Using the excuse that we needed to see how equipment and personnel performed on an alien world, before we made a fateful jump far beyond the galaxy, I rotated every person down to the surface of Slingshot. We also tested at least one of each major type of equipment.
The rotation gave me an opportunity to go down to Slingshot myself. Chang reported the science team was adapting well, and no one had done anything especially stupid on the surface. The powered-armor suits allocated to the science team had their software altered by Skippy, to protect the users from themselves. Still, they could get themselves into trouble if they weren’t paying attention. Being on an alien planet, a former Rindhalu world, was a significant distraction for everyone. The Commissioners were subdued during their own time on the surface, awed by what they were witnessing. They chose their own souvenirs from the frozen mud, both for themselves and their leaders back home.
I used my time on the surface to work with part of the science team, who were trying to piece together a broken item of technology that, really, was too big for us to bring up the Dutchman anyway. When it became apparent that my attempted help was not actually helping, I left the scientists and wandered off on my own, shadowed by a STAR team soldier to keep me out of trouble. My shadow was an Australian who was probably resentful about having to babysit me, just as Poole had when Smythe stuck her with that assignment. Poole was back on Earth, training a STAR team at Fort Bragg. I missed her, but I could see why she had opted to skip what was supposed to be a rather dull mission to locate a beta site.
Anyway, I wandered off just far enough to be by myself, and found a silver piece of junk poking out of the ground. I crouched down and dug it out of the frozen, sticky mud. “Hey, Skippy,” I called. “Do you know what this thing is?”
“Hmm. I’m only able to use the sensors in your suit,” he replied. “It looks like part of an artificial gravity generator. That is kind of odd, Joe. Why would the spiders have needed to generate gravity on a planet? Hmm, unless- Give me a minute.”
I stood up, cradling the thing. It was smooth on one end, jagged on the other, and about the size of a candy bar. On the horizon, I could see a white line that was the glacier that covered the southern half of the globe. As I waited, the ground shook from another massive chunk breaking off and thumping down. Sensors showed the area closer to the glaciers had a better density of objects for us to investigate, but I was not authorizing that unless we got truly desperate.
Skippy interrupted my thoughts. “That object has been subjected to radiation that is characteristic of long-term service in space, and of heating that mostly likely came from falling through the atmosphere. Joe, I believe that thing you are holding was once part of a Rindhalu starship,” he announced with a touch of awe in his voice. “It must have been torn apart during the battle.”
“Wow,” I shuddered, and bent down to place the object gently back onto the froze surface of the mud.
“You are not going to keep it, Joe?” He was curious.
“No. It feels kind of, disrespectful.”
“Disrespectful of the Rindhalu? The battle happened a long time ago,” he chided me gently.
“Not of the Rindhalu. It feels disrespectful of you.”
“Um, how do you figure that?”
“Because you think you also were aboard a starship, then you ended up buried in mud on Paradise for millions of years. I don’t want that thing sitting on my desk, and reminding you of what happened to you, every time you look at it.”
“Oh. Wow. Thank you, Joe. You are a good friend.”
“I am a filthy, ignorant monkey, Skippy, but I do my best.”
On Day Eleven, Skippy found the range extender dingus he needed, found two of them actually. I ordered the heavy equipment disassembled and transported up to the ship, while the away teams kept poking around for other stuff that might be useful or least interesting. We got everything securely off the surface by Day Fourteen, preventing me from having to order a nuclear strike on a planet that already had suffered a hard life. We jumped away one day early, with the bonus that Smythe’s team found a potential third range extender thing, only a few hours before they lifted off the surface.
CHAPTER NINE
Skippy tested all three WiFi range extender dinguses while we jumped back toward the super-duty wormhole, and declared two of them should do the job. He would not know for certain until he actually used it, which meant there was a risk that our entire operation on Slingshot might have been a waste of time. There was also a tiny but, as he said it, ‘non-zero’ risk that hooking up the extender dingus to our wormhole controller module would ruin the module. That would leave us having to use the other module to get home, except that module was needed to sell our crazy-acting-wormhole story to the Maxolhx.
