by J. N. Chaney
“What does kinda functional mean?”
“It means that there’s still power moving through its systems, but only in sporadic trickles.”
Kristin cut in. “It’s probably in some kind of low power survival mode. Maybe if we hooked up a power core to it, we could bring it back online.”
“And then potentially have to fight it? Thanks, but I’d rather not give our enemies the means of killing us,” Dash said.
But Conover spoke up. “I don’t think this thing is going to be doing much fighting anytime soon. It’s not just wedged in here tightly, but its weapons are also badly damaged.”
“Okay, so let me ask this. Can you hook up a power core to it using just the Pulsar’s manipulators?”
A paused, then Conover replied. “No. I can see where I can connect a core, but it’s going to require more delicate work than the mechs can manage.”
Dash scowled. The mechs had fine manipulators which could be deployed from one finger on each hand. But fine was a subjective thing. They were still pretty crude compared to human fingers, anyway. But he did not like the idea of Conover powering up a Battle Prince he was close enough to touch, whether it was wedged in a crevasse or not.
“Okay, collect some imagery of the connection point, and then you can explain to me what has to be done,” Dash finally said.
Another pause. “Dash, it makes more sense for me to do it.”
“Conover, I’m not going to risk—”
“Not going to risk what, me? Doing something that might teach us new things about these Battle Princes? Stuff that might help us win this war? Dash, I’m not that kid you picked up as a reluctant passenger on Penumbra anymore.”
“Oh, for—I know that, Conover, and wasn’t suggesting otherwise. I just—”
“Dash, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. It’s what you always do, put yourself out in front of the most dangerous stuff. But you’re the Messenger. You’re supposed to be running the war, not hooking up power cores to some alien tech.”
Dash closed his mouth. As much as it grated on him to admit it, Conover was right. It didn’t really make any sense for Dash to do something Conover could do better and more quickly. Plus, they would see immediate results. It would be like Benzel suddenly deciding to leave the Herald’s CIC in the middle of a battle to man a nova-cannon battery or fix a broken conduit. This really was Conover’s job, not his.
“You know what? You’re absolutely right, Conover, and I’m sorry for not accepting that right away.” Dash switched to a general comm channel. “Elois, do you have any standard power cores with you?”
“I don’t, but your shuttle pilot’s nodding at me that he does. I guess they’re meant to be spares or replacements for your mechs.”
Dash almost laughed. It was an excellent precaution—and one about which he’d been completely oblivious until now. Someone somewhere had decided they should pack spare power cores when the mechs were deployed, and Dash had had nothing to do with it. It perfectly captured what he and Conover had just thrashed out.
He instructed Elois to arrange to deliver a power core to Conover, and then withdraw again. She’d receive the same data he did via a repeater signal from the Pulsar and could participate virtually in examining the Battle Prince.
The shuttle swept in, slowing, then landing alongside the Pulsar. Elois got out, a power core in her hand, and placed it into the fine manipulators of the mech’s other hand. As the shuttle lifted again, Kristin lowered the core down to Conover.
Again, time passed. Dash just waited.
Conover finally spoke. “Okay, Dash, I’m ready to do this.”
Conover lay on the Pulsar’s enormous hand, his head, shoulders, and arms hanging in space. He’d had Kristin lower him as far as the depth of the crevasse and the mech’s reach would allow. It left him straining a little bit to reach down to the Battle Prince, but he could manage it.
The connection on the Battle Prince wasn’t actually compatible with their core, but Conover had brought a tool-pack down with him. He was able to open an access plate that surrounded the connection like a collar, exposing the conduit connections behind it. It took surprisingly little effort to disconnect the main bus, then cable it into a standard Unseen connector. He wasn’t sure if that was a testimony to the flexibility of Unseen tech, Deeper tech, or both.
Conover reached back, felt around for the core that Kristin had placed beside him, then paused to wipe his forehead. Ten meters deep in the crevasse, it was as dark as twilight. Even out of direct sunlight, though, the air hung warm, still and dank around him.
“Okay, Dash, I’m ready to do it,” he said.
“Right, just wait one, though.”
Conover waited. As he did, he kept a wary eye on the Deeper Battle Prince, less than a meter away.
This was very different than examining the remains of a Battle Prince in the safe and controlled confines of the Forge. Even then, that Battle Prince had been spectacularly dead. But he was a long way from the orderly cleanliness of the station and the formidable protection its security and other systems offered under Custodian’s eternal vigilance. This was him, a Battle Prince that was definitely not dead, and rock. Yes, he literally lay in the outstretched hand of the Pulsar, but that was not the same as being safely enclosed in its stout armor. The mech’s cockpit suddenly seemed very far away.
“Okay, Conover, we’re all set up here. You can go ahead and hook it up. But if you get even a glimmer of things turning bad—”
“Dash, I know what to do.”
“Yeah. Of course you do. Alrighty, then. This is your show.”
Conover wiped his forehead again with his free arm, then reached down with the power core. As he did, his brave words to Dash came echoing back to him. They’d sounded great.
Now, if only he actually believed them himself.
