by B. V. Larson
“I think that’s a yes, Valiant,” I said. “Keep our weapons on standby and employ them only defensively unless I order otherwise. Power management is your primary concern right now.”
“Understood.”
“Hansen, let’s go get our people.”
We still had several minutes before we got to the hole, so I called Stalker to implement the idea Kwon had triggered. “Commander Kreel, you there?”
“I am here, Commodore Riggs, though I am properly addressed as Captain now that I have command of this battleship.”
“Absolutely,” I said. At this point I’d call him a fucking five-star admiral if it got the job done. “Captain Kreel, you’re still pledged to my service, right?”
“It wounds me to know you felt the need to ask such a thing, Commodore, but I attribute your rudeness to your alien culture. I will studiously ignore it.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s great. I have some instructions for you.”
Speaking quickly, I gave a summary of the Macro and Nano fleets and how they operated, and then uploaded a short, straightforward description of the trial those ships would administer to potential new command personnel. “If you brief your people, nearly all of them should pass the tests without any problem, and they will become commanders of Nano ships. I’ll send you what I’ve got on the tricks and techniques used to get the Nanos to do what you want, but right now that’s all the time I have. You’ll have to work it out on your own.”
“Assuming your plan unfolds as you hope, what’s our objective?”
“Keep the Nano squadron from expending itself in a tactically inept, hopeless attempt to destroy the Macros. Make Stalker the core of a combined fleet, and harass the Macros from long range. You got that big gun; use it well. Sting them and make them come to you. Then you can unleash the Nanos on them. They fight better defensively anyway. If you find yourself losing, save what you can and run back toward us. I don’t think the Macros will follow because they’re in bad shape too. Their AIs should make a survival calculation and break off to look for a place to rebuild.”
“I hear and obey, Commodore Riggs. Kreel out.”
“Valiant, open a channel to the Nanos, using whatever protocols they employed in the past,” I said. “Also, alter my voiceprint to match my father’s.”
“Voice clone activated. Channel open.”
“Nano fleet, this is Riggs.” I said with what I hoped was the right amount of my father’s voice and swagger.
“Riggs recognized,” returned an inhuman voice a few seconds later. It sounded just like the vids of Alamo, though I figured all Nano ships were pretty much the same.
“Nano fleet, let me speak to the vessel called Alamo,” I said. Maybe I could establish some kind of rapport with Dad’s old ship.
“No ship is currently designated Alamo.”
“How about a ship named…Snapper?” I asked, hoping against hope.
“Requested ship is linked.”
I smiled. It made a kind of sense. Old Alamo had been destroyed according to the final reports, but you never knew. The fact that Snapper had out-survived my father’s ship didn’t surprise me. Emperor Crow had named this vessel and flown her twenty-five years ago. Maybe some of that devil’s wily skills had rubbed off on the ship. I hoped none of the evil intent had as well.
“Snapper, Jack Crow is dead. Therefore, I’m the commander of Star Force, at least in this system. Do you accept that?”
“Assertion accepted.”
“I’m speaking for Star Force as a whole. Can you speak for the Nano fleet as a whole?”
“We’re linked. Internal disagreement is impossible by definition.”
“Great. Snapper, I have a proposal for you. I wish to supply high-quality command personnel candidates to increase the efficiency of your anti-Macro actions.”
“Proposal accepted. State location of command personnel candidates.”
Now it got tricky. If I told them the candidates were aboard Stalker, the Nano fleet might decide the most efficient way to acquire them was to dismantle her. Well, I was no politician, but I’d listened to Dad talk about politics. One thing he’d told me was when you didn’t want to answer a question but had to give some kind of response, reply to the question you wanted to answer instead.
“Command personnel candidates will be provided for retrieval at the following location in one hour.” I passed the coordinates of the closest asteroid to Stalker. “Do not arrive early or the agreement will be null and void. Riggs out.”
“Revised proposal accepted. We will adjust our actions.” The channel closed.
I quickly updated Kreel on the situation and told him to send one volunteer per Nano ship to wait at the designated asteroid. Not only would command personnel make the Nano vessels more efficient, but they would effectively give me command of their ships—secondhand, perhaps, but it would be better than nothing.
By this time, we were approaching the gap in the slabs. As soon as Valiant dove into the interior, I hailed Gunnery Sergeant Taksin. “Pass the word, Gunny. Get everyone ready and waiting on the platform. We’re on the way to pick you up.”
“Aye aye, sir!” he replied with relief. “We’re seeing quite a battle going on, so watch yourselves.”
“Will do. Riggs out.”
Taksin’s warning proved prescient, for Valiant immediately rocked with a weapons strike.
“Shields on,” I snapped. “Damage?”
“Minor damage to the port aft quarter,” Valiant replied.
“Shields are eating power,” Hansen said as he angled the ship to skim along the inside of the hollow world as far from the central melee as possible. “The batteries won’t last five minutes at this rate unless we burn extra fuel.”
“Turn them off at your discretion and keep evading. Activate them if needed.” I took my familiar place at the holotank. Random shots struck near us from time to time, but it seemed that as long as we didn’t act aggressively the ships fighting each other were ignoring us.
