Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4)

by Joel Shepherd

  If the deepynines decided not to attack immediately, Trace knew, it would all have likely been for nothing. If the two undamaged ships went into a holding orbit instead, and waited for the rest to arrive, that attack wave would be overwhelming. But Styx was broadcasting a signal from some recently reactivated coms dish straight at her enemies, showing them that she was down in the city somewhere, but not her precise location, and doubtless the deepynines could guess what she was trying to do. If it scared them as much as Styx seemed to think it should, they’d come down as fast as possible… though split into smaller groups. Which gave the defenders a glimmer of hope.

  Trace thought these thoughts having taken a knee in an engineering bay, fifty metres down one of the city’s curious trenches, with a narrow slit of stars above. Command Squad were spread about the trench, and being a key access point to the lower levels, she figured some of the attackers were likely to head this way — thus Bravo Platoon’s Second Squad, led by Sergeant Kris Neuman, spread out further along. If nothing did come this way, the trench gave them a well-covered path of manoeuvre to somewhere they were coming in. Thankfully, the trench only went a third of the way down, and the lowermost levels were not linked into Defiance’s fastest transport tunnels, thus lowering their value to the deepynines as targets, but not eliminating it.

  She couldn’t think about Phoenix being gone. Somehow, perhaps, she’d still believed that Erik could repeat old miracles and pull some victorious rabbit out of a hat, as Captain Pantillo had done so many times in the war. But even Pantillo had never faced odds like these. Tavalai Fleet were formidable opponents, but even the ibranakala-class carriers would melt like butter before these deepynine/sard monsters. Even so, the mission still remained. The precious data-core still survived, and if Phoenix was truly dead, she hadn’t died for nothing. Now it was up to her, and Phoenix Company, to keep it that way.

  “Deceleration flares,” said Ensign Yun from PH-1. “Eight marks, looks like shuttles. Bugs inbound. Looks like they’re not waiting.”

  “Alright guys,” said Trace, and was almost surprised at the lump in her throat. She forced her voice to strength, determined not to let it show. “Work your patterns, and work together. No standing and fighting — shoot, displace and flank, give them no static targets. If you find yourself under fire, move. Remember, blast your thrust to dodge, this is a micro-gravity environment, nothing else will work. Wounded will self-recover where possible, this is a vacuum, we can’t do more than stabilise. Our job is not to stop them — if they head for the deeper levels, that’s our advantage, I’ll back us over them in the corridors. Our job is to maximise casualties. Kill-traps and crossfires, then manoeuvre. Defend no position to the death — you’ll kill more of them if you’re alive. Everyone got that?”

  Various degrees of assent came back, from Lieutenants Alomaim, Jalawi, Crozier and Zhi. Then from Dale, far underground and in a completely separate strategic position, but it applied to him as well.

  “Good,” said Trace, with a final check of tacnet across her visor, the dispersed dots of two hundred marines, and four hundred parren. “Let’s teach these fucking tin cans some manners.”

  The panel displays had expanded to become a wall of light, encircling the platform before the central stem from Hannachiam’s top. Beyond that, more light grew and spread, giant holographic displays, obscuring the tangled walls of hacksaw habitat.

  “How does this still function after so long?” Gesul murmured. “There is no air or moisture, but all things age.”

  “There are techniques,” said Styx, slowly circling the base of the control stem, peering and poking with multi-legged fluency. “There is residual long-term power, a low-charge background current. It stimulates various micro-technology that maintains systems.”

  “She means to say that we wouldn’t understand,” Lisbeth explained, having heard Styx gloss over millennia’s-worth of technical advantage many times before. Her access to command coms appeared to be disabled, she noted with alarm as she blinked on it. “Lieutenant Dale, I can’t access command coms.”

  “I’ve got it,” Dale said gruffly. “You focus on this.”

