Serengeti

by J. B. Rockwell

  The robots rolled to the middle of the cargo bay and then divided—three of them heading over to the Number Six probe while the other three trundled in the opposite direction, clustering around balky, oft-capricious Ten. Out came those long, spidery legs, unfurling from the robots’ sides, metal tips tapping at the decking as they lifted themselves up and tucked their tank treads tight against their bellies. No trundling like tiny tanks now. The robots crawled across the probes like the metal arachnids they were, poking at hidden panels, entering coded sequences to get access to the probes’ insides.

  Six slid open with a puff of air, hinged doors releasing on either side of its ovoid body, revealing a space packed tight with scorched metal, melted plastics and every other thing the probe had collected. Ten, on the other hand, had to be a bit more difficult. Ten flat out rejected the first set of codes the robots entered, and then balked at opening its doors when they tried to use a back-up set of codes.

  “Ten. Behave,” Serengeti ordered, speaking through a comms panel set in the hold’s wall.

  Ten beeped loudly and then flashed a series of error messages, insisting its door controls weren’t working properly.

  “Fine. You want to do it the hard way, we’ll do it the hard way.”

  Part of her was tempted to shut the probe down completely. The controls were there, an integrated part of her systems, and all it would take was a single command. Serengeti considered it and then tapped into the robots’ comms channel instead, calling in the cavalry.

  “TIG. Cargo bay.”

  A maintenance door opened at the far end of the huge space and another, even smaller robot rolled out. It paused just a few feet in and assessed the situation, face lights flashing, front legs lifting, scraping together in a gesture of worry that was peculiar to all the TIGs. The TIGs were smaller than the TSDs gathered around probes Six and Ten—repair robot, not analysis like their larger cousins—and came equipped with eight legs instead of the usual six, but other than that, the two robot models were nearly identical.

  The TIG beeped softly and raised its head, staring at the camera as it waited for orders.

  “Come here.” Serengeti flashed the light above a camera and then waited while the little robot extended its legs and tippy-tapped over.

  It stopped just below the camera, neck craned backward, chromed face looking up. Serengeti zoomed in on its side, reading the numbers and letters stenciled there to get its designation.

  TIG-442.

  “I want that probe open, 442,” Serengeti said sternly. “Repair the doors and then run a full diagnostic so we don’t have any more problems. A full diagnostic,” she added, emphasizing that one word, “inside and out.”

  A strange, strangled sound from Ten and his compartment doors magically sighed open.

  Too late, you little pain in the ass.

  “Run the diagnostics anyway.”

  TIG-442 nodded, face lights ticking up one side and down the other, and then he flailed his legs excitedly and scurried away.

  Serengeti turned the camera, addressing the TSDs around Ten. “Go through its hold,” she said, pointedly ignoring the probe’s protests. “Run a broad spectrum analysis on everything in there and then clear all that junk out.”

  Beeps and borps all around. Flashes of swirling face lights as the TSDs communicated with one another, figuring out who was going to do what. Serengeti left them to it.

  “TIG-442.” Serengeti swung the camera away, pointed it at the little repair droid again. “I want you to wipe Ten’s software when you’re done. Wipe it and reinstall, then run the diagnostics again to make sure there are no bugs left behind.”

  Ten beeped in complaint, insisting he was fine now. Really. Just a temporary malfunction and hardly worth all the fuss.

  Serengeti really didn’t care. It was high time Ten learned how to behave.

  A message popped up, flashing insistently, clamoring for attention. A message from Brutus—no surprise there—demanding to know when they’d be done so the armada could move in.

  Patience is a virtue, she started to send back, and then deleted it, querying her systems instead, checking on the progress of the other probes. Ten minutes, she wrote. Stand by.

  Serengeti sent the message and closed the channel, patently ignoring the indignant response Brutus sent back. “Go,” she told the TIG. “Be quick about it.”

  TIG-442 nodded, face lights flashing, cobalt eyes blinking slowly as he opened a panel beside Ten’s hatch and stuck the end of one leg into a socket inside.