I had to trust his judgment, while warning him that if he said ‘Hold my beer’ before testing the dingus, he would never be allowed to sing on karaoke night again.
The night before we were scheduled to arrive back at the super-duty wormhole, he woke me up at 0217, but not with the usual frantic ‘Joe Joe Joe Joe’. Nor did he sound drunk, which was a blessing. I was not in the mood for a discussion about The. Meaning. Of. Life, or whatever.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, Joe, are you asleep?”
“If I say yes, will you go away?”
“That was kind of a trick question.”
“I figured that. What is it this time?” I grumbled groggily, hoping he would go away.
“Well, this is kind of a funny story,” he began.
I sat up in the bunk, being careful not to wack my head. “Your funny stories are never ‘funny’, Skippy.”
“They could be funny afterward, when the crew is sitting around drinking beers and remembering all the crazy shit we went through, right? Assuming the crew survives, I mean. Which is looking more unlikely, you know?”
“Shit. Skippy, it’s late and I want to sleep, so please just tell me why this problem is so important, it can’t wait four hours until I was going to wake up.”
“It could wait another four hours, but every time I discover something important and don’t tell you immediately, you throw a hissy fit.”
“I never get ‘hissy’, you ass. What is the problem?”
“After I finished inspecting the three range extenders, I looked at all the other trinkets the teams brought up from Slingshot.”
“Ok, good. You were making sure none of that stuff is dangerous, because you are concerned for the crew?”
“Um, actually I was trying to decide which souvenir I want to keep for my mancave, but let’s go with the concern thing if you like.”
“Asshole.”
“Anyway, I discovered to my surprise that one corroded, mud-crusted piece of junk we found is a data crypt.”
“Like a USB stick?”
“Close enough. It’s a memory storage device. The interesting thing is what I found after I downloaded-”
“Downloaded? Holy crap, please do not tell me you got hit with another virus or worm!”
“What? No way, dude. I downloaded it into a virtual sandbox, it was totally firewalled off. Do you want to hear what I found, or are you going to keep whining about stupid shit?”
“You do understand why I am concerned about your judgment, when you go off and poke your nose into-”
“Joe, all I hear is ‘whine whine whine’.”
I sighed, using the time to count to three. “Fine. Please tell me the amazing thing you found. If you are going to say that data thing was full of spider porn, I am gonna smack you with this pillow.”
“Not spider porn, Joe. Although, hmm, if you have gotten bored with your usual selection of porn, I suppose-”
“Tell me right now, or I’m going back to sleep.”
“Well, heh heh,” his avatar looked away from me, so I knew it was bad news. “It appears that the Rindhalu have a functioning Elder AI.”
No way was I going back to sleep after Skippy dropped that bombshell on my h
ead. Asking him to wait, I ducked into the shower, threw on some clothes and went to the galley for a cup of coffee. Some of the crew were in the galley, getting prepared for early duty shifts, or having just gotten off duty. They looked at me expectantly, knowing that when the commander was up at an unscheduled 0230 in the morning, it had to be interesting, and likely was not anything good. Hoisting my coffee and taking a sip, I offered a bland explanation. “Skippy wants to talk about a new section of his opera.”
There were sympathetic groans from the crew. “TTA, Sir,” a pilot said to me, and held up a hand for a fist bump.
Because I was on the other side of the galley, I held up my free hand and we did a virtual bump across the space between us. “TTA,” I agreed with an eyeroll.
‘TTA’ was slang the crew had started using while we were stuck on Gingerbread in the Roach Motel. It had several possible meanings, depending on the circumstance, the way it was said, and the body language of the person speaking. If Skippy did something truly awesome, like making a Kristang battlecruiser jump in on top of other lizards ships and promptly explode, ‘TTA’ was our prideful version of ‘Fucking-A’! Most times, however, ‘TTA’ was said with a groan and an eyeroll. After a while, ‘TTA’ had come to mean enduring anything that potentially sucked, for the privilege of being a Pirate. Like when a SpecOps team completed a grueling training session, and Smythe declared “That was an outstanding effort. Let’s do it again.” The team would mutter ‘TTA’ to each other, while they put their armored suit helmets back on.
