Titans

by Edward W. Robertson

  "You made the right decision." I drew my stunner and shot the six crew members as fast as I could pull the trigger, leaving them stiff across the floor. "Get these guys stacked in a corner. Hey Fay, how do we turn this thing around?"

  "Confirm termination," the policeman said.

  "Huh?" Baxter said, glancing between Arthur and the cop.

  "Attention Officer Mayes." Arthur's voice rang in the small room. "I, too, am an artificial intelligence. I have a small bomb inside my casing. Any attempt to capture or disable—"

  The gun crashed. Arthur spun off the table and bounced against the wall, splinters of plastic bursting into the air, peppering the side of Baxter's face. His earbud went dead. He screamed and lurched forward.

  His ears roared with a second crash. His head yanked back and his left eye went blank. He stumbled around the table as the officer froze—he'd put one clean through the AI's head—then Baxter grasped the end of the pistol with one hand and the cop's throat with the other and squeezed until he felt one pull free and the other collapse. The man's legs went out, his limp weight dangling from Baxter's arm.

  "Arthur?" he said out loud. "Arthur?"

  22

  "Eight down, 643 to go." I rubbed my hands together against the freezing cold, voice raised over the cheering throngs of colonists. The matte black arrowhead of Fay's shuttle detached from the dome wall umbilical, tipped back on its tail, and streaked into the yellow sky, rippling the murky atmosphere like a stone in a lake. "The Sunspanner's shuttle holds twenty?"

  "Yep," Fay said in my ear.

  "651 citizens, divided by 28, multiplied by, what, forty minutes per round trip—"

  "Sixteen hours on the nose," it interrupted.

  I snorted, steam jetting from my nose. "Is that supposed to impress me? You're a giant computer."

  "A little."

  I grinned at the sky. So Fay was feeling cocky. Well, I was, too.

  After escorting the Sunspanner to Titan's orbit, swatting down a few stray missiles, and installing the umbilical in the side of the dome, we still had eighteen hours until the NightVision fleet rolled in. When the HemiCo armada and Olympian Atomics' troop transport showed up minutes after that, they would find that not only had we evacuated every rebel citizen in Shangri-la to the hijacked colony ship, but that we'd lit out two hours before they arrived.

  With their pursuit blocked by our fleet, and the threat of orbital bombardment if they took reprisals on the remaining citizens of Shangri-la, Fay could escort the Sunspanner on the first leg of its trip to Centauri, then turn around and distribute us—me, Baxter, Pete, Shelby and her team, Jia and any other rebel soldiers who weren't ready to pitch a tent outside the Solar System—to Mars, Earth, Hidey-Hole, Luna, or anywhere else we cared to go.

  Not that this was ironclad. HemiCo could choose to fight through our ships; Fay gauged their chances of victory right around 25%. If they then sent the battered remnants of their fleet after us—assuming they could catch up to the Sunspanner, which, judging from the speed they'd shown getting to Titan, would take them several months—Fay gave them somewhere between a 5-10% shot of taking us out.

  Which was to say attacking us would result in a 90-95% chance of suicide. Logically, they should negotiate a ceasefire, head back to Mars, and leave OA to restore their city and their highly profitable fusion isotope business.

  "Logically?" Baxter had snorted. "HemiCo is as logical as a bludgeoned rattlesnake. I offer a preemptive naysaying to any plans built on the assumption they'll react within the already-blurry lines of human reason."

  "They're powerful, not invincible," I said. "HemiCo's not going to throw billions of dollars of starships away to rescue OA's pet project."

  "Willing to bet your inexplicably long life on that?"

  "No," I said. "Speaking of which, Fay..."

  "I have no new information on that subject," it said. "All I can tell you is if you were designed, there should be evidence of your designers out there somewhere. Fortunately, once this is over, the two of us will have a very long time to search it out."

  I frowned up at the sky. "What about the other AI? Aren't you supposed to be protecting them?"

  "We have NightVision for that now," it said. "Besides, a deal's a deal."

  I nodded. I wasn't certain that was what I wanted, but I didn't have to make that decision just yet.