Scant minutes passed before I saw us approaching the landing platform where our people’s beacons blazed. Hansen pulled us up to hover just off the edge and opened the assault airlock for a quick rescue.
“Get inside, fast!” I ordered over the general channel. Crew streamed in while marines pulled security, bringing up the rear with quick jumps across the gap. Fortunately, the evacuation went smoothly.
Manipulating the holotank controls, I focused the ship’s sensors on the central cube where I’d followed Sokolov through the portal and presumably had entered—unless that portal had taken us elsewhere entirely. You never knew with so much teleportation going on.
The cube had drifted off center in the time since the boneyard ships had awoken and seemed to be spinning slightly. I found those to be telling details. Before, it had floated in the precise middle of the golden planet. Now it seemed to have lost control even of itself. That argued for Sokolov’s claim that he had somehow succeeded in blowing up the control center after all. Maybe he had another grenade on a timer, one I hadn’t seen. When we both left, it was free to blow itself when the clock ran out. Or perhaps he did something I completely missed. He knew a lot more about this place than I did. Of course he’d have a few more tricks up his sleeve.
“Valiant, download my suit records. Find the vids of the globular ship Sokolov boarded and try to match and locate it now.”
“Target located,” Valiant said after just a moment. AIs may not be good at creative thinking, but they excelled at searches.
I zoomed in on the icon flashing within the holotank. The globe ship was parked against the inner wall of the planet about a quarter of the way around from us.
“Hansen, take us there,” I said. “Sokolov must have faked us out with the shuttle move and stayed aboard. There’s only one reason that I can think of to do that.”
“He’s trying to find his girl,” Hansen said, and he aimed Valiant in the correct direction. We began a slow, fuel-conserving accel
eration.
Bridge watchstanders began filtering in to take their stations.
“Sir, why go after him?” Hansen said over his shoulder. “He’s already done his damage. I don’t like being stuck inside this place, and your Raptor buddies could probably use our help fighting Macros.”
I slammed my fist into my palm. “We can’t leave him out here on the loose. He’s far too dangerous. What if he gained control of this technology of the Ancients instead of just figuring out a few things? Right now he’s like a pet monkey in a battlesuit. He’s worked out how to turn on the HUD and move the arms. What happens if he learns to fire the lasers or arm the grenades?”
Hansen turned his chair to face me. “Metaphors aside…look, sir. There are lots of critters running around in that maze: beetles, Macros, other things we saw when we were dragging our asses after Sokolov. If none of them has taken control of the place, and Sokolov couldn’t after years of living there, what makes you think he suddenly will now?”
“Call it a gut feeling.”
“He already disabled the control center, right?”
“So it seems,” I said grudgingly.
“He can’t do anything even if he wants to,” Hansen said more forcefully than usual. “At least not anytime soon. And some of the ships in here outgun us severely. If any of them take a dislike to us, we could be in bad shape. And then there’s our insane fuel-consumption rate. Captain, we have to get out into open space before our luck runs out!”
I mulled this over, staring at the holotank while Hansen went back to his evasive piloting. I hated admitting it, but I realized the man was right. Sokolov would try to find his ladylove, and then he’d have his hands full. We could always come back later and try to track him down, maybe with more tech advantages from Marvin’s bag of tricks.
That reminded me of something else.
“Where’s Marvin?” I asked. No one answered. “Valiant, locate Marvin and Greyhound.”
“Unable to locate Marvin or Greyhound.”
“He’s probably outside the planet, then,” I mused. Turning back to Hansen I said, “All right, XO. Break off and find a hole. Get us out of here. Let’s go deal with the Macros once and for all.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Hansen replied.
A palpable feeling of relief swept the bridge. No one had enjoyed being trapped in this alien contraption.
-27-
I stifled a sigh of relief as Valiant punched through an opening in the golden globe. The blaze of the Milky Way across the main viewscreen and the uncluttered tactical view on the holotank felt like a fresh breeze across my mind clearing out my major concerns and allowing me to focus on the kind of challenge I was trained for: space combat.
Immediately, I found Stalker and the military transport Ox hovering out of weapons range. Nano ships swarmed the nearby asteroid. I saw the last of the suited Raptors plucked off the surface by snake-like arms and taken into the saucer-shaped ships. It looked like predatory flying insects snapping up bugs and devouring them. I wished the Raptors well.
Checking the chronometer readouts, I noticed less than fifteen minutes had passed aboard Valiant. But apparently more than an hour had gone by outside the golden planet. More time weirdness.
“Set course to join Stalker,” I ordered, “and find Marvin! I need to talk to him.”
A few moments later, Valiant spoke. “I believe I have located Greyhound.”
“You believe?”
“The probability exceeds ninety percent, but is not within parameters constituting certainty.”
“Show me.”
An icon flashed, showing a vessel accelerating fast, outbound directly away from the star and, therefore, from us. “Give me the best close-up you can,” I said.
A grainy image formed within the holotank, poor and washed out due to the angle of view from directly astern. The flare of three hot engines badly obscured the picture, but it looked like Greyhound to me.