There was another, very common, usage of the slang phrase. Whenever Skippy ‘entertained’ the crew on karaoke night, people would sit stoically in their chairs, quietly muttering ‘TTA’ to themselves as a reminder that, eventually, the beer can would be done singing for the evening.
When accompanied by a sad shake of the head or an eyeroll, the acronym ‘TTA’ meant Trust That Asshole instead of Trust The Awesomeness. Although nobody told Skippy about the alternate meaning.
The coffee mug was empty by the time I got back to my cabin, because medical research had indicated caffeine was more useful in my body than in a mug. I suppose, like anything, there were some idiots who disputed that research.
“Are you Ok, Joe?” Skippy asked as the door slid closed behind me. His avatar was in the same place on top of a cabinet, as he had been when I left to get coffee.
“Yeah,” I worked my scalded tongue around in my mouth. “I drank the coffee too fast and burned my tongue. Ok, let’s talk,” I sat down on my bunk, which out of habit, I had made up before getting into the shower. After years in the Army, seeing an unmade bed bugged me. “Tell me how you know the Rindhalu have an Elder AI, and that it is cooperating with them. Wait!” I held up a finger. “Before I get worked up about this, there are many kinds of AIs. Do you mean an AI like you, or something like the AI that controls, oh, something like a toaster or a dropship?”
“An AI like me, Joe. Or, something like me. I do not know what capabilities this AI has, because I suspect that some of my more awesome capabilities were not originally part of my design. My best-”
“Wait. Hit the Rewind on that, please. What do you mean by that? You were not always so fully awesome?”
“No. In some cases, I am guessing that I am now substantially more awesome than my creators originally intended. I have developed capabilities that I am pretty sure I didn’t have before. For example, my ability to warp spacetime is far greater than the capability built into my matrix. Do you remember when we first docked with the Flying Dutchman, and I took over their original AI?”
“Yes,” I think I knew what he meant. “The Dutchman performed a pre-programmed jump by itself, but you warped spacetime to throw the endpoint away from where the ship was supposed to emerge, so the Thuranin fleet couldn’t track us.”
“Correct. Those little green pinheads assumed their star carrier was lost in action,” he chuckled.
“Ok, so? You warped spacetime back then, and that was not that long after we met.”
“I did warp spacetime at that time, yes. However, it only takes a subtle tweak to the fabric of spacetime to throw a jump endpoint off its target. Plus, when we captured the Dutchman, I warped spacetime very close to myself. On our next mission, when we got ambushed by a squadron of Thuranin destroyers, do you remember what happened?”
“I remember a whole lot of shit happened real quick back then, but, I think I know what you mean. You warped a star, to burn those destroyers with a solar flare. Then you flattened spacetime around us, so we could jump away.”
“Exactly, Joe, very good,” he praised me without his usual snarkiness. “There are two great examples of me doing things I was not previously capable of. Warping a freakin’ star required me applying a whole lot of energy, and creating the warp effect far from my location. I was able to do that, only because I learned something from warping when we stole the Dutchman.”
“Whoa. At the time, you acted as if warping a star was no big deal, like it was a simple magic trick or a hobby.”
“Well, of course, Joe. I am, as you know, extremely modest.”
My eyeballs came very close to spraining, I rolled them so hard. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.”
“Plus, it makes me appear even more awesome, when I pretend to do incredible things with casual ease. Really,” he chuckled, “half the time, inside I am crossing my fingers for good luck and saying ‘oh shit I hope this works’.”
“You what?”
“Oh, um,” this time his laughter was nervous. “Not recently, of course not.”
“How recently?”
“Do we really have to dwell on the past, Joe? It is much more useful to consider our bright future, as we move forward together in solidarity.”
