Alpha Rises

by James David Victor

  “We will need to be prepared for any eventuality, combat or strategic,” he said sternly. “Although I have to tell you that there are no mission projections for what we are going into.” Which was a polite way of saying that absolutely anything could happen.

  “Yes, Captain-sir.” Lupik took it well, and added another belt of small grenades to her carapace.

  That’s what I like to see, Farlow thought. “Any news on those X3s?” he barked. “Shouldn’t they be back by now?”

  “No telemetry received, sir.” Merik was leaning over his console. “But there is a disturbance half a click away. Rocket signal…”

  “On the overheads, now!” The captain moved to see the curve of the trash-field, and then a sudden closeup when a plume of sparks and gases burst out from behind one of the containers as a very small shape hurtled out into space. It was one of the drones, flying erratically.

  “She’s home, sir.”

  “Download the material in her memory banks and bring her in to dock.” The captain thought quickly. If only one had made it back, then that meant that the other two had met with resistance of some kind. He needed to know what it was they would be facing down there.

  “Downloading from drone three… The data is pretty heavily damaged, but we have some video files and scan reports,” the captain heard the specialist say as the drone slid back toward them on an awkward path, making for its original deployment hub. With any luck, they would be able to salvage more and send it off for tests at Armcore Prime.

  On the screens above, the map image flickered and was replaced by the data from the third drone.

  The third drone peeled away from its brethren, arcing toward the entry point into the trash-field. The large blocks of the container walls loomed in front of it, like an impossible cityscape of floating buildings. In a heartbeat, it entered this new domain, its sensors pinging off the nearest obstacles as its on-board computers recalibrated its path and fired its positional rockets accordingly.

  Nearest Objects: 1

  Dimensions: 80m X 160m

  Metal Composition: Poly-steel 92% Graphene 6% Rubber 2%

  Sonar Results: 17% space. Metal compounds make up rest.

  Systems Reading: Active. Tracking computer. Propulsion systems.

  The drone was surrounded by floating castles filled with metal rubbish. It diverted its flight to pass by the first and into a zone much more densely populated. Its preliminary readings reported the same thing, time and again. More containers. More metal. No movement other than slight axial and gravitational drift.

  Alert! Telemetry lost with mothership!

  Alert! Telemetry lost with X3 drone 1 and 2!

  But the third search and surveillance drone did not slow down or halt its procedure. Backup routines that had been pre-programmed into its small body kicked in, overriding any abort commands or alarm signals, and instead told it to carry on with its mission. Reach the planetoid of Sebopol, conduct an orbital pass, sweeping the body of the planet for all available information.

  The small robot swerved to one side, out of the way of a slowly tilting trash container, and silently turned through a gap in the next layer, never finding anything different in its readings. Its scans pinged off the nearest metals and rebounded back to itself, but it could not reach any further. Of what it was racing toward, there was no warning or sign.

  Another tight aerial turn, and the small body avoided being crushed and was suddenly clear of the shell of fragmentary metal around Sebopol. From its angle, it looked like it was piercing down toward a dark world.

  Alert! Connection established with X3 drones 1 and 2!

  Off to one side, the other two bodies of the surveillance drones broke through from their own shells and speared down in unison with their sibling.

  But they were not alone.

  The world ahead was dull ochre, bronze red, and black with swathes of dusty white where there were still some dust-plains yet to be filled with humanity’s rubbish. In other parts, all that could be seen were plains of jagged bronze and steel, black and grey. A miasma of thin opalescence enshrouded the planet, as its thin atmosphere reacted with the decades of elements cast at its surface. It was a Vulcanic, Promethean world in the making. A world slowly being transformed into a metal ecosystem, fit only for machine life.

  All of this information was registered by the X3 drone in a matter of nanoseconds, but their collective course was already shifting away from their original target and to what was firing their alerts in rapid succession.