Taking a deep breath, Conover plugged the power core into his jury-rigged receptacle, wincing and even flinching back a bit as he did. If it triggered an explosion, he’d probably be vapor before his nervous system could even register it.
He scowled at himself. Was that supposed to make him feel better?
Nothing happened.
“I’m not seeing any changes in, well, anything,” Elois said.
Conover swallowed hard and studied his makeshift core connection. One thing that was pretty much a universal constant, whether you were talking about Deeper, Unseen, human, or any other tech was that power was delivered by the movement of electrons through some sort of conductor. Amperage, voltage, resistance, it didn’t matter. The specific conductors used might be different, but the principle was the same.
He puffed out a breath. Sweat dripped from his nose. His tech eyes let him see the electrical potential as a sort of dammed-up pressure, anxiously trying to make the trip from one terminal of the core to the other. But part of the bus must be broken somewhere, a conductor damaged and not letting that circuit close and that potential become useful power.
Shit. That’s right. Not only was he face-to-face with potentially deadly alien tech, but he was also fiddling around with conductors that would, if he accidentally bridged them, incinerate at least bits of him, and maybe the whole thing.
“Conover, how’re you doing?” Dash asked.
“Still working on it.”
The longer he spent lying down here, screwing around with this dangerous alien tech, the tighter his stomach knotted up. Did this happen to Dash, too? Did he have to put up with incipient nausea, things clenching up, his heart pounding, and feeling short of breath? The last time he felt like this was while trying to deactivate the Golden probe that had buried itself in the Forge. But this was—
Something he did seemed to close a connection. Power suddenly flooded the bus, bringing a whole series of the Battle Prince’s enigmatic systems online. He let out a relieved breath, only to suck it in again. That wasn’t the end of it. In fact, it was just the beginning of it, since now he had a multitude of systems to study to figu
re out what was happening, and hopefully do it before the Battle Prince did something destructive.
“Conover, Sentinel says we’re getting all sorts of power emanations now. That your doing?”
“Yeah, I guess so, anyway. It looks like—”
Conover cut himself off. Current flowed through the Battle Prince’s systems, lighting them up in his tech sight like fine tendrils of light. Several systems were now rebooting.
He clenched his jaw and waited, still hanging onto the power core, ready to yank it free.
Every instinct screamed at Conover to just get the hell out of there. But he pressed himself against the reassuring solidity of the Pulsar’s immense hand and stayed put.
“It looks like the Battle Prince is coming back online.”
“I have established a comm channel to the Deeper Battle Prince,” Sentinel said.
Dash stared for a moment, trying to think of what to say, now that he had the attention—after a fashion, anyway—of one of these things.
“Um, hello?”
He snapped a curse at himself. Um, hello? That was the best he could do?
“Who?”
The voice was clipped, flat, and mechanical. “I’m the Messenger. I’m the leader of the Cygnus Realm. We’re currently at war with you, but we’d really rather not be. We’d really like to talk—”
“Where?”
Dash twisted his mouth into a grimace. Okay, it was awake, sort of. But it was either having difficulty communicating, or it just wasn’t going to be capable of forming more than one-word responses. He sighed and tried again.
“You were severely damaged in a battle against the inhabitants of this planet. You crashed. We’ve powered you back up, and—”
“Who?”
Dash cursed. “Sentinel, this guy seems really out of it. Any ideas about where to go from here?”
“I could attempt to interface directly with the Battle Prince’s computational systems, but it would entail risk.”
Dash considered it. Sentinel might be able to learn a lot more by making a direct connection. But they had no idea what sort of risks that entailed to Sentinel herself, or whether her firewalls would even be enough to keep out some malicious connections right back.
“Let’s hold off on that, at least for now. Conover—”
“Enemy.”
Dash stopped. He chose his next words carefully.
“There’s no need for us to be enemies. All we want is to live our lives, let you live yours.”
“Enemy.”
A pause. Then, one more word.
“Attack.”
Dash snapped out another curse. “Conover, get the hell out of there!”
Conover studied the flow of data through the Battle Prince as Dash spoke to it. Many of its systems were still offline, and what was operating was doing so slowly, with a huge amount of error-correction going on, bogging things down. What caught his attention, though, was a persistent attempt to activate a particular system, one that defied its efforts because the stream of data kept being corrupted. But it kept trying.
“Who?”
As he monitored the exchange between Dash and the Battle Prince, Conover’s gut wrenched down even tighter.
His gut. Dash often talked about going by his gut. By the feel of a situation. There was nothing quantifiable or analytical about it. It wasn’t rational. And Conover had always prided himself on being rational.
But going by his gut, by the feel, was something that set Dash apart from the AIs. As good as they were, they simply couldn’t replicate that irrational, human tendency to do things that didn’t make overt sense but just felt right.
And putting a stop to this suddenly just felt right.
Conover pulled at the power core, meaning to unplug it. But the connection was tighter than he’d anticipated, and the core stuck fast in the receptacle. All he managed to do instead was yank it out of his own sweaty grip. It fell onto the Battle Prince’s armor with a dull clunk and rolled about a half-meter away. He grabbed for it, but it sat just a few centimeters beyond his reach. No problem, all he had to do was have Kristin lower him and move him to his right, just a bit.
