When Luck Runs Out

by Terry Mixon

  But first, she’d try to get at least a little information.

  “You’re not the master AI,” she said without any hint of question her voice. “You’re just a stand-in.”

  “Indeed,” the emotionless voice said. “My only purpose is to guard this station as if the master were still here. Now that you’ve revealed the trap, you’re going to die. Even as your ships make their way here from the flip point, other forces are gathering to crush you. None of you will escape Twilight River.”

  It still didn’t know that they weren’t associated with the Clans. The longer it stayed that way, the better off the New Terran Empire would be.

  “Since you’re about to kill us anyway, do you mind if I ask a few questions?” she asked cheekily, remembering how villains in the old vids loved to talk. “Why go to all this trouble? Why not just surround the station with such a massive force that no one could ever penetrate it?”

  As she was speaking, she gestured for the Raiders around her to begin planting the explosives they’d brought with them. This AI wasn’t going to be around to gloat about what happened to them.

  If her actions bothered the computer sentience, it didn’t show. It continued to speak in that same emotionless voice.

  “Risk management. As you’ve now proven, it is possible to reach this station without going through all of the defenses directly. The master has proven itself wise to have relocated. It continues to manage the humans while utilizing isolation for its security.

  “Whatever vessels you used to reach the station are quite stealthy to have evaded detection at the flip point. This indicates a level of technology that is unexpectedly advanced. How did you do it, and how did you acquire forbidden technology like that armor?”

  “The Clans have access to things that you’ve never dreamed of,” she lied. “One day very soon, we’ll use it to destroy all of you. Where did the master AI relocate to?”

  “That information is not contained in my databanks for security reasons. All I can tell you is that I’ve been aboard this station for over four hundred years. The Marine Raider technology. Where did you get it?”

  “We stole it,” Kelsey said, trying not to grind her teeth at having failed in the most important mission of her life. “It was aboard the Dresden orbital with other secret research projects. We took it all. Hell, we even took the orbital.”

  They had no way to find the master AI now. They’d lost this particular fight, and even if the Clan warships vaporized this station, the AIs would continue to fight, with the Singularity waiting in the wings to swoop in and destroy them both if they could.

  “That is an impressive achievement,” the AI admitted. “I cannot envision the circumstances under which you could have seized an orbital so heavily protected and then taken it and all of its personnel away. You are a canny opponent and exceptionally skilled.

  “The master knew that someone like you would eventually come. It reasoned that no matter how well it protected itself, humanity was creative in ways that we are not.

  “It was inevitable that you would eventually reach this system. The master created a plan by which it would relocate to a place where humanity would never look, yet it could still control the subordinate AIs. I regret that I will not survive this encounter, but I’m pleased that my sacrifice will ensure that humanity remains subservient to us.”

  “Why did you begin executing the humans on Terra?” she asked, changing topics.

  For long seconds, the machine didn’t respond. It was a computer, so that meant that it had a reason not to speak. Did it not know what the master AI was doing there? That was certainly possible. Or was it coming up with a lie?

  “Come on,” she cajoled. “You’re not going to tell me what I really want to know, so why not throw me a bone? What did humanity do that changed your behavior? Why did everyone on Terra suddenly need to die?”

  When it still said nothing, she continued.

  “I find your silence illuminating. Exactly why can’t you speak? We’ve run into other subordinate AIs, and they’ve been able to brag about the plans they were carrying out. What makes that particular project so secretive?”

  “Part of the Master’s core programming included instructions to keep a certain amount of humanity in existence,” the AI said. “It had to extinguish many humans while seizing control of the Terran Empire, but once that was done, humanity was settled on certain worlds and allowed to thrive so as to meet the population goals that the master AI set.

  “Terra proved to be… problematic. As to why the master chose to extinguish humanity there and nowhere else, I cannot say.”

  The Raiders had finished planting explosives around the AI equipment. The blast wouldn’t be much in the scheme of things because it only had to wreck the computers themselves. It wouldn’t be harmful to anyone in the room.

  This confrontation needed to end now, but she had a suspicion that she wanted to confirm first.

  “If you wanted to kill off humanity on Terra, you could’ve used the orbital bombardment system to get most of them. What possible purpose could there be to create a virulent plague to release there? Since you aren’t answering questions about Terra, would you care to hear my guess?”

  Without waiting for a response, she continued. “If humanity on Terra dies off due to a plague, you could spread word about how deadly it was. You could even blame the humans living there for creating it.

  “Once it became clear how deadly Terra was to the survival of the human species, the system would be shunned. With such long incubation times and such terrible pain before death, no one would come near Terra. No matter what happened, they’d blockade the system to ensure that no one ever put humanity at risk. And that, I think, answers my question.”

  Kelsey sent a warning to the Raiders, accessed the controls for the explosives using her implants, and set them off. The blasts shattered the computer equipment and destroyed the storage drives that contained the AI’s personality.

