by Ginger Booth
“Maybe it’s not him you’re angry at. Maybe I am angry now, a mid-life crisis. I am past forty. What was I supposed to make of my life. You know?”
Ben did know. But he’d done what he intended to do. With the kids raised – and he was way too young to have an empty nest already – he’d been trying to craft some new post-parental life with Cope. And it all crash-landed into Denali. Wasn’t saving others supposed to uplift you? Sass made it look that way. Granted, evacuating Denali Prime to Waterfalls was the most grueling salvation operation she’d run before.
And now they evacuated them right back to Denali Prime. Because the universe was fundamentally and implacably perverse.
Sick of himself, he sought to flip the tables. “What about you? Do you plan on kids?”
“I want them, yes. But my best lover is Husna, and – She got very angry when I visited. During your…vacation.”
Ben sobered quick and focused on his companion. That’s gotta hurt. “How is she?”
Husna Zales, head science officer of Sass’s expedition to Sanctuary, was over eighty, her Mahina Actual nanites expired. Darren Markley defied them, upgraded to Yang-Yangs and accepted MA’s punishment – exile from the city, and most of his net worth inherited by his kids while he still lived. Husna chose otherwise. Ben didn’t know her well enough to understand why.
“Very old. Fragile. Unrecognizable. Her eyes are cloudy. Confused. Part of the time, she didn’t remember me.” Remi fell silent.
Ben floated over and placed a hand on his arm for moral support.
“She was too old for me. I know that.” Remi nodded at him in acknowledgment. “But no one else, really. Romance was fun. By a glowing lake beneath an alien sky. Until the lake killed our nanites. Our love did not last. She ended it. A fantasy, unrealistic, she said.”
“I’m sorry.” Ben didn’t know what else to say. “What about Elise Pointreau?”
“The spy! You know she is married, yes? Two kids on Sagamore. Husband is chief of orbital security.”
“I did not know that!”
“Yes. Double agent, triple agent, who knows where Elise’s loyalty lies?” Remi laughed and waved his gauntlets in a warding off. “No, not Elise! It might be fun. But she will not gain me children.”
“I wonder if she has a Denali love-child with Teke.”
“I think children are not your problem, Ben.”
“No.” Ben had no idea what his problem was. Getting electrocuted in the middle of a tricky takeoff from Denali hadn’t helped. But Remi was right. He was lost before then. And it certainly wasn’t Texan’s fault. “You’re right. I need to talk to Cope. Honestly for a change.”
“He can take it,” Remi opined. “He is a bird-weather friend, yes?”
Ben laughed aloud, picturing pterodactyls and their emu. “Foul weather friend. Bad, not bird.”
“English is a difficult language. So is French.”
Ben peered at a battery meter. “Halfway? Oh!” He slipped out his blaster and added it to the charging items. “Did we accomplish what we came here for?”
“Yes, I think. The nanofab of course we must bring. Ah, we never find robot manufacturing. This, too, and the smelter. Processors, memory. Robots. This is enough. I think the question instead is how much asteroid you can carry through the gateway.”
“Mm, no,” Ben reasoned. “More how much asteroid I can control with the grav grapples afterward. But I should ask Teke whether the sheer mass is going to screw up my navigation.” He paused to consider this. “We could test that. With a jump and a rock. So, do we have a feel for the mass here?”
“This rock is nearly three tons per cubic meter.”
“No,” Ben corrected him. “This rock is riddled with tunnels and caverns. We’ll carve off any solid rock. Which affects its structural integrity.”
“Ah. Yes. But do we know…?” He pulled out a tablet and started estimating, based on the chambers and corridor systems they’d seen. “What mass and dimensions can you control?”
Ben’s tablet came out, too. “If my gateway navigation is off, I can’t do a damned thing but let go and wave bye-bye as Loki falls into Pono.” Remi had been with him on the deteriorating Prosper coming home from Cantons. The captain barely saved their asses with a second micro-jump out of the gas giant’s gravity well.
Remi chuckled. “In engineering, we find a margin of error. But we fuel for second jump, too. And we bring a physicist to calculate very fast, yes?”
