“Other than the sex,” I muse. “Isn’t that like saying that other than breathing, you and I are the same? Is not sex one of the primary motivations of biological existence? Your entire cultures seem devoted to it.”
“Perhaps. It just seems to me that his heart gets divided between us.”
“Maybe we are simply in different parts of it, taking up different places that would not otherwise be used.”
I am relieved when my board lights up, ending the conversation. We are being scanned. I am alarmed. My Infestor arm resonates to a searching signal that probes the ship. There is a resonance I did not expect, having purged and tamed the arm to my own use. Perhaps it is some form of IFF. Buried in the Infestor arm’s basic matrix is something that responds to the call from the Artifact ahead.
I have not planned on such a contingency and am locked in an immediate battle within myself. My M-7 persona bids me attack my own arm, ripping it off if need be. But I have learned from my previous battles with my old programs. I use my subroutines for self-repair, intelligence-gathering, and keeping myself combat ready. The imperative fades and I can control myself.
“Maauro, are you all right?” Jaelle asks. She has noticed my sudden freeze-up.
“Yes, but we are being probed by the Artifact. There is power and something aware in this object. It has recognized that some part of me is Infestor. There was a subatomic resonance in the arm, something programmed at the electron level that responded to that sensor sweep. Now that it has manifested and I know the mechanism, I can block it.”
“It thinks you are one of them?”
“I do not believe it is that complicated a program. I sense a very low-level subroutine, as if this was something left on long ago, probably to prevent space junk from striking the Artifact. The fact that I resonated simply means it did not look further at me. I could have been something from its own surface blown or knocked into orbit, or one of its own probes.”
“Let’s get down before it decides to take a second look,” Jaelle says. “There’s an immense landing field there. Shall we land there?”
“Not on the near end,” I say, studying the wide, flat space, large enough for a fleet to land. “We will pass over and land on the far side. If the Collector is as impatient as you say, she will land on the first open space. I wish to be close enough to her to rescue Wrik but not so close that they see us on the surface.”
An hour later, I spot a likely landing space and start us down. We land on the immense Artifact between two large pylons.
“What are those?” Jaelle asks, looking up at them as we ground.
“Flak towers for destroying small ships.”
Jaelle grimaces. “Like ours.”
“If they were going to fire on us, they would have done so long ago. Either the defenses are quiescent, or they have accepted us. Perhaps they have detected the active Infestor tech in my arm.”
“Low-order intelligence for such a machine.”
“Or the opposite,” I reply. “A low-order intelligence, detecting an incorrect IFF or signal, would simply fire. Only a high-order one would take the time to wonder why after 50,000 years there is a new outside Infestor contact. I suspect that the Collector’s ship with its Infestor cargo will also be allowed to land for that reason.”
I keep my hands on the throttle and controls, but nothing strikes us as we settle on our fins. I cut the drive.
“The Artifact has artificial gravity,” I say.
“I noticed my tail didn’t float off,” she shot back.
I ignore the non-sequitur. Jaelle is often irritable when afraid.
She gestures out the viewport. “It’s immense, but what is it? A space fortress, a ship, a station—”
“It is none of those. Impressive though it is, it would be a simple target for nuclear and plasma weapons. No, this looks as if it was made for something else, perhaps an evacuation vessel for colonies in danger of being overrun. Whatever it is, I must go into it. My programming bids me destroy this place.”
Pity and disbelief war in Jaelle’s face.
I shrug. “I have no choice.”
“What of Wrik?” Jaelle demands.
“The Collector will land at the first large space that can hold her ship. We passed over the most likely choice a few minutes ago. She has not come so far to hold back now. She will bring Wrik along in the hope it will protect her from me.”
“Will it?”
I look away unwilling to meet her eyes. “I hope so.” My voice sounds weak even to my own receptors. “I will, if I can, rescue Wrik, or create the conditions for him to escape.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Remain here and defend the ship with the crab robots in the hold. Wait as long as you can for Wrik and me. I will take a homer for him to find his way to you if I cannot accompany him back to the ship. If he arrives without me, take off immediately.”
“And leave you behind? Do you judge me a false friend or a coward?”
“Neither. Jaelle, the odds that either of us will regain the ship are minimal. If random chance so favors Wrik, you must leave.”
“Wrik will never agree.”
“Do not ask him. Take off the instant you get him aboard.”
“Maauro, I have not agreed.”
I smile at her. “Brave, Jaelle. No wonder Wrik cares for you so. But I have no more time to argue. My programming demands I go.”
To my surprise she comes over and embraces me. “Good luck, Kit-sister.”
I nod and quickly descend, gathering the tools and weapons I have prepared. I exit through the cargo bay, instructing the three crab robots to guard the ship and respond to Jaelle. I am alone now, striding across the Artifact’s surface under the strange, bar-like stars. While my exterior remains the same, Maauro is receding within me. I am becoming the nameless M-7, who possessed only a serial number. The enemy is in sight and I am again a weapon.
***
The ship settled toward the Artifact. Ferlan’s impatience didn’t even allow for a single orbit. “Maauro is down already. If something was going to attack, it would have struck her ship, bearing their worse enemy. Now we must land soon and locate the nearest large entry.”