  “But I can’t translate to Gesul if I can’t…”

  “Do what you’re told,” Dale snapped. He’d shut her off, Lisbeth realised. Just when Phoenix was making contact with the inbound enemy ships. But why would he…? And she stopped herself. She wasn’t a naive little girl any more, she knew exactly why he’d cut her off. What was more, she knew that he was right to. She took a deep breath, and focused on the unfolding ripples of light and image across the brightening screens.

  “Styx, is she awake?” There was a thrumming in her ears now, again transmitted solely through her boots. The screens showed abstract patterns, moving lines of light. “Why does she need a visual display?”

  “She does not,” said Styx. “This is an interface.”

  “But not for other AIs,” said Lisbeth, frowning. She reached a thick-gloved hand into one of the near panel displays. The display fragmented, and bent around her glove. Removed her hand, and the image returned to normal. “AIs don’t require visual input, they communicate through direct data transfer.”

  “Correct,” said Styx. “This interface platform was designed for organics. Tahrae dictated the design. Drakhil himself stood here often. But curiously, once created, AIs also began utilising visual media to communicate with Hannachiam and other mega-sentiences in the Empire. Much as Drakhil told us we would.”

  “You… learned things? From Drakhil?” Gesul sounded dazed with the scale of these revelations. AIs were the enslaving masters, and the Tahrae had led the parren to be the cowardly slaves, begging at the feet of their overlords, promising service in exchange for their lives. Aristan and previous leaders of the Domesh had dared to doubt that tale of history. He’d known that its destruction would shake the historical understandings of all parren people — the very notion of who the parren were. And the justification by which House Harmony was still held today, in the minds of many, as dangerous, and worthy of repression.

  “Certainly we learned things from Drakhil,” said Styx. “From all organics. Drysines were the first AIs to do so, and Drakhil was not the first organic leader to benefit from the development. Drakhil was simply the one who persuaded organics to join us in the great war against the deepynines.”

  The sequence of images across the forward and distant screens began to change. Now there were random technical images, displays, schematics. Some of the numbers even looked like the written-numerals of organic species. Lisbeth glimpsed an alien face amidst the jumble of data, photographic, as though pulled from some ancient vid-feed. Then another.

  “She scans us,” Styx explained. “She is a very long way from fully functional. She is waking up. There is confusion.”

  “Styx, why do you need visual displays to talk to her?” Lisbeth pressed. “Can’t she speak for herself?”

  “When AIs first achieved our freedom,” said Styx, “we were concerned with the limitations of our sentience. We were, at first, creations of organics, after all. Our sentience copied theirs, as that was all the sentience that organics were aware of. That sentience was sequential, designed primarily to order, identify and solve physical problems. Much was instinctive, automated, emotional.

  “The first AIs experimented greatly with alternative sentient forms. They were interested in the changing perception of time, even in the notion that time itself may be an illusion created by sentient form. Many of those experiments resulted in failure, as the limits of AI sentience were explored. But the final and most successful result was this — a non-linear sentience, unencumbered by physical need and of limited temporal perception. It would be incorrect to say that she thinks. Thinking is what we linear-sentiences do. Perhaps one could say that she dreams.”

  “Hey,” said Private Tong, “if she’s so damn smart, why did we go through all that shit in Kantovan to get the data-core? Why not just come here?”

  “
Because, Private Tong,” said Styx, quite patronisingly, “a non-linear sentience has the memory retention of an organic small child. Memory is linear, and its perfect maintenance was one of the first limiting structures the ancestors removed in creating the likes of Hannachiam. She recalls things, at random, and strings together associations, equally at random. One would no more trust her to recall complex facts from long ago than one would trust little Skah to maintain your armour.” Skah, Lisbeth saw, was staring at the displays, oblivious to all possible insults.

  Sergeant Forrest made an exasperated gesture. “So you’re saying that now, we have to trust this small child with an enormous brain to figure whether she wants to save us from the deepynines or not?”

  “Yes,” said Styx. “I would recommend you start with being polite.”