  The TSDs, meanwhile, had crawled inside Number Ten’s compartment and were busy sifting through its contents, using the sensors, diagnostic equipment and other specialized electronics built into the ends of their long, metal legs to analyze each and every piece of space junk the probe had gathered before chucking it outside, adding it to a growing mound on the cargo bay floor. Serengeti watched the operation closely, switching from one camera to another, eager to see what the probes had brought back. She even tapped into the TSDs themselves after a while so she could sort through the analytical data in real time rather than waiting for them to feed it to her.

  And all the while, the messages kept coming. More messages from Brutus, each one angrier, more impatient than the one before. And a single query from Henricksen on the bridge.

  Wait, she told them all. That and nothing more while the robots went through the last few pieces of space junk and closed the two probes back up.

  She tarried a moment longer, making sure Number Ten didn’t give TIG-442 any problems before switching her primary consciousness back to the bridge, flashing an indicator on the Command Post’s mash-up panel to let Henricksen know she was there.

  “Well?” he asked her.

  “Barlow,” she said. “The debris the probes brought in is from Barlow. That’s all that’s left of him.” She cut off Number Ten’s video feed, shunted the TSDs’ data to the front windows so the crew could see for themselves.

  “Shit,” Sikuuku swore.

  Kusikov stood up and leaned forward, hands pressed flat against the comms panel as he read through the data. Finlay just sat there, eyes wide and staring, head moving from one side to the other.

  “Any chance we can salvage the AI?” Henricksen asked her.

  “No.” A single word, filled with sadness and anger. “Barlow died with his crew.”

  “And the others?” Henricksen asked softly. “Osage? Veil of Tears? Is there—are they…” He frowned and glanced at the crew around him. “Was there anything from them?”

  “No. Just Barlow. If Osage and Veil of Tears were here—” A perimeter breach warning flashed through Serengeti’s systems, cutting her off. “Proximity alarm,” she announced, voice calm and cool as ever. She reached out with her sensors, searching for whatever was out there.

  “Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit!” from the Artillery station. Henricksen might not swear often, but Sikuuku had no such qualms.

  Finlay leaned forward, working desperately at her station, looking for the black void of displacement that marked a ship coming in. It was there, Serengeti could feel it through her sensor arrays, but from the way she shook her head, Finlay obviously hadn’t found it yet.

  Serengeti tapped into the Scan station, scrolling the detection grid to one side until the jump breach showed at the center.

  “Buckle forming one thousand kilometers off the starboard bow,” Finlay called.

  Good girl.

  Brutus sent a message, using the main comms channel this time rather than the direct line to Serengeti herself. Serengeti read it and then waited, letting Kusikov relay the communication to Henricksen.

  “Brutus is asking for details, sir. Wants to know what’s coming in.”

  “As if we have any more idea than he does,” Henricksen growled. “Tell that son-of-a-bitch—”

  Flare of cobalt blue light in the video feed tracking Brutus and the other ships in the armada. More flares, bright spots of color popping up everywhere as the fleet
of ships fired up their engines and closed in on Serengeti’s location.

  “Brutus in-bound, sir!” Kusikov called, a hint of alarm creeping into his voice.

  “In-bound? What the hell does he think he’s doing? Kusikov—forget it.” Henricksen mashed at the comms panel attached to his Command Post, opening a ship-to-ship channel to Brutus. “Brutus, this is Serengeti. Maintain position. Repeat. Maintain position until we know what’s coming in.” Henricksen closed the channel and turned to Finlay. “Anything?”

  “Not yet, sir. Breach is still forming. Chatter coming through but it’s indecipherable at this point.”

  “Recall the probes.”

  “But they’re not done—”

  “I said recall the goddamn probes, Finlay!”

  “Yes, sir.” Finlay tapped furiously at her panel, sending recall instructions to the probes outside.

  “Sikuuku! Bring the forward artillery stations back online.”

  “Already did. Forward stations are hot, sir. Port and starboard in stand-by.”

