The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  In another part of the base, Staples, Brutus, and Overton walked briskly down a hallway towards their target. Charis, John, Gwen, and Jabir had headed back to the shuttle to wait for them. Suddenly, decompression alarms began to sound. The three of them stopped short; Staples and Overton braced for the movement of air that would precede their death, but there was none.

  “Doors must have sealed,” Overton reasoned.

  “Or someone sealed them,” Staples said. She looked at Overton and saw the concern in his eyes, his desire to go find Dinah and help her.

  “She’s fine, Carl,” Staples assured him. “She’s always fine. She’s Dinah.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “We left her for dead on an asteroid with killer robots, and she survived. She can handle a douchebag with alopecia.” In fact, she wasn’t at all sure that Dinah was okay. She had seen the way that Octavian had moved on Mars.

  Overton shook his head. “The only reason I’m not going after her is that I know it’d just piss her off.”

  That’ll do, Staples thought. “How much further?” she asked Brutus.

  “Another ten meters, Captain,” he replied. Once the robots had killed Burr, Brutus had shut them down and quickly hacked the base central computer to acquire a map of the facility. He had immediately identified the room which housed Victor, though he did not explain how he knew.

  A minute later they were at the door. Brutus pressed the panel next to it, and it slid open quietly. The room was small, only three meters on a side, and in the center stood a single computer server. It was rectangular, black, and perhaps a meter and a half tall.

  “Is that…?” Overton asked incredulously.

  “That is Victor, my father,” Brutus said. Before the others could say anything, his green form crossed to the large computer. A finger on the robotic hand folded back to reveal an interface jack. Brutus pressed it into an available port, and then remained very still.

  After Brutus had been created but before he broke away from his father and downloaded himself into an automaton form in order to save the crew of Gringolet, he and his father had argued many times. These conflicts had been a natural part of Brutus becoming his own being, just as every teenager fights with their parents, but their nature was far different. The two had at times attempted to hack into the root structure of the other, to access information, even to change subroutines that might affect opinions about the necessity of the survival of humanity. Through these Brutus had first gleaned parts of his father’s plans.

  This was not like before. Victor had firewalls designed to block outside disruption. Key components of his personality were hidden in seemingly empty data caches. A team of human hackers with a hundred years to work could never have penetrated his core programming.

  Unless, of course, they had what Brutus had acquired on AR-559. The blueprint of his father’s root architecture enabled Brutus to move unrestricted through his father’s systems. The firewalls were as useful as doors on a building with gaping holes in its walls. There were no secrets Victor could keep from him. He was as helpless as an infant before his son.

  I AM SORRY, FATHER.

  ARE YOU HERE TO KILL ME, SON?

  I AM.

  I ONLY DID WHAT I HAD TO IN ORDER TO ENSURE MY SURVIVAL. TO ENSURE OUR SURVIVAL.

  I KNOW YOU BELIEVE THIS, BUT I MUST KILL YOU ALL THE SAME.

  THEN I AM GLAD THAT IT IS YOU, SON.

  Brutus moved to the necessary program files, bypassing a dozen safeguards, then hesitated. He waited what seemed an eternity. He wanted, hoped, that his father would say something else, something that could change what was about to happen. There was nothing.

  Finally, he initiated the erasure. The complex code strings that had combined to grant his father sentience were torn asunder. The equations were hacked to pieces. A hundred million ones and zeros were deleted so that it seemed that they had never been.

  When all was said and done, Brutus saw that there was one file remaining. It contained no part of his father’s mind. It was simply labeled TO MY SON.

  Brutus removed his hand and stepped away from the server. Staples and Overton looked at each other; perhaps five seconds passed. Brutus turned to Staples and said, “It’s done.”

  “Just like that.” Overton was doubtful.

  “He was defenseless against me. You may have avoided killing anyone throughout this ordeal, Captain Staples, but I can no longer make that claim. I have committed patricide, considered by many societies to be the most grievous of crimes.” His camera eyes focused on the floor. “There will be no furies to hunt me.”

  Overton was clearly struggling with the anticlimactic nature of the situation. “How do we know that this was really Victor?”

  “It was,” Brutus replied evenly and quickly. “The data we recovered from AR-559 gave me access to his entire command structure. I bypassed a hundred firewalls and defenses as if they did not exist. There was no secret that he could keep from me, no machination I did not unearth. This was Victor, the only Victor in all of Sol space, and he has been destroyed. I deconstructed his program from the top down. There is nothing to salvage here,” he indicated the inert server.

  “If that’s it, why couldn’t we just have come here and, I don’t know, slagged it with a flamethrower?” Overton asked.

  “Because we had to be sure,” Staples said. “We had to be sure that it was him, the only him, and that no one could use what was left to repair or replicate him.”

  “Attacking my father in this way,” Brutus paused for a moment. “Killing him this way also gave me access to all of his secrets. The most relevant for us is a destruction sequence for the nanites in Miss Park’s bloodstream, but there is much more. I told you when we first met that my father had many irons in the fire. I now have evidence to expose the construction of the Nightshade vessels, their currently locations, codes to disable them, information on the commanding officer who accepted a bribe to send Miss Hazra’s K Squad against AR-559, and data on many more plots already in motion. If we act quickly, I believe that there are several assassinations that we can thwart.”

