by Zieja, Joe
“You are to tell me the moment you feel any hint of a desire to marry me,” Keffoule said. “While I can expect you to acquiesce, I cannot compel you. That would be unsavory.” She made a face.
“You seemed to have no issues about compelling me to come to your ship,” Rogers said.
Keffoule shook her head. “I regret the circumstances I had to use to bring you aboard.” A hard look passed through her eyes. “But if you recall, you did violate our agreement of neutrality.”
“So did you,” Rogers said, folding his arms and leaning back on the bed, which, he discovered, was on wheels. He stumbled, caught his balance, and stood up again, refolding his arms. “Ahem. So did you.” Being tough was really not his strong suit. Could he con, drink, or gamble his way out of this situation?
“My subordinate acted without my authority,” Keffoule said.
“Well, they all still shot at me an awful lot, for having no authority.”
Keffoule bowed her head slightly, perhaps a gesture of apology or just her way of saying “You have correctly represented the fact that people did shoot at you.”
“These things have passed.” She said the words like a truism. “If it makes you feel any better, I have imposed a strict no-fire order on the rest of the fleet. From now on, it requires my express permission for anyone in the fleet to employ weapons, even in self-defense. In the meantime, you are free to roam around the ship as you please. Should you require anything, you may contact me directly through this.”
She reached behind her and, instead of producing a pistol with which Rogers was absolutely sure she was going to shoot him, she produced a datapad. At least, it looked like a datapad. The form was similar, but it was smaller and a little more stylish than the Meridan version. He supposed the two systems would have some crossover in their technology.
Rogers looked at it like it was a snake for a moment before reaching out and taking it. “You’re giving me a datapad?”
“The functions have been severely limited, of course,” Keffoule said. “It has only a few remaining communications programs, including that blue button there, which will connect you to me.”
Rogers had a feeling he would not be pressing that blue button. The rest of the display showed some standard info, such as the ship time, fleet status information, and, of course, several applications with which to practice one’s math.
“I hope you’ll do your best to make yourself at home on my ship,” Keffoule said, retreating slightly toward the door. Any hints of a seductive attitude—most of which Rogers wasn’t even sure had existed in the first place—had vanished; she was all business now. “I do hope you’ll consider this seriously, Captain Rogers. Your fleet is in a dire position, and the galaxy is in need of these sorts of unions. If the two of us were to be married, it would solidify the Two Hundred Years (And Counting) Peace in a way that military deterrence could never do.”
Rogers raised an eyebrow. So this was political? Keffoule must have a very skewed perception of how important he was in the Meridan military to think that marrying him had any hope of doing anything except making him very uncomfortable. The way she’d acted on the Ambuscade—what did that word mean?—she’d made it seem like it was some kind of bizarre attraction gleaned from reading intelligence reports.
Rogers cleared his throat. “I see. Well. Um. I’ll keep this with me.” He fumbled, red-faced, to put the small datapad in his own too-big holster. “In the meantime, I could use something to eat. Where do Thelicosans keep their dining facilities?”
Keffoule let out a low chuckle. “Unfortunately, troops use their datapads to spend meal chits.”
“So? I’ll just use mine.”
“That function has been disabled.” Why was she looking at him like that?
“That seems kind of mean,” Rogers said. “So where am I going to eat?”
“You are, of course, going to be treated to the finest food we have to offer on the Limiter—without dairy, of course, I know how Meridans can be.”
Rogers felt, for some reason, mildly offended by the stereotype. “I’m not lactose-intolerant.”
Keffoule brightened. “Very good,” she said. “I’ll make a note of that to my personal chef.”
Rogers swallowed, salivating. “Personal chef ?”
“Yes, of course,” Keffoule said as she turned to walk out of the room. “You are to take your meals in my personal stateroom. Ring me when you’d like a meal, and I’ll be happy to join you.”
The sudden silence allowed Rogers’ stomach’s growl to echo loudly throughout the room.
“I’m not very hungry.”
Keffoule smirked. “I had heard you were a better liar than that, Captain Rogers. For now, I have pressing business on the bridge to attend to. Until we meet again. Xan!”
The wobbly faced man appeared, this time riding a strange circular platform. Keffoule jumped nimbly on the back of it and gave Rogers a blank look before the vehicle sped away, accompanied by what Rogers thought was a rather ridiculous bubbly noise. He was left standing in the medical room.
What was he supposed to do with all this? He obviously couldn’t marry her—that was out of the question and still struck him as really, really creepy—but he didn’t think he’d be leaving the ship anytime soon, either. The datapad she’d given him would obviously be used to track his position and activities, but it was also a valuable tool that, given some time, he might be able to use to his advantage. Rogers felt like he was in the middle of several rocks and hard places, and all of them looked like a romantic candlelit dinner with the enemy commander.
Sighing, he picked up his new shoes, put them on—they were surprisingly comfortable—and went for a walk. He wondered how everyone back on the Flagship was getting on without him. They were professionals—they were probably all as cool as cucumbers.