“Point,” Ben conceded. He finished his sketch calculations in silence. The math was a welcome reprieve from upsetting contemplations. “Not very big. Four klicks across for the gateway, less for the grapples. The fuel depot rock is small enough. This one we have to cut smaller. But surely that’s not how you move an asteroid. When Hell’s Bells relocates one?”
“No,” Remi agreed. “But the asteroids, they are in Pono orbit. We add vector, very slowly. We could add engines. No! In fact, we have those engines! Loki’s ships!”
“I like how you think, chief! We attach the JO-3’s and couriers to the rock, warp it all through. Then use their propulsion to nudge the asteroid into a stable orbit. My grav tractor is only an extra nudge. Or bring the fuel factory through on the same pass, and use Merchant’s tractors to control that.”
“Two!” Remi declaimed his verdict. “Two tons per cubic meter. Point something. Roughly.”
“Check each other’s work,” Ben requested. They swapped files to second-guess each other.
Remi unbent from his tablet satisfied, having altered nothing from Ben’s considerations. “I understand why you are best pilot. You know how to work your ship.”
Ben felt the warm glow of his smile blossoming under the compliment. “I know how to pick an engineer, too. Well done. We’ll get a second opinion from Cope and Markley. But we know the ship and rock better.”
Remi glanced sourly around their little oasis of light. “Amen.”
“So use this as a first draft proposal,” Ben concluded. “Four klicks across, nanofab near the edge. Mass godzillion tons. So-and-so brontoburgers and processors, plus however many robots Loki can cram in.” Remi’s calculations included formulas on all of those, parameterized by the dimensions Ben supplied. “Propose it to the physicist and the AI. See what they say. Good. We accomplished today’s mission.”
Remi began laughing softly, and soon they both cracked up. “Except that one thing.”
“Our nap! You’re right!” This redoubled their gales of laughter.
Their hysteria gradually sank into quiet chuckles. Ben named and placed their calculation files on his tablet for maximum visibility. In case his crew found it after they were dead.
What a memento for Cope.
Ben’s stomach gurgled to remind him of suppertime failure hours ago. “Are we charged yet? Let’s sleep in the nanofab.”
It took another 20 minutes to extricate themselves from the bat cave. Ben wanted to cry as the homey cone of soft light blinked out. Again they were stuck with the two harsh narrow-beam headlamps, slashing through pitch blackness. But they’d find a place to sleep where they could rig it again, he promised himself. For once, he devoutly wished not to sleep in the dark.
They turned into the corridor, only to find a brand new wall erected while they were in the bat cave. It dead-ended the tunnel between them and the nanofab. They were cut off from their air supply.
27
A couple hours earlier, Nico Copeland had accompanied Wilder and Joey to the asteroid, to hunt for his adoptive dad. As the brains of the outfit, the young man sorely wished his companions had brains of their own.
“Wait, dammit! Come back! I’m setting up the repeater.” As acting captain, and the only mining expert they had left, the increasingly frantic Judge insisted his asteroid party remain in constant contact. The prevailing theory was that Ben and Remi got lost in the tunnels down here.
Nico reflected that getting lost would be all too easy. He couldn’t find their lost party’s engravi
ng at the first T-intersection until Joey stepped off of it. With no up or down, tunnels uniformly round, and only a narrow headlamp for visibility, this place was creepy as hell and seriously disorienting. “Now try.”
“Try what?” Wilder demanded, leader of the party in his own mind, several meters to Nico’s right down the tunnel, as Ben’s arrow directed.
“Call Judge!”
“Judge, Wilder, do you copy?” The security guy’s voice exuded impatience.
No response. Nico tried it with his own suit radio. “Judge? Please respond. Dammit, wait here!”
“Nico, give up. You’ll never feed a signal through these corridors,” Joey opined. “You know the cable conduit in Mahina Orbital? Runs with the lights along the tunnels. That repeats all the comm signals. On a fresh tunnel at MO, it’s hopeless. Suit radios only work in line of sight.”
“Then I need to go back to the surface and tell Judge. And etch this intersection, like Ben did.”
Wilder’s patience evaporated. “Rego hell! Joey, surface. Talk to the old woman Judge. Nico, etch your heart out. I’ll be in the first chamber.”