“Very well,” Marcel said.
“That looks like a landing stage coming up, biggest one so far,” said one of the bridge officers.
“Arrange for a landing,” Marcel said. “Take her down slowly. Be alert for anti-shipping weapons.”
“All this looks new,” Ferlan said, her voice almost musical with excitement. Her eyes shone and she looked younger. I thought that she must have been quite beautiful in her youth. “No craters, no pitting, it could have been commissioned yesterday.”
“Yes,” I replied, “impossibly so. It’s spent 50,000 years rolling around a system where the star blasted most of the planets to rubble with a collapse. Somehow it’s been defending itself. Or something is different about time down here.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “that must be it. It would explain the boundary layers we passed through coming down here. It’s an event horizon of a sort. On one side time hardly seems to move at all.”
“Yet our biological processes do not seem affected,” Marcel added. “If time stands still, how is it that our hearts, our lungs are not affected?”
I looked at him in surprise.
“Eh,” he said, “just because I can bend the iron bars with my bare hands does not mean I do not use my brain. I surmise that there are two layers, a main one which stops time and another one inside, where time again moves. Perhaps slowly, we cannot tell, mes amis, as our measuring sticks have been reset to what you could call local time.”
“Look at that section,” the flight officer said. Again the screen flicked and we saw a discolored section of the hull, an indicator gave a sense of scale. The damaged section was thi
rty times the length of the Hummel. The patch looked as if someone had poured liquid metal and smoothed the torn edges.
“Looks like the sort of repair one makes to a particle beam hit, only vastly larger,” Marcel said. “Rough work. That was not done in a shipyard.”
So,” Ferlan mused. “It was attacked and damaged at some time.”
“The first expedition did not see this,” Marcel said. “Their instruments were not capable of this resolution and they didn’t get this close. If it was hit once, it may have been hit a number of times. This may explain why it has been here so many millennia, anchored to a dying sun in the middle of nowhere. It may have been damaged and like the Captain who discovered it, hiding out.
“As good an explanation as any,” Ferlan agreed.
The Collector’s vessel drifted down on the apron of a landing stage for something far larger than Hummel, though there were no landing lights. We sank into what looked like a valley, lined with cranes and conveyers.
“Come, Wrik,” Ferlan said. “We have an adventure to begin.”
“How about I just stay here and keep the home fires burning?”
“No nonsense, now,” she said. “I have waited most of my life for this day.”
I followed Marcel and Ferlan down several decks and into a large, wheeled transport with a small turret on top, one of three such in a line on the deck, punctuated with an armored car at either end of the column. Lights flared and sirens whooped as the deck crew evacuated the deck prior to depressurization. The giant clamshell doors rolled back in depressurized hull.
Marcel cursed softly and I spotted his concern. A can of lubricant had been left on deck and burst during the depressurization. A cloud of oil spread from it, to his evident disgust.
“Sloppy deck crew,” I said, drawing a dark glare. Ferlan looked back from her spot near the driver and wagged a finger at me.
But Marcel seemed disposed to laugh it off. “Mon Dieu, but what can be expected from such morons?”
We drove onto the rough surface of the Artifact, across the landing stage to a series of giant doors. Guilders were already working with immense power jacks to lift the outer doors. To my surprise, the smallest of the doors lifted. The jacks braced it and the entire column drove into the space beyond. Some of the Guild party stayed on the other side to let the jacks down, sealing the outer airlock. Others brought in still more jacks and started work on the inner doors.
“The airlock is repressurizing,” Marcel announced. “Looks like a bit of a hurricane out there.” As if to confirm his statement the car rocked a little.
The work crew levered up the inner airlock, but in proof that the Artifact was not totally dead, the inner door rose above the lifting jacks reach. A few small lights showed a labyrinth of huge passages beyond.
“I don’t know what worries me more,” Marcel said, “the lack of any response, or the presence of power and artificial gravity.”
“It may be merely good automatics,” Ferlan said. “We have seen evidence of their technological superiority before. Bid them move out.”
“Recon out,” Marcel ordered over the radio.
“Flinss,” Ferlan called, switching to another screen to reveal the hatchet-faced scientist. “How are the Infestors?”
“Quiet,” she said. “I’ve fed and watered them. Still, I get the oddest impression they are listening for something.”
“Very well, let me know if there are any changes.”
Our vehicle started up, second in line as we rolled out of the immense airlock.
Ahead lay the dark bare metal of the Artifact, grooved for traction as if intended for us. Beyond was cavernous space. Our vehicles bumped their way down the ramp, moving slowly; gravity was about two-thirds of normal. Once we were in, the advance crew lowered the inner doors.
“Atmosphere is normal,” Marcel reported. “Advance team says it smells funny but there is nothing worse than that.”
“Wouldn’t expect it,” Ferlan said. “We all like the same real estate.”