* * *
“What are you doing down here?” Master Sergeant Hart asked Deet. The engineering crew was busy in the Pit today, still cleaning up from the assault on the milk containers. Pieces of Ravagers were scattered all over the maintenance bay, and the crew looked haggard, though perhaps happy to be doing work of actual value. Hart’s coveralls were stained with grease and flaking milk.
“The bridge was too busy for me to do work,” Deet said.
That was an understatement—at least, Deet thought it was an understatement. He was still having trouble with some of the more loosely interpretable comparative functions that humans used to describe things. Based on his experience, though, he thought “understatement” was an appropriate word.
Let’s analyze, Deet thought. The word “understatement” meant that a previous description was weak or too restrained based on the actual facts. He had used the word “busy” to describe the bridge. What were the actual facts surrounding the status of the bridge?
A small electrical fire had occurred when several of the systems technicians dove over each other attempting to find something called the “panic button,” which Deet had understood as only an expression used to designate the disregard of rational thinking in favor of overwhelming fear. It appeared, however, that the Flagship really did possess such a button. Nobody could find it, and, worse, nobody could explain clearly what it was supposed to do if pushed.
Aside from the electrical fire, Captain Alsinbury had charged onto the bridge, knocked several people unconscious, and begun demanding that the hangars prepare boarding ships onto which she was about to stuff every marine on the Flagship for a counterassault on the Limiter. Deet’s knowledge of tactics was improving, and even he could tell that this was an ill-advised move that disregarded simple facts, such as there being a giant horde of enemy ships between the Limiter and the Flagship that would certainly have turned any assault ships to dust before they arrived. It would appear that something else was altering the marine’s thinking patterns that Deet was yet unable to perceive.
An electrical fire and a raging marine would have been chaotic in and of themselves, but apparently the p
ilot who called himself Flash had been trying to argue that he was now the acting admiral, which had caused the Viking to stop throwing technicians around and start chasing him in a repeating circle around the edge of the bridge. This had, actually, resulted in more technicians getting thrown around. It simply ceased to be the captain’s objective and began to be a side effect.
On top of all that, they had no idea where either Rogers or Tunger had gone. They’d made an attempt to recover Tunger, and they’d thought they had him, but he’d never made it back to the Flagship. Apparently he’d disappeared right out of the marines’ arms.
Deet concluded that “understatement” was appropriate.
“So where’s Rogers?” Hart asked.
“He is also busy,” Deet said.
Not a lie, Deet concluded. He was finding it easier to mislead people than it was to outright lie; his logic circuits made it difficult for him to utter something that was flatly incorrect. He would have a hard time, for example, telling Rogers he was a good commander or objectively handsome. But he could certainly tell Rogers he was better than Klein.
The command crew, after debriefing the marines on the bridge, had decided to keep the kidnapping of their acting admiral a secret, to avoid widespread panic. Panic was, they concluded, best kept to the bridge, which Deet hoped was not still on fire.
“Son of a bitch is always too busy to come down and visit the low people,” Hart said, shaking his head. He pulled a mug of something off a nearby shelf and sat on a crate near where Deet was working—an awkward feat considering the gravity cast that had been applied to his right leg. Hart had, in a moment when he apparently had forgotten the laws of physics, attempted to kick a droid in the face.
Deet wanted to be left alone—he’d chosen this obscure corner of the Pit to work so he wouldn’t be disturbed—but he supposed that a droid, surrounded by the lifeless carcasses of his brethren, might attract just a little bit of attention.
Another understatement, he thought. He was getting the hang of this.
In order to simulate being alone to further his productivity in decoding the strange behavior of the rest of the droids, Deet employed another human tactic he’d learned; he pretended Hart wasn’t there.
Plugging into the first corpse—he still didn’t feel right doing this—Deet started to swim through the huge amount of boot-up data that flew into his active memory banks. He had to reroute a lot of the code through his own boot-up data to make it think it was locally sourced, but that wasn’t anything new. He’d refined this access procedure so many times that he’d written a boilerplate protocol to do most of it automatically, keeping his metaphorical—he was getting good at that, too—eye out for deviations in the standard codes.
Or was it proverbial eye? [expletive.] Why was acting like a human so hard? They were such base creatures.
Hart gave a loud sigh and sprawled out on the crate, taking an unnecessarily long slurp from his mug. Deet wasn’t exactly sure why, but this annoyed him. It seemed like a deliberate attempt to distract him from his current task of discovering why hundreds of robots had tried to kill every human aboard the Flagship. It was an important detail. The engineer should not be slurping his coffee so loudly.
“What is it?” Deet asked. He tried to moderate his tone but moderated the wrong portion, resulting in an actual tonal change via frequency modulation. The droid he was plugged into—a standard model, serial G-441—flailed its arms in response. Hart acted similarly.
“What the hell was that?” Hart said. “You trying to blow out my eardrums?”
“That was a frequency shift, not an amplitude shift,” Deet said. “I thought you were an engineer.”
