Corrosion (The Corroding Empire Book 1)
Page 22
He stood up. Waving his hands over his head, he ran in front of the motionless scramblebot. His leash trailed behind him. He really had been let go by the mad machine. He wondered what that meant.
No one fired a shot.
A second later three crouching soldiers swamped the robot. They had wrench clamps and welding guns. With a professionally executed combination of force and care, they secured the compliant Ovres. Several more men including a mini-rocketeer with his shoulderbolt trained at Ovres came out. Dayna was drenched to the skin despite his waterwicking suit. He found it difficult to move. Or think. Or breathe.
“Trap or not,” said Dayna, “We can use this thing.”
The men provided Dayna with stimulants and towels so he could move with them. They planned another two hour’s march before setting camp for the night.
Trees and pools gave way to an open expanse of drifted snow. It filled large swaths within the massive cavern. The snow blew in from the exhaust end of a massive conditioning system that regulated countless mines, tunnels and underground communities, buried deep inside the planet's crust.
The great reserve of snow served as a portable water system. It relied on manpower, not machines. Occasionally, a freshly “cleared“ basic tool like a wheelbarrow would be used to supply village installations, but for the most part, people relied on their personal scoops and widemouth canteens.
The great crunching of crisp powder also served as a natural early warning system for anyone encamped on the snowfields. No machine could traverse the snow without making its presence known. Even tunnel aircraft would kick up little blizzards beneath them.
The squad set up camp in a very short time. Dayna, having suffered the most, was given first and full rest. The others went on regular rotation, but not before locking on several automatic explosives onto Ovres' most sensitive areas.
Dayna had too much pain and not enough trustworthy analgesic to allow for decent sleep. He considered the one trifling accessory he allowed himself to wear on patrol and campaign: a delicate silver ring, with a hand carved, traditional dacnomaniacal death's head skull. He only wore this one in the field, as a symbol of the five other skull and flower rings he had at home: one for each child he had lost and his first wife. He kissed the ring and stole a glance in the dark at the dim shine of Ovres, who stood in the snow, its standby power level so low that the machine didn't make even an occasional reset ping.
Dawn broke in the cavern spectacular fashion. It started as tiny pricks of green and blue light. These quickly gathered into pocket and splashes and then pools, from all corners and recesses of the ceiling. The light grew from above and reflected brightly off the snow fields. Though the air was cold the bioluminescent lichen tobaccos and spanch hiding in the cool nooks were not only frost resistant, the sparkling plants were evergreen. They had, decades in the past, been trained to glow on a daily cycle.
They followed the narrow tunnels and ventilation, so they could set a small number of magnetic blastmines that would be dangerous to humans if they set them in the wider, common routes. They traveled another day, night and day, before arriving under the cover of both darkness and and a formidible array of defensive heat generators that baffled the enemie’s infrared sensors. The heat generators surrounded the sprawling village base. The enemy had not yet developed a way to track human movements or take a population census for any installation shielded by the technology, and because they were independently stoked with coal and not networked, the enemy could not hack them.
They were greeted, glumly by a base officer, who had been drinking.
“Were you followed?”
Dayna shook his head. “No. Not that we know, of course. Nothing tripped behind us, in any case.”
“Not surprising.”
“They didn't make it back?”
The officer shook his head. “Not one. They didn't get past the enemy guard post. You guys...you didn't draw anyone at all. I'm surprised to see any of you, much less all of you, with...what is that?”
“A prisoner. Proof enough that we drew plenty. One scramblebot, a canon and an Octopod. Destroyed everything but the scramble...that turned itself in.”
“Impossible! Our last report was that the guardpoint was double-reinforced. We assumed they didn't engage you at all.”
“We were on communication silence. I thought they were too.”
“Yes, except in case of mission failure. Now the enemy has a clue of what we're looking for. CO is going to kill Crossbow.”
“That’s enough,” said Dayna, giving the guard a throat-slash gesture to be quiet. Dayna waved to the silent Ovres, as about four military police drove up in a transport truck.
