Blue Planet

by S E T Ferguson

  Instead, the literal gun to his head seemed to have lit a long-smoldering fire within the man. The bully had been cowed—by a woman, no less—and it seemed to make him realize he hadn’t been the person he could be. He had immediately volunteered to join those fighting the drones, enthusiastically joining and encouraging others, particularly the group of men and women who were often dismissed by others as unproductive, to join as well.

  The last time Vlad had seen Reed, he had been among those celebrating the initial victory over the first set of drones. He celebrated as they all had, as victors over a seemingly superior foe. This hadn’t made him a hero, and it hadn’t made up for what he had done to his family over the years, but it had gained him at least the start of something good. Reed was a fighter. One of them. A Columbinian. He would have a long way to go to full redemption, and some would never grant it to him, but at least he had started down that path.

  He was also someone who would leave a wife and two young children behind. He may not have been the best father, but he was still the only father those kids had.

  No, Vlad thought, one young child.

  Bo, Fawn’s young son, had been among those killed. She had lost her son and her husband in the fighting. Vlad didn’t know why the young boy—he was only two or three years old—had been outside during the attack, but it seemed he had. And now he was gone.

  When they brought in the seventh body, Vlad had been sitting next to Beryl. It was long after Reed’s body had been brought in, and all of them had seemed to relax, thinking they were done with the death and injuries of the day.

  Anyone near her would have seen that Beryl was exhausted. They had been waiting for Iris to tell them where they could help with the injured Columbinians. As they sat there, Beryl had repeatedly fallen asleep, her eyes closing and her head nodding on to Vlad’s shoulder where it would sit until a noise woke her up. At her feet, Camp had lolled on to his side, the sound of his light snores drifting up toward them.

  The scream that echoed throughout the underground room had jolted Beryl awake, her head snapping back to attention as her dog did the same at her feet.

  The scream had come from Fawn.

  As soon as she woke up, Beryl jumped to her feet, trying to see what was going on by the entrance to the Caves. Vlad followed her as she pushed her way to the front of the room, desperate to see what was going on with her friend.

  When they reached the entrance, Vlad saw the body a second before Beryl must have, his height allowing him to see over the crowd.

  He had tried to stop Beryl then, to grab her arm and hold her back. He hadn’t known why he had done that; Beryl would have learned the truth whether or not he stopped her at that moment. The most Vlad could have done then was to delay the inevitable and to stop her from finding out who it was.

  The little girl on the stretcher looked like she was taking a nap, her black hair splayed around her head haphazardly. She was young but already pretty. Had she grown up, it was clear she would have grown into a beautiful woman, just like her mother.

  But now, she would never have that chance.

  There wasn’t any blood; it had either been cleaned up, or whatever shot had killed her was small and discrete, probably something to her back. It was the kind of wound someone would have received when fleeing. Vlad couldn’t help but think only a coward would have shot a child as she fled, and that was exactly what the drone that had shot her had done.

  Vlad couldn’t believe that only the day before, this same girl on the stretcher had been talking to them, asking about fighting the drones and wanting to join the fight with them. In another time and in another situation, it would never have come to this.

  It should never have come to this on Columbina, either, he thought.

  Beryl rushed past Vlad, trying to see what he should have delayed her from seeing. But he hadn’t.

  As soon as she saw the little girl, Beryl had stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand had moved to the emerald around her neck.

  And then, Beryl had dropped to her knees and cried.

  The girl on the stretcher was May Lee.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Looking at the Earthlings’ ship, Beryl thought—not for the first time—that this might have been the wrong decision.

  The day before, after they had brought in May Lee, the Columbinians had made the decision that now brought Beryl to the Earthlings’ ship.

  At first, with their tempers running high, most of the Columbinians had wanted to blow the Earthlings’ ship out of the sky.

  It was the easy, safe decision. It would mean they never had to deal with another drone. They would have the finality of knowing the Earth AI in their sky would no longer be a threat to them or their way of life. It would also allow them to exact some immediate revenge on the Earth AI for what they had done to them, for the injury and death they had rained down upon them when the Columbinians had done nothing to provoke it and had only sought to welcome them to their planet.

  With a little time, though, cooler heads began to prevail. There were practical concerns about destroying the Earthlings’ ship. Blowing the ship out of the sky would likely lead to space junk littering their orbit for months. Until they could get it cleaned up, it would keep V away from the planet and keep them from having their now-valued escape route too far away from the planet for easy evacuation. If they could take over the Earthlings’ ship, it would give them a second ship that could take them out of their own solar system. This was an asset of incredible value—it wouldn’t take long to refit them and make it suitable for exploration or even as a ship to travel between the already-settled planets; after all, Hodios was the same ship, and Iris could easily retrofit it the same way she had with their original ship. Even if that wouldn’t work, as scrap, the metals and other materials on the Earthlings’ ship represented years of mining operations now sitting above their planet.

  But there was one, overarching concern that brought all but a few to the side of taking over—or trying to take over—the Earth ship.