  “Good.” Henricksen looked to the aft feed, swore softly when he saw Brutus and the rest of the armada still moving. “Serengeti. Any chance you can use your AI wiles to talk some sense into that bastard?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Brutus and the rest of the armada were just two minutes out now. Serengeti sent a coded request directly to the Bastion using a private channel, received a squeal of static in response.

  Prick.

  “Any luck?” Henricksen asked her. He didn’t sound all that hopeful. He could see for himself that the fleet was still moving toward them.

  “None. Apparently Brutus isn’t in the mood for AI wiles.”

  “Prick.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Finlay—”

  “Almost! Breach is forming.”

  A flash outside, bathing the bridge in silver-white radiance. Finlay hunched forward, shading her eyes as she searched through the reams of information scrolling across her Scan station.

  “It’s a ship,” she said slowly, frowning in concentration. “Signal’s garbled though. Not squawking like it should.” She fiddled with something, scrolled through a screen of data, fed it into a secondary panel. More fiddling and a muttered curse as she shook her head in frustration. “Can’t seem to get the call sign.”

  Serengeti slipped in behind her, parsing through the data, finding gaps and errors, mangled translations the Scan systems couldn’t deal with. “Something’s wrong.” She grabbed the Number Two probe and reversed its course, sending it out toward the breach.

  “What’s happening?” Henricksen asked her. “What’s out there, Serengeti?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A chilling admission coming from an AI. The mood on the bridge turned decidedly tense.

  The Number Two probe drifted closer, camera picking up an object just exiting the breach, sending the video feed back to Serengeti’s bridge.

  “That’s a ship, alright,” Henricksen said, studying the feed. “Hard to tell from here but it looks like…Titan class? You supposed that’s—”

  “Osage! Osage! Osage!” an electronic voice yelled, screaming through the ship’s speakers.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  “Osage! Osage! Osage!”

  “Goddammit, Kusikov! Cut that thing off.”

  “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” Kusikov mashed at his panel until the artificial voice finally shut up.

  “Osage,” Henricksen grunted, staring at Number Two’s feed. “But that wasn’t Osage herself, was it?”

  “No,” Serengeti said quietly.

  The AI should have announced the ship’s arrival. Or the captain or comms officer if the AI was disabled. But the voice that poured through her speakers sounded pre-recorded. Serengeti tapped into the comms channel, listened to the voice for a few seconds, analyzing the speech patterns until she confirmed her suspicions.

  “So. Is it?” Henricksen asked her.

  Serengeti cut the comms. “Is what what?”

  “The ship out there. Is it Osage?”

  Hard to tell, honestly. The ship was Titan class—the data the Number Two probe sent back made that much clear—but its electronic beacon was badly scrambled, the information it put out so garbled that Serengeti couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And when she reached out, searching for Osage’s AI mind, she found nothing. Just a blank space and a wall.

  “Number Two’s coming in visual range,” Finlay announced. She reached for the camera controls, panned the lens around as Number Two came head-on to the intruder and then slipped around to its side, and the letters written in bold, slanting font.

  “Osage,” Henricksen breathed. “Dammit. Dammit all to hell.”

  Osage had found them, but Osage was dead. Well and truly dead. Holes showed in the grey-skin of her hull, rents scored along both sides, tearing through her triple-walled hull, exposing her skeleton and the corridors underneath to the vacuum of space. And the damage didn’t stop there. The ship’s back end was gone. Just gone—ripped away entirely, leaving snaking lines of cables, circuitry and shredded hull material trailing behind her, and a cloud of metallic debris floating long in her wake.

  “What happened to her?” Sikuuku whispered. “What the hell happened to her?”

  “And where’s she been?” Henricksen added. “Shredded as she is, how’d she manage to make jump?”

  “Where’s Veil of Tears?” Serengeti wondered.

  She saw something—a bright red sparkle just inside Osage’s hull—and took the controls from Finlay without asking, steering the Number Two probe inside the damaged ship and then panning its cameras left and right.