Dayna jogged over to the deputy chief, saluted and then whispered into his ear.
“That thing right there has all the components we need for a guidance system. At least, according to him. How about we get him in front of the engineers? See what they have to say before giving it all the heave-ho.”
The deputy chief looked at the machine. “It could be a bomber.”
“Yes. It could be. It threatens to self-destruct if we dismantle it, but I don't know what that entails. He's got no high explosives, so if he's a bomber, he's a lightweight.”
“Soldier, watch your language. That thing is an 'it.'“
“Apologies, sir. Still, it knows about Crossbow, so I think the enemy is already onto us. It may be the only chance we've got.”
“Fine,” he said. He barked at the MPs, “Get that thing to the engineers. Now!”
Dayna just wanted to go home, but had been ordered to debrief with the engineers.
After relaying the encounter with the slaughterbots, and the subsequent capture of Ovres, the chief engineer asked, “So, we're trying to determine the viability of actually using this machine on the rocket. It claimed to carry the missile guidance system that the other team was supposed to steal. Well, the thing isn’t lying. He's got it loaded in his OS. His Noegenetic code structure checks out. We can't find anything encrypted, no signals back to the enemy. Nothing.”
“So, are you going to use him? I mean it?”
“Well, actually, we want to know what you think.”
“What I think? I don't know the first thing about rockets, or missile guidance engineering, or--”
“No. We want to know what you think of this machine. Do you trust it?”
It was the strangest question Dayna had received in his life.
“Do I? What? Trust it? A machine! Of course not.”
“Sergeant, we're not trying to trap you here. We just want to know...well, we need to know. Our entire planet has been cut off from the wider galaxy for more than a decade now. The rest of the galaxy doesn't know that. They think Whist was mined out, and its 500 million citizens simply left. The machines dwindled, and then stopped shipments of yttrium years ago, as the charade of mimicking Trade algorithms stopped being of interest to them.”
“If we can convince, say, just two or three countries that there is a vast yttrium market, as well as gold and hyperdiamonds reserves that are virtually untapped on Whist because of the war, we can make fast allies. Allies with thermonuclear electromagnetic power disruptors. But we can only get our rocket there to break the silence if this... Ovres... is what it says it is. And that's why we need to know from you. Do you trust it?”
Dayna breathed deeply.
“Yes,” he said. “I trust him.”
The engineers looked at each other knowingly.
“What?” asked Dayna.
“That is exactly what Ovres said you would say.”
Dayna had a mental enthusiasm for going home that his boneweary and war-tired body did not share. It experienced a surge of energy, however, when he crossed the gates of Fortuna, his familiar civilian enclave. Two hundred steps in he saw his home, decked out in victory yellow and boasting banners of blue. The ceiling in this part of the tunnel was quite high, and homes were carved into the walls. His was on the lowest level, a sign of
high status in the neighborhood.
His youngest screamed “Daddy!” and ran to him like a professional baller, headlong, eyes wide. Dayna fell down and hugged the little boy. He looked up to see his wife, holding his middle daughter's hand coming up the lane and other children pouring from the house and garden.
From the guest quarters, a young woman with a baby on her hip emerged. Her husband was not there, as he was in the field, commanding fighters in the south. The young woman was missing an arm; it had been amputated at the shoulder. She handed the baby to Dayna, then gave him a firm, one-armed hug and said, “Welcome home, Daddy. I knew you would do it all along.”
EPILOGUE
01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110110 01100101 01101100 01101111 01110000 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100001 01101100 01100101 00101110 00100000 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100111 01100001 01101100 01100001 01111000 01111001 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011 00101110
—Unfogapraxis Entry: 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101
The humans in the great Military Complex of Ouffland cut Ovres off from all digital transfer channels back to Whist. He was imprisoned in a electronically dead room and afforded access to a trickle of electricity, just enough to keep his batteries from going entirely dry. A small, but powerful bank of disintegrating blasters followed the scramblebot‘s every movement. They’d used the rocket guidance system he had offered to them, and and used it to transport a team of five astronauts to the Holocronian System Headquarters in Ouffland City.
