When Luck Runs Out

by Terry Mixon

  “I screwed up by tricking you, and I’m sorry. I did what I thought that I had to do, and it turned out to not make one damned bit of difference. You can punish me when I get back, and I’ll accept whatever you think appropriate. Bandar out.”

  Once the message ended, Jared shook his head. “If that’s what was waiting for her, then there was no way that we could’ve known anything about it or done anything differently. The machines planned things out better than we did.

  “Once Persephone joins us, we’ll move back to the Obelisk system. Once we’re there, we’ll set up some scouts to make sure that nobody comes after us. Then we’ll finally be able to get together and make a new plan.

  “This is a setback, but maybe we can still pull a save out of thin air. We have to. Everyone is counting on us.”

  27

  Talbot was ready to pounce the moment the pinnace’s hatch opened, only he hesitated when his wife came out with her head hung low. It didn’t lessen the anger he felt about what she’d done, but maybe this wasn’t the right time to have that discussion.

  Without saying a word, he gestured toward the side of the passage so that the rest of the Raiders could extract themselves from the pinnace. His wife nodded and stepped over that way, holding her helmet in the crook of her arm.

  “Did you lose anybody?” he asked quietly.

  Kelsey shook her head. “No. The part where we would’ve fought somebody ended up being short-circuited because we had the IFF codes to stop the automated weapons platforms from shooting at us. I’m sorry, Talbot.”

  “As you should be,” he said, putting his hand on her armored shoulder. “You took a huge risk, and you never even let me know. That hurts.”

  “Not that it’s any defense, but I couldn’t exactly do that while you were trapped in the obelisk. I considered staying to help find you, but I needed to be here. If we had failed—like we just did—that would’ve been a disaster. It is a disaster.”

  She covered her eyes with her hand and tilted her head down until her chin rested on her armored breastplate. “It was all a damned trick. The master AI hasn’t been here in centuries. It left another AI to make certain that anybody that showed up with the override didn’t get to keep it. The damned thing burned out the only key we had to control the master AI. We are totally screwed.”

  He reached out and lifted her chin with one finger. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve been behind the eight ball before, so don’t count us out. Did you find anything that might help us figure out where the blasted thing went?”

  “Maybe,” she said as she put an arm around his waist and started them down the corridor. “It said that it didn’t know where the master AI had relocated to, and I suppose that’s possible, but it got me to thinking about events around Terra.

  “Why were they trying to kill off all the humans there? Why were there so many ships blockading the flip point that led to Alpha Centauri?

  “I think it came up with the Omega Plague to make sure that humans had no desire to ever enter the Terra system. If it could turn it into a plague zone, then no matter what happened in the Rebel Empire, the master AI would be safe.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t see how that helps us. We don’t have any way to get to Terra, except with Persephone, and she can’t get through the flip point to Alpha Centauri since it’s so well protected. We’ve stirred the hornets’ nest there, and I don’t think it will be safe to go back. If the master AI is in that cul-de-sac, it’s got to be suspicious now. It’s going to be watching everything.”

  Talbot pulled her to a stop and rested his forehead against hers. “Some of the things we’ve found under the obelisk might be able to help. I believe that it showed us a map of all the flip points in the galaxy.

  “One of them leads to Alpha Centauri. It’s a kind of ultra-far flip point that sits even farther out than the far flip points that we’d already discovered, but it can cover the distance to Alpha Centauri in a single flip. If that’s true, we might still be able to end this.”

  “I can’t see how,” she said in a defeated tone. “Even if we could get there, without the override, we can’t make the master AI do anything. Even if we blow it up, that doesn’t change the strategic situation much at all. The rest of the AIs will keep suppressing humanity, and they even might decide that it’s a grand idea just to let the Omega Plague loose on every human world.

  “Oh, Talbot, I don’t want to lose hope, but we might have lost this fight.”

  Her last sentence was said almost in a whisper.

  “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my wife?” he demanded.

  She looked up at him and blinked in confusion. “What?”

  “Princess Kelsey Bandar, the colonel commanding the Marine Raiders, does not give up. She doesn’t know the word quit. She’s survived every single thing that the AIs have thrown at her and laughed. Whoever you are, you can’t be that woman, because if you were, you’d already be plotting how to twist the situation around and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

  His words made her smile just a little. “It’s hard to be optimistic when I just lost the only existing key. Maybe Carl can salvage it, but I’m not holding my breath. Without it, I don’t know how we can possibly make the master AI issue a stand-down order.”

  “We can figure that out later,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “Right now, I think you have something else to tell me.”

  She shook her head, and her smile grew a little bit. “It sounds like you already know. I’m pregnant. The baby is five months along. It’s a girl.”

  Kelsey held up her hand before he could say anything. “I know that I put her in danger by going on this mission, but it needed to be done. This is my fight, and without winning it, there isn’t a universe where it’s safe for our child to live.

