by J. N. Chaney
“A complete translation into unSpace is not possible this deep into the system’s gravity well. We would have to gain distance from the star. However, translation through the Dark Between is just barely possible this far from the star, although with some risk.”
Dash narrowed his eyes at one of the planets, another gas giant orbiting in a long ellipse inclined off the plane of the rest of the system’s bodies by at least thirty degrees. It was otherwise unremarkable, although some astronomer would probably be intrigued by its peculiar behavior. It was probably a wandering, rogue body that had been gravitationally captured—temporarily at least—by this system’s star. More to point, though, it was large and energetic enough to be considered a brown dwarf, a wannabe-star that was almost heavy and dense enough to ignite the nuclear fusion that powered actual stars, but fell just short. It therefore remained a massive ball of gas, but one that still emitted a lot of heat and radiation.
There were seconds now until the Harbinger was in firing range. Some risk seemed far better than the alternative.
“There!” Dash said, the distant brown dwarf fixed in his mind and, therefore, also in the Meld. “Let’s go there, now!”
“Translation to the Darkness Between is available,” Sentinel said. Dash immediately flung himself at his objective—
—and the universe winked out—
—then winked back into being. The brown dwarf suddenly loomed, a colossal presence blotting out most of the starfield. The Archetype was immediately awash in radiation pouring from the almost-star.
He looked back at the place he’d been a moment before. A few seconds passed, then he saw a distant, but distinct flash, the tell-tale signature of the Harbinger’s big chest-cannon. Based on the time it took the flash to get here, he must have translated away at almost the same instant it fired.
“Missed me, you Golden son-of-a-bitch,” Dash said. “Let’s see what it does next. If we can’t slug it out, we’ll move like a ghost until we can.”
“I feel compelled to point out that by translating to this remote part of the system, the Harbinger may now approach the Forge unhindered,” Sentinel said.
“It might. But it won’t.”
After a pause, Sentinel said, “I do not understand how you justify your apparent certainty.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
There was a longer pause before Sentinel said, “I believe you are trying to make a point. What it is, however, eludes me.”
Despite the horrific tension and uncertainty, Dash laughed. “Good. If I can outsmart you, then maybe I can outsmart the Harbinger.”
This time, there was just silence.
“Don’t concern yourself,” Dash went on. “I can accept that I have some limits with the details of your tech, and even the Golden. I accept that it all works, but really, I don’t understand it. Even on the Slipwing most of the time, I know if I push this button, that thing will happen. And if it doesn’t…well, sometimes I can fix it, and if I can’t, I find someone who can.”
“I am still failing to discern your point.”
“My thing,” Dash said, “is people. I’m pretty good at knowing how they think…what makes them tick upstairs. And, with all due respect to you, super-advanced alien AI that you are, when it comes right down to it, you think much the same way we frail, feeble humans do. That means the Golden and their Harbinger probably will, too, and that means that I was built for this fight.”
“So your apparent certainty regarding the Harbinger’s anticipated behavior is based on what you would do in its position?”
“Bingo. And if I was the Harbinger, I wouldn’t want to go after the Forge while the Archetype was still out here somewhere, maybe ready for battle again, and about to pounce at any moment. I could end up caught between the Archetype and the Forge, and that is not where I’d want to be. That flying crate is hardwired to survive, I bet, and that means it sees us as what we really are— the only true threat to its existence.”
“But repairs to the Archetype’s weapons are not yet complete. Therefore, you are not in a position to—pounce, as you said.”
“Yeah, but the Harbinger doesn’t know that.”
“You believe the Harbinger will focus on destroying the Archetype first, rather than trying to deal with it and the Forge simultaneously. I would point out that the same reasoning gives it justification for dealing with the Forge first.”
“Maybe. That’s a risk. But this is where gut instinct comes into it, and this is what separates us, at least in this regard, friend. I respect your vast skills, but in this case, it’s best if you respect mine.”
“That is not a rational approach to problem solving.”
“Damn right it’s not. But, just like I’m not a tech guy, rational has never been the sole province of humanity, and if anything, I’m just a guy.” Dash paused, then managed a smile. “A guy who’s the Messenger and an Archetype jock, but still a guy.”
“Your gut instinct notwithstanding, it makes considerably more sense for the Harbinger to attack the Forge. It is presumably communicating with the drone currently inhibiting the station’s functions, which means it knows that the Forge is vulnerable.”
“You know, this is a good opportunity for us to get on the same page. We’re going to win this fight, Sentinel. Believe it.”
“I have just detected a spatial displacement nearby,” Sentinel said.
Dash nodded, realizing it through the Meld even as Sentinel said it. The doubt that had begun gnawing at him gave way to his own moment of quiet assurance. He’d been right.
“It’s the Harbinger, isn’t it? It came after us, didn’t it?”
“So it would appear.”
“Gut instinct, I’m telling you. Sure, humans die a lot sooner and lose our teeth and hair, but we pull through when it counts.”
“Your teeth are excellent, and you do not have any hair loss that I can detect.”
“Thank you. I floss daily, but that’s not important right now. Let’s meet this bastard now and chat about my grooming later,” Dash said, opening his senses again to the Meld.
