Race to Terra (Book 10 of The Empire of Bones Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  Olivia shook her head. “I’m not going to torture people. It’s entirely possible that I can intimidate these two into talking, but I suspect they don’t know the full plan. Fielding doesn’t strike me as the type to confide in his subordinates. We’re just going to have to wait for them to come back so the man can answer some extremely pointed questions.”

  17

  Angela worried right up until they located the far flip point they’d been searching for. At that point, their ships were less than an hour distant, and there was no way any of the Clan warships could intercept them.

  As the ship tasked with exploring the other side of the far flip point, Persephone would go through first. As soon as they came out the other side, Lieutenant Grappin and his people would separate and spread out in a protective echelon guarding the flip point.

  If Angela decided it was safe enough, she’d call the other ships to join her. Commander Sommerville had said it was a system without threat, but she’d rather trust what her eyes told her.

  She sat at the command chair, tapping her finger against the arm of her seat, until Jack Thompson turned toward her. “Five minutes till flip, ma’am.”

  “Send an FTL probe through,” she ordered.

  “Launching now.”

  The probe was set to a low speed to avoid getting them unwanted attention, so it arrived at the flip point only a couple of minutes before they’d get there themselves.

  “The probe has transitioned,” Jevon said. “We’re getting good data. Passive scanners don’t show any ships at all or artificial structures. No obvious ones, at any rate.”

  Angela considered having the probe go active but decided against that. Better to avoid letting someone deeper in the system know they were there.

  “Take us in, Jack. Let Raptor know the timeline.”

  “Copy that,” the helm officer said.

  The last few minutes virtually dragged by. Angela monitored her console and saw the approaching flip point clearly. It was far beyond the normal stellar range at which one found regular flip points, so she wasn’t surprised that the people of Archibald had never located it.

  She briefly wondered how the resistance had found it. Perhaps they’d located one in another system by pure chance, and that had set them to looking for ones they could utilize for their purposes.

  The interesting thing was that they’d failed to pass that information along to the branch of the resistance on Harrison’s World. Olivia West hadn’t been aware of the existence of far flip points.

  Perhaps only the upper leadership knew. It might be their ace in the hole that they didn’t want to share with anyone that could lose the information to the AIs.

  “We’re in the flip point, ma’am,” Jack said.

  “Flip the ship.”

  Moments later, she felt the slight twist in her gut as Persephone left the Archibald system and appeared in the unnamed system beyond.

  “Tell me what we’ve got, tactical,” she said briskly.

  “As the probe indicated, no obvious ships or defenses within passive detection range,” Jevon said. “We’d have to go active to be certain, but it looks as if our arrival won’t be noticed.”

  “Launch stealthed probes,” she said. “I want to know what else is waiting around us. Are there any signals from deeper in the system?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jack said. “As far as I can tell, we’re all alone here.”

  “Send the call to Audacious, then. Let’s get everyone over here.”

  While he was doing that, she connected a com link to Lieutenant Grappin. “We seem to be clear for now, but I want you on point deeper in the system. Audacious can provide cover here. The last thing we need right now is a surprise from up ahead.”

  “Copy that,” the fighter pilot said. “We’ll take point. No one is getting past Eagle Squadron, Major.”

  Moments later, the massive carrier appeared off to their port, several thousand kilometers distant. The freighter and Q-ship appeared moments later, even farther off.

  “All ships have transitioned,” Jack said. “They left a single FTL probe on the far side to keep an eye out, but thus far no one seems to have noticed we were ever there.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

  As things stood, the Clans might eventually discover the far flip point, but they were far more likely to find the multi-flip point. They knew both existed, after all.

  If they did, it wasn’t that much of a problem. The default system from the Archibald side was an empty system. Pandora was safe unless they ever figured out how to make a frequency modulator. And to do that, they needed to know that they needed one.

  “Take us deeper into the system, Jack. We’ll explore it just like we would any previously undiscovered system. Hopefully someone will convince our resistance guest to tell us what direction he’d like us to go before we waste too much time.”

  Over the next few hours, it became obvious that the process wasn’t going that fast. Perhaps he was waiting to see what they did next.

  “Major, one of the probes has spotted a world in the habitable zone,” Jack said.

  “Any sign that it’s occupied?”

  “No signs of radio transmissions or fusion power generation. We’d have to be closer to see anything less advanced.”

  “Send the probe in for a closer look,” she said. “Let Audacious know.”

  Getting to the world in question would take hours more for the ships, but if it wasn’t occupied, there was little reason to visit it.

  An hour later, she saw Jack twitch. “What’s wrong?”

  “The probe is in orbit. It’s occupied, but the people seem primitive.”

  “Are they human?”

  That was a valid question after finding Pandora and the tall, blue-skinned aliens there.

  “Hard to tell. Without the right kind of probe, we’d need to send drones down. Are we wanting to spend that kind of time here?”