  “If we take another crack at the master AI, I’m not going to let other people fight on my behalf. I’m going to pick up a plasma rifle, and I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. Neither you nor my brother is going to stop me. And neither is Lily Stone, even though I’m sure I’ve pissed her off too.”

  Talbot nodded. “Oh, she’s pissed, all right, but I wouldn’t worry about her for the moment. Worry about Julia. To say that she’s unhappy that you used her as a vehicle to put a child at risk—her child, in a way—is something of an understatement.

  “As for me, I can’t tell you how happy that I am that we’re going to have a baby. You’re going to make an amazing mother, a she-wolf protecting her pup.”

  He enfolded his wife in his arms and held her as she cried. He’d do whatever it took to keep her safe. To keep both her and their daughter safe.

  She might be going on this mission to Alpha Centauri—if they figured out how to make it work—but he’d be at her side, and he’d be damned if he’d see either of them hurt without dying first.

  Carl huddled over his workbench aboard Invincible with Austin and Ralph, watching the data come up as his specially built nanites began disassembling their alien cousins.

  While he was keeping an eye on all aspects of the examination, Austin was paying close attention to the materials and construction of the little alien machines while Ralph was attempting to pull the code that they used onto something that he could read.

  It was an ambitious project and one that he wasn’t confident had any chance of success. They didn’t have anything that could disassemble the picotech. They’d have to settle for trying to get the best scanner readings they could of the little beasts. The femtotech was still only a suspicion.

  “The way they’ve designed them is really interesting,” Austin said. “It makes them much stronger—in a relative sense—compared to what the Empire created. Their manipulators are interesting too. There’s a lot to learn here.”

  “I wish I was having that easy a time,” Ralph complained. “You can just look at the things. I’ve got to figure out how to pull their programming out when I don’t even have a clue how their interface works.” />
  “If it was easy, anyone could do it,” Carl said philosophically. “What I’m interested in is how they communicate with one another. Inside the body is one thing, because the web of Imperial nanotech can forward signals from one unit to another until it reaches the nanogenerator.

  “So I’d guess the fact that these nanodevices can work together isn’t that unusual, except for the fact that they don’t have any kind of command unit. Somehow, they form a collective that makes up their command authority.

  “They also control the picotech and femtotech—if there really are any of those in there. Not just inside the body itself but out to about fifteen meters from Elise.”

  Austin shook his head. “Honestly, that’s impossible. These little things are way too small to generate that kind of signal power, much less be able to form part of a hive mind. That’s what it would have to be, right?”

  “It depends on how sophisticated the programming is and how much processing power each individual unit has,” Ralph said. “Having seen the obelisk, I’m not willing to rule anything out.

  “Remember how Omega gave you all of his species’ collected knowledge in that little bitty box of discs, Carl? They weren’t anything close to as advanced as these crab critters. Who’s to say that one of these nanites doesn’t have the same kind of processing power as one of our nanogenerators?”

  “That’s… disturbing,” Carl admitted. “When you add in some of the other things that these devices seem capable of doing, that’s an almost godlike power. No, scratch that. It is godlike.

  “Down inside the obelisk, devices just like these disassemble stone doors in less than a second. The reverse process took just as little time, even though it had to assemble that wall of stone from molecules of air. Or maybe it pulled the material from the rock around the opening. That would probably make more sense.

  “And that’s not even the most disturbing suspicion that I have.”

  When he didn’t say anything for a few seconds, Ralph nudged him with his elbow. “Don’t keep us in suspense. What capabilities are we missing?”

  Carl took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What I’m about to tell you is classified at the highest levels. You can only talk about it with one another, Princess Elise, Coordinator West, Commodore Meyer, Admiral Mertz, Colonel Talbot, Princess Kelsey, Marcus, and me. The same goes for you, Marcus. Clear?”

  The others indicated their understanding.

  Once they’d done so, Carl continued. “The small chambers down below sent us to an alien world. One tens of thousands of light-years away. Only I’m pretty sure that it didn’t send us there physically.

  “I believe the alien device used these nanites and smaller devices to scan us at a subatomic level, and then it disassembled us. The data that it pulled from us was sent via FTL to a receiver, where we were rebuilt from local materials. When we came back, the same thing happened.”

  Austin held up his hands and shook his head. “Wait a minute. You’re not the same Carl that you were yesterday?”

  “I certainly feel the same as yesterday, but who can say for sure? I had Commodore Stone pass me the complete scan that she had for Princess Elise before we made the trip, and I compared it to the one taken after our little excursion.

  “While there are some extremely minor variations, the differences are very well within tolerances for just having a day pass for a biological being. To the very best that the Imperial medical scanners can tell, Princess Elise is still exactly the same woman she was before all of this took place.”

  Ralph put his tablet down. “This isn’t some kind of weird prank, is it?”

  “No prank,” Carl said flatly. “And there’s no way that this could be like the transport rings. Those opened a wormhole between the two ends that we walked through to get from one place to another.

