The stranger matched velocities and terminated boost. Half a kilometer away, it hung as if motionless against the huge stars.
“Still no response,” Nansen told his crew. “We—Hold!”
Magnification showed him and Sundaram the forms that climbed out of the skeleton. Instruments gave dimensions and movements. To unaided vision they would have been mere glints, but they swept swiftly nearer in a V formation.
No screen at a station gave so clear a view. “Robots, yes,” Nansen said like a machine himself. “Fifteen of them. Each a cylinder, about three meters long. Four assemblies with nozzles around the circumference at the waist—jet motors, I think, probably chemical. Four landing jacks aft, or so they appear to be. … Claws at the ends, perhaps they double as grapnels. Four arms forward, branching and rebranching … yes, at the ends, what must be manipulators and assorted tools. An array projecting at the nose—a lens in it? A laser? Gleams and housings elsewhere—sensors?—¡Esperad! They are turning about… interior wheels, minuets?” Flame flickered. Vapor roiled, thinned, disappeared. “Yes, they are on approach, they are coming in.”
The shapes drew close. The optical program tracked them and displayed the images.
“¿Qué es? They … they approach aft—they touch down—induction grip like our boots? But it is—¡Madre de Dios, no!”
The machines were on the plasma drive lattice. They clung as wasps cling to a prey. Radiance sprang from their lenses. Metal glowed suddenly white, sparks fountained, a cable writhed loose, a thin girder parted and a second robot seized the pieces to bend them before they could fuse.
“They’re attacking us,” Mokoena said, stunned.
“Start the drive!” Ruszek roared. “Burn the bastards off!”
“No,” Yu told them. “We have already lost too much feedback for the guide fields. We would melt the entire assembly.”
“Stop, please stop,” Sundaram begged. His little brown hands bounded over the keyboard before him, seeking to hit on a message that might be understood.
“Shoot their ship!” Kilbirnie yelled.
Sweat stung Nansen’s eyes. “Not yet. We know nothing, nada.”
Brent’s voice rang: “Well, we can defend our own. Lajos, you and me go out and kill those things before they take our whole hull apart.”
“By God, yes!” the mate shouted. “Tim, you’re nearest the small arms locker. Bring us weapons. Selim, come help us suit up.”
“I will go, too,” Zeyd said.
“And I,” Kilbirnie put in.
“No,” Nansen decreed. “Not you two. Ruszek and Brent have the military experience. We cannot risk more.” A groan escaped him. He also must stay behind.
Dayan sent him a benediction. “We know how you feel, you, our captain.”
“This must be s-s-some tragic mistake,” Yu gasped. “They would not—rational beings—”
“They are doing it,” Zeyd said.
Sundaram had won back his inner balance. “I am working out a program to transmit,” he said fast. “Basic mathematics, flashes for numbers up to one hundred, digital symbols for operators, operations conducted to identify than. And we will vary an amplitude, sinusoidally, parabolically, exponentially, and present a succession of prime numbers. All to show we are not automatons but conscious minds. You can begin now, at every wavelength you have. I will continue adding more.”
Nansen set it up for him, without hope. What harm? Doing so took a fraction of his awareness from the destruction outside. Parts were floating free in space, bobbing off into the distance. Several robots left the work to move forward. They flitted around the after wheel and parallel to the hull, slowly, on feathery gusts of jet. Ahead of them lay turrets, bays, locks, vulnerable sensors; beyond the forward wheel stretched the mast that generated and controlled the I radiation shield. If he could just bring those forces to bear—But they heterodyned to form a hollow shell, and the requirements of feedback made their very creation dependent on a high background count.
The mother ship waited, mute. Instruments registered its mate, speeding closer.
A shuttle jumped from forward wheel to main hull. Sweeping about on his order, the optics gave Nansen an image of it. The shuttle reached a port and secured itself. The men aboard were cycling through, into the passage beyond. They were bound for the nearest exit to space.
