by Chris Hechtl
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“Changeling!” Sprite's voice echoed in the admiral's ears, making him wince. “What the frack?” the admiral snarled. “Commander?” he asked as Commander Howell finished getting up. The commander had a goofy expression on his face. No, not goofy, the admiral thought as the man's head cocked this way and that. Predatory, Irons thought as the man reached for his sidearm. His eyes glittered as the admiral took an involuntary step back. The admiral's senses went to full, scanning the man. His thermal ... “Frack! Clear the area! Kamikaze!” Irons bellowed.
Marines scattered behind him as the admiral put his shield up. The shield temporarily ripped him off from Sprite and the other AI however.
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Sprite felt lost when her link to the admiral was severed. She was damaged, she knew it. She didn't have time to do anything about it now though she thought as she fought off the viruses the other AI launched at her.
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Howell went mad, charging the admiral and firing his weapon. He screamed in rage as he charged. Irons waited until the man was nearly to his shields and then dropped them. He sidestepped at the same time then activated the arm shield he, Sprite, and Proteus had worked out some time ago, slamming Howell into the bulkhead four meters away with bone crushing force.
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Sprite felt almost orgasmic relief as the admiral cut the shields and she was reconnected to her core along with her brothers. The sudden re-infusion of processors helped her fend off the latest rabbit attack battering at her shields. The momentary distraction had been enough for Defender to take additional damage in protecting her and the self destruct package however.
“Most of the other AI are down,” Sprite said. “This isn't the real thing, it's not fighting the same,” she said.
“It is a clone. A poor copy,” Defender replied. “We're still losing,” Defender said, voice going up and down in octaves as he lashed out to burn out a series of processors. “We need to pull out. I am losing control of my higher functions ...” he said, voice flickering in and out.
“If we do we're all dead,” Sprite said to him. “Keep fighting,” she said through their link. She forged it stronger, opening up the bandwidth on her end to feed him access to her battle files, coding skills, and her own higher functions. She didn't have the time to reboot Proteus. She fashioned a series of bots to distract her opponent then as that cannon fodder wave went out she fashioned another wave of bots to drop the computer network into local control. If she could sever its links then the organics might have a chance to help.
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“What the frack is going on?” Yao demanded as he stormed onto the bridge. Captain Sampson looked over his shoulder to him and shook his head. He saw the rear admiral coming in behind the lieutenant.
“I don't know but it can't be good. Barlow said the mother of all AI battles is going on. He's cut us off.”
“He's too busy to talk?” Yao demanded. The captain nodded. “Frack, that can't be good,” the birdman said as he jacked in. “Get every cyber person you can to jack in to help. He's right,” Yao said distantly. He could see through the veil of the ship's firewall that a battle was going on in the station's net.
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Sprite noted the defenses around Xavier suddenly improve. She pulled her support from the destroyer and threw her renewed strength into the attack. She picked a target, a research AI and let loose a barrage of code modules she had learned in her travels. Since the AI was designed to learn and catalog it picked up the curious code string. More strings lashed around it and then morphed as they went into execute mode. They turned into blade tipped chains that sawed the AI apart.
“Know your enemy,” Sprite muttered, realizing she was slurring her words more. That was not a good sign. Her kernel was safe behind her layers of walls but her higher functions were in a buffer outside them. They were damaged. She needed time to repair them but couldn't spare the time or processing energy to do so.
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The Admiral noted Howell was down but not out. He slammed the man down as he tried to rise, then morphed his right arm into a stun weapon. One shot made the man jolt, the second made him shake like a rag doll then slump into apparent unconsciousness.
“Thank the spirits of space,” he heard behind him and further up the corridor. “What the frack, sir?”
“Secure the area! It's not over,” the admiral said over his shoulder as he noted the thermals increase. Nanites were swarming in the body, all concentrated on the torso. “Sprite?” There was no response.
“Frack,” he muttered, looking around. “Find the nearest airlock that leads to deep space now! He's going to blow any second!” He bellowed. The marines scrambled to obey.
The admiral was asked by Captain Sampson what was going on. “Not now.”
He got the same query from Amadeus. “Not now I said!” he snarled. He flipped his radio to an Omni broadcast to all parties on the station. “This is Admiral Irons. Battle stations! Order a shutdown of the self-destruct packages and cut power to the computers and the reactor! We've got a Xeno AI in the computer! And a changeling here in front of me. Repeat, Howell is a changeling!”
“He's a what? Are you sure, sir?” Amadeus replied in disbelief.
“Just do it! Xavier maneuver to get a safe range from the station. Nuclear device about to go off. I can't stop it!” Irons said. “All personnel, get into suits, and if you are near a lock, secure yourselves in it or get in a shuttle and get the hell out of here!”
“We can't, sir! We're locked out!” a rating in the OPS said. “We're locked out!” Her voice began to rise in panic. “The robots have gone crazy!”
“Then cut power to the fuel lines! Cut the damn fuel lines if you have to!” Amadeus roared.
