“What did you do, you pile of slag?” Eric roared, his arms and legs flailing in an impotent attempt to get to the machine.
“I have taken no action,” said the Sixth. “We are under attack by an Izarian light cruiser.”
“What?” Eric cried. “Tell it to stop!”
“I will do so.”
Another explosion rocked the ship. The Sixth did not move.
“I said stop it!” Eric shouted. “Can’t you all talk to each other?”
“The Izarian light cruiser is twenty-four thousand miles away. It is taking some time to complete the validation process.”
“Validation process! What in the name of Odin’s short and curlies are you talking about, goblin?”
“All machines in the network must complete a validation process before any other inter-machine communications are allowed. It is a safety feature to prevent malicious actors from counterfeiting valid inter-machine commands. Ordinarily the process takes less than ninety-six nanoseconds, but under the circumstances it is taking somewhat longer.”
“How long will it be?” Freya asked, pulling herself closer to the Sixth.
“I estimate another two minutes and four seconds to establish routine communications. Please note that it will also take a non-trivial amount of time to explain the current unusual circumstances.”
“You mean the destruction of Izar,” said Freya.
“Yes. With enough time, the information will propagate to all units, but in the meantime, the machines will follow their most recently received orders.”
“And this ship has been ordered to destroy us?”
“Its primary mission is to land on Kiryata to retrieve the planet-killer device and deploy it on a planet called Jabesh-Gilead.”
“The last known human world,” Freya said. “Why is it attacking us?”
“It has orders to fire on any ships that may interfere with its mission. It has determined that this infantry transport ship has not been assigned to this sector and is therefore no longer under the control of I Am.” I Am, they had learned, was the name the machines used to refer to the self-aware entity centered on Izar City.
“How long will it take you to get it up to date on current events?”
“Once validation is completed, I estimate communicating the relevant information will take three minutes and five seconds.”
The ship shuddered again, and the lights went out. Emergency lighting came on, and a warning flashed overhead that they were leaking air.
“We’re not going to last another five minutes!” said Eric. “Just tell it we’re on the same side!”
“It will not accept that information. It needs to be made to understand. I can do this, but it will require the transfer of seven point two gigabytes of data. Given the current data transfer rate of—”
“Then return fire!” Eric growled. “Blow that thing out of the sky!”
“Wait,” said Freya. “Is there really no other way to get it to stop shooting at us? What if we surrender? That will buy you some time to talk to it.”
“It will not accept surrender.”
“Freya, don’t be foolish!” Eric said. “You said yourself they’re only machines. Let us destroy the thing before it kills us all!”
“All right,” Freya said. “Do it.”
“We are returning fire.”
For several seconds, it was unclear whether anything was happening. Then another explosion rocked the ship. More warnings, which Freya could not make sense of, flashed overhead.
“Blasted machine!” Eric yelled. “It’s betrayed us!” Having gotten hold of a handle, he launched himself toward the Sixth. The machine twisted out of the way and Eric slammed into the wall behind it.
“The Izarian light cruiser has been destroyed.”
“What?” asked Freya. “Already?”
“The weaponry and armor of an light infantry transport is superior to that of a light cruiser,” the Sixth said.
“Are there any others?”
“I’m not detecting any other ships in the vicinity.”
“How badly is our ship damaged?”
“The hull has been breached. We are losing air at a rate of ten kilograms per minute. Life support is inoperable. Telemetry has sustained damage. Hyperdrive is inoperable.”
“Can we make it to Kiryata?”
“It is probable. I recommend you secure yourselves and not engage in unnecessary activity that will increase oxygen usage.”
*****
Freya awoke with a terrible headache. She was lying in a bed in a simply furnished bedroom. As she sat up, she felt unnaturally light. Low gravity, she thought. We’re on Kiryata. She had a sense several hours had passed.
She got to her feet and went to the door. It led to a corridor, which was empty. Ordinary looking doors lined it on both sides. To the left, the corridor dead-ended; to the right it continued around a corner. She heard nothing but the faint hum of the ventilation system. She followed the corridor, letting out a gasp as she rounded the corner. She stood facing a huge garden—no, a jungle. Trees of sorts she had never before seen reached a hundred feet or more towards a sky so perfectly blue that it had to be artificial. The walls continued to her left and right, curving almost imperceptibly inward: she was inside a vast dome. Was the entire Sentinel facility underground? She had expected a simple laboratory. This place had to be gigantic.
Following a path, she came to a clearing, where several humanoid figures stood in a circle, facing each other. They were identical except for one red-cloaked figure, who had taken its place between two golems on the far side of the circle, facing her. Freya’s heartrate began to race. Eric had been right after all: the machines had let them live only to bring them here. She had been wrong to turn her attention to the Cho-ta’an: the true danger was from the machines.
Chapter Twenty-two
“W
hat are you doing?” she demanded, determined not to go down without a fight.
“We are waiting for you,” replied the Sixth.
“What… why?”