***
I approach an access hatch; it is crudely over-engineered, simple and merely mechanical. When I insert filament sensors into it, I find only rudimentary wiring, reinforcing my belief that massive as the Artifact is, it was constructed quickly. My filaments sever the electronics of the hatch with a millisecond laser burst. Quickly I let myself into an access trunk for piping and electronics. I check the massive cables bundled alongside me, finding only a trace of power, so low it might be a false echo. There is plenty of room for me to move. Even Infestor work drones are far bigger than I am.
Once I close the hatch, I am in pitch-blackness. IR and radar are not sufficient and I use visible light emitted from my eyes. I am unhappy about the target it makes but my CPU is buried deep in my chest, which is some comfort.
I move deeper through the outer shell of the Artifact, which is made of many branching trunks like this one, and lining layers of armor. I descend over one hundred meters through the outer layer before I again find myself facing a hatch. This more robust mechanism is clearly an airlock for workers. I open the hatch after a quick study. Fortunately, as an intruder unit, I am programmed with Infestor language and script. I see a lifting panel at the bottom of the airlock. Rather than use it, I drop to the floor, grateful for the padded bottoms of my boots that deaden the sound of my armored body dropping four meters. A door faces me, which tells me that the Artifact’s interior is like that of a ship, with the artificial gravity biased so decks are horizontal.
There is no power in this mechanism and I extrude a filament to power the doors. The overhead hatch seals and a reading shows on the inside airlock; there is atmosphere on the other side. The gauges tell me the atmosphere is breathable. While I am indifferent to atmosphere so long as it is not corrosive, this could mean live Infestors on the other side.
Cautiously I open the door, retracting the filaments into my hand. The temperature on the other side is cold by biological standards and no attack greets me. Instead, I am in a corridor that extends until it curves out of sight in the distance both ways. Hundreds of doors line the bulkheads and there are many corridors leading inward. The scale of the Artifact I have come to destroy daunts me, but I move out. There is no cover, so I stride down the center of the hall.
A peculiar feeling comes over me as I skulk through the empty corridors, passing ranks of sealed rooms. I feel a mix of emotions: exhilaration that I am doing what I was created to do and an anxiety that I might perish here, unseen by my friends. The endless maze of silent corridors is so far from the beautiful worlds and vistas that I have seen with my friends Wrik and Jaelle. Why should I be here alone, possibly to be destroyed and entombed without even the stars for company? After my 50,000-year sojourn in the asteroid, to again face such a prospect fills me with dread.
I throttle down these unfamiliar and unhelpful emotions. I am M-7, made for war. I ask no quarter and give none. I must put aside Maauro and her dreams in order to continue my mission. I have no room for weakness.
For lack of a better attack plan I continue to the left, my arbitrary west. I am heading for the nearest large landing stage. The Collector should cross over it if she follows our approach vector. My analysis is that she will land as soon as she can, held firmly in the grip of her obsessions, but wishing to deploy her maximum force. Given that her vessel is similar to a landing barge, this means wheeled or tracked vehicles requiring a large entrance. It will be useful to use her forces to spring any traps present and I may be able to secure the release of the biological Trigardt, so long as mission objectives are not impaired. I march on.
The Artifact is not decrepit, and indeed other than a heavy layer of dust, it could have been built recently. My sensors give me anomalous readings whenever I attempt to gauge anything about age. I am puzzled that no automatics have attacked me, even if there are no live Infestors remaining aboard. Their c
ybernetics were not as advanced as ours, but their weapons technology was.
I pass through what must have been a staging area. A large number of Infestor light armor units are present, but they have been packed and preserved and are not a threat. Still there is more power here. I see some telltales on the walls from operating systems and douse my eye-lights. There is now sufficient illumination for my night vision to be effective. I exit the assembly area on a corridor road down which the vehicles must have been driven. I pass larger machine areas, possibly factories and some sections that look like hive living quarters, but I see no sign of the enemy.
Nothing I have seen will provide me with a means of destroying the Artifact. Even overloading my powerplant would cause only localized damages, the blast smothered under billions of tons of metal. I will need to delve deeper, seeking magazines, engines or control spaces in order to follow my imperative.
Suddenly I detect a familiar silhouette and level my armspac at it. But this Infestor is no longer a threat. I race forward to examine the desiccated body, lying half in a side room, possibly living quarters for it. The Infestor is parchment-like skin over bone, with rags of fabric over it and a pack of tools alongside. This is a worker unit without the overdeveloped claw hand of the fighters, intelligent, but with little sense of individuality, almost a biological robot. It may have been securing this room when it simply expired. The body has been here a long time, but clearly not anywhere near the 50,000 years that have elapsed.
The factors line up for a solution in my CPU; time inside the light and gravity well the Artifact lairs in, is moving at a different rate than in normal space. This place must have been a lifeboat, or an ark, for the remaining Infestors. They hid in here, hoping to outlast the Creators, using some form of new drive to twist space and time. As I ponder the corpse at my feet, I remember the Murch and their transdimensional drive. I’d studied the unit when I repaired the shielding that kept them safe. The principles on which that prototype drive worked were new to the Murch and poorly understood, but a transdimensional drive must alter time and space to function. The Infestors may have stumbled on similar principles, creating a pocket universe to hide in.
My Outcast State (The Maauro Chronicles Book 1) Page 28