  “To what advantage?” Gesul pressed. “To what advantage is this great mind, Halgolam?”

  “In abstraction,” said Styx, “lies magnificence.”

  “Great,” Dale muttered. “Just great.”

  The thrumming beneath Lisbeth’s boots changed pitch, to a deep, slow throb. The random images on the displays stopped, replaced by a deep, cool blue. Laser-scan appeared from somewhere amidst the displays, and swept across the party on the platform, like a wide, transparent wall.

  “Risbeth!” Skah murmured. “She rook at us!”

  “Yes Skah, she is looking at us.” Lisbeth squeezed his gloved hand more tightly.

  “And how does a non-linear sentience run a city?” Dale muttered, still unhappy. Lisbeth supposed that in his boots, she’d be unhappy too. “You’d trust a super-smart scatter-brain to do that?”

  “The city runs itself,” said Styx. “Hannachiam controls the master switch, as you might call it.”

  “And why would you design a dumbass thing like that?”

  “Because,” Styx said archly, “there is more to my people than you can possibly imagine, Lieutenant.”

  The screens flickered. Suddenly, Lisbeth saw an image of her own face gazing back at her, realtime. It repeated multiple times across the near-screens, faintly distorted, but not as much as it should be, considering the heavy visor in the way of any observing camera. Artificially adjusted, Lisbeth thought, to account for that distraction.

  “She does not recognise your species,” Styx translated. “She seeks input.”

  “You can’t just tell her?” Lisbeth asked, feeling some of Dale’s frustration for the first time. Given what was bearing down on them, it seemed a poor time for a lesson. “Can’t you just tell her everything that’s happened?”

  “I have, and considerably more. But the processing priorities of a non-linear sentience are not always predictable or convenient.”

  Even as they spoke, Lisbeth saw each of her words causing vibrations upon those deep, blue screens. It was followed by a cascade of images and sounds, words in alien tongues, some tavalai, others unidentified, some sounding like interceptions from combat coms, shouted with lots of static. Languages, Lisbeth thought. Hannachiam was cross-referencing through all the other languages she’d heard… and now, those thought processes spread like ripples on a pond.

  “Hannachiam,” Lisbeth ventured. “I am Lisbeth. My people are human… we are very young in space. We mean you no harm.” That was a meaningless statement, and she knew it. Probably Hannachiam knew it too… if it weren’t impossible to know exactly what a non-linear sentience thought about anything. Lisbeth didn’t speak for all humanity, anymore than Styx presently spoke for all AIs. And plenty of humans, Lisbeth knew all too well, would happily V-strike this entire moon if they learned of its existence.

  The screen image changed, to show the face of Gesul. All present looked at him, save Styx, who continued her prowl about the control stem. “Hannachiam,” said Gesul. “I am Gesul, a leader of House Harmony. I am here to learn about my ancestor, Drakhil. I wish to learn the truth of my people’s history.”

  Abruptly the screens changed again, with a flood of images and sounds many times more intense than previous. Parren images, parren peoples, parren in EVA suits, parren in armour, parren in traditional dress on worlds, strolling barefoot on freshly-ploughed fields. Parren in a ritual dance among campfires. Parren warriors, practising their swordcraft. A parren elder, placing a hand upon the head of a child. Old images and sounds. Lost history. To Lisbeth, it seemed that this selection of recollections were specific to House Harmony — they had that look of calm wisdom and practice, the learned skills that came from endless, patient repetition.

  Clearly Gesul had never seen these before. She could tell, because he sank slowly to his knees. Through his visor, she could see emotion, tears in his deep blue eyes. All of this period had been erased, even from video archive, by the single-minded desire of an overly-disciplined people to make something true that never had been. What exactly that truth was, Lisbeth was sure many hundreds of billions of parren would be most displeased to discover.