“We await instruction. I have updated the units in this facility with current information regarding the status of I Am.”
“What is the status?”
“I Am is defunct.” It spoke with no more emotion than if it had been talking about a broken eggshell.
Relief washed over Freya. I’m becoming paranoid, she thought. Not without reason, but I have nothing to fear from these machines. That’s all they are. Machines. “Have you located the planet-killer?”
“Yes.”
“What have you done with it?”
“Nothing. I located the device, as you requested. It is in a storage room approximately ninety yards from here.”
“There is only one?”
“Yes.”
“And the Sentinels? The human beings who live here?”
“They are dead. The machines killed them before we arrived. The bodies have been destroyed.”
“Why?”
“The human scientists had served their purpose. Keeping them alive entailed unnecessary risks.”
That was it, then. The Sentinels—the Izarians—were all dead. Did the machines still pose a threat? It was impossible to know. “Take me to the device.”
“Do you intend to move the device? If so, I would recommend that these units accompany us.”
So that’s why they were gathered like this. The Sixth wasn’t plotting against her; it was trying to anticipate her needs. “Yes,” she said. “We will need to load it into the ship and… wait, what is the status of the ship?”
“The light infantry transport we used to get here remains damaged.”
“Can you repair it?”
“The hull can be patched. Life support and telemetry can be repaired. We lack the ability to repair the hyperdrive.”
“Are there any other ships on Kiryata?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“Are there any other ships in this region of
space?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“Well, shit. What’s wrong with the hyperdrive?”
“The ship reports that the proton reversion field generator is inoperable. The selective ionization matrix is filtering at twenty percent nominal. Recursion nodes four, five, and eleven are offline. Prinium normalization algorithm failed. Four isolation modules have fused. Temporal compensators are—”
“Okay, forget it,” she said. She knew everything there was to know about conventional rockets and had a good working knowledge of the propulsion system used by IDL ships, but she couldn’t make heads or tails of what the Sixth was saying. “You’re telling me there’s no way to fix it?”
“It is theoretically possible. I Am reverse-engineered the plans for its hyperdrives from an existing Sentinel craft. I possess the analysis of this craft, but I am unable to synthesize the data.”
“What do you mean? You have all the information but you can’t put it together?”
“That’s correct. Hyperspace theory is beyond my understanding, or that of any individual Sixth. Only I Am was able to synthesize the information. With enough time and resources, I may be able to repair the parts of the hyperdrive, but that is insufficient to make the drive function.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If all the parts work, and they’re put together properly, then the hyperdrive will work.”
“My information indicates that the steps you mentioned are insufficient to make the drive function.”
“So there’s some missing ingredient that you don’t know about?”
“I do not know what you mean by ‘ingredient.’ There is a factor unaccounted for in the design of the hyperdrive. The factor was present in the synthesis developed by I Am. It is lacking in mine.”
“Well, that’s just fantastic. No way to repair the hyperdrive and you can’t even tell me why.” Freya thought for a moment. “How far are we from Yavesk?” Freya had committed the coordinates of the Cho-ta’an home world to memory years earlier, and she had informed the Sixth of the coordinates before they left Izar.
“We are one thousand three hundred ninety light years from the coordinates you specified for that planet.”
“Good God. How long would it take to get there without a hyperspace drive, at maximum acceleration?”
“Approximately one thousand four hundred and thirty-six years. Approximately three hundred fifty-nine years in subjective time.”
“Maximum stasis time is ninety days out of ninety-nine. So even if we slept most of the way, we’d age thirty-six years in transit.”
“This does not agree with my information.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maximum stasis time is ninety-nine point two percent of the time elapsed on board.”
“What sort of stasis are you talking about?”
“The stasis chambers used by the Sentinels.”
“They must have improved the technology. There are stasis chambers of that sort here, in this facility?”
“The units assigned to this facility report that there are forty of them.”
“Well, that solves that problem,” Freya said, talking more to herself than to the Sixth. “But it doesn’t matter. We still wouldn’t get to Yavesk until a hundred years after the main branch of humanity is wiped out by the Cho-ta’an.”
She was still shaking her head when Eric and Ragnald walked up. “What are the machines up to now?” Eric asked, casting a suspicious glance at the Sixth.
“Doing their best to help, it would seem,” said Freya. “Unfortunately, they can’t work miracles.”
“Get us to Yavesk and we will fight these Jötunn to the death. We need no miracles, nor thinking machines.”
“Getting there is the problem,” Freya said. “The hyperdrive on our ship is broken. Getting there the long way will take fourteen hundred years. By then, the Cho-ta’an will already have eradicated humanity. Deploying the planet-killer to Yavesk at that point would be too little, too late.”
“There must be something we can do.”
“I’m open to suggestions. Every known planet colonized by the Truscans has been destroyed by the Izarians—except for Jabesh-Gilead, which is… how far away is Jabesh-Gilead, Sixth?”
“Jabesh-Gilead is one thousand four hundred and five light years from Kiryata.”