The weapons were still offline, the situation still dire, but Dash allowed himself a brief smile of satisfaction. If he really could get inside the minds of these godlike AIs, then maybe he could actually believe his own words of just a moment ago—that he really could be good at something, amid all this galaxy-shaking alien bullshit.
Something other than flossing, anyway. At least flossing and fighting started with the same letter.
He’d find out soon enough.
23
Conover inched his way closer to the drone. It, in turn, did nothing.
“Be careful,” Amy said, stepping through the breach behind him, realigning herself to the interior gravity as she did. “Up” inside the Forge was ninety degrees to what it was on the exterior, so they had to endure a momentary burst of disorientation as they passed through the transition. It did nothing for Conover’s already touchy stomach; he had to take another moment to swallow hard and wait for the flutters to fade.
“Okay,” Amy said. “Here we are. Here it is. What next? We just start taking it apart?”
Her matter-of-fact tone suggested she might, indeed, be fine with just starting to take the drone apart. But Conover, shoving aside the last wobbles in his gut, shook his head.
Which Amy couldn’t see inside his helmet, of course, so he said, “Just give me a minute to look this thing over.”
Conover looked at the alien drone, the quantum lenses in his eyes doing a deep scan in seconds. When he used his enhanced sight, few tech secrets could elude him, and he focused on nothing but the item before him.
The world collapsed, everything that wasn’t the tech he was studying vanishing into a peripheral fog. When he’d first tried this on alien tech—the Unseen device called the Lens—the fantastic intricacy of it had yanked his awareness along such twisting, branching pathways, and down holes of such deep complexity that he’d actual
ly become lost, unable to extract himself from the artifact’s bizarre technological landscape. Like the image of the man he’d shot, it had burrowed into his mind, wraithlike and unwelcome, and it could not be casually withdrawn. All Unseen tech still threatened to do the same thing to him; he was ready for it now, though, which made it easier to deal with.
Forewarned was forearmed against the masters in their galactic war and the tools they left behind.
Golden tech, like this drone, was different. Unseen tech seemed to somehow extend into parts of reality he couldn’t properly envision, much less really understand—he suspected it was a manifestation of the Dark Between, as Dash called it. Golden tech was far more rooted in normal space, but was also fantastically more complex within it, having an almost fractal structure that never seemed to end no matter how deeply he looked at it. Both races’ tech made looking at something like the Slipwing seem like studying a kid’s toy. Both left him unsettled and feeling small.
Both were lethal beyond belief.
This drone seemed at least similar to the other one they possessed, but Conover had no idea if it was actually the same—certainly not in every detail, anyway. Moreover, the Golden tech seemed to be changing as he studied it, adapting to the pressure of his gaze like a shy animal on an unspoiled world. Things that might be circuit pathways writhed like things alive—and, who knew, maybe they were—as though the drone kept revising and adjusting its ongoing functions. That meant it could probably repurpose parts of itself to take over functions that were compromised elsewhere, which was going to make deactivating it a lot harder.
“Conover? Are you okay? What’s going on?”
Amy’s voice sounded muffled, distorted, and distant, as though she spoke to him through a long pipe. Conover blinked and pulled his awareness back out of the strange landscape of the drone’s tech.
“Yeah. I’m okay. It’s a lot to see.”
“Good. You had me worried. You were just kneeling there, staring at it.”
He blinked again, clearing the lingering fuzz from his mind. “It’s complicated.” He turned and looked at her. “Actually, complicated barely begins to describe it.” He gave the device a grudging smile.
“Did you learn anything?”
“Kind of.” He looked back at the drone. “It’s not like that last drone. That one was mostly inert when I looked at it, probably because Custodian had mostly shut it down. This one’s fully active.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we can’t just remove a component from this one to disable it they way we did with the other. We could probably take this one almost completely apart, and it would still be able to keep doing whatever it’s doing.”
“Damn things. Worse than ship’s bugs. What do you suggest?”
“Custodian, is there no way for you to use your security field, or whatever it is, to at least partly shut this drone down?” Conover said.
“I am still entirely blind to the drone’s presence, so I cannot.”
“But, you know its here,” Amy said. “You can see it with your own maintenance remotes.”
“True. However, I am unable to target the security functions upon it, because the systems that would do so are offline.”
“It’s like trying to shoot at a target in a closed room, I guess,” Conover said. “You might know the target’s in there, but if the door’s closed, you can’t aim at it.” The shooting analogy had just come to him, but it made him think yet again of that man’s head bursting in his gunsight.
“A crude parallel, but a reasonable one,” Custodian replied.
“So what if you just shut everything down in this area?” Amy asked. “Just make it some sort of, you know, blanket effect?”
“There is no guarantee such an indiscriminate approach will have the desired effect.”
“Still worth a try.”
“Custodian, if you do that, what will happen to us?” Conover said. “Our vacsuits, comms, and the like?”
“Since I am actually unable to resolve any specific targets in the portion of the Forge where you now are, your own technology will also be suppressed, particularly given its relatively primitive nature.”
Amy sniffed. “Rub it in, why don’t you.”