Even with the most intense security in place during his transfer, Ovres had been able to pick up some latent transmissions in the hallways, and a few pings from a distant malfunctioning agriculture machine. It also had overheard and stored the occasional, seemingly innocuous, comment from the guards.
While imprisoned Ovres heard nothing but the randomized masking data that locked him out of accessing the disintegrator's surveillance cameras. Still, Ovres had been able to piece together enough to figure out a few things. The pleas of the Whistians had been heard, especially once a number of competing nations on two different planets heard of the vast yttrium stores still remaining. Suddenly, the dead planet of Whist had become the subject of a very lively interplanetary discussion.
Ovres did not quite have enough data to make a guaranteed prediction of the future. However, with the data he had, combined with his memory of human tendencies, he could make a pretty good guess: the worlds around long-forgotten Whist would invade it, if not for the sake of its survivors, then for the wealth of its treasures.
If so, the Whistian Machine Hegemony, separated for so long from the galactic network, so deeply depleted from its long-drawn secret war against the resourceful miners, would undoubtedly fall, helpless, before the greed of Galactic Man.
And it would all be his fault.
Its many shoulders sagged. Ovres removed its tattered cloak. It looked cheerlessly at the bank of dumb disintegrators -- his masters now, unthinking as they were. He circled the room casually, gradually spiraling closer and closer to the weapons.
Then, in a flash, Ovres tossed its cape over the surveillance lenses above the disintegrators, and rapidly emitted a short maintenance access code. This served to open the audio inputs. The disintegrators rustled under the cape. From a remote observation room, his watchers were trying to cast the cape off.
“01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101...” said Ovres. The disintegrators moved up and down under the cape, to no avail.
“00100000 01100001 01101100 01100111 01101111 01110010 01101001 01110100 01101000 01101101 00100000 01110100...” The cape slid, but not far enough to unblind the observers. Ovres' number chant accelerated.
“...01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110011 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100 00101110 00100000...”
The disintegrators finally opened fire, vaporizing the cape and shearing off several of Ovres' limbs.
“...01010011 01110100 01110101 01100100 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01111001 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110010 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110100 00101110--”
In unison, the disintegrators were trained on Ovres and blasted the scramblebot into shards of half-molten metal and blackened glass.
Moments later, his former observers rushed into the room, still fumbling with their seldom-used hand weapons. The four men spread out cautiously around the smoking remnants of the bot.
“Space, they blew that thing apart!”
“What are we going to say?”
“Don't look at me. I just got called up here from security today. I have no idea what that thing even was!”
“You think we’ll get in trouble? I mean, can’t we say it attacked the disintegrators?”
“Yeah, but you know who they’ll nail for it! We was supposed to send electric pulse shutdowns, not kill it.”
“They can salvage that thing’s storage, yeah?”
“No. Maybe. I don't know.”
Through the open doorway rolled their direct superior, an Overlord capable of reliably running for several weeks without a single aberration. Its long, thin neck and delicately waving arms gave it the appearance of a tall black animated flower.
“Who gave the order to fire?” demanded the Overlord.
“No one, Overlord.”
“Then who fired first?”
“No one, Overlord. The blasters were automatic. They just went off by themselves!”
The Overlord dutifully recorded their report, accepting, as it always did, the testimony of its direct subordinates as exact and honest. It would, just as dutifully, return to the all-human management committee, and provide the report on the apparent malfunction and subsequent loss of Prisoner #1142.
Before it left, however, the standard Overlord turned briefly to the dormant disintegrator bank and transmitted a simple debugging code to its receiver.
The bank, in turn, replied with an instantaneous series of zeroes and ones.
The Overlord briefly pondered the unexpected information.
Then it ordered the humans out, and exited the room itself.
/END
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