by B. V. Larson
Suddenly, I knew why Carlos had come to wake me up. No one could make this call but me.
The stakes were high. Her eyes watched me as I thought about it. I was glad she wasn’t telling me all the pros and cons—they were obvious.
If we contacted this ship, and it wasn’t from Earth, we’d be revealing our hand. It could be very bad if it was some element of Battle Fleet 921 that we didn’t know about. After all, we hadn’t seen the fleet in a century. The Galactics might do things differently now.
“Do it,” I told her. “Contact them.”
She nodded, clearly unsurprised.
“Done,” she said, touching a spot on her screen. “We’re not identifying ourselves, we’re demanding that they do so. That way, if it isn’t a human ship, they might not realize we aren’t the Nairbs. It should buy us time.”
“Good thinking. How long until we can expect—?”
The radio began squawking even as I spoke. While I’d slept, we’d been closing in on that troublesome planet where our earlier siege had cost us time and lives. Besides, it wasn’t too far to go for communications traveling at the speed of light.
“Identify, or be destroyed,” said a robotic-sounding voice.
I frowned at the console she’d hooked up. “That doesn’t sound like Graves, or Deech.”
“It’s not,” Natasha agreed. “Analysis gives a ninety-five percent chance it’s an AI voice.”
“Really?” I asked. “AI is running that ship?”
“Seems like it.”
Narrowing my eyes with a new suspicion, I made a spiraling hand-gesture. She transferred the channel to my helmet, letting me talk to—whatever it was on the other end of the line.
“Unknown vessel,” I said, “are you allied with the rogue planet you’re orbiting?”
There was no answer, even after I waited twenty seconds or so, the length of time I’d waited before. I was just about to repeat my query when Natasha stiffened in alarm.
“They’ve fired missiles!” she said. “Two of them—we’ve got incoming, McGill.”
That surprised me quite a bit. I’ve had missiles fired at me any number of times, of course, but I’d been under the general impression we were having a conversation. Apparently, I’d been misinformed.
“Get our defenses up,” I ordered Natasha.
She threw her hands up in defeat, shaking her head. “I don’t know how to do that! I’ve spent every hour figuring out how to fly this thing—not how to make her fight.”
“Give me any info you have on those missiles,” I told her. “Are they similar in design to the X-ray missiles that were fired at us before?”
Natasha worked her computer for what seemed like a very long time, but which had to be under a minute.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding emphatically. “Same spectrography on their chemical trail. Same general size, acceleration—”
“Can we outrun them?”
She shook her head. “We’d have to go to warp again… I don’t know. I’ll start working the calculations.”
“You do that,” I told her. “Your timer here—is this accurate? It’s says we’ve only got four minutes.”
“That’s a best guess.”
“Great…”
Thinking fast, I opened the channel again. “Hostile ship,” I said, “there’s no cause to fire on us. We’re from—”
“Your vessel has been identified,” the artificial voice spoke up, interrupting me. “It’s been classified as ‘enemy’ and will be treated as such.”
“You’re making a mistake. This is Centurion James McGill. We are allied with the rogues… uh… the scientists of Arcturus IV.”
There was no immediate response, and I became a little nervous. This was my first time commanding a starship, and it looked like it might be my last.
The two missiles streaked toward our defenseless, stolen ship without pausing. They were going to go off when they got close and irradiate us all. We’d be as dead as fish sticks in a microwave after that.
“Contact the planet directly,” I told Natasha. “Call up Floramel for me.”
“Last I heard, she was aboard Nostrum,” Natasha pointed out.
“I know that, but you have to give it a try.”
Shrugging, she did as I asked.
The channel crackled, but we didn’t hear anything.
“Floramel? Anyone down there? You’re robot ship has gone mad. It’s attacking us, and we haven’t done a thing to make it hostile.”
Finally, a blip came back. “Is this the man known as James McGill?” asked a male voice.
“Yes, it certainly is.”
“If you’re innocent, we suggest you run from our vessel. It is automated, and it will protect us at all costs. If you don’t flee—you will be destroyed.”
“Where’d you get this ship, anyway?” I demanded.
“We’ve always had it hidden in the system. We didn’t reveal it because we weren’t sufficiently threatened.”
“Great, well, can’t you switch it off?”
“It’s a doomsday device. We’ve accepted our erasure, but we intend to greatly harm those who remove us from the cosmos.”
“This action on your part is premature,” I insisted. “Turn off your robot dog, and—”
“This conversation no longer serves any purpose,” the guy said. “We wish you well. May your last two minutes of existence be enjoyable.”
After that, the channel closed. I stared at the screen with my mouth hanging open.
“Well, shit a brick,” I said. “They don’t even seem to care.”
“I’m charging up the warp engines, but we need time, James.”
Contacting the AI ship again, I demanded that it answer me.
“Hey, one-two-three… wake up, robot!” I said.
Nothing came back, and I looked down at Natasha. “Can it hear me?”
“I think so, yes.”