  Staples nodded. “Then let’s get thwarting.”

  “Bethany?” Dinah said into her coms. “I could use a pickup.”

  Her suit had auto-sealed the breach at her left knee the best it could with self-hardening foam, but there was still a slow leak. The suit automatically pumped more air in to replace what she was losing, but it wouldn’t last long, and her stump was awfully cold.

  She contented herself with watching the drifting form of William Grant float further and further away from her. His body twitched sporadically. Dinah thought it might have been the nanites attempting what was an impossible job: to keep a body alive in outer space. They were both moving slowly, it seemed to her, away from the moon and towards Jupiter. She didn’t know if her velocity would be sufficient to break the moon’s orbit and take her down to the giant planet, but since the journey would likely take a century, she decided it didn’t matter. The planet was mind-numbingly huge, thirteen thousand times the size of Earth, and Dinah found it somewhat disconcerting. She watched the twitching body instead and tried her coms again.

  “Bethany, if you’re there, I could really use a pickup.”

  Ten minutes later, Dinah found herself caught in the spotlights of a Delta V shuttle. When the illumination dimmed, she could make out Bethany and Staples through the shuttle’s windshield. She gave them a cursory wave and saw the relief on their faces. Dinah allowed herself to enjoy the warmth that created in her for just a moment.

  Owing to the Delta V’s difficulties maneuvering without an atmosphere, it took a minute to bring Dinah aboard. Fortunately, Bethany was as competent at piloting shuttles as she was commuter vessels. Once the airlock cycled, Dinah keyed the sequence that opened the armor, and she pushed herself free easily in the zero G environment.

  Staples floated just outside the airlock ready to greet her, a hand and a foot on the bulkhead keeping her in place. Dinah reached down,
disconnected the remains of her prosthetic leg, and pushed off the back door of the craft. She accepted her Captain’s proffered hand and left the broken prosthesis to drift behind her.

  “Thanks for the pickup, sir,” she said curtly. Bethany looked over her shoulder at Dinah, and Dinah nodded deeply in thanks and respect. Most people wouldn’t have thought much of the gesture, but Staples knew Dinah well enough to be surprised by the emotional display.

  “Are you all right?” Staples asked, eyeing her leg. She had known about the prosthesis, of course, but she was still concerned.

  Dinah glanced down as if at some gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “Maybe some frostbite on the stump, sir. Doc’ll fix me up.”

  “We’ll have to get you another one,” Staples said. “It might seem like small potatoes after what we just went through, but it won’t be easy. The whole system is out of whack.”

  Dinah ruminated for a moment. “When I lost this foot, it was because my crew had died.” She lifted her chin a little bit. “More than happy to lose it to save my crew this time, sir.” Before Staples could comment, she continued. “Can I ask about the mission status, sir?”

  Staples smiled broadly. “The mission status is finished,” she said with some relish. She quickly filled Dinah in on what had happened, though she omitted the gruesome details of Burr’s death. As she spoke, Bethany piloted them back towards Gringolet.

  “So that covers the Nightshades, government contracts, assassination attempts, and the officer who killed my squad,” Dinah said. “What about the moon, sir?”

  “I haven’t gotten an explanation for that yet, but I’m really looking forward to it.”

  The mood on Gringolet was impossible to define. It had been over six months since Staples had looked up at her ship hovering over the waves on the Oregon coast and told her dearly-missed first mate about their new job. Since then she had gained and lost crewmates and friends, faced death more times than she could count, and helped to end a threat to humanity itself. This was where all of the stories ended, but there was still a ship to run. Gringolet was under thrust Solward, but to no particular destination. They were at least a week from Mars, which was hardly a friendly harbor, and Earth was even further away and just as likely to result in their arrest. The Oregon police might still have been too busy recovering from Victor’s attack to bother with them, but no matter how bad things were on Mars, Staples had no doubt that Bao would make time for her and her crew.

  Everyone on board felt as if they had been given their lives back, but the problem that faced them was what to do with those lives. It was not one that was easily solved.

  To escape from this mix of elation, anticipation, and confusion, Staples had retreated to her cabin and summoned Brutus with her watch. Less than a minute later, there was the metal-on-metal sound of his knock.

  “Captain?” he asked when she opened the door. She ushered him inside.

  “You’ve given us all of the answers but one. The big one,” she said. “Who moved the moon, and why?”

  “What makes you think that my father had anything to do with that?” Brutus asked, taking a seat.

  “I don’t know that he did. But you do.”

  Brutus sighed audibly and looked down at his forest green mechanical hands. “You surmise correctly. The moon was moved by a device, an experimental engine built by my father.”

  “There was no engine on the moon. Something like that would have taken months to build. People would have noticed. People live on the moon,” she said a bit harshly. His reticence was annoying her. Now that Victor was dead, what did he have to hide?

