
Kelsey knew this wasn’t a fight that she was going to win, so she waited her turn and went through the airlock after half of the platoon had preceded her.
The Raiders on the other side had spread out to cover the approaches to the airlock in case they were attacked, but things were quiet. Far too quiet. The place felt like an abandoned tomb.
The habitable section of the space station was dark, the lights were off, the artificial gravity wasn’t active, and the climate controls were turned down. That meant the air was unbreathable, and there was frost over everything because the ambient temperature was far below what one would find in the arctic on any world.
The interior map of the station showed that the lab holding the master AI was only a couple of decks away and a quarter turn around the station. Reaching it wasn’t going to be complicated or time consuming unless they ran into resistance.
The lack of obstacles made her paranoid. Surely this machine couldn’t believe that it was safe. Was it that arrogant? She supposed that was possible, but the best plan was to go in expecting to trip an ambush.
The fire teams moved ahead, leapfrogging one another until they reached stairs leading down, specialists checking every meter of the way for booby traps and scanner systems that could detect their approach.
Every second they remained undetected made the hackles on the back of Kelsey’s neck rise even further. Something wasn’t right. There was a hammer about to drop on them, and they had to be ready for it.
They reached the deck holding the lab and came to the first security door that would’ve blocked the station personnel from going into the restricted area. It was closed and locked, and the security system was on.
“Kelsey, we’re going to have you bypass the alarm,” Angela said through her suit speakers. “We’ll go through hard and fast with the expectation that we’ll run into heavy resistance. Stack up, everyone.”
The security system bowed to Kelsey’s command codes, and the Raiders flew in.
That was when they finally met the resistance that they been expecting all along. Thankfully, their foreknowledge of the autonomous weapons platforms proved useful, because they’d already cracked the IFF codes they used.
There were four of the devices arrayed behind the hatch leading into the lab, using their grav drives to remain motionless. They had plasma weapons that were aimed toward the opening and would have undoubtedly fired if their electronic controllers had allowed it.
Sadly for them, every single suit of Marine Raider armor indicated that it was a friendly unit. The Raiders quickly vaporized the damned things.
No audible alarms sounded, but the master AI had to know they were there now. Kelsey activated her suit com at full power and contacted the other platoon.
“We’re in the lab and have initiated hostilities. What’s your location and status?”
Even as she spoke, the Raiders ahead of her were rushing into the lab, while those at the rear of the platoon were arrayed to defend against incoming hostiles. This fight would draw every single combatant on the damned station.
“Second Platoon is three minutes out, Colonel,” the lieutenant in charge said. “We haven’t encountered anything or anyone.”
“We’re going in, so you’re responsible for the rear guard.”
“Copy that.”
They wouldn’t move in completely until the reinforcements arrived, but that was more than enough for Kelsey to go see what was waiting for them.
The next obstacle was inside the lab: a massive armored wall that was on none of the original specifications. It looked like it would be proof against sustained plasma fire. There was a large hatch that led into the area of the lab that contained the master AI. It was locked up tight and had a computer interface rather than any type of manual lock.
“Make way,” Kelsey said as she wormed her way through the crowd and reached the large hatch. She attempted to utilize her implants to link up with the computer, but it wasn’t accepting input. They were going to have to do this the hard way.
“Fontana, I need you to link this up with one of the tablets so that I can interface with it.”
The tech quickly brought out a tablet with a hard cable and used a tool to break the display to get at its innards. A few deft movements with his fingers, and he held up a thumb.
“It’s all yours, Colonel.”
Kelsey linked her implants into the tablet and through it into the computer beyond. It, of course, denied her access to everything, but she presented her authorization codes as the Crown Princess of the Terran Empire.
The computer had undoubtedly been built by the AI, but had it thoroughly scrubbed the device of all overrides that she could use against it? All Imperial computer systems were constructed with allowances for the Imperial family. If any of those authorizations were still there, they’d have a crack to worm into its security and get the hatch open.
At first, she was concerned that it had totally locked the system down, but she finally found one of the subsystems that wasn’t blocked and presented her authentications, forcing it to grant access to a limited portion of the hatch controls.
“I’ve gotten into one of the subsystems, so now it’s up to you, Fontana,” Kelsey said. “Get this hatch open.”
The specialist got to work through his implants, working his way through the security systems built into the computer. It was apparent that he didn’t have direct access to the hatch, since it didn’t immediately spring open, but he seemed to think that that wasn’t too much of an impediment, because he just kept working.
The clock continued to tick down on their mission, and Second Platoon arrived to take up position behind them. Still no attacks from elsewhere in the station. Still no alarms.
Something was definitely wrong.
After checking her internal chronometer six times, Kelsey forced herself to stop looking. All that was doing was making it seem like this was taking forever. Instead, she started
examining the rest of the lab area.
Here inside the outer labs, it was clear that no one had cleaned up after the AI had seized control. There was still equipment and other detritus from the overthrow of the humans that had built the AI. There were no bodies, but she knew that was meaningless. Everyone in the station had been either killed or enslaved.
She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find, but she dispatched some of the Raiders to search every area that they could get to. Any equipment that they found now, any notes, might be critical.
Unfortunately, the few tablets they found were long without power, and none of the other equipment made much sense or seemed useful.
It took Fontana roughly ten minutes to finally crack the hatch. He turned toward her and held up a thumb. “I’m ready to open it up.”
Angela made a gesture, and all of the Raiders stacked up outside the hatch, ready to go in and secure the compartment. She pointed her index finger at Fontana, and he triggered the hatch, which promptly slid open.
The Raiders poured through the hatch, and Kelsey edged her way into the front group, because she wasn’t going to be held back at this point. This was the moment they’d all been waiting for, and she wasn’t going to miss it.
She’d seen the AI hardware that made up Marcus, Fiona, and Harrison. What was in the lab looked a lot like that, and she supposed that shouldn’t surprise her. The one difference was that all of the equipment was more widely spaced to provide access for humans.
There were some external controls mounted directly onto the system—for monitoring purposes, she guessed. Attached to that panel was what looked like the slot for the override.
Kelsey made her way to that console and brought it online. It was powered, and the system came up, showing that the computer was operating within nominal parameters. With a grin, she pulled the override out of the protective pouch on her hip and inserted it into the slot. The panel flashed once and went dark.
Then smoke began rising from the override.
With her heart in her throat, Kelsey snatched the override from the slot and could immediately tell that it was damaged. What the hell had happened?