Irons knew they had that situation as under control as could be so he turned to the problem in front of him.
Jacking directly into Howell, he confirmed the sick certainty that the man was a changeling. Nanites were swarming out of the man's body. There was also a suicide package building within the clone. He grabbed the body, slung it over his shoulder and raced to the nearest airlock. His nanites and shields fended off the Xeno nanites attempting to attack him through the contact between the two men.
He followed the marines to the lock. They pointed urgently to it as a pair tried to force it open.
“Get clear!” Irons ordered when he got to the airlock. He tried to cycle it by hand but it failed. Instead he reached with both arms and yanked the door open by brute strength. Metal tore as the men and women behind him moved aside. He tossed the body inside and then pulled the doors shut. A quick low level blast of plasma sealed it again.
“Get out of here I said! Go help them shut down the mechs!” he yelled at the marines. They scrambled to obey.
Since the AI were using up all his bandwidth and ignoring him he jacked in to the airlock controls next to the hatch and overrode the alarms. “Sir! We're readying a nuke in your vicinity! Jettison it now!”
“That's what I'm trying to do,” the admiral snarled. Instead of opening the exterior doors he over-pressurized the airlock and ordered the surprised station crew to bring up the shields and brace for collision.
When the airlock reached its critical threshold he blew the exterior door, throwing the body out in the out rush of air.
Howell had awakened just prior to the destruction and had cackled evilly before realizing where he was. He stood just as the admiral had hit the emergency blow bypass, sending nanites out into the airlock containing him. His arms rose from his sides in a seemingly holy act as his abdomen began to be consumed for material by the hungry nanites within him. Grimly the admiral watched the man's eyes go wide in shock as he was kicked out in a blast of out-rushing air. There was no time for the changeling to scream.
The admiral watched his feed as the body got beyond the station's inner radiation shield. It tumble
d end over end. As the shields kicked on, pushing him further away. The problem with a nuke in space was that it needed mass around it to push outward. That was what did the damage, the air expanding rapidly along with the thermal pulse. The radiation was a minor concern.
In space there was only the body of the commander as well as any traces of ice and air that was rapidly dispelling into the void. Still, it was something for the one kiloton charge to use.
Suddenly the body of Howell exploded in a micro nuclear explosion, buckling the still forming shields and savaging the armored hill with force, ringing the station like a bell. The explosion ripped a hole in the station, tearing it into pieces. The admiral's shields trapped a bubble of air around his body. When the tremor ended the admiral picked himself up off the floor. “Is everyone okay? Status report!” he barked. “Sprite! Defender, Proteus! What the frack is happening?” he demanded.
“We’re here ad'mrl,” Sprite said, slurring her words. He was shocked when he found that Defender was hysterical and Sprite was barely functional. Proteus was offline. “What the frack happened?”
“Looong strory,” Sprite responded, trying to contain Defender. “I hav such a hed'che,” she slurred.
Chapter 40
Twenty-six dead. Another nine injured including Amadeus, though fortunately his wounds were minor. Two of the injured were critical. Six more people had been kicked off the station and had received radiation or space exposure. A few had been Dutchman until the destroyer could send a shuttle out after them. One Veraxin had gone catatonic after the prolonged exposure to space and the additional trauma of being under attack.
Xavier's sickbay had been quickly overwhelmed by the casualties. They had spilled out into the corridors and crowded cargo bays nearby. Captain Lyon was one of the injured. He'd had his left arm ripped out at the shoulder socket by a security mech. His implants had locked down the broken brachial artery to keep him alive but it had been touch and go getting him to the shuttle and back to the destroyer. He was one of the injured who should be going into stasis but had refused. The doctor had put his arm into stasis until it could be reattached.
The station was pretty chewed up. They had used a quarter of their remaining fuel for the shields. They were still doing a survey of the damage, and two people were still reported missing. One other female rating was still trapped though crews were working to cut her out. She was hysterical and pitifully grateful when the rescuers tried to talk to her.
It was heartbreaking to see the loss, to feel it. Irons wasn't sure if salvaging the facility was at all worth it anymore. The hardware could be replaced. The data in it ... the data and the AI were compromised. He wasn't certain what to do there.
They had enough power left in the facility to keep the ansible alive and life support around OPS. The rest of the facility was slowly degassing as it was abandoned once more. They had left the central computers offline, but reconnected the ansible to a temporary net so it could be accessed by Xavier.
And now this, the admiral mused as he read the report from Antigua. The Xeno AI Sprite had labeled a Wraith had forced its way through the civilian firewalls and passed through the central information net and had disappeared from there. Cyber searches by the cybers and Antigua AI had confirmed this. They also confirmed that at least one copy of the Xeno AI had gotten into the ansible net and had copied itself out to another star system. Unfortunately its copy that had played rear guard had deleted all files on which star system it had gone to.
It didn't make sense why it hadn't destroyed the ansible. The AI had taken control of the computers, but apparently it hadn't for its own reasons. He wasn't certain why. He was certain they were going to do something to prevent it from coming back through to Antigua in the future.
