by S. E. Smith
But she—that small, animated, young blonde woman, Anastasia Steed, with the ringing voice and the bright anger, improbably cheered on by the swirling sparks in the ceiling of the Meetingspace—she made some of the cotton go away.
That she didn't know the meaning of his name bothered him like an iron filing under his skin.
He scanned the programming change he'd just made. Then he submitted a simulation request to the Ship's Intelligence. And then he waited. The Intelligence was enormous, but enormously busy. His sims were Impending-Mission priority, but so were countless other demands on the processing power of the Intelligence.
To the Intelligence, he was “Jaxdown1.” There wasn't another Jaxdown in the ranks of its users. He might even be the only Jaxdown in the whole Ship, even counting the colonists still in cryostasis until such time as they were revived and rose to the surprise of their lives at learning the Starship’s fate to date.
His given name was Ten, it-isn't-a-nickname Ten, because he'd had ten fingers and his grandmother took that as a good sign. His old family name didn't matter—nobody else from his poor and broken family was here. But Jaxdown mattered to him.
Jaxdown had been an undercity, with rundown buildings on steamy polluted streets in the shadow of the superskyscraper where the rich lived. Like in every other undercity on Earth, children in Jaxdown were born with odd numbers of fingers or collapsed brains or shattered families. He'd had an intact body and brain and a grandmother who loved him and who was a teacher. She made sure he got an education. She died of a ferocious tropical disease that raged through Jaxdown while he was away at the university he'd gotten into by scholarship. That was when he applied to go with the Ship to a new world on the other side of the stars.
He'd had to learn, and been tested on, extensive information about the Ship's mission plan. He'd passed that test with a perfect score. But the Ship's journey hadn't gone according to plan. Something about the first destination lacking a moon for life-giving, world-stabilizing tides so the Ship had gone on and finally found a mild world called Green with an ocean moon called Blue. The colonists built a city and had children. But far behind the Ship in space and time, a fast kind of starflight was invented, humanity radiated out to many worlds, and a religious war swept across the stars. That war engulfed the Green colony without warning. The Green colonists fended the war off long enough to send the Ship on again. After yet another centuries-long journey it reached the already colonized world called Gotayel. With Gotayel being far away from the interstellar religious war, the Ship was finally safe. Gotayel was near a star-going city-state called Avendis: the apex of interstellar civilization. But between Gotayel and Avendis lay a nebula called Starcloud, where it turned out monsters dwelt—that discovery having been made in the form of a disastrous misstep in a diplomatic mission from Aeon to Avendis. The mission had taken a colossal detour on the way to Avendis and been missing for months until Captain Zilka commanded a rescue ship that went into Starcloud and came out in triumph with the lost parties found and stunning revelations about the dark heart of Starcloud. To the great alarm of Gotayel and Avendis alike, there were things in Starcloud that took the notion of interstellar bad neighbors to unimagined extremes. Now an Impending Mission was being readied go back there to rescue endangered alien allies and probe Starcloud’s secrets—hopefully before something in Starcloud took the initiative and attacked first.
All of that news upset most Risers whenever they were revived from stasis—some had been so incredulous that they needed psychiatric care—but not Ten. He had all of that cotton inside. The Starship’s ragged history, which happened while he was in cryostasis and insensible anyway, didn’t matter to him.
Anastasia Steed mattered for some reason. It mattered how angry and beautiful she was in the Meetingspace with that mysterious electrical echo in the shadowy ceiling above her. He'd always been attracted to intelligent blonde women, though to no avail—he was a total failure at talking to anyone like that. He always sounded slow and stupid to them.
Jaxdown1 flashed. His sim was about to start.
He watched the data from the sim flow through the screen.
It went better than the last sim. But it was hardly a success. He really should have been tagged by the Intelligence as “Jaxdown0,” he thought bitterly. He wasn't getting enough done fast enough. His contribution to the Impending Mission might amount to zero.