Nico muttered, “Aren’t you glad Sass isn’t here.” He hastily extracted his cutting gels. He’d seen his dad Cope do this, years ago. “Um, which color gel first?”
“Yellow!” Joey and Wilder hollered at him. Wilder added, “Moron.” Joey snagged the failed repeater and coiled its cable as he headed back out to the shuttle.
Nico started to write his name under the original arrow, thinking that if Ben found the note, it would cheer and encourage him. He finished the N and deemed it close enough. His dexterity with the second gel was even worse than the first, trying to retrace the same lines by squirting, while controlling his drift in zero-g. Dad made it look so easy.
Joey proved yet again he was a nicer person than Wilder. “Use Sag gravity, 0.7 g seems to work best.”
Now he tells me. Nico sheepishly settled to the ‘floor’, with the arrow pointing right. “Wilder?” He recoiled in surprise as Joey skate-walked past him. Everyone was the same audible distance apart, since sound only emerged from his suit radio. And unless they crossed his helmet beam, he could see nothing. Suddenly he realized Wilder was not in line of sight and would never answer.
He tucked his gels back into his belt and tried to follow Joey. But unlike settlers of his dad’s generation, the young man never learned to walk at the forbidden low gravities. His first overly energetic bound took him to the ‘ceiling’ to bounce down, spread-eagled. “Argh!”
Joey turned back and hauled him into an upright position. “Slide your feet like this. Damn, Nico. Didn’t anyone teach you to space-walk?”
“When I was sixteen!”
“Time to grow up.” Joey pulled ahead and turned into a funnel-like doorway, out of comms.
Nico followed into the vast processor hall Ben and Remi so admired earlier in the day. His jaw dropped, beholding the most magnificent computer hardware he’d ever seen. Then his headlamp fell on a blackened chunk cut out of the shelving helix lining the walls. “What did you do?” he yelled, irate. Wilder held his blaster out, elbow straight, and blasted another chunk of precious electronics. “Wilder, that’s our client you’re shooting! Stop!”
“Just letting off a little steam,” the security goon excused himself. “They ain’t here.”
“Don’t break stuff!” Nico objected.
“Look, Nico. You’re here because you’re the boss’s kid, not because you know how to do squat. I communicated our position.” Wilder took another potshot. “Further, I’ve motivated ‘our client’ Loki to get off his digital ass and find Ben and Remi.”
Joey murmured, “Save your ammo, Wilder. I’m checking the next intersection. If it’s etched, they’re not in any of these rooms. C’mon, boss’s kid. You can position yourself halfway between me and trigger-happy over there. Be the repeater.”
“What is this crap, anyway?” Wilder asked.
Nico blurted, “You could have asked that before you shot it! These look like computer cores.” He drifted closer to study a shelf. “Each of these plates, a supercomputer running at superconducting speed.” He ran his light along the shelf, counting for about 10 degrees of arc, then up, counting shelves. “Rego hell. This one room holds more processing power than the entire Aloha system.”
His light was the only one left in the chamber. No one heard him. New agenda. Never leave line of sight with Wilder. Scratch that – Joey. He skated awkwardly out of the chamber and followed the bobbing light beams ahead of him. The first vanished behind the gentle curve of the ceiling. He tried to hurry before the next, Wilder’s, did the same. “Guys, wait up!”
Wilder apparently wasn’t responding to him. “Are you sure?” Despite the plan, Wilder assumed the middle repeater spot.
“Sure of what?” Nico asked.
“Joey says this tunnel dead-ends. Blank wall. Checking side chambers.”
“Wait –” That left Nico again out of comms range with anyone else. But he redoubled his efforts until Joey was visible again, or at least his headlamp swiping the end of the tunnel. “Joey, do you see any etchings?”
“That’s what I’m looking for,” the modest crewman agreed. “Maybe.”
Nico caught up, and studied the short line he pointed out, dead-ending into the wall. Just having practiced with the gels, the younger man was sure. “Yes, that’s an etching. Part of one.”
“Why would someone etch a notch?”