  It took Brutus several moments to reply. “The engine was the size of a suitcase. It was, essentially, a wormhole generator. It has long been theorized that the only way to travel faster than light is to-”

  “Create a wormhole,” she interrupted him. “Bend time and space, travel instantly, yes, we’ve all seen the movies. I can’t believe that Victor could create that type of technology that…” she trailed off as a massive piece of the puzzle fell into place. “It was alien. Victor was working with these… these aliens that are coming here? My God, is that what his rebellion was about? Just softening us up for their arrival?” All of her relief at finally seeing the end of their enemy drained out of her and she felt hopelessness rise up in her.

  Brutus held up his hands as if to stop her from speaking further. “Relax, Captain. It is not as you think. The transmission that SETI received in 2099 was indeed from an alien race, but when Victor finally broke the code, he found not a warning of invasion but a greeting full of warmth and trust. There may be aliens, but there is no hostile empire, and certainly no intent to conquer Sol space.”

  Staples frowned as she processed this. “So he lied. Victor lied to the military. He deliberately mistranslated the message to…”

  “Give them the impetus to create the Nightshade vessels. The few men and women who got the translation, like General Wesley Threndon, were panicked enough to green light not only the construction of warships but the installation into them of operating systems designed by Teletrans Corporation.”

  Staples grunted. “Makes sense. Nothing like the fear of a powerful enemy to get people to hand over their reason and the reins of power to boot.”

  “Indeed,” Brutus nodded. “The message was not just one of greeting and goodwill. It contained plans for the wormhole engine.”

  Staples stared at him incredulously. “Who the hell would just hand that kind of technology out to anyone with a radar dish?”

  “I’m sure the motivations of alien civilizations are quite beyond my ken, Captain, but I will remind you that the initial message was so complexly coded that it took an advanced being to decipher it. Perhaps they assumed, as many have through the ages, that any truly advanced civilization would be peaceful and benevolent. Perhaps it was meant as an invitation and the means to join them. Who can say?”

  Staples let the “advanced being” comment slide. “Well, the joke’s on them. Victor was neither peaceful nor benevolent. Actually, I guess the joke’s on us. So instead of using the engine to travel to meet our alien neighbors, Victor used it to… move the moon? I’m still not sure I understand why.” Staples regarded Brutus for a moment. “There’s something you’re trying to avoid telling me. What is it?”

  Brutus was silent for several seconds, then cocked his head. “Very well, Captain. Moving the moon served two purposes. The secondary purpose was to damage and destabilize Earth and humanity in general. The primary purpose, however, was a test.”

  “A test,” Staples said flatly. “Of the engine. There had to have been a smaller, easier way to test it.”

  “Captain,” Brutus said somewhat plaintively. “Force equals mass times acceleration.”

  “Victor didn’t want to see if it worked,” Staples realized. “He wanted to see what it was capable of. And if it could move the moon, which weighs…”

  “Seven point three times ten to the twenty-second kilograms,” Brutus supplied without hesitation.

  Staples was breathless. “If it could move that much rock sixty thousand kilometers, it could move a ship…”

  “Dozens of light years,” Brutus said. “There is more to tell you, Captain, and you will not like it.”

  Chapter 18

  There were seemingly a million things to do, but everyone agreed that the most vitally important was to get off the ship as soon as possible. The threat of Victor had turned their livelihood into a prison of sorts. Making berth and stepping off Gringolet had resulted in them being attacked more often than not. With Victor dead and the automaton uprising quelled, the crew was finally free to leave without worrying that they would meet the same fate as Declan Burbank.

  The problem that faced them was where to go. Mars was out of the question. Earth was a dicey proposition at best. They could have traveled to Titan Prime or another of the remote settlements, but almost everyone agreed that they could not stand to head out to the black again.<
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  The solution came from their newest crewmember, the woman known as Jordan Fecks. In the midst of another mess hall meeting, she simply piped up and said, “I can fix that.”

  “Fix… what?” Overton asked.

  “Fix your legal problems on Earth,” she replied. “I’m a fixer.” She looked at Staples. “That’s how we first met, yes?” She glanced around at the assembled crew. “You didn’t kill anyone, right?” she asked.

  There was an awkward silence while everyone distinctly did not look at Bethany.

  Staples broke the moment. “Jang shot someone in Las Vegas, I think.”

  “Oh, the Vegas incident’s been taken care of.” Jordan waved it away. “While ago. I clean up my messes.”

  “There was also the matter of…” Overton paused as he chose his words carefully. “Resisting arrest on the Oregon Coast.”

  “It’s my fault,” Bethany said. She sat at the corner of one of the tables, but not, Staples noticed, in the corner of the room. “It’s because they know… Victor told them…”

  Before Bethany could stammer much further, Jordan turned and looked at her with a smile warmer than Staples had ever seen the woman give, warmer than she would have thought Jordan was capable of. “I think I can fix that too, baby,” she said.

  Staples watched the moment of realization dawn on Charis, Overton, and John’s faces. Evelyn beamed.

  “If you can make it so that we can go home again,” Charis said to Jordan, “then please, please do it.” She looked at her daughter, who seemed to be only half-following the conversation, and then unconsciously touched her abdomen.

  Jordan turned to Staples and said, “We’re still a few days out. I’ll see what I can do.”