In that flashing information, he saw where the logic was weak. He could fix that before the available next sim window. He started re-programming and doggedly kept at it, losing track of time.
His workspace was crammed in a corner near the back door of the Devices Lab. He barely registered the door opening. After a short silence he heard someone's throat being cleared. “How's it coming with your robot swarm?”
It was her voice.
He nearly fell off the spindly plastic stool under him on as he turned around. “They aren't ready to demo.” He braced himself for a tirade like she'd given everyone earlier.
She looked at his crammed corner and its clutter, including the wrappers from four meal packets and the blanket on the floor he'd been sleeping in. “Not for lack of trying. Your robot swarm was mentioned in the Captain’s Council just now. Let me see if I can help.”
“You?” he blurted.
“I'm Anastasia Steed.”
Embarrassment heated his face. “I know. You're the Starcloud hero.”
She gave him a crooked smile. “A hero is just somebody who does what they have to do because they’re the only one who can do it.”
An objection welled up so strongly that he had to bite it back. The Starcloud heroes had fallen into a strange and terrible place, made good use of every resource they had, stayed alive, been rescued, completed their diplomatic mission, and cemented the starfaring alliance between the Ship and Gotayel. Meanwhile he was nothing like that. He was just it-isn’t-a-nickname-Ten, nobody-knows-what-it-was-Jaxdown. He was not a hero and not even the roboticist that the Impending Mission needed now.
“I personally saw the places in Starcloud where we may need your botswarm and my technical training includes electrical engineering and material science. So I may be able to help you match your robots to the challenges they'll face. Just as important, I may be able to help you limit the problem because I know what you don't need to prepare for.” She helped herself to the upturned crate his rare visitors used as a chair substitute. “Tell me about your botswarm.”
He'd explained it so often—though never to someone who mattered so strangely much—that it came easily to him. “Earlier robot swarms explored the Martian caverns and found the signatures of life. This is a more sophisticated swarm than those. The units are highly differentiated and semi-autonomous.” He pulled a visualization of the swarm up on the screen of his workstation, so he could look at it instead of her. That was easier for him no matter who his interlocutor was. “The functions are duplicated—secondary functions back up the primary functions. The swarm could sustain loss of half of the units and still produce detailed results.” The idea made his stomach clench, though. The songbird-sized robots weren't 3D printed: they had been made by hand, by his hands, with exactitude surpassing anything a 3D printer could do. He was their maker and perfecter. He loved his robots. “They're designed for little or no gravity, to explore caverns or crevasses in the interior of comets or small moons, at a distance of kilometers from an astronaut using the controller, with frequent losses of signal, so they have to be able to make their own decisions. Flocking birds and bird bots on Earth could see each other and feel the currents in the air to coordinate and fly together without colliding, but control, autonomy, and coordination of this many units are hard to all achieve in space with weightless locomotion and highly constricted spaces. Their small size tightly limits the circuitry and the capability that can be included in them. But I solved those problems. My botswarm worked in a trial on orbit.”
“And won the Han-Chee Young Inventors’ Prize. So what
's the problem now?” She managed to look relaxed on her perch on the crate.
“I'm asked to make the swarm able to recognize and respond to active and intelligent threats. So they need a new functionality that I didn't design into them from the start. They're meant to explore dark, constricted space places, but not to be spies or assassins. The military had swarms like that, with tight control. My control is loose and resilient to losses of signal. Mine don’t spy or assassinate. They explore for the unknown. It's called open swarm, open mind.”
“From what I've read about old Earth militaries, yeah, they would keep a botswarm on a tight leash.” She was nodding. “But yours could definitely be a big help in Starcloud! Let's go through your work bot by bot and your programming bit by bit, so I really understand.”
He took a deep breath in relief. She sounded practical. He could work with people like that. “To start with would you like to see each unit, Commander Steed?”
“Yeah, but call me Stasia.”