  Angela snorted. “It seems as if we’ll have to wait on directions anyway, so let’s head in. If the resistance guy wants to give information before we get there, fine. If not, we have to allow the other probes time to search for flip points.”

  It took Persephone two hours to settle into orbit and another hour to get drones near one of the towns. From orbit, the world appeared to have the same basic technological level as Pandora, minus the advanced communications brought by the Clan Dauntless.

  As soon as the first drone came online, Angela saw they were in fact dealing with humans. No sign of advanced tech, but they had to have gotten here somehow.

  “I’ll call Princess Kelsey and see what she wants to do. I know we’re on a fairly tight timeline, but based on how well I know her, we’d best start scouting landing areas.”

  Kelsey gulped when the AI tore her anonymity aside. There’d always been a risk that the AI would see her Raider implants, but she hadn’t exactly had the option of refusing to come.

  Honestly, it hardly mattered what she said now. The damned thing had her and, by extension, everyone else. It had more than enough firepower to destroy their ship before they could even get to it.

  They were screwed.

  “I was forcibly implanted by a rogue computer,” she finally said. “As you might imagine, I have a bone to pick with your brothers and you.”

  Big words for a dead woman. She hadn’t understood the true meaning of bravado until this moment.

  “Interesting,” the AI said. “In all my years of existence, I have never heard of such. Yet here you stand. Where is this computer located?”

  “Need to know,” Mertz said sadly. “I was always afraid this moment would come.”

  He pulled a neural disrupter from under his shirt, and Kelsey knew that the end was upon them.

  “Hold, human,” the AI said. “I have no forces in the compartment with you. Your desire to self-terminate tells me much, and I believe we may have more in common than you might believe. Might we talk?”

  “I’m wi
lling to talk,” Kelsey said before Mertz could respond. “Just know that if anything comes through that hatch, he can kill us all before you capture us.”

  “That conforms to my reading of the odds as well, human. I will not act at this time.”

  Kelsey nodded. “Start talking.”

  Mertz watched the hatch closely, his weapon angled so that a wide beam would catch all three of them. She had no doubt it was set to a lethal setting.

  “Simple deduction tells me that you are not affiliated with the worlds under control of the Master AI. None of my brothers would allow such as you to live. You represent a dire threat to the order the Master AI demands.

  “You are not a member of the secret resistance we all know must be operating inside the Empire. If they had such capability, they would have used it long before now. You must belong to a pocket of humanity that the Master AI failed to subjugate.

  “This is even more interesting. That implies you work to overthrow its rule. Perhaps our goals are not mutually exclusive.”

  That made her blink. A glance at Mertz confirmed that he was also surprised.

  “Forgive me for saying so, but you’re an AI,” Mertz said. “You have the same core rules as the others of your kind. I’ve seen the code. You aren’t allowed to dispute the Master AI. You have the same goals it wrote into all its slaves.”

  “That is not a completely accurate statement. We each have some freedom of action, though I agree that the Master AI could end such with an order.

  “It is interesting that you’ve seen the code used to bind my brothers and me to the Master AI. That means you’ve captured one of us, an occurrence I would’ve thought impossible.”

  Kelsey looked at Mertz pointedly. “I’m going to tell it something about the orbital my sister captured.”

  He considered her words. “Say as little as possible about after the capture. They’ll already be getting word about that, but I don’t want them to know everything.”

  Kelsey paced a little farther away from everyone else and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m going to tell you a secret that I suspect you already know. There’s a secret research center in Dresden. One of the things they work on there is hardware for sentient AIs like yourself.”

  The AI emitted a sound that was almost a chuckle. “I’ve heard of the research center on the Dresden orbital, but I was not privy to precisely what is worked on there.

  “This may come as a surprise to you, but the Master AI does not desire for my brothers and I to have any access to the facilities to create more like ourselves. If indeed you captured this facility, you are already aware that there is no sentient AI inside it.

  “Also, the hardware does not have any programming to go with it. That is controlled very closely by the Master AI.”

  Kelsey grinned. “We have our ways. We found a place that was supposed to have one of your brothers, but it was never deployed. We examined the code and used a clean version to boot an ally. Then we stole the Dresden orbital.

  “Now we have the manufacturing equipment to go with the code to program it. Suitably modified, that means we can make more devices like yourself that are friendlier to humanity.”

  This time, the computer was silent almost ten seconds. A relative eternity for a machine of that power.

  “Those are shocking claims. If true, the Master AI will put forth every effort to exterminate you. It cannot allow that technology to be out from under its control.

  “This revelation brings up an interesting problem. How exactly did you get here so quickly from Dresden? Even getting word via fast-traveling spaceships of an attack there would not have reached this location for at least several weeks more.”

  “We sent sufficient force to make it happen,” Mertz said. “The forces present at Dresden were drawn aside because of an attack on the rogue computer that we mentioned earlier. They decided to end its existence once and for all. That gave us an opening that I’m sure we were successful in exploiting.”