  No one wanted to sentence the humans on the ship to death, which is what they would do if they blew the ship out of the sky. It hadn’t been the humans on the ship who had brought death and destruction to Columbina. If they killed them, they were little better than the AI that had attempted to destroy Columbina.

  Now, though, as the Earthlings’ ship loomed before them, Beryl wondered if that had been the right decision. Were they sending dozens more people to their deaths? And in support of what? Helping out humans, the only one of which they had any interaction with had stood by and let the AI kill them? What if the other Earthlings supported the AI? And what if the AI had killed off the other humans? What if there was no longer any point to the Columbinians being there?

  And even if the initial concerns were assuaged, what if Iris couldn’t take over the systems of the Earthlings? They could all die there on the Earthlings’ ship, a victim of their own hubris in trusting Iris and her supposedly superior intelligence.

  Though in Iris’s defense, she knew there was a chance she couldn’t take over the Earthling’s ship, and they could all die in the skies over Columbina.

  She hadn’t voiced that concern to everyone, though.

  “It’s not going to be as easy as me taking control of the Earthling’s ship from here on Columbina,” Iris had said to Beryl and Vlad after the decision had been made to try to take over the ship instead of blowing it out of the sky.

  “What?” Beryl had asked, wondering why Iris hadn’t previously mentioned this.

  “I can’t entirely take over the ship from Columbina. I am almost positive I can take over the ship if I am on it, as it is essentially an old version of Hodios. But with these old systems, some of them require a physical presence to take over. I can do what I can from here, but I can’t do everything.”

  “You aren’t sure you can take over the ship from here? And what do you mean by some of these old systems? Are we talking about something that could kill us
if it goes wrong?” Vlad had asked then, his voice weary from the longest few days of his life.

  “Honestly? All of the ship’s life support systems aren’t online. Back when we first got to space, there were certain redundancies built into the essential life support systems to ensure no one person could take it out or that a rogue worm or virus could destroy it, and some of those redundancies are isolated. Those weren’t the only systems they did this to, either.”

  “Should we be worried about any of those other systems?” Vlad asked. “You know, beyond the life support systems that make it possible for humans to live in space?”

  “Not really. Except, based on my drone surveillance and research, I think they have some defensive capabilities which are not online, either.”

  “Defensive capabilities? As in, the ability to shoot our Birds out of the sky if we come near their ship?” Beryl could hear the worry in Vlad’s voice. He, more than the rest of them, knew the vulnerabilities of their Birds.

  “No, nothing like that. The AI seem to have some small fighting drones on the ship, which is something new that we never had on Hodios. I suspect they are offline because of past attempts at sabotage or escape. Someone has likely attempted something against the AI in the past. Keeping them offline keeps them out of the control of someone else. Like me.”

  And now, they were mere seconds from docking on the Earth ship, their little Columbinian colony, and its relative safety far below. Where they were headed, there was nothing safe or pleasant awaiting them.

  For a moment, Beryl worried that Iris had been wrong about the Earth AI’s defensive capabilities. Perhaps they had some way to blow the Birds out of the sky that Iris hadn’t discovered, and they were all mere moments away from death.

  But then, the docking doors opened in front of them, as Iris assured them they would. She hadn’t been able to take over all of their systems from Earth, but she did have significant control over parts of the ship.

  That the first thing Iris had told them would happen had occurred, relieved Beryl.

  Next to Beryl, she saw Vlad’s shoulders drop a bit. Behind her, sighs and escaped breaths signaled that others were similarly relieved. They were past the first hurdle and knew Iris had some control over the situation they were getting into. Was it as much control as Beryl would have liked? No. But it was better than nothing.

  Now, the only thing left to do was to follow through with their plan.

  At its heart, the plan was simple. The Columbinians would get Iris onto the ship, overtake or destroy the Earth AI, kill all the random drones on the ship, and let Iris replace the Earth ship’s AI with her own intelligence capabilities.

  At least, it was a simple plan so long as everything went right. At every step, there were a dozen things that could go wrong. The drones could kill all of them. They might find out there were more defensive capabilities than Iris had discovered. The humans on the ship could all attack them. Iris might have trouble replacing the AI.

  The last one terrified Beryl. If Iris couldn’t replace the AI with her own, more powerful intelligence system once she took over the ship—if she took over the ship—it would be the humans who would be in trouble. And not just the Earthlings, but the Columbinians. A ship hurtling through the sky at ridiculous speeds is not the sort of place a human wants to find himself or herself when it loses all power and life support systems.

  When she had first heard Iris’s concerns about replacing the Earth AI, Beryl had been worried about the ship falling from the sky. However, Iris had assured Beryl that the real problems she and the other humans had to worry about were a loss of warmth and oxygen. There was also an off-chance that when Iris took over the ship, something could go wrong and all of the humans would be sucked into the vacuum of space.

  That worried Beryl, but Iris hadn’t stopped there with her concerns. If something went wrong, but the Columbinians were able to get to the Birds, it would still doom the Earthlings on the ship to death, as they would be unable to evacuate all of them quickly. Essentially, they could be forced to leave the humans on the docking platform of the ship, sentencing them to death because they didn’t have the capacity on the Birds to evacuate them quickly enough.