  Alert! Movement detected at grid reference…

  Alert! Propulsion systems active…

  Alert! Unknown scanning systems detected…

  In the space over the planet, the X3 drones were witness to a sight that no other living or mechanical creature had ever seen. It was like watching the universe give birth to a god…or was it what it would be like if a god had decided to torment its creation?

  Gouts of flaming gases were vented with precision into the near-orbital space between the trash shell and Sebopol. Strange purple and white static energies were playing over monstrous forms. Shapes like metal arms, hooks, and grapples convulsed and churned against each other, locked in a thumping, mechanistic embrace.

  The drones had nothing in their limited databanks to describe what this was. An industrial process? A space station? A warp engine malfunction?

  From portholes and docking ramps, new chains of metal emerged, flailing in the air as if tasting the vacuum for the first time. Clouds of other, smaller drones like the X3s swarmed them, picked them clean of scraps and finished them. And still the floating monstrosity convulsed and ground its heavy gears. Large shells of metal, cast in curves and dressed in iridescent patterns never before seen in human manufacturing, locked and closed over this intimate display of industrial organs. Bursts of flame and energy played roughly throughout its own exoskeleton.

  The third drone was collecting data on this new creature. It had engines, but they were not of a type known to the drone’s database. It had fins, so it could fly. The power signature that it was radiating was of a magnitude a hundred times larger than the clipper-scout that the drone had come from. Enough power to run a small space station. Enough to power a battle group of Armcore vessels.

  But then a wave of data-signals swept over each drone, simultaneously smelling them, tasting them, assessing them for what they were.

  Alert! Invasive protocol! Firewall breached! Security protocols activated!

  The immense computer intelligence swept over the drones’ infantile code-defenses with ease, disabling them and reprogramming their computers—all but one.

  The third drone somehow, miraculously, managed to fend off this attack by reiterating its fundamental programming. Get data. Return to hub. It had made the calculation that its mission was over, and it was already turning and firing its rockets erratically.

  Maybe the strange god-machine was already too busy with its birthing procedure to fully devote its attention to the task, or maybe drone 3 was just lucky. Whatever the reason was, the third drone careened off the nearest orbital container, damaging its thin body as it spiraled into the shell of metal. Behind it, its last scans revealed that its two siblings had hung motionless for a moment, before slowly speeding toward their new father, the alien machine god, and they radiated completely different signals than any X3 should be capable of.

  As soon as drone 3 was back in the shield of metal buildings, the alien scanning stopped, halted by its own camouflage. The third drone sped on, thumping off the trash containers on its desperate flight home.

  In the final screens from drone 3, it showed the clipper-scout that was also its mother appear in the distance, as it gratefully rolled and wobbled back to its own birthing hub…

  “What the hell was that!?” Reus exclaimed from the cockpit in alarm. Behind him, in the central cargo and crew area, his look of alarm was mirrored in the face of Gunner Lupik, but not the other two, surprisingly.

  Th
e captain-who-was-once-a-general was too old to be surprised any more by what the universe had to throw at him. Not that what he had just witnessed through the drone’s onboard cameras wasn’t shocking, surreal, and unnatural, but it was also something real, which was the small crutch that he held onto. Whatever that thing is, it has a body, and if it has a body, we can damage it, he thought. Just not with anything on board this little tin-can, he added disparagingly about the miniscule ship that he had been tasked with by Senior Tomas. If I had my old battle cruiser? Then we’d have a fight! he thought ruefully. He might even be able to kill that thing if he still had his old command. Another reason why Senior Tomas needed to learn to listen to his older officers. Need to work with the machine around him.

  If we can get a battle group here double-time, we might be able to nip this whole thing in the bud! he thought with real hope…and a little regret that he probably wouldn’t be the one to do it.

  Beside him, and for whatever reason, the captain noted that the Specialist Merik had not been surprised at all. Maybe he was mad, or maybe all shock and fear had been programmed out of him by the Armcore Specialist Training Program.