“That’s him, running away,” I said under my breath. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Unknown,” Valiant answered. The ship had sharp audio inputs.
I worried that Marvin knew something we didn’t, such as that the golden planet was about to explode taking everyone with it. I had to believe he would have told me if we were in grave danger, though. “Give me a tight beam to him, maximum power.”
A moment passed. “No response.”
“Crap. What a chickenshit. Ping him every five minutes until he responds.”
Letting Valiant keep an eye on Marvin allowed me to concentrate on other matters at hand. We were pulling up on Stalker as it accelerated gently to follow the Nano fleet heading for the retreating Macros.
“Commodore Kreel, this is Admiral Riggs,” I said once Valiant had established contact. I was starting to get the hang of the Raptor mind when it came to titles, at least out here away from the homeworld: you claimed whatever you could justify. Kreel technically had two Raptor vessels and the Nano ships under his command, making him a squadron commander or commodore, and that meant I was the ranking admiral.
“I hear you, Admiral,” Kreel said without additional comment.
Adrienne shot me a darkly amused glance. She wasn’t taking my self-promotion seriously.
“We’ll follow the Nanos at a distance,” I said, “until your people can influence their actions. Do you need any further assistance from Valiant?”
“I believe we have had all the assistance we can handle for the moment, Admiral.” The translator program gave Kreel a dry, acerbic tone. It was almost sarcastic.
That seemed odd. “Please elaborate,” I said.
“Your robot installed an AI in Stalker. Unfortunately it neglected to tell us about it until our ship initiated a conversation with low-ranking personnel about the state of certain emergency repairs. It took Lieutenant Zhou a great deal of time to determine what was happening and to convince some of our less educated troops that an evil god had not, in fact, taken up residence here. And that was only the most perplexing of issues. There are more, but I won’t bore you with the rest, Admiral.”
“That’s Marvin for you: a potential disaster on a dozen legs. Then again, I bet he did fix Stalker faster than you thought possible.”
“Yes, Admiral. He also improved our weapons efficiency by over twenty percent.”
“Then you’ll just have to work through any idiosyncrasies he may have introduced,” I said. “It’s not worth resetting the AI back to normal. Let’s get back to the issue at hand. Task Force Riggs—that’s us, you guys and the Nano ships—have about the same combat power as the Macro fleet. I’m not interested in mutual annihilation, though, and in a stern chase the following fleet is generally at a disadvantage because the leading fleet has a choice of running or fighting when and where they choose. Unless, of course, the chasers have a big speed advantage, or the quarry has a fixed asset they must defend.”
“You have much to teach me, Admiral,” Kreel replied. From a human I’d have judged that as a smartass response, but I decided to take it at face value.
“As my ancestors taught me,” I said with a touch of pompous inflection in my voice. I figured that would play well with Raptors.
“Admiral, may I ask why we’re chasing down the Macros at all? There are ships of many races now killing each other within the golden planet. What is it about this particular variety of alien that offends you?”
How could I express to a Raptor what the Macro menace meant to a human, to all biotics in Earth’s federation? I thought I had a way.
“The Macros are our Lithos, Kreel. Our nemesis—except we didn’t mistakenly create them. They viciously attacked our planet and we spent a decade driving them off. They’re the enemy of all biotic life. If left alone, they’ll reproduce and grow like a spaceborne cancer until they’re strong enough to attack the nearest organic sentients. That means you Raptors. Fighting fifty of them now means we don’t have to fight fifty thousand of them later.”
“I unde
rstand, Admiral. You are wise.”
On this subject I didn’t have to be modest. Kreel was right.
“Anyway, to beat the Macros we have to find or manufacture a tactical advantage for ourselves. The trick is going to be getting the Nanos to fight when and how we want them to rather than according to their hardwired protocols. Despite their programming that wants to acquire command personnel, the individual Nano brainboxes don’t actually follow specific orders very well. And they certainly don’t allow micromanagement. Mostly you have to trick them by issuing unambiguous directives and letting the AIs work within those parameters because I don’t think the brainboxes actually want to be under the command of biotics.”
I said this all with a bit more confidence than I actually felt because I’d never been in charge of even one Nano ship, much less a fleet. I had studied them a lot, though, and my Dad had told me enough stories about the old days that I believed I was right.
“I think I understand,” Kreel said.
“The Macros are going somewhere,” I continued. “As far as our sensors can determine, there’s nothing in their direction of travel except comets and asteroids. Odds are they’re looking for a place to deploy a dome and a factory to start reproducing and increasing their combat forces. I’m of two minds about this. We can let them expend the effort to set up a base. If they do, they’ll be tying themselves down to a defensive position as well as using up even more fuel and materials before a fight. But if they manage to get a production engine going, we may end up facing a continuous stream of reinforcements when we have none.”
“An ambiguous situation.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “The other choice is to try to hit them before they set up a base. That cuts out the advantages and disadvantages of the first option. It makes things more predictable—but probably more bloody.”
“We’re ever ready to die in your service, Admiral Riggs.”
“And I applaud your sense of honor, but I’d rather as few of us die as possible between your people and mine. Okay?”