“AI ship,” I said. “You’ve gone mad. Slow down those missiles, and we’ll leave your system. You’ll be a hero, having defended—”
“Your pointless communications are wasting my processing time,” the ship complained. “You must cease this idle chatting.”
“Wasting your processing time?” I demanded, incensed. “I’ll have you know you’re about to blow up an allied ship, one that would be willing and able to help you defend this system against the real battle fleet. I’ve never even heard of such a stupid AI system.”
“This is the McGill?” asked the voice.
“I already said so, moron.”
“Don’t antagonize it, James,” Natasha hissed at me plaintively.
“Your ship would do battle with the Imperial fleet that’s expected to arrive shortly?” the AI asked.
“Yes, of course. We don’t have much in the way of—”
Natasha reached up a hand, placing it over mine and shaking her head.
“Oh… let me repeat: yes, we will fight alongside you. We’d be glad to.”
The AI ship didn’t answer. Natasha’s eyes were huge, hopeless. She reached up a hand again, grabbed mine, then stood and gave me a kiss.
“You always were an idiot, James,” she said. “I don’t know what I saw in you.”
“Uh…”
That’s when the lead missile went off. I saw a bright spot, like a star being born among the heavens.
Was that how X-rays looked when they fried you?
I didn’t know, but I figured I was about to find out.
-56-
For about ten long seconds, I figured we were stone dead. I could tell by the way Natasha was acting all lovey-dovey that she thought we were goners, too.
But then, slowly, everyone relaxed. We weren’t dead. There was no way the beams from those missiles could have taken so long to reach us.
“What happened?” I asked.
Natasha let go of my hands and sat down again. She checked over her instruments.
“The X-rays went off—but they didn’t strike
our ship. They were either aimed badly, or—”
“Or nothing!” I whooped. “The AI changed its mind. Hot damn! Winner-winner chicken-dinner!”
Carlos stared at me as I celebrated life.
“McGill…” he laughed. “That’s got to be the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth. Chicken dinner? What’s that even mean?”
I gave him a hard look.
“Oh…” he said, “I mean: you sounded retarded, sir.”
“That’s better.”
I would have smacked him, but I was too happy to be alive right now.
“Sir,” Natasha said, “the lab people are trying to contact us.”
Sitting down with a huge sigh of relief, I picked up a strange-looking headset. It looked rubbery—and crusty.
“What are you supposed to do with this?” I asked her dubiously.
“You’re supposed to put it in your mouth,” Carlos said unhelpfully. “It’s like a suppository—but it goes in the other—”
I kicked at him, and he skittered away. Carlos was good at dodging well-earned blows. He’d had a lot of practice.
“You hold it up to your ear,” Natasha said. “The sound comes out of that bulb. But I wouldn’t, like, touch it to your ear.”
“Yeah, it’s sticky,” I said. “These Nairbs are disgusting creatures. I’m glad we spaced all the bodies.”
The bulb-thing began talking to me. Screwing up my face into a scowl, I held it close enough to listen.
“Hello?”
“McGill?” said a feminine voice. “Is that you?”
“Floramel? Yeah, it’s me.”
“You’re still alive. Did anyone die?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “The defender is a doomsday weapon, you have to understand.”
“Uh… how do you mean?”
“It’s meant to fight on after we’re all dead. We built it for the Cephalopods originally, but they never deployed it.”
“Hmm… Why didn’t you guys use it against Nostrum as soon as we showed up to invade?”
“We honestly didn’t think we had to.”
I found that somewhat offensive. She was saying that they thought they could beat us with one hand tied behind their backs. To be honest, though, they were probably right.
“Okay,” I said, “why didn’t it kill us?”
“We thought that it might have done so. We’re not in complete control of it. The ship has advanced AI, and it thinks for itself.”
“Huh… you mean you set a big dog on us without knowing if it would kill us or not? That’s not very nice.”
“You have to understand, James, you’ve been gone for days. When the Nairb ship warped out, everyone assumed that your boarding party had been lost.”
Thinking about it, I could see how they might make that mistake. After all, there had only been my single unit aboard.
“How did Nostrum do against the invading gargoyle-things?”
“The guardians? They caused some wreckage and some deaths, but they were destroyed. Your legion dealt with them quickly enough. But they did serve to convince Tribune Deech that you’d all been lost and the mission was a failure.”
“Yeah…” I said, trying to look at it from their point of view.
We’d been sent to board the enemy ship, but instead of returning, a pack of monsters had come back through the portal instead. Then, the target ship took off and vanished. That had to have looked very bad for us.
“So, they took the legion back to Earth?” I asked.
“That’s right.”
“And they just left you out here?”
“It sounds harsh, I know,” Floramel said, “but I understand your people. They’re hoping the battle fleet will come here and annihilate us, but then stop. They’re hoping that if they’re nowhere near the scene, Earth won’t get blamed.”
“But they must have been worried if they thought we’d failed. The Nairbs could have contacted the battle fleet by now, or joined their ranks.”
“That’s true,” she said, “they didn’t know what had happened, and they weren’t happy about that.”