Telling him her special name made more of the cotton inside him burn away in a flare of pleasure. Feeling strangely alive, he unlidded the canister in which the botswarm was packed. “The lid of the canister is the controller. It’s miniaturized too.” He took out the bot that rested in top in their particular packing order. “This is Sampler One. It takes tiny samples of encountered substances and stores them in an onboard depository to bring back to large and sensitive analytical machinery at home. The Ship has analytical machines like that. Sampler One does remote sensing as a secondary function. Sampler Two, here, has in situ analysis as a secondary function.
“Analysis One and Two do in situ analysis of material as the primary function. That's not as informative as actually bringing a sample back, but often it may be more doable. They both do sampling as a secondary function.
“And these are Cam-com One and Two. They primarily have high-resolution cameras and send the images back by telemetry. They both have telecommunication as a secondary function.”
She looked at each bot with interest that didn't dim when she turned her direct gaze to him. She had blue eyes. More cotton burned out under her bright blue gaze. She said, “Compared to what either the military or resource exploitation companies had in the Solar System, this is an extraordinary botswarm.”
Feeling encouraged to the point of happy, which was a feeling he'd almost forgotten, Ten showed her the next three. “These are the Explorers. They’re the smallest, to fit into the tightest spaces. They each have a rudimentary camera and a very rudimentary sensors and a tiny little sample collector.” With pride, Ten lined them up on the table. “Explorby One, Two, and Three.”
“Explorby?”
He hadn’t meant to say that. He never used his own word for one of his robots when explaining them to strangers. He stammered, “I, ah, actually, to myself, I don’t call them a botswarm. They have wings. See?” He demonstrated with an Explorby, having it unfurl its two filmy solar panels. “The panels can flex like wings in an environment with air but no gravity and help the bot reposition itself. A long time ago—on Earth—another student said I was making botflies. I didn’t like that. So I call them flutterbys.”
“Got it. A flutter-by swarm.”
“I call it a kaleidoscope which is the word for a group of butterflies,” he blurted.
Her eyes widened. He held his breath. Then she said, “That is excellent.”
His heart tripped faster. For some reason, it mattered incredibly that she liked his own words for his creations. He carefully took out the last flutterby. “This is the unique one that does command and control for the swarm because a human operator may be a hundred klicks away. Com-con sounds too much like Cam-com, so I call it Intellby.”
She laughed. It sounded like laughing for him, not at him. She had a nice, rippling laugh that made other people working in the Device Lab look up and smile. “Show me what makes your flutterbys tick.”
He eagerly turned back to his workstation. “Here are the design specs. . . .”
Anastasia Steed found that she was enjoying this. Enjoyment was not a feeling she'd had much of in a long time. After all that had happened in Starcloud she'd felt like a snail out of its shell. To be more exact, she felt like an unshelled snail in a universe full of salt. Too often, she remembered the Green City that had been new and full of hope until the interstellar war that nobody on Green asked for or even knew about came along. The Green City had been destroyed and with it, her family—mother, father, little brother, all gone. A red armor of rage had shielded her ever since, until the terrible adventure in Starcloud. There, she saw what she had become—a rageful and violent creature—and she hadn't liked it. She'd left the rage behind in Starcloud. On the whole it felt better not to be angry all the time. But too many things reminded her of her lost family and their lost world. Not being angry left her feeling vulnerable and almost always sad.
Learning about Ten's robots was unexpected fun. The kaleidoscope was a botswarm with very sophisticated design and programming. Ten was a brilliant young man who knew how to work hard. And when he had anything to say, he said it with precision and no more words than necessary: he had a high signal-to-noise ratio. She liked that.
Even more to her surprise, she discovered that they spoke the same languages—electrical and mechanical engineering and references from ancient books. Ten demonstrated the range of movement of the sample claw of an Explorby. “It moves precisely, like a Swiss watch.”