He knew which that would be, and focused on it. After endlessness, while the wrecking went on aft and the scout robots advanced forward, the valve drew aside. Two space-suited figures clambered out and took stance to peer around them. Their boots clung fast, their hands gripped firearms. More were slung at their shoulders. In the harsh sunlight, they shone like armored knights. The jetpacks on their backs were like the wings of the warrior angel Michael.
They were not symbols, though. Individually fitted suits gave recognition; burly Ruszek, slender Brent. An antenna picked up their radio speech.
“On to the drive,” the second engineer said. Ardor pulsed. “Shoot on sight. Bullets. A rocket would blow one into scrap. We want them in condition to study.”
“Give them a chance first,” the mate growled. “Maybe when they see us they will—Hold! Cover me.”
A robot rounded the hull, flying low alongside its great curve. Light sheened off smooth alloy, dendritic arms, watchful pseudoeyes. Still clutching his rifle, Ruszek spread his arms high and wide, a token of welcome.
The laser lens came aglare. His helmet darkened barely in time to save his sight. He leaped, tore free of the hull, floated. Metal glowed where he had been and bubbled along the slash the energy beam left.
Brent was already firing. The robot spun back from impact. The slugs tore through its plating. It gyred off, jets dead. The arms flopped.
Two more appeared. Ruszek knew better than to shoot from free fall. He twisted around, activated his motor, struck the hull, went step by gripping step to join his partner. Brent’s rifle hammered.
From aft rose the other machines, a swarm across the monstrous stars. Ruszek slung his rifle and freed his rocket launcher.
Lasers flashed, seeking range. Metal seared.
“The orders for that came from the ship,” said Nansen. To it: “No, you shall not kill my men.”
A rocket streaked on a white trail of smoke. Its radar found a target, its warhead exploded. A rose bloomed soundlessly, spread thin, vanished. Fragments tumbled where two robots had been, winking in the sunlight.
In vacuum, the concussion had merely tossed the others a little. However, their pack dispersed. For a minute or two they drifted in several directions, as if uncertain.
Nansen had entered his command.
The robots regrouped. They moved again toward the men. Ruszek and Brent stood back to back.
A torpedo slipped from a launch bay in Envoy. Nansen sent instructions. The lean shape slewed about and jetted.
Low-yield, the nuclear blast nonetheless filled heaven with incandescence. The fireball became a luminous cloud. When that had dissipated, shards whirled red-hot and molten drops hurtled like comets gone insane.
Nansen’s attention was back on his men. They had had the hull between them and the explosion, sufficient shelter; else he would first have used a counterrotator to swing his vessel around. They had not moved from their position. As he watched, Brent shot an approaching robot. Again the bullets ripped thin skin and tore circuits asunder. The machine wobbled backward. Pieces dribbled from it.
The sight was almost pathetic, because the entire band had lost purpose. Momentum bore its members past. Two of them encountered the ship, took hold with their jacks, and stood. Tools on the arm-branches plucked empty space. The rest of the robots drifted by and dwindled in view.
“Hold your fire, Al,” came Ruszek’s hoarse mutter. “I think we’ve won.”
A few fragments of the slain vessel struck Envoy, not too hard, sending faint drumbeats through her air.
Nansen let out a breath. His skin prickled. He smelled his sweat, felt it on brow and in
armpits, heard himself as if from afar: “Return inboard, you two. Well done.”
“We’d better stay here awhile, on guard.” Brent’s words were a little shrill, but they throbbed.
“No hay necesidad—no need.” Nansen hesitated. His thoughts hastened, he believed; it was language that had gone heavy. “At least the probability of more trouble in the near future seems slight. We destroyed the mother ship, do you know? It must have been in charge. The robots doubtless have some autonomy, but without orders, they don’t … don’t know … what to do. At any rate, they don’t when they meet something as unheard-of as we must be.”
Horror spoke from Mokoena: “You destroyed—whoever was on board?”
“They were after us,” Kilbirnie snarled.
“No, the ship must have been robotic, too,” Dayan said. “The wreckers were—agents, organs, corpuscles serving it. I can’t believe intelligent beings would mount a senseless attack. It was most likely due to a program not written for anything like us.”