  Ultimately, all of Beryl’s worries could be boiled down to the same problem: there were an infinite number of ways this situation could go wrong and only a few ways it could go right.

  Thus, when the docking bay door slid open, it meant something had already gone right. Things could go very badly, very quickly from this point, but at least something had gone right.

  Although, in reality, something else had already gone right for the Columbinians. Or rather, they had something other than Iris going for them, and that something was the Earthlings’ ship itself.

  The previous day, after the decision to attack the ship had been made, Iris had laid out the ship plans. Those who had volunteered to go up on the ship had gathered around her then, looking at the plans she had pulled out of the ship’s system.

  It had been Vlad who had noticed their potential advantage first.

  “It looks like Hodios,” he had said when he realized it, a smile spreading across his face for the first time since the decision had been made to attack. “Not Hodios as we know it, or V, but Hodios as it left Earth.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Iris had replied. “It’s not similar to Hodios. It’s exactly the same.”

  “Exactly the same? That seems impossible,” one of the others who had volunteered for the mission to attack the Earth ship had asked. Beryl had been wondering the same thing. Based on the number of people nodding their heads, they had not been alone.

  “That’s what I thought. But it’s amazing. Even details which aren’t important seem to have been covered. Do you see these bolts?” Iris pulled up a picture of a metal joint on the screen in front of them. The joint was fastened to another by a number of bolts. The man who had questioned the similar ships nodded and Beryl found herself doing the same thing. “You can see they have the name of the manufacturer on them.”

  The bolts had the term “AL-OY” on their heads, raised above the rest of the bolt. Most of the people in the gathered teams heading to the Earthlings’ ship had begun nodding then, as Iris pointed to pictures from Hodios, their own ship.

  “Here’s the thing. This manufacturer went under part way through the building of Hodios. As in, it stopped making these bolts part of the way through the construction of Hodios. As you can see, there are places where some of the bolts have this stamp, and others don’t have any stamp.” The four bolts in each picture consisted of two “AL-OY” bolts and two plain bolts, situated in the same places on a joint.

  “Now look at these pictures from the Earthlings’ ship. This is the same joint. You can see that the same bolts have the ‘AL-OY’ stamps on their ship as we had on Hodios, and the same ones that didn’t have the stamps don’t have them on the Earthlings’ ship.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe someone is now using the old name for a new company,” the man commented, though he looked like he was beginning to believe the two ships were similar, if not the same.

  “I would agree. Except every place with the AL-OY bolts on the Earth ship are the exact same places that had the AL-OY bolts on Hodios when it left Earth.” Iris had pulled up more comparisons on the bolts, showing places where there were both the AL-OY bolts and the other, plain bolts. They were exactly as Iris said—perfectly the same. Over and over again.

  As in, the only way that it could have happened was if the ship had been copied exactly from the previous Hodios plans and pictures, without any changes—even on things that didn’t matter, like a decorative portion of a bolt reflecting the name of a defunct company.

  That their ships were exactly the same wasn’t a huge advantage, but it was something. Iris would know all the weaknesses of the ship. Beryl would take even the smallest advantage in this fight.

  And, of course, they had Iris on their side. She had already
saved them once from the Earth AI, and Beryl had no doubt she could do it.

  Unless of course, Iris accidentally froze them all to death in the cold reaches of space before she could get the life support system working.

  For all the troubling aspects about what they were going to do, though, nothing could assuage Beryl’s concerns at all concerning one aspect of their takeover of the Earthlings’ ship: Iris still didn’t have access to the area of the ship where the man from the video had been taken. Nothing about that part of the ship was online. Other than the knowledge of the ship plans for that part of the Earthlings’ ship, it was, essentially, a complete unknown.

  Even supposing Iris could take over the ship, they would have to go into that part of the ship completely blind.

  Vlad continued to pilot the ship toward the opening door of the Earth ship. Beryl had done this flight a hundred times, back when they had been working to colonize Columbina and were regularly traveling to and from the surface of the planet. This time, though, it seemed different. Like they were smaller, and the Earth ship was larger than Hodios. Beryl suspected it had something to do with the threat the Earth ship, which Hodios and V had never posed.

  The Bird skirted through the opening to the docking platform. Just as when the ship had taken Vlad’s father and Beryl’s mother to their deaths, the space Vlad had to get into the ship seemed minuscule, like it was far too small for the Bird to make it through.

  As Vlad guided the Bird into the ship, the light on the docking platform momentarily blinded Beryl. In person, it seemed far brighter than it had on the videos from the ship Beryl had seen. Had this been the same thing her mother thought as they docked on the ship? Had this been one of her last thoughts?

  Beryl’s eyes adjusted to the bright interior lights of the ship, and she could then make out the docking platform in front of them. To her left, the Bird her mother had taken to the Earthlings’ ship was sitting, apparently undisturbed since it had been abandoned there. Beryl felt some relief that there were no bodies still on the docking platform. She didn’t look closely to see whether those spots on the docking platform were still stained with the blood of the Columbinians.