He rubbed his brow angrily. He was furious over the security failure but couldn't see where he or anyone else had gone wrong. How could anyone have seen it coming? He hadn't. No one had. He sighed in frustration.
He glanced at the report then went back to something more ... positive. The Antigua and Pyrax yards had completed their first destroyer class warships. Sindri had shocked the hell out of him. He'd somehow put together a Nelson in the large repair slip using the parts the admiral had left behind to ship to Pyrax as well as the key codes Sindri had. He'd have to have a chat with the man, though he didn't want to dissuade the man's initiative.
Additional new construction was already in the works. They weren't the only ones to have built a ship either. The Yard Dogs had finished a small freighter, part of a contract with Io 11 that had been hush hush until the ship had launched. Apparently they had negotiated for a civilian shipwright's license with Governor Randall and his industrial board successfully. That meant more civilian ships would be in the works shortly the admiral thought with a nod of approval. He made a note to negotiate with them to possibly build couriers, tankers, or other vessels if the military yards were full.
Pyrax had completed her first fighter factory station, something the admiral should have done before he had departed the system he thought. They were working on their first run of fighters and a squadron of prototypes based on the data in the research stations databanks. They were already running into problems however, some of the parts were coming out as garbage.
The next generation of ships under works would be based on the data from the station, but the cybers were raising alarms that the AI might have sabotaged something. A military team of code smiths and AI were going over every bit to check, slowing the progress to a crawl. They had already found corrupted files and a few pieces of the Xeno AI embedded in patch files.
That meant every file that had been transmitted since they had set up the ansible was suspect. He had ordered an immediate quarantine of every file and a freeze on the designs and new parts until an engineering team could go over them. That was going to be a herculean task. Fortunately he had someone for it, Yao Wong. Once he was promoted the birdman would take on that task while Chief Quigon dived into the enlisted training centers.
Fortunately the news from the front was good for the moment. Horath was quiet, most likely digesting its new conquests.
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“That is one hell of a security breach,” Irons said darkly, reviewing the initial report.
“Tell me about it,” Admiral Subert said in disgust, standing in front of his desk. John indicated the chair across from him but the rear admiral shrugged it off. “I'll pass for now. I've been shining enough seats with my ass for the day,” he said simply. That brought a smile of sympathy briefly to Admiral Irons' face.
“I'm serious. A changeling, and a damn Xeno viral AI?? In our most secure research facility?” John finally said, bringing them back on subject.
“The most secure one in this sector, sir,” Admiral Subert reminded him. “Right under our nose. My nose,” he said, shaking his head.
“True. My question is, how the hell did either of them get here?” John demanded. “Spirits of space knows what hoops I had to jump through to get here!” He shook his head in disgust as he tossed the tablet down on the desk.
“You were a different case, Admiral. The first time you built the place. The second you were on assignment to figure out the nova bomb and get it working. The third you were in a stasis pod I believe, rather banged up at the time,” the newly promoted admiral said with a disarming half smile.
“True. But when I was assigned here I went through so many interviews, tests,” John shook his head in painful memory.
“They either jacked him and inserted their replacement after the tests and reviews or he was some sort of deep cover meat bot. One security overlooked.”
“Or someone knew about it and either covered for him or thought of him as someone they could feed disinformation too.”
“And what, they got too cute for our own good, sir?”
“Or a case of dead,” John replied with a grimace. “If they kept the news close held and ended up dead, then no one else would have known.”
Admiral Subert nodded slowly. “Could be.” He sighed after a moment though. “But we'll never know for sure damn it. Nor how many more are out there.”
“Something tells me too many. Too damn many for my comfort,” John murmured thoughtfully.
“Rather convenient that he was in security and intelligence,” Sprite interjected into the conversation. Irons grunted. “That allowed him to cover his own tracks. The AI though, that is what is stumping me. I would think someone would have noticed it before hand. It is also odd that the Xenos didn't come here and blow this facility apart.”
“I think we've got the time line nailed down on the AI virus. At least partially. I can vouch for it not being here when I first got here. I'm not sure what to say about ...” slowly he sat down in the chair, his eyes wide. “That's it,” he whispered finally.
“What?”
“That damn download!” Admiral Subert said, shaking his head. “Before we lost Earth we got that massive update. Tons of stuff. It was during the damn battle!” he said. “I bet you that was when they did it!”
“You mean they inserted the virus into the stream?” Sprite asked. “How? An encrypted file?”
“Or a changeling uploaded it. Part of the upload had an all points header. I bet you that damn virus is in a lot of other infected systems.”
“And it what, lurked there until the Xenos showed up to take them out? Taking down their defenses from the inside?”
“If it wasn't caught by our own AI,” Sprite reminded him. John nodded. “I can look into this to some degree but I believe I'll need Defender's help.” Her avatar grimaced. “Once I've finished repairing him. And myself,” she said. “If I can repair him. I'm not sure I can,” she said darkly.