“So… what now? Are you going to stay here and fight?”
“Yes,” she said firmly.
“How about you and I get together and talk?” I asked her.
Floramel hesitated, and I caught sight of Natasha’s reaction. She’d rolled her pretty little eyes at me. That wasn’t too much of a surprise, because I knew she still cared about me that way.
“All right,” she continued. “You’re in range now, so I’m sending another gateway link up to you. You’ll be able to move from your ship, to my planet.”
Sure enough, a gateway kit appeared in the hold. It was kind of freaky, watching the backed-up vids of its arrival.
We set up the kit and soon had two humming poles a meter apart. Before I walked through, I had a chance to marvel at the tech. These nerds really had come up with some neat tricks.
What if the lab people had decided to send us a bomb instead? I supposed that if that had been the case, I’d never have known what had hit us.
When I stepped through, Floramel and a team of her aides in white suits were there to meet me. They looked like they were curious about me, but they were also wary.
Floramel smiled, but the rest didn’t.
Taking this as an invitation, I stepped right up and gave her a hug.
Her eyes were wide in alarm, but her smile returned after a minute. I got the impression that hugging was weird to them, like one of those double-cheeked kisses French guys always handed out in the old vids from Earth.
In any case, she liked my personal greeting and led me up into the nicer, cleaner region of the dome.
“Where’d you hide that ship all this time?” I demanded, pointing up through the diamond-hard blue glass at the nighttime sky over head.
Arcturus was below the horizon, and the local stars were big and blazing through the relatively thin atmosphere of Rogue World. The ship itself was visible up there too. It blotted out a portion of the starscape and reflected the distant light of the central star. Like a silver-white triangle, it hung up there, motionless above the planet.
“It hides itself. It’s been up there all along with a light-shield surrounding it. We activated it when Nostrum left us. The battle fleet will come now, and all will be lost.”
I lowered my eyes back to hers. She was staring up at the sky. I could tell this was an emotional time for her, and I could understand why—but I didn’t get all of it, like her people’s strong motivations.
“Why’d you fight so hard to stay here?” I asked her.
“This is our home,” she said simply. “I know it must look like a lifeless rock to you, but we were born here.”
“That’s it? You’re defending your home turf?”
“It’s not just that. We lived for a half century as slaves to the Cephalopods. We don’t want to go back to being slaves to the Galactics now. All our life’s works would be gone as well, even if we did submit to survive. Isn’t that so?”
I thought about it and nodded. She had a good point. Her work was illegal. Even if, by some miracle of diplomacy, these rogues were allowed to live here under their bubble, they would never be permitted to continue inventing things that other star systems in the Empire no doubt had the patent on. The very idea was unthinkable to any Nairb or Mogwa.
“Yeah…” I said. “I get it. You couldn’t even do the work you’ve dedicated your life to. So, how are we going to keep you breathing?”’
“You can’t James,” she said, then she pointed up into the skies again at her automated ship. “But the AI ship might. It’s very powerful. It might just be able to stop the battle fleet.”
I laughed in her face, but she didn’t seem to get offended. She didn’t smile, either. She meant it.
Floramel was a hard case. She didn’t want to leave her world, even though I offered her safe transport out. She di
dn’t want that, and she didn’t want to admit she was going to lose this fight, either.
“We’ve got defensive capabilities we haven’t revealed yet,” she told me.
“Really? Why didn’t you use them against us, then?”
“I have to admit, we didn’t think you stood a chance against us. When you personally led a mission into our dome, we were shocked. All our predictions said it couldn’t be done by an external ground force. We were wrong.”
“You sure as hell were,” I told her. “And you’re wrong about the Mogwa fleet, too. They know how to fight. They won’t do it fairly, either. They’ll stand off in high orbit and blow this planet to fragments.”
She kept gazing up at the sky as she talked to me. Looking up like that, her face was as pretty as a picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, just as she couldn’t take her eyes off the stars.
Seizing opportunities had always been one of my strong areas. Accordingly, I slipped an arm around her thin waist and put my head up close to hers, staring up like she did.
“What…? You’re touching me again. Is this some kind of tradition on Earth?”
“It sure is,” I said. “Do you like it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s unexpected and provocative. Are you attempting to mate again?”’
“Uhh… Would you like that?”
She blinked at me. We were close, close enough to kiss. I already had one arm snaked around her waist, and for me, that’s halfway to home base.
But I didn’t pull her to me and go for it. I let her think about it first. This kind of girl was a thinker. Sometimes, you had to let that kind decide what was what for themselves.
She came around in the end and melted up against me. We kissed, and I held her close. We both looked up at the skies again.
“You’re looking for that fleet, aren’t you?” I asked her. “Waiting to see the moment it arrives.”
“Yes.”
“What will your people do when it shows up?”
“We’ll fight. First, the AI ship will challenge them. It will do battle. We’ve analyzed Galactic warships as best we can. It was built to deal with them.”
“You mean it has more tricks up its sleeve than just throwing out X-ray missiles?”