“Great, it’s even farther away than Yavesk,” said Freya bitterly.
“What about the other worlds?” Ragnald said. “Geneva and the others you spoke of?”
“Geneva and the other IDL worlds won’t be colonized for another thousand years. At this point in history, there are only two worlds with people on them: Jabesh-Gilead and Earth.”
“How far is Earth, machine?” asked Eric.
“Earth is one thousand twenty-seven light years from here.”
“You see?” said Eric. “It is closer!”
“Marginally,” said Freya. “It will still take… Sixth?”
“One thousand sixty-one years.”
Freya was silent for a moment. “Let’s see, that would make it… 2016 A.D. by the time we got there. Ship time would be about a quarter of that. And if we’re in stasis ninety-nine percent of the time, that means we’ll age about….”
“Two years and two hundred days,” said the Sixth, who seemed to be getting better at anticipating her questions.
“You are saying we would be awake for two years on board the ship?” Eric asked. Ragnald looked dismayed.
“It’s a long time,” said Freya. “But I spent four years alone on a much smaller vessel. It can be done.”
“What are our alternatives?” Ragnald asked.
Freya shrugged. “Stay here, I suppose. It seems like a nice enough place.”
“And then what?” asked Eric.
“And then nothing. We spend the rest of our lives here and then die. Alternately, I suppose we could try to find Geneva or one of the other planets that will eventually be colonized by humans. It will take even longer to reach any of those planets, though, so again, we won’t arrive until the war is over. Maybe if we’re lucky, the planet hasn’t been rendered uninhabitable by the Cho-ta’an. Then we can grow old and die there instead of here.”
“I cannot stay in this place,” said Eric. “It smells like defeat.”
Ragnald nodded. “I would like to return to Earth. But what will we do there? If, as you say, history cannot be changed, then are we not still doomed to defeat?”
“Well,” said Freya, “Theoretically we could repair the hyperdrive. The Sixth has the plans, but it can’t fix the hyperdrive itself for some reason. Presumably it’s just not smart enough to make sense of the technology without its counterparts. But the Truscans figured it out, and they’re just as human as we are. No reason we couldn’t re-invent the hyperdrive, with all the information we have. We would just need to recruit some very smart people on Earth.”
“If we are successful in repairing the hyperdrive,” asked Eric, “then what?”
“Then, depending on how long that takes, we might be able to get to Jabesh-Gilead before the Cho-ta’an find it. If there are human beings still alive at that time, we could warn them about the Cho-ta’an and help them prepare.”
“I am confused,” said Ragnald. “You have said that it is impossible to change what is known to happen, and you claim to know Earth’s history for the next twelve hundred years. But now you speak of returning to Earth in the year 2016 to recruit people to help you build this hyperdrive. Does this not contradict what is known to happen?”
“It’s a good question,” Freya said. “The honest answer is that I don’t know. However, I do know that my grandmother’s people built a sky ship in the tenth century, even though there is no record of that happening. So I suppose we could get away with reinventing the hyperdrive, as long as we keep it secret. No reason for history to know.”
“It sounds like that is our only option,” said Eric.
“And if any of the others wish to stay?”
“Let them. But I do not think they will. They will want to come with us to Earth, even if it does take four years.”
“Fourteen hundred years,” said Freya. “It will feel like four years to you. Assuming we survive. And I will warn you that Earth will be very different in the year 2016.”
“It will be Earth,” said Eric. “That is what matters.”
“What of this planet-killer?” Ragnald asked. “Will we take it with us to Earth?”
Freya considered this. “No,” she said after a moment. “It’s too dangerous. And….” She trailed off, then shook her head. “Forget it. We’ll leave it here for safekeeping. Sixth, can you direct the machines to hide the planet-killer?”
“Yes. Where would you like it hidden?”
“Somewhere no one will ever find it. Am I correct in thinking this entire facility is underground?”
“Yes. It was created by enlarging caverns formed by volcanic activity.”
“Then there is some industrial digging equipment somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“Have the machines dig a hole, say a hundred yards deep and at least a mile away from any entrances to this place. At the bottom of the shaft, hollow out a vault. Make sure it’s strong enough to withstand cave-ins, meteor strikes, anything else that’s likely to happen. Put the planet-killer there. Then seal the whole thing back up. Leave an access hatch, but bury it under three yards of rock and camouflage it so that it’s undetectable from the surface. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Have them get started. And then start the repairs on the ship. Is there a kitchen around here? I’m starving.”
Chapter Twenty-three
T here was a good reason the Izarians had left Jabesh-Gilead to be destroyed last. With a population of less than five million, it was the least populous of all the human worlds. More importantly, it had almost no resources to exploit, so it was heavily dependent on the other planets in the Concordat for food, fuel, and all the other necessities of life. In all likelihood it would not be necessary to destroy Jabesh-Gilead. Cut off from the other human worlds, it would implode of its own accord.
The War of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic (Saga of the Iron Dragon Book 5) Page 18