Nansen’s tongue began to moisten. It moved more readily. “We’ll discuss this at leisure, and lay new plans,” he said. “Meanwhile, Mate Ruszek, Engineer Brent, we’ll not hazard you further. Come back.”
“To a heroes’ welcome,” Kilbirnie cried.
“First I’d better blow these two here apart,” Ruszek said.
“No!” Brent exclaimed. “We want them to study, dissect. The military value—lasers that powerful, that small—”
“Well, I’m God damn not going to leave them squatting on our hull unless I’ve put their lights out. Right, Captain?”
“Can you do that with a rifle?” Nansen asked.
“We did already.”
“Don’t shoot them in the same places,” Brent urged. “Leave different sections intact. We need the knowledge, I tell you.”
“For war?” Yu protested. “Why? I thought we are agreed this was essentially an accident.”
“We are not certain of that,” Nansen replied. “We’ll try to find out. First, of course, we’ll assess the damage and commence repair.”
Sundaram stirred. “No,” he said. “First we should attempt contact with the second ship. It will be here in another hour, won’t it?”
“It will not,” Nansen declared. “I am about to launch a second missile.”
“Oh, no!” Yu screamed. “You cannot tell—”
“I can gauge probabilities,” Nansen answered, “and that robot brain yonder may have learned something from what has happened. It shall not get a chance to apply the information. I hope the rest of the fleet will take that as a lesson to leave us alone.”
“But, Captain—”
“I am the captain. Let any guilt fall on me. I am responsible for all of us.”
Sundaram parted his lips and closed them again.
Nansen’s fingers wrote a command. Another torpedo eased into space. It turned, searched, found its target, plotted its course, and spurted off. After a while, very briefly, a new star winked.
There was no further sound from the engine center. Perhaps Yu had turned her intercom off. Perhaps she wept.
16.
Robots and humans working together restored Envoy’s plasma thruster. It had not been too badly damaged, as short a time as the wreckers were granted. She came about onto a new path and at length took orbit around the planet that bore life.
No more raptors troubled her. “They must have passed word back and forth,” Kilbirnie said. “They’ve learned we’re bad medicine.”
“Yes, they aren’t conscious, but they can learn—within rather broad limits, I’d say—if my guess about them is right,” Nansen replied.
“Oh, what is your guess?”
“I’ll wait until we have more data.”
“Aweel, meanwhile the rest of us can have the fun of making our own.” After the brush with ruin, mirth ran high, if a trifle forced.
Moonless, a fourth again as massive as Earth, turning once in forty-two hours on an axis barely tilted, atmosphere more dense, the planet still looked familiar enough to rouse an ache in a human breast. Although ice caps were lacking, oceans shone sapphire and lands, sprawled dun beneath white swirls of cloud. The air was nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, carbon dioxide; it knew rain, snow, sunshine. Life flourished. The reflection spectrum off plants was not that of chlorophyl, but the chemistry was of protein, and animals were abundant.
They included sentient beings. High resolution found large brown creatures with stumpy legs and six-digited hands in villages(?) that consisted mostly of dome-shaped dwellings. They cultivated fields, mined and milled and manufactured, shipped and traveled, with the help of domesticated beasts and modest machines. They crossed the seas under sail; sometimes they flew in lighter-than-air craft. Dams, windmills, and solar collectors supplemented fueled power plants to furnish a certain amount of electricity. Designs were exotic and often suggested sophisticated engineering, but the main energy source seemed to be the combustion of biomass, and apparently much land was given over to growing this. Local variations in everything were noticeable, but nothing like what Earth had known through most of its history. Here might well be a world united under one dominant culture.
It was the ruins that leaped out at eye and mind. Remnants of cyclopean walls and sky-storming towers reared above forest crowns, brush-grown plains, deserted islands. Lesser relics lay everywhere; some had been incorporated into later works. Other traces—old riverbeds, peculiarly shaped mountains, anomalous patterns of vegetation—likewise told of past grandeur.