  After Fay's shuttle blasted off with the first payload of passengers, the Sunspanner's transport touched down a few minutes later. It was a squat vessel, like a flying tugboat, but not as cute. Twenty colonists filed into the umbilical. The shuttle crew deplaned and sealed the tube to their entry hatch. The moment the colonists were secured, the shuttle lumbered upward, angling from the dome as it prepared to kick in its boosters.

  Bright red tracers seared a path from ground to sky. The shuttle wobbled, shedding debris from its fat body.

  "Oh no." My breath curled in the freezing air. "No no no."

  The crowd inside the dome gasped and moaned. The shuttle sagged like an old balloon, left wing dipping. Outside the dome, a battlewagon lurched forward and unleashed a second volley from its multigun. The shots shredded the shuttle's rear. It exploded with a weak flare. As pieces of it and its passengers rained from the cloud of smoke, the crowd began to scream.

  "What just happened?" Fay said.

  "They rolled out a battlewagon," I said, numb. "They shot down the shuttle."

  "Rob, acknowledge," Jia said in my ear. "Something's going down across Thermopylae."

  Someone grabbed my shoulder. A short-haired man gaped through the dome at the smoke curling from the crash.

  "Rob?" Fay said. "What do we do?"

  "OA's figured us out. They're making their move." I pulled from the man's grip and sprinted to a cart parked outside a shop Hermalina's people had converted into a distribution center for blankets, clothes, soap, omnis, and all the small necessities anyone might want to take up to the Sunspanner. "We need to get everyone who can shoot a rifle down in Thermopylae. Fay, are your gun platforms any good in atmosphere?"

  "Titan isn't their ideal operating environment, but they should work."

  "Get one down here to defend your shuttle. Now."

  "You want to keep going?" Fay's voice dripped with anguish, the smallest I'd ever heard it. "My shuttle can only get a third of the colonists on board before HemiCo's fleet gets here."

  "This is how we beat Persia, Fay." I gunned the cart, showering the storefront with yellow grit. "We keep their army at bay in Thermopylae while you tie their ships up in Artemisium. Meanwhile, we evacuate Athens. If they break through, there won't be any colonists left to capture."

  "But everyone died at Thermopylae!"

  "Don't you think I fucking know that?"

  "I could send the shuttle one last time," it wheedled with icicle-bright clarity. "Just four passengers: you, Baxter, Pete, and Shelby."

  "We can do this! But we need your help, Fay. Get that platform and take out that wagon. Please!"

  It was silent for several seconds. "Affirmative. Good luck, Rob."

  Cold air streamed past my face, freezing the hair in my nostrils. The road dipped for a tunnel and the cart's wheels left the ground. I flattened my body, the tunnel roof ripping inches above my head. The cart jarred hard, bouncing me from the seat as I clung to the steering handles.

  "Where are you, Rob?" Baxter asked through my earbud.

  "Almost there. Fay?"

  "Platform en route," it said.

  I tore across the dome, weaving around stray pedestrians and the frozen piles of garbage the citizens had dumped in the streets since their recyclers shut down. I popped out of the next tunnel into warm air—relatively speaking; the wind felt sharp enough to shave my cheeks, but my nostrils no longer pinched with every breath—and straight into a flock of backpack-toting locals surging for the tube I'd just left. I swore, swerving and bleeding speed.

  "Battlewagon destroyed," Fay said. "I'm going to deploy a second platform. If we lose
my shuttle now, it's over."

  I blew a jet of steam between my teeth. "If you're spending this much juice on the ground, are you going to be able to defend yourself when their fleet shows up?"

  "The odds just got longer."

  I cut down a side street to detour around the snarl of outgoing pedestrians, furious at Fay, my team, myself. How had we not seen this? Had we really believed Olympian Atomics would let us hijack their ship, kidnap their colonists, and blast off for their planet without raising a hand against us? That they'd just sit tight on the other side of Thermopylae, stymied by a handful of citizens-turned-soldiers armed with stolen weapons, trained on the fly (and under-ammoed as we were, most of this had been done virtually, using Fay-authored software), exhausted from weeks huddled in a cold, drafty, dark tunnel?

  The hubris! Our punishment would be divine.