  “While we went from a small chamber to another small chamber, the vast distance suggests that it wasn’t a wormhole. There are just too many constraints to something like that, and I didn’t see any kind of event horizon. We also didn’t have to move to go through it. We were scanned, disassembled, and the information sent on.”

  The two men stared at him for long seconds without saying a single word. Eventually, Austin spoke for the pair of them.

  “We can’t send FTL data at anything like the kind of throughput you’re talking about, much less over that kind of distance. Do you know how many atoms are in a single body? Do you know how many different relationship equations would have to be run to make sure that the various adjacent atoms were in the appropriate locations? And then you have to take into account the various chemical actions already taking place inside the body. The entire notion is ridiculous.”

  Carl laughed. “Ask a prespaceflight Terran how likely it is that we could use wormholes to get from star system to star system. Or use transport rings to move from one place to another without passing through the intervening space. Or have a visitor from an alternate reality.

  “These aliens were obviously far more advanced than we can imagine. That’s why we have to focus on getting every bit of information we can from the devices they’ve left behind. Don’t get hung up on the fact that something took me apart and put me back together again. I can’t tell the difference, and neither can anyone else. We just need to keep that information very private.”

  The two men nodded somberly. Then, by unspoken agreement, they got back to work. These mysteries weren’t going to solve themselves. They had to break down a few of these alien nanites if they were going to figure out how any of this worked.

  Besides, doing this took his mind off the fact that he’d just gotten word that the mission to stop the master AI had failed. That problem seemed unsolvable, yet he had to figure out how they were going to take down an AI without an override. How could they make the master AI do what they wanted when there was absolutely no way to leverage it into doing so?

  This alien technology might give them a method for doing that, but the clock was ticking. If he was going to come up with an answer to save humanity, it would have to be soon.

  28

  Kelsey stepped into the flag briefing room aboard Invincible with a scowl. Lily had ambushed her for both an examination and a tongue-lashing. The good doctor had quite the mouth on her. Her friend hadn’t spared any effort elaborating on just how much of an idiot she’d been.

  Frankly, Kelsey had been happy to escape with her life. Or to escape confinement until she gave birth, which Lily had threatened to do. She wasn’t willing to discount the doctor trying to do just that either.

  And honestly, that had been a lighter roasting compared to what Julia had dealt her ten minutes later. Her doppelgänger knew all her tricks and hadn’t been put off by any of her excuses. Talbot was right. She had been supremely pissed.

  And of course, the fact that the ultra-precious override had been destroyed only made the other woman more furious, and justifiably so.

  Water under the bridge. There was nothing she could do about it now. She’d have to improvise a new plan and somehow make up for her failure.

  Jared was already at the head of the table when she arrived, with Elise and Julia sitting on one side and Sean and Olivia on the other.

  Talbot was nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t surprising. He’d told her that he’d planned to be in marine country, refining their plans. There were a lot of things to get ready if they were going to conduct a major raid on an unknown facility.

  Everyone gave her their full attention when she came in. Julia added a stiff glare.

  Kelsey sat beside Sean with a sigh and focused on Elise. “Tell me that Lily is as protective of you as she is of me.”

  “Oh, no,” her friend assured her. “She’s much more protective of you. I behave when I’m told to.”

  “Really?” Kelsey asked with a raised eyebrow. “I hear you were kidnapped by alien robots and maybe sent across the galaxy. All I did was invade a station full of murderous artificial intelligences.”
r />   “Well, when you put it that way…”

  Kelsey frowned and looked around the room. “Wait a second. Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of strange robot butler following you around?”

  “I managed to convince it to wait in the next compartment. Apparently, talking to it like a three-year-old for about ten minutes and pointing at the corner does some good.

  “That doesn’t mean that it won’t come looking for me in the next five minutes, though. It’s not very bright, I don’t think, and it wants to see if I need anything at random times. It was some kind of servitor, and it’d been without a master for so long that it’s a little anxious.”

  Olivia delicately cleared her throat. “If you two are finished baiting Jared, we probably should get to the meat of this conversation. We need to figure out what we’re doing next. Hell, we need to figure out if it’s even possible to do anything else.”

  Kelsey reached into her pocket and pulled out the override. She set it on the table and bowed her head sorrowfully toward Julia.

  “I stopped by the lab and had Carl test it. It’s completely fried. We’re going to have to come up with a different plan.”

  “How can we?” Julia asked sharply. “We had to have the override to make the damned machine obey an order to stand down. Now, even if we destroy it, the war will continue. The war in my home universe is lost.”

  “Maybe not,” Jared said, holding up a hand to forestall any response. “Just because we can’t see another option right now doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. We’ve got a bunch of codes that we’ve picked up from various places over the last year. It’s possible that we can forge instructions to the other AIs to stand down. What do you think, Marcus?”

  “That’s rather doubtful, Admiral. The codes that we received weren’t particularly effective against the mad AI that you visited, and I don’t believe that was because it was so different from the others, either.