“Enemy.”
“Attack.”
“Kristin, get me out of here!” is what he shouted instead. Dash’s warning started before his ended, but the Pulsar was already lifting him away.
Dash saw Conover rise into view as the Pulsar raised him out of the ravine. But all he could do was watch, desperately hoping that he got back inside the protection of his mech before whatever was going to happen, happened. It would probably involve a large explosion, which would hit both mechs at point-blank range.
“The Deeper Battle Prince is attempting to cascade a failure into its own power cores. If it succeeds, a multi-megaton explosion will result,” Sentinel said.
“Can you stop it?”
“No. I strongly recommend we withdraw to a safe distance.”
Dash kept his eyes locked on Conover. The Pulsar’s cockpit had opened, and he’d heaved himself inside. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds for him to get back into the cradle—too long.
“Kristin, lift off, straight up, as fast as you can go!” Dash shouted. As he said it, he did exactly that with the Archetype, rocketing it straight up, while veering aside to minimize his chances of inadvertently colliding with the Pulsar. The mech quickly gained altitude, punching through scattered clouds and heading skyward.
Dash glanced back down, then swore yet again.
The Pulsar remained grounded, on the edge of the ravine.
“The Messenger instructed me to lift off!” Kristin said.
“And I countermanded it,” Conover shot back, levering himself into the cradle. As soon as the Meld connected and he merged with the mech, he reached back down into the crevasse. He wasn’t going to let this happen. He’d come here to dig the secrets out of the Battle Prince, and that was exactly what he’d do.
“Conover, what the ever-living hell are you doing?” Dash shouted over the comm.
Fortunately, he’d studied the thing long enough to know exactly what he wanted to do. He ignored the power core, which might take him several tries with the Pulsar’s fine manipulators to grab, and instead focused on levering open the armor around the access port. Viscous fluids spurted as he dug the manipulators into the Deeper construct, then grabbed and tore out a portion of the Dark Metal mesh that seemed to function as data storage and processor in one. It came free in a sloppy spray of clotted gore.
“Yes! Screw you!” Conover shouted, then launched the Pulsar straight up. Strings of organic goo streamed from the mesh as the mech accelerated, gaining altitude fast. He’d still only gained about a thousand meters before the Battle Prince exploded.
Dash stopped breathing when the ground beneath him vanished in a dazzling flash. The Pulsar vanished into the fireball that rapidly expanded outward from the Battle Prince at its epicenter. He kept holding his breath as the fireball rose. The Archetype shuddered when the shockwave finally caught up to him. The fireball, a roiling cloud of plasma nearly as hot as a star, soared upwards.
No sign of the Pulsar.
Dash was running out of curses and started recycling them as he jackknifed the Archetype and dove back down, toward the soaring glare of the fireball. He heard Leira shouting at Amy, who was apparently intent on doing the same thing. Dash got it, but he wasn’t sure what either of them could do.
Something popped out of the top of the fireball, trailing a glowing wake of vaporized armor.
Dash let out a groan of relief. The Pulsar kept gaining altitude, now rapidly outpacing the rising column of destructive energy.
“Conover, talk to me!” he said.
“I’m here.”
“Your ass is as good as kicked, kid,” Dash blazed.
“You can take your turn after me!” Amy cut in.
Conover stunned Dash by laughing. “You know what? I got to see a nuclear explosion from the inside. Somehow, getting my ass kicked doe
sn’t seem like much of a threat. Besides, I was able to retrieve most of the Battle Prince’s Dark Metal neural net before he went boom.”
Dash slid into formation with the battered but still functional Pulsar. Amy closed in from the other side. Dash almost expected the two mechs to hug, which would be profoundly weird.
Also, he had to admit, kind of sweet.
But mostly weird.
6
Dash had only been in this part of the Forge twice. Once, when Custodian had revealed this remote and isolated section to him, and again just after the Golden were finally defeated and the Life War ended. The only way of accessing it was from outside the station, through a small hatch lost in the vast expanse and clutter of the Forge’s vast hull.
No one else had ever been here. Literally no one else. This small cluster of compartments was for the Messenger only. He’d only told Leira about their existence so that she knew to ask Custodian about them if he fell, and she became the Messenger.
Although, as he unfastened and pulled off the helmet of his vac-armor, it struck him that that had just been an assumption, that he’d name his own successor. The Unseen had, in a way he still didn’t really understand, chosen him. Would they choose who came after him, as well? Had they already set that in motion? Or was it up to him?
“Custodian,” he asked, as he entered the first and largest of the secret compartments, “who becomes Messenger after I’m gone?”
“I believe you have named Leira as your successor. Have you changed your mind?”
“What? No. It just hit me that I wasn’t sure if it was up to me or not.”
“If the Creators have included imperatives in my programming that would dictate otherwise, I’m not currently aware of them.”
Dash groaned. Leave it to Custodian to answer both yes, it’s up to you and actually, I don’t know for sure.