  Either way, Farlow now had some intel on what was going on in there. Alpha is building something. But what? A body? A super-station?

  “We have the drone secure?” Farlow asked.

  “Yes, sir.” The specialist checked his console. “Returned and stowed in its hub.”

  “Then I think our work here is done,” Farlow commented, feeling only slightly sad that he didn’t get a chance to lead an away mission as he had hoped. Stop being prideful, he told himself. Wear your badge. The mission required him to get intel on the target and report back, which was what he would do. “Turn us around, Pilot, and get us to a safe warping distance—”

  FZZAP! It was precisely at that point that all the lights in the clipper ship flickered, and the large overhead screen burst into a firework of sparks.

  “What the—” Farlow was jumping back as the ship started to list to one side. Red emergency lights flushed on, filling the room with a hellish, baleful glow.

  “Pilot! Report! The captain grabbed onto the Gunner Lupik’s hand to stop her from falling to the floor. He noted that Specialist Merik was still clinging onto his console, furiously typing as if possessed.

  “All systems reset, Captain-sir! Navigation’s down! Propulsion’s coming back online… Oh no.” The captain saw the pilot’s face go a deathly white.

  “What is it?”

  “Weapons system offline,” he said.

  “What was it? Were we hit by something?” Farlow shouted. Do we have the engine power to jump? Where are the escape pods? His military mind started racing.

  “No damage reported, Captain-sir. I–I don’t understand what happened!” Reus was starting to panic.

  “I know.” The specialist had abandoned his console and was half falling, half jumping down the tipped-over side of the clipper-scout and toward the equipment lockers. “It was the drone. It’s downloaded some kind of backdoor between our system and that thing out there…”

  “Alpha,” Farlow whispered in horror as he realized what had happened. He had read the reports on the creation of Alpha, back when he still had four stars on his lapel. The Alpha AI was the most advanced machine intelligence in existence, even before it had been melded to that Valyien thing. Now what could it do? It could certainly reprogram a crappy X3 drone or three, he thought. Alpha was too smart to not have planned this out several hundred moves ahead of their squishy biological brains, the captain reasoned. Alpha must have infected drone 3 with a specially cooked-up virus and had allowed the cameras to show that it had somehow miraculously escaped…but it never had. Alpha has a backdoor into this ship. It will only be a few seconds before that thing has complete control over it…

  How do you beat a strategist that has studied every major conflict and analyzed your every move, the captain thought.

  “Specialist? What are you doing?” He turned to see Merik unpacking the lockers.

  “Warp engine, Captain. Our only chance is to jump out of here, now.”

  Maybe, the captain thought. But wouldn’t Alpha already know that was precisely what we were going to do?

  “Jettison the drone. That’s an order,” he commanded the specialist.

  “Captain-sir, there isn’t time…”

  “Then make time, dammit! I am still your commanding officer, Specialist!” he snapped. And if Alpha has already seen what we are going to do, then we need to do something unexpected…

  With a glare, Merik climbed back up to his console and punched at the keys. “Done. Can we get out of here now, please, Captain-sir?”

  “Pilot? Is propulsion back up yet?” Farlow ignored him.

  “Aye, sir. But only rockets. The warp engine is still cycling.” Reus sounded frantic.

  “Good. Full burst on the rear rockets.” Farlow was climbing hand over hand up the cargo hall and to the cockpit.

  “What!?”

  “You heard me! I want full burn. Park us inside that metal shield, now!” Farlow snapped. “It dampens all signal controls, doesn’t it? Including the control signal coming from Alpha! That will give us time to reboot the ship’s systems and repair.”

  None of his crew looked as though they appreciated traveling nearer to whatever that mechanical god-thing was, but Farlow still had a touch of his old authority in his voice, and Reus hit the propulsion rockets to make the clipper-scout surge forward, toward the unknown.

