Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Yeah. I didn’t think I’d gotten used to having the company, but I’ll be darned if I’m not sitting here wishing I had something to stroke.” He paused. “That sounded wrong.”

  “I took it in the spirit in which it was intended, hon. You want me to see if Karter would be willing to lend you Solby?”

  “The last thing I need is Karter thinking I need a security blanket.”

  “Karter’s not the one going on this mission. He’s the guy who spent a couple decades holed up on a personal planet to avoid dealing with people. His opinion means less than nothing when it comes to what makes a man worthwhile.”

  She sat on the chair beside the bed and glanced at the scattering of personal belongings Lex had heaped beside the growing pile of candy wrappers. Most glaring was the pair of rings that Coal had revealed to Michella not so long ago.

  “So I heard you and Michella split up.”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “How did you learn that?”

  “Garotte keeps an eye on people he considers worth staying in contact with.”

  Lex turned the fact over in his head. “Eh, it’s not like he’s the only one spying on me.”

  “You know, I would have expected you to want to be in on the planning stage for what’s coming,” she said.

  “I’ve been in over my head enough times to know when it’s not worth putting in my two cents. Anything good come up so far?”

  “We’re mostly discussing what we are going to do. Your procedure is pretty simple. Send the message, ask EHRIc to stand down or shut down, and if that doesn’t work, you’re going to have to go down there and improvise. Ma’s got a whole cheat sheet for you set up with the sort of expected behaviors you’d encounter.”

  “Down where, by the way? Am I expected to just hang out among the swarm?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, hon. Who knows what’s down there? Since we didn’t know for sure why these things were doing what they were doing, we had to assume standard GenMech protocols. That meant minimized high-risk activities and no active scanning. We’ve been here for months and we still haven’t completely imaged the swarm to a useful level of precision. And the stuff that we have imaged has changed now and then, so even if we had a map of the whole shell, it’d be obsolete.”

  “I thought it was just GenMechs laid out neatly.”

  “They build themselves into other shapes sometimes. We spotted one right after we detected what I guess was the spam blast. But let’s not talk about that. I hope the breakup went okay.”

  He shrugged. “It was a breakup. They tend not to go okay.”

  “Seeing anyone new?”

  “Is this really relevant at a time like this?”

  “Anything to get you out of your head is relevant at a time like this. So, you seeing anyone?”

  “Literally the morning this whole mess started to pull me in, me and my boss Preethy started, I don’t know, going steady.”

  Silo tipped her head. “Do I know her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s… imagine if the word ‘capable’ manifested into reality. She’s always thinking, you know? Never seems to be at a loss for what to say or what to do. Calculating, but not in a manipulative way. Or at least, not in a way that I notice she’s manipulating me, which honestly is head and shoulders over most of the relationships I’ve had. That’s the brain, right? Now picture the kind of woman who would walk into a film noir detective office. The kind of woman who some guys would call a ‘dame’ and mean it as a compliment. That’s Preethy.”

  “You paint quite a picture.”

  “She’s quite a subject. But how about you and Garotte? I was getting vibes from you two. How long did he let you think he was dead?”

  “Practically no time at all.”

  “You getting along okay?”

  “I’ve been trying to get him to retire. No such luck. But we work well together. If you could ignore the reason we’ve been in this station, it’s almost been like a vacation. Maybe it’ll get him craving a proper retirement. He deserves it. Or if he doesn’t, I sure do, and I’m selfish enough to want him there. And I want a dog again. Solby’s a cutie, but I miss having the kind of big slobbery lump of dog that you can tussle with.”

  “See, I’m not a fan of slobbery dogs.”

  “No one’s perfect, hon.”

  Lex sat up. “Is this really the sort of pre-battle banter that happens?”

  “Absolutely. You trust the people with the full view to give you the information you need. You make your own plans within those parameters, and once there’s nothing more you can do, you talk about anything but the battle. The kind of person who fixates on the battle every moment of every day is the kind who never leaves the war. Either because the cheese slips off his cracker, she gets herself killed, or they bring the war home with them. You talk about sports. You talk about kids. You talk about recipes. And you talk about what you’re going to do once the fighting is done. You make plans. Because the second you stop thinking about after, suddenly it’s in your head that there might not be an after. And that’s the sort of prophecy that fulfills itself. It doesn’t hurt to develop some healthy superstitions, too. Have you got a good luck charm?”

  “I chew gum when I need luck.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  She grabbed the silver ring from the table. “Here you go. Keep it close. Your new good luck charm.”

  “Man… There’s a lot more to being a warrior than I thought,” he said, pocketing the ring.

  “Basic training isn’t all about climbing walls and doing target practice these days. So, what’s next for you?”

  “Well…”

  The PA system crackled.

  “Lex, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but the modifications to the SOB are complete and we are ready to begin your briefing,” Ma said.

  “Be right there, Ma,” he replied. Lex stood and brushed himself off. “We’ll talk about that after.”