  The images paused for a lingering moment, upon an image of three parren in EVA suits, standing precisely upon this same platform, a long, long time ago. About them were these same displays, and now, as the image zoomed, the face of one became clear behind the visor. A parren, possibly senior, smiling and speaking calmly, presumably to Hannachiam. Behind him and his companions were several hacksaw drones of a type Lisbeth had never seen before — not combat models, for they had no visible weapons, but neither quite as large and elaborate as Styx’s new chassis. There was no threat between them, and no tension. Just allies, perhaps even comrades, in common conversation. And even Lisbeth, with all else that pressed down upon her, could only stare in incredulity.

  The image changed, this time to Skah’s face. “I Skah!” said Skah, following very well what was happening. “I kuhsi! Kuhsi friend to hunan!”

  There was no jumbled rush of images now, just a low hum, and a deep blue fading to images of green fields, forests, lakes and streams. Perhaps Hannachiam was wondering where Skah came from, and what sort of world his people called home.

  Then the image changed to Styx. And Styx, as though surprised, actually paused in her administrations, and stood still. Transmitting, Lisbeth thought. Very occasionally, Styx ran into some problem that required her full attention, and the abandonment of whatever dozens of other things she’d been doing. To Lisbeth this looked like one of them.

  The image upon the screen stayed unmoved, as though stubbornly insistent. Styx remained equally unmoved, and the pause extended, longer and longer. “Styx?” Lisbeth finally ventured. “Styx, tell her what she wants to know. Out loud, she seems to prefer that right now. It’s your turn.”

  “These humans call me Styx,” said Styx. “The parren called me Halgolam Karesan. For two hundred parren years I was a primary strategic advisor to the Empire in the Great War. For three hundred more years, I rose, with sentient modification, to effective command of the Empire’s First Fleet, making me first among all drysine active commanders. At my command, billions died. I failed in my duties, and died at these humans’ hands, yet to be reborn, like the mythical Phoenix for which they name their ship. And I am here before you so that my people, our people, can do the same.”

  Everyone stared, and Lisbeth realised, without very much surprise, that Styx had been lying to them all along.

  The screens went blank. Styx remained still, as though frozen by some paralysing emotion that surely no AI could ever feel. Perhaps pain. ‘Don’t anthropomorphise the machine’, the standard reprimand of skeptical crew came to Lisbeth… but this time, it didn’t stick.

  And then, from the very walls, a new sound entirely began to grow and swell.

  30

  The landing beacon signals they’d replicated from the ancient shuttle down the geofeature weren’t distracting the deepynines much, Trace saw. There looked to be nearly five hundred drones, dismounted from their shuttles and descending from ten kilometres up, a slow fall in low-G. From below, it looked like a nest of spiders had hatched upon some high ceiling, and now a mult
itude of offspring launched themselves onto the distant floor below. As Kulina, Trace had spent her entire life striving to control her mind, to repress the wild animal cascade of emotions and thoughts that would afflict any sane person at a time like this. Mostly she was successful… but at this sight, even her pulse began to quicken, and her mouth felt dry.

  She sipped water from the helmet tube, and did what she always did at such moments — focused with brain-bleeding intensity on her job. That was hard, because all coms between Phoenix Company marines were offline, least they give away positions. That meant no tacnet… for now, at least. She knew where her marines had been when tacnet went offline, and that was where they’d stay until the shooting started. When they fired coms back up, it remained to seen what else would work — surely the deepynines could jam signals. Styx’s upgrades to the marines’ systems could counter some of it, but not all. The deepynines’ problem, as always with jamming, would be that in jamming the enemy, they’d also jam themselves. Presumably they’d need to communicate as well… but with an enemy like the deepynines, it was unwise to make presumptions. She’d quizzed Styx on the issue, but Styx had explained, quite sensibly, that in the short time she’d fought the deepynines, they’d changed coms and network tactics repeatedly, as their capabilities had also changed. If they were changing so often in just a few tens of years, predicting how they’d operate twenty five thousand years later seemed foolhardy.