  10

  Jumpers

  The container units crackled with warp energy, a glow like a sun’s glare, although there were no large stars in this section of space. Suddenly, the light melded, mutated, and with a feeling like an explosion-wave underwater, the containers blipped out of existence.

  This was a common occurrence here in the Lashar System, itself a fairly broad and barren space between the neighboring systems of Andis and Kuvalla. Only a few rocky planetoids and slow orbit asteroids passed through. That and the hundreds of thousands of container ships.

  Lashar System was especially chosen for this purpose, as a transit site in the same way that you might find a monorail station or a starport hub on any of the Coalition home worlds nearby. Lashar was safely inside the confines of Coalition of space—secure from pirates and enemy raids—but also empty enough that large amounts of warp jumps could be performed without any associated hazard of gravitational waves or unintended accidents. The many mega-conglomerate companies of the Coalition had been using this space for a hundred years or more, and there was a steady string of container ships spread out like pearls on an invisible thread, weaving their way through.

  It was also where the Andis gas-harvester had been destined, there to birth its own container ships from its metallic womb and pump them out into the line toward their destination.

  “You found it?” the tense Captain Eliard muttered to the tense Cassandra beside him.

  “Yeah. That one.” The blonde woman looked up from her cramped console beside the ship’s wheel. The cockpit was designed for the Mercury’s original purpose as a luxury racer, and not as a serviceable transport.

  El followed Cassandra’s pointed finger out of the cockpit windows, to see the large steel box with the under-slung booster rockets, circular warp engines, and tiny personnel cab at the front making it look like some kind of horrible queen bug, pregnant with its offspring. What the captain knew it really was pregnant with, however, was stellar gases from the harvester.

  “And you’re sure? I don’t want to end up at Earth now, right?” Eliard said through his clenched teeth. Cassandra could tell that he was already living on his very last nerve and there was a rather ugly vein popping from the side of his temple. It was from being there, this deep inside Coalition space—the very place she knew that he had fled from many years ago to live the life of a smuggler and a pirate, stealing the Mercury Blade along the way. That would be enough to put him into a lifetime isolation cube somewher
e in Coalition space, but now that they were also wanted by Armcore for the theft of Armcore property, the House Archival Agent knew that they were probably all set for a firing squad somewhere on some terrible desert planet.

  Yeah, it’s pretty clear why he’s tense, Cassandra thought.

  The agent, however, had no such sign of stress about her. As a member of one of the Coalition noble houses, she was used to spending time moving through Coalition space, and even moving through it with a degree of comfort. It wasn’t the luxurious upbringing that calmed her nerves, though. It was the fact that she had been trained from an early age to be an agent—one of the emissaries of the Coalition Noble Houses who ‘did their work abroad,’ as the saying went. In other words, she had learned how to sneak in and out of situations, to steal documents, and to whisper the right words to the right people at precisely the wrong moments. She did so with professional ease.

  “Then let’s do it.” El nodded, easing off on the Mercury’s thrusters so that the ship started to drift out of the matched trajectory with the harvester. They were still confident that their signals wouldn’t be measurable against the warp engines that were firing every few seconds, but the captain didn’t want to take any chances.

  Cassandra felt her stomach lurch a little as the captain let the Mercury fall just slightly out into space. The ship moved gracefully, like a slow-motion dancer.

  THRUM. A tap of the captain’s hands on the ship’s wheel and one of the rear booster rockets burned for just a fraction of a second, righting them, and then a second, slightly longer burn propelled them toward their target.

  The arrow-like wedge of the Mercury drifted forward on minimal controls, all radio and telemetry chatter silenced, underneath the line of container ships. It was masterful flying, Cassandra had to recognize, but she also knew that this wasn’t going to be the difficult part of the whole operation.

  The Mercury slid forward effortlessly, another touch of the rear left-hand side booster and it spiraled perfectly out of the view of the personnel cab and ducked under the next container ship, the one that Cassandra had identified as going to Armcore Prime.