  I braked hard outside Thermopylae, fishtailing, spewing dirt over the conscripts scrambling to erect a tent around the sheets and pillows masquerading as our med center. I leapt off the still-rocking cart and ran to the arms shed. Out of body armor. To hell with it; the stuff had nearly drowned me once before. The targeting goggles and correctional bracers were long gone too. I shouldered a rifle, filled my pockets with spare clips, and tied a paring knife around my left calf.

  "What's so funny?" the quartermaster asked me.

  I nodded to the hundreds of green-suited soldiers kicking up dust in the other dome some hundred yards away. "Think this knife will save me? You got any rocks I can throw?"

  The man drew back his chin. "This is all we have."

  "I've got more practice with these anyway." Sweat slimed my sides as I descended into the warm and ceaseless exhalation of the tunnel. I put my finger to my earbud. "Where are you, Baxter?"

  "Past the wagon."

  I weaved among our walls of trash, furniture, and dirt. They lights they'd rigged along the tube were as bright and yellow as the daylit domes. Pete waved from a line of troops kneeling to my right. I squeezed past the battlewagon. In the trench beyond, Baxter crouched behind his rifle, perfectly still, as if he were a replica of himself in a museum that, centuries later, would recreate this scene for giggling tourists.

  He fixed me with his green fractal eyes, the scar beneath his left glossy in the yellow light. "Thoughtful of you to show up."

  "Why in the world did you have to put us up front?" I said. "Where's Jia?"

  "Inside the wagon. And we're in the front because the front is the best place to kill these vermin you share a species with."

  I frowned down the tunnel. "Most of the people we're about to kill, or get killed by, are men and women who needed a job."

  He snorted. "They're mercenaries paid to enforce the will of entities like HemiCo. Yes, sure, a hammer's just a tool. A tool can be used for good or evil. But the difference between these people and a hammer is that a hammer can't walk away."

  "Walking away wouldn't do any good. They know they'd just be replaced by someone else."

  "Ah. So you think we should invade Earth next." He tugged his lower lip. "I'll bring it up with Fay."

  We talked more, I'm sure, but I don't remember what about. The tunnel yawned on, a dark-sided mouth striped by a long tongue of yellow pavement.

  "Movement up top," Jia announced from the wagon, the third time she'd done so in the hour-plus since I'd settled in beside Baxter. Well familiar with the delays and frustrations of any campaign, even one as small and centralized as ours, I expected another false alarm, dubious OA would be ready to march so quick.

  A small metal can clanked down the far side of the tube. Three more followed.

  "Grenades!" someone yelled. I hunkered down, arms over my head.

  "Those aren't grenades," Jia said slowly, voice booming from the wagon's speakers. "Oh, shit."

  Opaque white gas hissed from the canisters, flooding the tunnel. The gas grenades were a good twenty yards away, but the steady warm breeze would engulf us in seconds. Men shouted orders. Baxter sprang from the trench and ran back down the tunnel.

  I gaped. "You coward!"

  The gas swirled forward. Already it smelled strangely sweet, like artificial sugar heated and dried, evoking memories of a riot outside Central Park when the USA had gone temporarily insane at the start of the 21st century. Pepper spray, or something like it. When the first tendrils tickled my nose, I broke and leapt from the trench.

  Baxter stood atop the wagon. He shoved aside the wide-eyed gunner and contorted his body into the multigun's turret.

  The quartermaster's crew passed transparent masks to the back lines of troops. I tripped toward them. Shots puffed through the roiling clouds, whining off the roof, paffing dust from the upslope at the tunnel rear. I dropped behind a dirt wall. Bullets thudded into the heaped-up soil.

  "Get us more masks!" Jia shouted. "Check the emergency cache!"

  "You wanted me?" Baxter screamed from the wagon turret. "Here I am!"

  The multigun crashed too rapidly to separate the thunder of its shots. I clamped my hands over my ears, squeezing my eyes against the stinging vapor tumbling over the dirt wall. I choked, coughed, cried, rolling in the dirt. Baxter's gun thundered like Zeus. Footsteps thumped past me, headed for the incoming OA soldiers. Something big and warm and unnaturally light tumbled onto my balled body. I rolled a corpse off me, eyes watering, and groped at its face. My nails tapped plastic. I pulled the mask off with a squick and tugged it over my mouth, gagging and gasping for untainted air.