“I know what that is because I’ve read a lot of Twentieth-century books. It’s reading knowledge.”
He seemed more comfortable not making eye contact while he conversed, but now he did, briefly. “Me too. The library in my neighborhood only had old stuff out of copyright. I like old books.”
“Me, too.”
He smiled at that. The effect was like the end of an eclipse. She suddenly realized that he was damned cute. He was compact and dark-haired, with medium brown skin and a sketch of mustache and beard that gave his features added definition without blurring the edges. Under thick black eyebrows, his eyes were the warm brown of milk chocolate. In short, he was as nice to look at as he was agreeable to work with. And he had an excellent smile.
Telling her mind to get back to work, she pointed to a few lines in the programming densely written on the screen of his workstation. “I think you ought to vary that. You can do an A-B-C trial, comparing simulations that use three different values.”
The smile went away. “I don't have much of the Intelligence's time to work with.”
She grinned. “You do now. I have an authority key to get the Intelligence's attention.”
Stasia—he treasured her nickname—was very busy planning the Impending Mission, but she came to his tiny cluttered corner the next three mornings to work with him. He looked forward to her arrival more each day. He made sure to get up out of his blanket in time to wash his face and brush his hair and teeth before she arrived.
On the fourth day, she was late. That made him unhappy. He didn't want to lose any minutes with Stasia or miss any bright blue glances from her.
When she did come through the lab’s back door, she looked harried. “Pack up the flutterbys and bring 'em to Council.”
He stared at her. “They aren't ready for the demo.”
“It's not for the demo.” She looked grim.
He caught up with what she'd said. “Do you mean the Captain's Council for the Impending Mission—with the Captain and her officers all there?”
“Yes.”
His mouth went dry.
Hurrying with her down hallways where he'd never been before, and carrying the kaleidoscope canister in his arms—and memorizing the turns because he hated getting lost—he found himself entering a conference room. There were seven important strangers already in there—which was seven more than Ten felt comfortable coming to the attention of.
Captain Zilka was tall, slim, and decisive even though she was only about twenty-five Earth years old. She was also
well-informed. When Stasia introduced him, Zilka said, “Your name is Jaxdown as in the Florida Undercity—Jacksonville Down?”
Captain Zilka knew what Jaxdown was? “Yes, Ma’am.”
She nodded. “Downers are smart, tough people. I'm lucky you're up and on our side, Mr. Jaxdown.” While Ten was still floored by her unexpected words, she turned to the rest of the people in the room. They were the officers who had served for her on the brave ship Guardian Angel, built in the Shipyard of Gotayel and crewed by a mixture of Starship and Gotayelan people expressly to rescue the wayward diplomatic mission from Starcloud. It had been a breathtakingly dangerous venture that succeeded beyond well enough. In Captain Zilka’s Council, the Ship people and the Gotayelans were seated among each other, their origins mattering less than their bonding as a proven team.
Captain Zilka told them all, “Here is the unwelcome situation. You, Commander Steed, nettled the Assemblers enough that they took a hard look at their work with the help of a Riser who was a technical accident investigator on Earth. What he found looks like sabotage. Somebody doesn't want this mission to go.”
There was stunned silence, then raised voices, one of which was Stasia: “The hell you say!”
Zilka stilled the room with a wave of her hand. “Saboteurs would know our mission is rushed and therefore vulnerable. The attempted sabotage is in the external assembly done in space in the Shipyard of Gotayel. It turns out that the Assemblers’ Guild had to go past their verified and vetted full members and add honorary members. Background checks were done by arcane Guild rules.”
“Their rules have loopholes?” an officer asked harshly.
“Not exactly. The Shipyard of Gotayel is a web of intrigue, clique, class, and mixed motives. The Yardmaster is a good ally of ours and tells me that the rules have many checks and balances that work well enough in their way. Unfortunately, it is a slow way. Our mission is happening too fast for the ways of the Shipyard to keep up.”