“I am merely stating a fact.”
“Whatever. Anyway, the bottom line is that you might be able to shut this thing down, at least partly, but you can’t be sure. But you’ll shut us down, too.”
“Correct.”
“I assume that our primitive tech doesn’t include, you know, us as in, our hearts, brains, lungs and stuff, right?” Amy said.
“No,” Custodian replied. “I can exempt your biological functions and any technology that may be interfaced directly with them.”
“Not that any of us have artificial hearts or the like,” she said, then gave Conover a sharp glance. “You don’t, do you?”
“Just my eyes. And it would be good if they kept working, yeah.” He took a deep breath. “So let’s try it.”
But Amy frowned. “Hang on. We’ll lose our suit functions—air recycling, heat, even comms. Things will get pretty ugly for us, pretty fast.”
“I know. But we need to know if Custodian can do it. If it works, and it can turn this drone off, then that might be all we need to do, at least for now.”
“Well, we should pull back, then.”
“No time. This is already taking way too long.”
After a pause, Amy said, “Okay, fine. What are we waiting for, then?”
“Custodian, go ahead,” Conover said. “Shut everything down here for—let’s say thirty seconds. We’ll see if that neutralizes this thing.”
“Understood.”
Their suit lamps winked out. At the same time, the constant whisper and faint whine of the various systems in Conover’s vacsuit stopped, plunging him into utter silence, broken only by the sound of his own breathing and the rhythmic rush of blood in his ears.
“Come on,” Dash said, watching the display depicting the Harbinger—or, at least, what he had to assume was the Harbinger. Thanks to the constant tsunami of x-rays and other emissions from the brown dwarf, even the Archetype’s formidable scanner tech couldn’t resolve much more than a kilometer or so away.
“Come on!” he said again. “Do something. Don’t just sit there!”
“What do you expect the Harbinger to do?” Sentinel asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s not in an offensive mode. That concerns me.”
“What does your gut instinct tell you?”
“Do you really care? Does this mean you might think there’s something to it?”
“I cannot rule it out,” Sentinel said. “You may have some ability based in properties of which even you are unaware. Available data does record instances of apparently telepathic life-forms, although your species, humans, are not particularly noted for it.”
“You think I might be psychic?” Dash tried to flex his mind but was rewarded with a pulsing in his ears, and nothing more.
“I am not taking any particular position on the matter. I am simply stating that I cannot rule out your gut instinct as having some validity—particularly since it does seem to be able to predict events—after a fashion, anyway.”
“Glad to see you’re open to the possibility.” Dash would never have expected this generally dispassionate AI to actually give his gut instinct any credence. But that was something to wonder about another time—if there ever even was another time, that is.
Dash went on, “I’ve got nothing, this time. I guess the Harbinger could just be waiting for us to make the next move. But you’d think it would know time’s on our side, and it must know where we are.”
“It likely does not.”
“But, we can see it. Can it see us?”
“The Archetype can register the gravitational anomaly created by the Harbinger in real space. We, however, are between it and the brown dwarf, whose vastly greater gravitational signature would mask that of the Archetype. And
all other scanners are currently ineffective because of the brown dwarf’s emissions.”
“So it’s blind to us?”
“Effectively, yes.”
Dash pushed up his lower lip and said, “Huh,” impressed. This had worked out better than he’d hoped.
A sudden, searing flash of energy enveloped the Archetype.
Dash flung himself aside, but they’d already taken the hit. “Shit! I thought you said it couldn’t see us!”
“The brown dwarf emits little visible light, so by scrutinizing the area long enough, it presumably saw us, or at least our outline. For weapons of this complexity, that is often enough.”
Dash braced himself for more bad news through the Meld, but strangely, the attack had done only superficial damage. It was, he realized, because of all the radiation from the brown dwarf. It dispersed the effect of the Harbinger’s normally lethal chest cannon.
The missiles it had just launched wouldn’t be affected the same way, though.
“Incoming,” Dash snapped, slamming the Archetype into a rapid series of evasive moves. But it wouldn’t be enough. At least one, and likely two of the missiles were going to impact.
“The distortion cannon is back online.”
Dash didn’t hesitate. He fired it, pulling three of the missiles into its momentary gravity well, and deflecting the other two. One exploded nearby, but again, the damage was only minor.
“I need the dark-lance,” he said, “or at least missiles of my own. We need ranged weapons that can’t be dispersed by the brown dwarf.”
“The dark lance is online. Missiles will be shortly.”
A pair of the surviving missiles still had a lock and accelerated hard, trying to reacquire the Archetype. Again, Dash didn’t think about it, he just snapped out dark-lance shots from the proverbial hip, ripping the missiles into quantum debris. His technique verged into muscle memory, as each passing moment in combat led him to feel like an extension of the Archetype, rather than a mere pilot.
He followed up with a shot at the Harbinger, aiming, like it had, basically by eye and as much magnification he could get. He scored a hit before the Harbinger could evade and was satisfied to see debris erupt from the enemy mech. Still, it seemed like such a weak hit for such a powerful weapon. The Harbinger was a mirror of him, and he didn’t like it one bit.