  “Osage is accelerating!” Finlay called, voice filled with alarm.

  “Accelerating? How?” Henricksen demanded. “Thing’s a wreck! Half the bloody engines are gone!”

  “Don’t know, sir, but she’s moving. Looks like she’s got one engine that’s still operational and she’s using that to push herself along.”

  “Goddammit. What the hell’s going on?” Henricksen growled.

  Good question. Serengeti studied Osage a moment, watching the dead ship drift closer, wondering where she’d gone, and how she’d gotten back.

  A perimeter alert popped up, flashing brightly, screaming for her attention.

  “Breach forming off the starboard bow.” Serengeti pulled back, refocusing on a patch of inky darkness swirling to one side.

  “Distance?” Henricksen asked.

  “Five hundred kilometers.”

  A last look at Osage—sister ship and companion. A last moment to wonder where the ghost ship had come from, how anything was still operating when the AI inside was dead.

  Where were you, sister? What happened to you? Serengeti wondered.

  She considered a moment and then tapped into the Number Two probe, streaming its position in real time to her AI brain so she could track Osages’ location.

  More alarms, proximity alerts lighting up faster than Serengeti could address them. She abandoned the probe, letting one of her sub-minds monitor the feed as she swiveled electronic eyes to the darkness outside.

  Multiple breach signatures now, buckles forming, creating black voids that sucked inward before blowing back out. She threw a schematic on the bridge windows, marking each new breach as it formed, waiting for ships to appear as they exited jump. One breach became ten, then twenty, then fifty, with more and more forming every minute. Serengeti added each new contact to the schematic and, slowly but surely, a pattern began to emerge: A thick crescent of buckles arcing around the armada’s port side.

  “Talk to me Finlay!” Henricksen called. “What’s going on out there?”

  “Osage is closing.”

  “Forget Osage. How many, Finlay? How many breach signatures are out there?”

  Finlay worked at her panel a moment and then froze, staring hard as the stars lit up outside and the first of the ships appeared. Data came through—a name and
call sign, all the electronic information an interstellar vessel endlessly squawked out. More flashes—a dozen on either side of that first arrival—accompanied by more data, more information for Serengeti to pour through. She processed it in a moment, found nothing but bad news. And then she waited, watching Finlay chew at her lip, taking it all in.

  “I count…a hundred. Hundred and three. Hundred and five. Hundred and—holy,” Finlay breathed, eyes widening, looking surprised, and worried, and a little bit scared as more and more ships popped into existence. “It’s them, sir.” Finlay half-turned, looking behind her. “I think we found them. I think we found the DSR fleet.”

  “Fuck,” Henricksen swore. “This is all going backward.”

  “But we found them—”

  “They found us, Finlay.”

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice.

  The whole idea of sending the scouts ahead—and Serengeti after them—was so they could get the drop on the Dark Star Revolution. Scan their capabilities and see what they were up against before it all went sideways. Instead, it was the DSR who’d gotten the drop on them. They had Brutus to thank for that. Brutus who’d so foolishly brought the rest of the fleet in.

  “Must’ve been watching this place. Left a probe or a beacon somewhere. Something too small for the scans to pick up. Something cloaked maybe. Hidden.” Henricksen frowned at the schematic, muttering curses as ship after ship flashed into existence, completing the crescent walling them in on one side. “What’s the count, Finlay?” he asked again.

  “Twenty-three ships transited from jump so far. Looks like…another hundred and three buckles resolving. Hundred and thirty vessels in total, sir. Most of those yet to transit.”

  “Hundred and thirty,” he muttered. “Thought there were more.” He reached to one side, querying the system, frowning at the information it brought back. Henricksen looked up at the camera, pointing a finger at the screen and then tapping at a single piece of data. “Two hundred sixty-three,” he said softly. He flicked his eyes to the windows, then back to the camera. “System said a fleet of two hundred sixty-three ships attacked Tissolo. Satellites around the planets confirmed that information. So where are the rest of them?”