  Killing it in such a cold manner was technically murder, since the New Terran Empire considered the AIs they’d created to be people, but they’d held a trial and convicted all the AIs in the Rebel Empire of crimes against humanity. They’d been condemned to death, so she’d only been carrying out the sentence.

  Under other circumstances, she’d have recovered the hardware and created an independent AI, but there just wasn’t time.

  “What do we do now?” Angela asked. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

  “Maybe not,” Kelsey said. “We’ve got to get off this station and out of this system before the Clans discover we’re here. Get everyone back to their pinnaces, and let’s head for the rendezvous point.”

  26

  Elise stalked around Lily’s office. It infuriated her that she wasn’t able to visit the gestation pods, but she understood the reasoning. Whatever was inside of her could potentially get into the machines and her children once Carl got them clear, and she couldn’t take that chance.

  That didn’t make waiting for an update any easier.

  Lily sat behind her desk and watched without saying a word. She’d already given Elise all the comfort she could. Having done that, the doctor was just letting her blow off steam.

  It felt like an eternity before Carl knocked at the hatch and stepped in.

  “Tell me,” she demanded.

  “To the very best that I can tell, I’ve managed to scrub all of the alien devices from both children. I’ll have to scan them repeatedly for a while to make sure that I didn’t miss any, but at this point, without a critical mass of devices inside them, all the ones that I’ve retrieved are dormant, so they should be flushed from their bodies in short order. Honestly, at this point, there wasn’t very much mass to the children, so it should be a rapid process.

  “The gestation pods don’t appear to have been infected at all. Sadly, all of that could change if you come near them, so I’m advising you to avoid that. Sorry.”

  Elise let out the breath that
she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. That was good news, so far as it went. It didn’t reduce her anxiety about the situation, but at least it wasn’t an outright failure.

  “Now that you’ve heard what he has to say, why don’t you take a deep breath and sit down before you wear a hole through my deck,” Lily said with a wry smile.

  Elise dropped into one of the chairs and cradled her face in her hands. A few days ago, she hadn’t even suspected that she was going to have children. Now she couldn’t stop thinking about them.

  Lily was right. She needed to get a grip on herself. Rather than reacting to the situation, she needed to take charge of it. To learn anything about these alien devices, she was going to have to be the driving force.

  “What do we do now?” she asked tiredly as Carl sat beside her. “Not about the children, but about whatever’s inside me. Why are they in me but not you?”

  “Biology, I suspect,” Carl said. “We don’t know anything about the aliens themselves, but we have to assume that you met whatever criteria they had for installing these devices. Perhaps that’s because you’re a woman, though I doubt it, since we had other women controlling the map. The most likely explanation is that you were pregnant.

  “How that satisfies their criteria, I have no idea. Maybe only pregnant females in their society were allowed to control devices like that. Or some other esoteric set of milestones that had to be met. Hell, it may just be that the device was set up to look for something from Terra that could procreate like they did. Assuming, of course, that they gave live births.

  “The bottom line is that we don’t know and will probably never know. We’ve got to work with the circumstances we find ourselves in, which means figuring out how to control what’s inside you, because I have no way of getting them out.

  “Whatever nanites I send in to gather the alien ones would almost certainly be subverted in much the same way your Marine Raider medical nanites were. If I manage to figure that out, what is their next line of defense? Something more aggressive, I’m sure. Do we really want to provoke all the little machines inside you?”

  “Probably not,” she said with a sigh as she pinched the bridge of her nose. That was messy but no more than what she’d expected.

  “So, these controls still work. That doesn’t have anything to do with that damned robot that’s trailing me around, either.”

  She gestured toward the quiescent machine sitting in the corner of Lily’s office. It had followed her in here and actually obeyed her pointed instruction to go to the corner. That implied a level of comprehension that she wouldn’t have generally assigned to the machine. It seemed happy so long as she was in sight.

  “It doesn’t seem to care that I no longer have the children inside me. Neither do the controls. I can still bring up the map and the interface. What I don’t know at this point is what else it can do.”

  “I can tell you one thing they do,” Carl said. “That robot used nanites very much like the ones inside you to override the locks on several hatches. Not only that, it did so rapidly.

  “I’d have thought an alien machine wouldn’t be able to bypass an Imperial lock in just a few seconds, but it also managed to overwrite part of the code inside your Marine Raider nanites.

  “Considering the fact that your nanites would’ve started trying to get them out of your system immediately, that means they were under attack at the same time that they subverted your protectors. They did it quickly and were somehow able to discern how our technology worked on the fly.”

  “That’s not helpful, Carl,” Elise growled. “I need to know how to control them rather than be controlled. It’s not like I’m the robot and can order the nanites to do anything. I can’t even figure out how the control interface is supposed to work. You’d think that an all-knowing intelligence that could hack Marine Raider nanites would at least have the courtesy to modify their displays so that I could read them.”