“Did a war destroy what was here?” wondered Zeyd one evening in the common room. “Could the shipkillers be left over from it?”
“I doubt that,” said Dayan. “Nothing looks as if it was broken by anything but neglect and weather.”
“Besides,” Ruszek added, “those aren’t really shipkillers. They tried to dismantle us, is all. When we fought back, they went straightaway kaput.”
Mokoena shuddered. “Not straightaway.” She caught his hand. “If the captain had been one minute slower, you would be dead now.”
“But Lajos is right,” Yu said. “They had no real defenses, they were not military machines. Let us not project our psychology onto the souls here. Perhaps they have never made war.”
“That would be lovely,” Sundaram mused. “If we could get to know them—an enlightenment—”
Nansen dismissed that idea at the formal meeting several days later. “We are pledged to go to the Yonderfolk,” he said starkly.
“But the science to do,” Mokoena demurred. “A whole new biology.”
“The beings,” Sundaram added in his quiet fashion. “Their thoughts, feelings, arts, their mysterious history.”
“I know,” Nansen replied. “But you know, all of us know, we could spend our lives here and not begin to understand it. We’re in search of a starfaring race. I only agreed to this diversion because it might somehow bear on”—he faltered—“on certain questions about the stability of high technology.”
“Well, doesn’t it?” Cleland made bold to ask.
“Yes and no,” Nansen said to the half-circle he faced. “Clearly, they never achieved the zero-zero drive. It does appear their time of glory was long ago. Perhaps the civilization we are bound for did not yet exist. Perhaps the haze in this cluster prevented their finding traces of any farther off. It was discoveries like that which led us to the principles of the quantum gate.”
“Somebody had to do it first, independently,” Kilbirnie argued. “I suspect we would have regardless.”
Nansen shrugged. “Who can say? In any event, I have had a few thoughts about the situation here and how it came to be. I’ve discussed them with Engineer Yu and Physicist Dayan, who carried them further. We have what we believe is a reasonable hypothesis.”
Brent glanced at Yu, Kilbirnie at Dayan, with a flash of jealousy. Kilbirnie lost hers in fascination as talk continued.
“A high technology, including nucleonics and doubtless genetic en
gineering, arose on this planet, and evidently there was world peace, too,” Nansen said. “Perhaps there always was. They explored the planetary system. They began to use its resources: energy, minerals, industrial sites that did not harm the biosphere at home. In all this they were like us.
“Then why should they not do what our ancestors thought of doing, and would have done if zero-zero had not made it irrelevant? Send probes to the nearer stars—and in a cluster, every star is near. Robots to survey and study and beam their findings back.”
“Our ancestors did, a few times,” Cleland pointed out.
Nansen nodded. “True. But they never took the next step, which was to send von Neumann machines.”
“What?”
Nansen looked at Dayan. “Would you like to explain?”
“It’s simple enough,” she said. “We use the same principle every day in our nanotech, and in fact it’s the basis of life and evolution. Send machines that not only explore and report to you, but make more like themselves and dispatch those onward, programmed to do likewise.”
Brent whistled. “Whew! How long would they take to eat the galaxy?”
“It wouldn’t be that bad,” Yu told him. “It would be enough to make a few score in any given planetary system. An asteroid or two would suffice for materials.”
“A probe wouldn’t be a single unit,” Dayan added. “We’ve seen. A carrier, housing the central computer and its program; a number of robots to do the actual work, including to build the next generation of machines.”
“But none ever reached us,” Ruszek argued, puzzled. “Why not? If it began here, oh, a million years ago—well, we’ve seen what kind of boost the carriers have. Sixteen hundred light-years, they should have spread through that before now.”
“High boost,” Brent said, “but limited delta v.” He had been pondering the recorded data, as well as starting to dissect the slain robots. “Maybe a fiftieth or a hundredth c.”
“Even so—”
Zeyd narrowed his eyes. “The shipkillers,” he hissed. “Can they be the reason?”
“Not that simple,” Dayan answered. “Our conjecture—But, Captain, you can probably explain it with the least technicalese.”
Starfarers Page 12