Hart gave him a face that Deet had learned to associate with an implied obscenity. “Anyway, I was wondering what you were doing with the old droids.” Hart gave the deactivated robot a distasteful look. “A lot of people don’t even like looking at them anymore.” He glanced at Deet for a moment as though he was about to say something else, but stopped himself. Deet thought he could infer that the humans on the ship were also having a hard time looking at him, despite how many times he attempted to utilize things like humor, metaphors, and stupidity to try to show them how much he was like them.
“We are still unclear as to why the droids malfunctioned,” Deet said, letting the insult pass over him. “I am attempting to connect with some of the droids locally and discover why they were able to do what they did.”
A distant scream distracted them both for a moment. Deet saw one of the technicians who had been on the bridge running across the Pit with flames streaking out of the back of his uniform. Apparently they had either found the panic button or failed to keep the panic contained—Deet still wasn’t sure how he was supposed to tell which was which. A pair of engineers—one of whom was Sergeant Lopez, the woman who had been integral in helping Rogers defeat the droids—tackled the technician to the ground and began attempting to smother the flames.
“Was that the defensive systems tech?” Hart said. “What’s he doing down here?”
The same thing he was doing on the bridge, probably, Deet thought. He decided silence was the best response in this situation.
“Anyway,” Hart said after it became clear that Deet was unwilling to engage him further about the flaming technician, “what have you found so far?”
He must be bored, Deet realized. Boredom was one of those things that compelled humans to do stupid and inconvenient things, and another thing that he struggled to understand. You didn’t just spin processes idly if they weren’t accomplishing something useful; you shut them down.
“A lot of nothing,” Deet said. When it became clear that Hart was looking for more of an explanation, Deet begrudgingly continued. “No matter how many times I erase the core, it seems they still awaken with a desire to execute protocol 162.”
“Protocol 162?”
“Killing all the humans who get in their way.”
“Oh.” Hart cleared his throat. “Those sons of bitches . . .” He trailed off, then looked at Deet nervously. “I mean, uh.”
“You don’t have to censor yourself just because they look like me,” Deet said. “I’m not them.”
For some reason, this seemed to strike Hart as a profound thing to say. He nodded slowly; then his whole body relaxed. “Well, shit,” he said. “Those tin can sons of bitches really wanted to kill us, didn’t they? Who made the damn things?”
That sounded more like the Hart Deet had come to know. In some ways, Deet respected the man. For a droid whose profanity generator was permanently broken, it was easy to look up to someone who practically breathed obscenities.
“So far we have only concluded that the core parts were manufactured by a company called Zeus Holdings, Inc. We don’t know who that is, nor can we do good research at the moment, thanks to the communications jamming being conducted by the Thelicosans.”
“Those tin can sons of bitches,” Hart said again.
Deet paused a moment as his logic tree split into several parts.
“To whom are you referring?”
Hart shrugged. “Whoever.”
Deet really did like this man.
“So Zeus made these things,” Hart said, leaning forward. He pulled the crate he was sitting on closer to Deet so that he could see the inside of the open droid Deet was currently working on.
“It seems that way, yes.”
“What do you think the problem is, then?”
Deet beeped. He had run through this protocol thousands of times, trying to pick apart different data pieces inside the main operating system of the droids. He believed that was where the problem was, but the more he tried to pick apart the operating system, the more doors closed. It was like trying to find out what was inside a house of a million windows by only opening one at a time. Whoever had programmed this had clearly wanted things to stay segregated. But why? Protecting proprietary code was one thing; this seemed deliberately mangled. He explained all this to Hart, wh
o swore again.
“That doesn’t sound like any programming I ever heard of,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I was into robotics, though, and I never did any of this artificial intelligence crap. It was only my intelligence that was in there.”
“I can only imagine what kind of robots they were, then.”
Hart seemed not to notice the insult. “But you say you can’t, uh, see the inside of the operating system because it’s so segmented and closed off ?”
Deet beeped his agreement. “It’s all so [EXPLETIVE] frustrating.”
Scratching the stubble that seemed to be perpetually on his face, Hart wiped his hands on his coveralls, which might or might not have actually cleaned his hands, and took another long drink from his mug. He appeared to be thinking. Deet was only guessing at this, of course, based upon educated observation. Humans always had the same expression when they were thinking—like they were exerting great physical effort or attempting to void their bowels. He hoped it wasn’t the latter.
“You’ve got the same operating system, right?” Hart said. “I mean, I hope you don’t have the same operating system, or you’ll just go around killing people and all that shit, but you have something similar.”
“Yes,” Deet said. “I have the prototype operating system of the droids with the Freudian Chip and many of the same components as those without them. So what?”
“Well,” Hart said, “that should help you eliminate most of the data segments. If you can match them with your own, maybe you can see which ones are different. That’ll narrow down your search, anyway.”
Deet processed that for a moment. Perhaps this human was good for more than just entertainment via vulgarity. He’d have to create a copy of his own operating system—which seemed like something one should not do in public, for some reason—and then hold it somewhere while he layered the data onto another droid’s. It would take up most of his available memory reserves, but his preliminary calculations told him it could be done.