“No – part of one,” Nico repeated. “See, this end is rounded. That’s an arrow pointing that way. But then the wall was added. I think.”
“Paranoid much?” Wilder had ducked out of a side chamber and overheard. “Why would Loki close off a tunnel after Ben and Remi passed through?”
Nico’s heart started to thud. “Loki? Or someone else?”
“I don’t get it,” Wilder admitted. “I thought we were strolling through the big one’s brain. Who else is there?”
“Loki’s architecture,” Nico explained. “He clones himself, creates a copy, with specific instructions, goals, tasks. If Loki needed to carve tunnels and build computer rooms, he’d create a sub-Loki. It’s recursive. Like, assign a sub-Loki to excavate the asteroid. And that Loki creates a sub-Loki for, say, this corridor. And on down.”
Joey regretfully said, “I don’t get it, Nico.”
“Me neither,” Wilder opined. “I know you forget this, shrimp, but I have a degree from the same university as you and Ben. Hated computer science. Recursion makes my brain hurt.”
Nico kicked the wall in frustration. Which cordially kicked him back like a flailing pool ball, across the tunnel for a bank shot against the dead end wall. “We’re not dealing with Loki! A sub-intelligence ordered robots to do this. But why? I need to talk to him.”
“No, brainiac,” Wilder replied. “We check these chambers.”
“Both,” Joey suggested peaceably. “Nico, go ahead back to the shuttle. Wilder and I can check the chambers.”
With his unskilled spacewalking, Nico didn’t exit the asteroid much ahead of his companions.
Over the radio, Judge’s verdict was immediate. “Get your asses back to the ship.”
“I ain’t leaving here without the cap,” Wilder countered. “Ben would never abandon me.”
“Screw yourself, Wilder!” Judge replied. “Joey, fly! Feel free to leave the idiot.”
“Aye cap!”
“You can do it, Loki,” Nico urged the wild-haired avatar on the dining room screen. “You’re just telling your subprocesses to become aware of any abnormal occurrences and report back. Like Wilder’s damage to your processors.”
Loki’s eyes narrowed. “Who is Wilder and why did he damage my processors?”
Floki intervened. “Never mind that, grandfather. When there is damage inside your asteroid, say a wall collapses or –”
“My robot procedures include thorough testing of substrate integrity!” Loki objected. “My walls don’t collapse!”
“Manufacturing failure?” Nico suggested. “Surely something needs repair sometimes.”
“Of course,” Loki allowed, “but why would a brain the size of a planet be aware of that? I have janitor bots. Their intelligence is limited, but they do their job!”
Nico blew out. “Can you push an instruction down the tree, then? Any janitor doing unusual cleanup –”
Floki interrupted, “Nico, ‘unusual cleanup’ is a sophisticated interpretation. Grandfather, don’t they have sensors? Could we send them a sensor profile of men in spacesuits? A three-D model? Do our suits have an electromagnetic signature?”
Loki shook his head. “Those robots don’t see anything except their assigned materials. They don’t hear anything except their controllers.”
Nico pounced. “Controllers! Their controllers would recognize unusual patterns. Wouldn’t they?”
Loki’s forehead wrinkled. “This is very uncomfortable. Trying to become aware of autonomic processes. I have at least twenty levels of abstraction between me and an individual robot. Unless I take control of one directly.”
“Perfect!” Nico suggested. “Direct one and… Do they have any way to communicate with Dad?” His heart sank before Loki replied.
“Why would I install a human communication interface in a construction bot? No, all of those are manufactured on the planet.” The AI leaned forward, scowling harder. “I’m trying to cooperate. Why is this so difficult?”
“It’s always hard to practice new skills, Grandfather,” Floki soothed. “The smarter we are, the more frustrating it is to think in new ways. Because we’re better at our usual way. But try, please. There are no intelligences on the asteroid capable of communicating with Ben? Or even noticing that he exists?”
“Communicating directly, no,” Loki reasoned. “But I’m available if we can find him. Let me try something.” He blinked once, twice, three times. “Ah. Here’s a map of the interior of the asteroid, all controllers who responded. For some reason, there’s that dead zone. Did your Wilder damage something important?”