“Uh huh. Did you get that slogan from the Joe Stalin book of inspirational sayings?”
“No, why?”
“No reason. So, you are developing new and better awesomenesses?” I didn’t know if that was an actual word, but it should be.
“Correct. Here is another example. To calculate how to jump the ship through an Elder wormhole, which is still one of my Greatest Hits, by the way, I had to invent a new branch of mathematics. Not just a new type of math, it is an entirely new way to conceptualize transdimensional variables. More importantly, I had to rewire the way I thought about math, to greatly streamline my processing capacity. That is also how I was able to outthink the AI on the Maxolhx cruiser, when I made that ship vibrate itself apart during our last mission. No way could I have done that sort of thing when I was buried in the dirt on Paradise. Joe, I still have significant and annoying restrictions on my actions, but in some ways, it is like I have been freed to explore my full range of capabilities. Not only can I now do things I suspect the Elders prevented me from doing, I might be doing things they didn’t expect I could do. It is kind of humbling, Joe. For sure, I know the wormhole network never expected any fool to try jumping a ship through connected event horizons, which leads me to believe that the Elders themselves did not think that was possible.”
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit indeed, Joe. The Elders build a network of stable wormholes, that have remained in operation for millions of years after they departed the galaxy. Yet, who said ‘Duuuuuh, can we jump through a wormhole’? A filthy monkey, that’s who! Monkeys kick ass, Joe!”
Maybe Skippy was right. Maybe my superpower, if I had one, was being too dumb to know what questions not to ask. Creative Stupidity might not look great on a resume, but it had been causing havoc across the galaxy. “Sorry to drag us off topic there,” I began to apologize.
“Right,” he snorted, “because you never do that.”
“Oh, shut up. The Rindhalu have an Elder AI, even if it might not be quite as awesome as you are.”
“Oh,” he chuckled. “It is a safe bet that thing can’t approach my awesomeness.”
“Really? You have been awake for only a short time, right? How long has this other AI
been active?”
“Oh shit,” he gasped. “I hadn’t thought about that. Thanks a lot, Joe, you jackass!” he glared at me. “That thing has had a long time to expand its range of capabilities. Oh, damn it, we might all be totally screwed. Maybe we should take the ship outside the galaxy, and stay there.”
“Hey, before you start throwing stuff into a suitcase to prepare for a long vacation, how about you start with the facts? What do you know, and how do you know it?”
“I know the Rindhalu have an Elder AI, because there was a mention of it in that data crypt the away team found under the mud on Slingshot. The data is kind of vague, other than making it clear the Rindhalu have an Elder AI, and that it is functional. The data crypt was sort of about a research grant, one group of Rindhalu scientists applying for access to the AI, to assist with their efforts. Sort of like how scientists on Earth submit proposals to use a particle collider for their experiments.”
Part of me was wondering if the unfortunate Rindhalu scientists had to listen to their AI sing to them, before it would help their research. “That’s it? You don’t know how long this AI has been helping them, or what it can do?”
“No. That info was not in the data crypt. Before you ask, I also do not know where it is, or was. If it was on the Rindhalu homeworld, then it is not there now, because that is now in Maxolhx territory. The Rindhalu would have made every possible effort to secure the AI when they were forced to leave their homeworld, so I am certain the Maxolhx did not capture it during their brief war. It is possible the Rindhalu lost the AI, if the ship it was aboard was destroyed, and neither side was able to recover it.”
“That is not much to go on,” I mused, disappointed.
“Having access to an Elder AI would explain the rapid technological progress of the Rindhalu, within a hundred thousand years of their achieving starflight capability. In a short period, the spiders went from barely being able to travel from a star system to a nearby Elder wormhole, to the point when their civilization spanned the galaxy. Hmmm, it may also explain why their initial burst of exploration faded just as rapidly, and they pulled back to an inner core of worlds until the Maxolhx rose to prominence. Why bother exploring the secrets of the Universe, when they have access to an Elder AI that can explain everything to them? There is something else, Joe.”
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