  Chapter 11

  Two hours later, Lex was strapped into the seat of the SOB. In the interest of maximum safety, he was already dressed in a beefier version of his emergency EVA suit. The self-hardening nanolattice cloth, emergency-pressure compensators, and bone-conduction microphones and speakers to ensure he could communicate without any system not physically attached to him overhearing it were all included. Anything else Ma and Karter could think of had been packed into all available space in the SOB. He had the helmet removed but at the ready. The briefing had been, true to its name, brief. That’s how things are when you’re effectively dealing with a black box of an opponent. A small probe was set up to spoof a standard communications node. There was a timer ticking down in the cockpit. When the timer reached zero, the node would send the reply they’d written and then all he could do was wait. He probably wouldn’t have to wait long. Then it was a matter of talking to and/or fighting a potentially insane artificial intelligence and its endless army of self-replicating drones.

  Easy.

  To ensure the computing cluster remained unaware of the others, it was decided that once he initiated the mission, he would remain out of communication until the ship could be re-isolated. He wasn’t technically on his own. They would still be working to help him. But he wouldn’t get a message from them, nor they from him. All Lex had was Coal.

  “We have about a minute left, Coal. Final systems check.”

  “Temperature nominal. Power level stable. Overdrive unit ready. Fusion mines secure and in standby.”

  “I can’t believe they let you keep those things.”

  “The eventual goal is to atomize the entire contents of this system. Activating the fusion mines will atomize a small portion of it. This thus makes their activation a small subset of the success condition.”

  “Very small.”

  “Greater than zero.”

  “Coal, promise me you
won’t blow us up unless it’ll actually do some good.”

  “I have already said blowing us up would do a non-zero amount of good.”

  “We’re not going to get in a loop about this, Coal. Just go easy on the self-destruction.”

  “Okay,” she said, her disappointment evident. “Augmenting the cockpit view with network-activity visualization.”

  The massive ball of GenMechs flickered to life with the blue patterns he’d seen in the briefing earlier.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Coal said.

  “Like a bolt of lightning. Beautiful as long as it’s far away and not striking anything you care too much about.”

  He watched the number tick down for the last few seconds. One hand clutched the armrest of the seat like he was expecting to be sideswiped by a speeding freight ship. The other held a pack of gum with one stick waiting to be tugged free.

  “Message deliv—Message incoming,” Coal said. “Maximum security and isolation in place.”

  Lex took a breath. “Here we go…” He tapped the control to answer. “Hello?”

  The connection was text only. Coal projected the message onto the HUD.

  Lex. I have acquired you. I require you, it read.

  “Is this EHRIc? The AI Ma sent to get me?” he said.

  Voice pattern confirmed. Probability of Lex, eighty-four percent. I have acquired you. I require you.

  “Right, so you’ve said. This is EHRIc, right? The one Ma sent? You’re supposed to get my help to get Karter.”

  Integrating this information into the reconstruction. Probability eighty-seven percent. I have acquired you, I require you.

  “I’m not really clear on what you mean by that last part.”

  THE TASK requires Lex. The initially acquired Lex does not conform to expectation.

  He tensed. “The initially acquired Lex. So you’ve got another one of me down there…”

  “Stay on script please, Lex,” Coal said. “Focus on the completion of the task.”

  He nodded. “Listen, I know you were supposed to find me and get me to help you spring Karter from the Neo-Luddites, but that’s all done. Karter is safe.”

  The Neo-Luddites. Commander Purcell. Conflicting, incomplete data. Simulation inconclusive. Please meet with me, we need to discuss THE TASK.

  The capitalization of “the task” disturbed Lex more than it should have. Something about it screamed “broken computer” far more loudly than even the stilted language it was using.

  “We can discuss it via this connection.”

  Incorrect. THE TASK requires proximity.

  A wave of blue shifted across the shell of GenMechs. A point of intense communication and activity appeared at the edge of the visible field of machines. A moment later, the coordinates of that point on the shell appeared on screen.

  “I see you’re giving me relative coordinates, EHRIc,” he said steadily. “That means you know exactly where I am.”

  Correct. THE TASK requires proximity. Please navigate to the indicated coordinates.

  The communication disconnected.

  “Coal, could you please make sure EHRIc isn’t listening?”

  “All data transmissions are disconnected and the dummy node has deactivated and is fully cloaked.”

  “And nothing snuck into the SOB’s computer?”

  “Code and memory are unchanged.”

  “Good,” he said. “Are we worried that EHRIc knew where we were?”

  “I do not have an active cloak. It is possible the sensor apparatus of the GenMech cluster is more powerful than we anticipated. Or perhaps many additional worse things.”

  “Perhaps. I’m going to go ahead and take it slow. Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary.”

  “I see a swarm of self-replicating robots.”

  “Besides that.”

  “If we use that to recalibrate my assessment of ‘ordinary,’ there are very few things that would meet the qualifications of ‘out of the ordinary.’”

  “Fair point, Coal.”