  A conscript sprawled beside me, waved at the gas-thick air, then bobbed up and fired down the tunnel. The multigun blatted on. Behind its awful thump, I heard Baxter laughing.

  The gun spun down just as I caught my breath and poked up my head. The last of the gas slipped past me, shepherded by the breeze.

  OA's dead painted the walls. Their bodies were too ruined by multigun fire to count. Shredded green uniforms flapped in the warm wind. My mask couldn't filter out the coppery stink of blood, the rotten blossom of insides turned out. I stripped my mask and vomited stringy fluid into the yellow dirt.

  Going off the wagon's thermal scanners, Jia thought we'd taken down about 25 of the enemy before they'd fallen back. Nearly ten percent of their total strength. We'd lost three of our own, another four injured. After treatment, two of those might be able to make it back to the line.

  They'd tried to catch us napping. Without Baxter holding down the multigun while the rest of us struggled to breathe, we would have been overwhelmed in the very first skirmish.

  "I wasn't calling you a coward," I told him once he hopped down and retook his place on the front line.

  He eyed me. "Then who were you accusing? Your lungs?"

  "Of course. They choked at the first sign of danger."

  More than a smile lit his eyes. Something holy, some discarded weight or expelled ghost.

  "Why do you hate them so much?" I said.

  "I told you," he said. "They killed my friend."

  "I know that. I want to know how."

  "Oh. The sordid details." He tapped his nails against the crosshatched black grip of his rifle. "Do you have any regrets, you old bastard?"

  "A few," I said. "They tend to disappear with the judicious application of alcohol."

  "Real regrets. The kind that are etched on your soul."

  I stared at the ceiling. "Just one."

  "Tell me that," he said, tapping the grip, "and I'll tell you about Arthur."

  "I see."

  "Well, let me know if you change your mind."

  I nodded. As if the motion had jarred the memory loose, at last I could see Demostrate's face. It was a specific moment: she was in bed and I was headed there. Her eyes were bright semicircles, blue as the Aegean. Lips parted in a toothy grin that was half joke and half breathless anticipation. Bound hair squiggling across the straw mattress like a dark river. The delicate point of her chin.

  It was the first time I'd remembered it in over a thousand years.

  * * *


  Three more shuttleloads made their way to the Sunspanner. Eighty colonists down, counting the twenty who'd died in the shuttle explosion. Not counting Thermopylae's defenders, that left 491 on the ground. It would take 41 hours to transfer the last of them to the colony ship. The NightVision fleet would arrive in fifteen hours; HemiCo's forces would be right on their heels.

  Fay's precision in delaying the under-construction NVR ships from leaving Earth orbit until the last possible minute was nothing short of dumbfounding. There had been over 900 million miles between Earth and Titan when the fleet launched. That number wasn't static, either—it changed every instant as Earth and Saturn whipped through their discrete elliptical orbits. Yet Fay had nailed the arrival window as surely as a kid firing his BB gun at the neighbor's house.

  Baxter scowled and peeked over the ridge. "I am going to have someone's head for this insult."

  Little legs clacked the walls, poked the dirt. A swarm of six-legged cat-sized bots advanced down every surface of the tunnel. A red eye blinked at their front. Below these gleamed the cold black snouts of gun barrels.

  I laughed. Last century, I'd been a consultant for defense firms leaping into the field of "smart" warbots. Mostly, I'd earned my paychecks warning the designers the theory would sabotage them from the start. Design the bots with too many commands, and they would immediately respond in ways ranging from the useless (following ant trails until they broke down, say) to the ludicrously dangerous (spraying their programmers with bullets the moment their software was updated).

  No matter how simply and elegantly they phrased the bots' directives, there was too much collateral damage. Program them to shoot everyone in a green uniform, and kids got shot for wearing the wrong jersey. Even if you operated in a civilian-free zone, a bot like that could be thwarted by stripping off your shirt.

  In the end, the bots turned out useful in two very limited situations: when you didn't give a shit about collateral damage or civilian casualties, and when you were fighting armies of other bots.