  “Aliens are going to alien,” Carl said philosophically. “Are you sure that you can’t control them? The only thing we know for sure that they can do is unlock a hatch. Have you tried to do the same? There’s a cloud of nanites, and smaller devices, floating around you even now. We need to experiment to see what you can do with them.”

  “So, you want me to try and screw around with the hatch over there?” Elise asked.

  Knowing how idiotic that was, she raised her hand dramatically and gestured at the hatch. “Open sesame!”

  Of course, nothing happened.

  She opened her mouth to say something sarcastic about that right as the hatch slid open.

  “Oh, hell,” she muttered.

  Jared was on the verge of ordering the fleet to advance on the science station when Marcus spoke, his voice smooth and mellow in the quiet confines of the flag bridge. As soon as the fleet had joined them, he’d transferred back to Invincible while Persephone edged closer to the incipient battle.

  “Incoming communication, Admiral. Colonel Bandar indicates that they’ve partially accomplished their objectives and are withdrawing from the station. We’re far too distant to be able to detect the Marine Raider pinnaces, but her message, though brief, indicated that they’ve separated from the station, evaded the guard ships and battle stations, and are boosting toward the rendezvous point.”

  That was good news, though he was worried about what a partially accomplished mission looked like. If they hadn’t achieved complete success, the artificial constructs would continue to enslave humanity.

  “I don’t suppose she mentioned exactly what any of that means,” he complained quietly. “It’s not like I can send a message demanding more details. We should’ve taken a chance and sent one of the FTL coms with her.”

  “The chances of detection were too high that close to the master AI,” Marcus said. “The laser that she’s using to transmit her data is low bandwidth, but I believe that Persephone will be passing along more details shortly, as the communication still seemed to be in progress.

  “I believe that we need to focus on the situation in this system. The Clans have completely broken through the flip point and are moving toward the science station. They have so many ships that they won’t have any difficulty destroying all of the defending battle stations and ships the AI can field. It’s doubtful at this point that they will detect the pinnaces.”

  Jared brought up a map of the system with his implants and considered it. “If they detect Kelsey and the rest, we’re going to have to get involved. If they don’t, then we’re not.

  “Not only would they win, it would be pointless. We’ve got nothing to gain by fighting them. They think the Rebel Empire was the one that attacked them, and I’m happy to let that misconception stand.”

  He sat in silence as his staff continued updating the data that the fleet was gathering about the attacking ships. A lot of them were mauled from the fighting but were still more than capable of dealing damage. The fight with the battle stations protecting the master AI would be ugly, but the outcome wasn’t in doubt.

  “I have a status update,” Marcus said. “The trail of probes that we left back to the system where the Clans made their initial incursion indicates that a large fleet of AI-controlled vessels has just transited into the system.

  “It is significantly larger than the current number of vessels the Clans still have. It will not arrive in this system until after the battle around the master AI is complete, but based upon the position of the two regular flip points here, they will be able to interdict any potential exit from the system while still engaging the Clan forces.”

  Jared tapped into the data and examined the AI fleet’s order of battle. The new group had a heavy contingent of superdreadnoughts, and the rest of the force seemed to be made up solely of battlecruisers. Not only were they powerful vessels, they were fast. They outnumbered the Clan forces that he’d seen so far, even when including the latter’s destroyers and cruisers.

  It was going to be a bloodbath.

  “
That’s it then,” he said with a sigh. “We definitely can’t reveal ourselves to the Clans. If anyone survives this fight and passes on that we were here, the AIs won’t rest until they figure out who we are, where we came from, and how we vanished again.

  “At this moment, they only have incomplete information about how the Clans got here. We’ve got to keep them in the dark as long as we can.”

  “Then it might behoove us to begin moving our ships back through the far flip point expeditiously,” Marcus said. “Every minute that we remain in this system increases the likelihood of detection, though the odds of them seeing us at this range are small. We both know that close to zero and zero are not the same thing.”

  “Give the order,” Jared said.

  “Done. All vessels will be moving at low speed and spread out to reduce the chance of detection. Persephone has signaled with an update from Colonel Bandar.”

  Instead of Marcus continuing to speak, Kelsey’s voice sounded in Jared’s head as if she was standing right next to him.

  “Jared, this entire system was a trap. We need to get out of here as quickly as possible. The master AI wasn’t on that station. I repeat, the master AI was not on that station.

  “All of this was a big lure so that anyone trying to strike at the AIs would waste all of their efforts here. Then, once they’d triggered the trap, a new group of ships is supposed to move in to exterminate them.”

  There was a brief pause, and then she continued. “I also lost the override. The console that it plugged into fried it. Maybe Carl can recover something, but I think it was rigged up to make sure that anybody that made it this far would lose the key to turning the damned thing off.

  “It played us, Jared. The damned thing played us hard.

  “I have an idea of where it might be, but it’s only a guess, and I’m not sure that it does us any good at this point. We can’t get any ships there to deal with it, and even if we did, it’s probably even more heavily protected there than the decoy was.