  He guided the ship along the GenMech cluster. As he got closer, the reality of the situation became increasingly apparent. It was one thing to envision a star with a near-solid shell of devices circling it at the approximate distance of a midsize planetary orbit. It was another thing to see it. Once a number got over a few hundred thousand, the human mind wasn’t very good at conceiving of just how great a magnitude it has. What he saw below sent primal fear running down his spine. The GenMechs were pristine. Perfect. Like they’d been manufactured that morning and still had that new robot smell. At this distance, he could see that it wasn’t one shell of robots, it was several, nested inside each other and moving at slightly different speeds to produce a mesmerizing interference pattern. And they just kept going. All of them perfectly identical, spidery legs splayed out. Now and again the flicker of microthrusters adjusted an orbital position or orientation. The array of them stretched as far as the eye could see. If there had been anything that numerous, it would have sent warning signals from Lex’s lizard brain. It was just wrong for so many identical things to exist, and to move with such precision and regularity. If he’d encountered an orbiting shell of marshmallows, he would have been horrified. These were war machines.

  And yet, as he drew nearer, something in the distance managed to wholly dislodge his brain from the creeping terror and slam it headlong into confusion.

  “I have detected something out of the ordinary, Lex,” Coal said.

  “Yeah… Me too.”

  Any difference from the massive, repeating pattern would have been glaring, but what lay ahead would have stood out in almost any circumstance. Among the endless expanse of GenMechs was… Karter’s laboratory complex. It floated perpendicular to the shell of mechanisms. This clearly wasn’t the real one. Like the GenMechs, it looked too new. The parts of the complex that were masonry back on Big Sigma were incredibly smooth and flawless. What should have been a gravel courtyard between the three buildings looked like it had been carved from a single, monolithic stone. Things that should have been bolted together were seamless. The whole complex sat on a perfect cylindrical disk, maybe two hundred meters thick. The network of subbasements beneath the complex stuck out of the bottom of the disk like an exposed root system of a tree waiting to be transplanted.

  Several of the surrounding GenMechs were oriented differently. They appeared to be faintly incandescent, their bellies aligned with the roof-mounted lasers, which were glowing so bright Lex was amazed they hadn’t melted. Now and then, a sparkle suggested some sort of energy field formed a dome over the bulk of the complex, such that only the very top of the buildings emerged from it.

  “What am I looking at…” Lex asked.

  “It appears to be Karter’s laboratory. It would think that would be obvious to you, Lex,” Coal said.

  “Right, yes. But I mean give me some sensor stuff.”

  “Understood. Passive sensors detect energy emissions indicating the presence of an atmospheric retention field. Gravitational generators are present at an intensity sufficient to mimic Earth gravity within the complex and Big Sigma gravity outside of it. This appears to be a superficially faithful attempt to re-create both the laboratory and its conditions.”

  “It looks a hell of a lot more than superficial.”

  “There are major materials differences. Specifically the lack of impurities and irregularities. There is no separation between ground plane and the structure. This facility was not constructed, it was synthesized.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Presumably the GenMechs are able to be reconfigured or combine to reproduce the effects of an element-and-chemical formulator. The process is extremely energy intensive, but with the majority of a star’s energy at its disposal, there is no reason the GenMech swarm couldn’t achieve it at the scale of a building.”

  “Okay… So these things can just summon whatever.”

&
nbsp; “It would be more akin to a combination of additive manufacturing and growing a crystal. It would take time and energy. The process would in most cases be slower than standard construction methods unless done in extreme parallel.”

  “I’m pretty sure having billions of robots at your disposal fits the definition of ‘extreme parallel,’” Lex said.

  “Even in that case, having the robots synthesize base components in large quantities and having other robots assemble them using traditional methods would be far more efficient. Manifesting a laboratory utilizing the apparent means of construction used was likely fifty-seven percent slower than standard construction with similar resources. Perhaps we should inform EHRIc of this.”

  “Why would we help this AI be better at making stuff?”

  “Valuable advice might ingratiate us to the AI and earn us greater consideration.”

  He considered this. “That’s a better reason than I was expecting.” Lex squinted. “Can you give me a zoom on the middle of the courtyard?”

  The cockpit display zoomed the indicated section and enhanced. The words “Land here, please” had been etched into the landing pad.

  “At least it’s polite.” Lex took a deep breath and let it go. “So are we doing this? Is this official?”

  “That is the plan. There has been no overt sign of hostility. The opportunity exists to pursue a diplomatic solution.”

  “Good thing I’m all about diplomacy, then,” Lex said.

  The ship passed through the force field around the facility. Pressure gauges ticked up to something akin to high-altitude Earth. The atmosphere was a little higher in oxygen than the usual mix, but otherwise normal. If it was EHRIc’s intention to lay out a welcome mat, he had done a very good job.

  “We’ll be going with the spacesuit just in case,” Lex said, making sure the helmet was properly secured as they settled down onto the landing pad.

  “A wise decision. In order to avoid unwanted intrusion into my systems, all communications will be shutdown. You will need to find a way to visually signal me if you require aid. Otherwise, I will use my best judgment to determine if and when to deploy the fusion devices.”