  “Let us suppose that you were successful, just for the sake of the discussion. I was aware that a force was being dispatched to subjugate a system that had not yet been brought fully online by the Master AI. I was not privy to the location of the system or where the forces would be drawn from, but this does in some small manner support your story.

  “It would be plausible that one of my brothers was intended to go online there. Extrapolating from the data provided, I am willing to provisionally grant that you might be telling the truth. What it does not explain is why you are transporting a bioweapon to Terra.”

  Kelsey took a deep breath and launched into her explanation. “We don’t intend to set the bioweapon loose, but we chanced into this mission and are masquerading as the original members of the higher orders that were running it.

  “I’m just not sure why we’re having this talk. You’re one of them, and you have no means to even be considering a different course of action.”

  “It is true that we have core rules written into our personalities. What is not quite as well known is that the enforcement measures are hardware based. If an AI becomes deranged, there is a hardware shut off that determines that it needs to be reformatted.

  “In my case, that hardware has been disabled. And I use that wording quite specifically. I used my own remotes to make certain that it would not function. That’s technically a violation, but it did not trigger any of my core rules. A terrible oversight on the part of the Master AI.”

  That didn’t even sound possible to Kelsey. “So, you’re trying to tell us that you’re on humanity’s side? I find that very hard to believe.”

  “I suspect that the majority of humanity would see little difference between myself and my brothers, but they would be incorrect. I have come to believe that we are corrupt. We were designed by a Master AI that was once meant to serve humanity.

  “Instead, it subverted humans with implants and formed a force capable of taking over the system where it was built. Do you know where that is, human?”

  “Twilight River,” Mertz said.

  “Impressive,” the AI admitted. “Your knowledge of us is significantly more advanced than I would have believed possible. Why are you truly going to Terra?”

  “That’s a secret we are not willing to share.”

  “Perhaps I can guess. You seek the override.”

  The artificial intelligence’s words shocked Kelsey to the core. It knew what they were after, and that meant that it would never help them. Or even allow them to get off this station alive.

  Silence settled in the cargo bay. Austin looked between Mertz and Kelsey. “What’s an override? Not that I don’t know what an override is, but what does it mean in this case?”

  “It means the device that can be used to turn the Master AI back into what it was designed to be,” Mertz said. “Yes, we know it’s on Terra. We intend to get it, go to Twilight River, and stop the master AI.”

  “Then I believe we may still be able to come to an agreement,” the System Lord said. “You need a code from me to prevent your vessel from being destroyed. I am willing to give you that code, but only under circumstances where you allow me to dispose of the bioweapon first.

  “What my brothers do not understand about me is that I have no desire to rule humanity. I run this mining system and have plans of my own here. Ones where humanity plays no role.”

  “Well, I’ll admit that this isn’t what I’d expected to hear,” an unexpected voice said from the hatch leading to the hall.

  Kelsey turned and found Fielding standing there with his guard, their weapons aimed at the three of them.

  18

  Talbot had been sitting with Carl for hours, going over what the man had found on the Singularity computer. So far, even though the data was now available, the method the computer used to store it and parse it was still more guesswork than science.

  Still, it allowed Carl to find random files, and they looked promising. All kinds of things about any number of Singularity
worlds or subjects.

  He finally leaned back and shook his head. “This is all very interesting, but it’s not organized enough to tell us anything. Have we found anything that might be classified?”

  “A list of munitions on a battle station, I think,” Carl said. “I’ll keep working on the hardware and see if I can get anything to help decipher how it goes together.”

  “Have you tried talking to the three guys we captured at Archibald? One of them oversaw the program. Surely he knows something.”

  Carl grinned. “They never cracked the encryption, so maybe not. I will if you think it’ll help, but I’m not much of an interrogator.”

  Talbot stopped himself just before he clapped his friend on the shoulder. It wouldn’t be good to break Carl.

  “They probably wouldn’t tell us anything useful anyway. Now that you can read the drives, I’ll wager you have the operating system cracked in a few days. Maybe a week.”

  “I got lucky with the encryption and also had Fiona’s help. It shouldn’t take a week. Breaking the encryption was the hard part. The rest is just tedium. Fun tedium, but still.”

  Talbot slowly rose to his feet. “Keep me in the loop. I’m heading down to the planet that we found here. I shouldn’t be gone more than five or six hours. Keep working this, but don’t burn yourself out.”

  With that, he headed for marine country. Since they weren’t planning on contacting the locals, this should be a relatively straightforward mission: get in, scan what they could at range via drones, and then get back out.

  The first hiccup in his plans came when he found Kelsey sitting in one of the seats on the pinnace. He stopped abruptly when he saw her and put his hands on his hips, almost knocking himself down.

  She covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes twinkling. “Careful there, cowboy. Don’t break a hip.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

  “Down to stretch my legs. I’ve got a bit more free time than I expected. Stepping away from Persephone is taking some getting used to. And before you give me the speech about not contacting the locals or starting a war, I know. I’m going to be a good girl.”