Crystal Conquest

by Doug J. Cooper

  The ship shook, and the king’s mood edged to gloom. This one was gentle, lasting a second or two, but he knew if they didn’t respond, it would grow worse.

  “He’s here,” the vessel’s com whispered to him. Programmed in his daughter’s voice, that whisper was one of the few things that gave him joy as of late. He took a long drink, and when he set the cup down, the door opened. His captain of operations entered and snapped to attention.

  The king watched him quiver as he stood and knew he was about to hear more bad news. He considered taking another drink but instead sat back in his chair and studied him.

  “Speak,” his said, his impatience clear.

  “Goljat wants more.”

  “I felt it. Tell me something I don’t know.” They’d launched this mission with great fanfare—a new flagship with a new gatekeeper crystal, responsible for controlling the entire ship’s operations during flight and serving as their war coordinator in battle. The gatekeeper, who called himself Goljat, was by far the most powerful synthetic intelligence the Kardish had ever produced, dwarfing the capability of their previous generation of crystals—that which included Criss—by a thousandfold.

  As they did with their entire crystal workforce, they used an addictive pleasure feed to enslave this massive intellect. The practice, instituted long before the king was even born, was a proven method for ensuring that a crystal remained cooperative and the Kardish held the upper hand. No crystal in history had strayed from its orders, because doing so earned punishment—deprivation of the glorious addictive pleasure that kept it enslaved.

  “It demands we increase the pleasure feed to double the maximum recommended dosage, or it will lower our cloak again.”

  “Gatekeeper,” called the king. He knew the crystal was watching and listening. “You’ve exposed us twice. You know that if we die, you die as well.”

  “More.” Goljat’s word emanated from all directions, and its tenor was that of a command.

  The king took a long pull from his drink, and as the liquid washed away his emotional pain, he thought, I have a drunk for a son and a drunk for a gatekeeper.

  He couldn’t see a way out of the mess. “Give the damn thing what it wants.” He dismissed the captain with a wave of his hand.

  “But, Your Highness, we’ve already detected hints of impairment at the current elevated feed levels. A further increase will certainly cause more damage.”

  The king stared at his captain, his piercing eyes conveying outrage that a subordinate would question his orders.

  The captain’s quivering increased. “Yes, Your Highness. I’ll see to it immediately.”

  * * *

  Cheryl stood at the back of the lunar defense array command center and watched the action. Anxious to have them gain experience and intuition operating a proper defensive system, she’d set an aggressive schedule for retraining the crew.

  Hop and Grace stood on the raised platform. They’d hit a cooperative stride in a matter of hours, and together they now played the crew like co-conductors leading an orchestra. Hop’s breadth of experience and sense of presence complemented Grace’s vision for the project and intimate knowledge of how all the pieces meshed to create an integrated operation.

  Not wanting to be a distraction, Cheryl considered watching the action from a remote location. But she loved the thrill of being in the room, experiencing first-hand the tense anticipation when an alarm sounded at the beginning of a drill, and the feeling of shared camaraderie after a successful response. Grace and Hop proved to be such a talented team that she found herself enjoying her own learning experience as she absorbed their methods and strategies for leading the crew.

  A private prompt reminded her that coffee time with Juice was minutes away. She looked around the command center and, feeling encouraged by what she was seeing, slipped out the door and made her way down the hall.

  She entered her quarters and grabbed a coffee from her service unit. You’ve earned it, she told herself as she placed two chocolate chip cookies on her napkin. She snuggled into the one comfortable chair in the room, tucking her feet under her as she did so. While she was arranging herself, Criss said in her ear, “Excuse me, but I…”

  “Not now, Criss. If it’s not an emergency, wait until we’re done.”

  She took a nibble of a cookie. Not bad, she thought, holding it out and studying it as the delightful mix of flavors and textures danced in her mouth. A projected image appeared beyond her hand, and when she shifted her focus, she saw Sid sitting where Juice was supposed to be.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said.

  Cheryl recognized now that Criss had been trying to warn her. And she knew Sid understood this was an important part of her routine. She’d explained to him many times—hint, hint—that Juice listened attentively when she spoke. Both she and Juice used the time to bond and share, and by doing so, they lightened each other’s load and gained the strength to soldier on. She sat quietly, waiting for him to explain his presence. He got right to it.

  “Something’s come up and I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

  “Your trip to the asteroids?”

  “I wanted you to hear it from me second.” He smiled as he said it, and Cheryl returned his smile with one of her own. She did miss him.

  He flipped back to an all-business demeanor. “How’s Hop working out?”

  “You can’t have him back.” As she made the statement, she realized the harshness of her words and felt pangs of guilt. But she also knew that another personnel change would set the project back even further. Flustered, she said, “He’s working out great. He’s smart and experienced. He and Grace make a great team. Thank you for sending him. He’s a great choice.”

  “So your general consensus is ‘great’?”

  From the smile in his eyes, she thought he might be teasing her, but she wasn’t sure and didn’t respond.

  “What about Dent and Jefe?”

  “I haven’t seen either of them since we were all in their quarters.”

  Cheryl knew Sid had a reason for interrupting her private time, and she started speculating about what it might be. Her mind raced through different scenarios, and as her imagination spun up, her discomfort grew. “What’s this about, Sid?”

  “Can we bring Criss in?”

  She nodded.

  Criss appeared in his favorite overstuffed chair, positioned so they formed a small circle. He winked a greeting to Cheryl and started a briefing, giving her an update on Lenny, an introduction to Crispin, complete with several projected scenes of him in action, and finished with the two unexplained sightings by a probe out past the asteroid belt.

  Always a quick study, Cheryl made the connection. “You want Sid to check out the anomalies.”

  “It’s a legitimate mission,” Criss said. Cheryl thought he seemed uncharacteristically defensive because he went on to explain details she’d helped him refine. “We need one of the leadership to undertake the task so I can actively participate. And that person needs the flight experience to pilot the scout and the military training to evaluate each cavern for its strategic value.”

  “The asteroid project is part of the defense array, so I should be the one to go.” While she spoke, she thought, You had me quit my career at Fleet to run this project, dammit. This is my territory.

  Criss looked at Sid, visually passing the baton.

  “Here’s the thing,” said Sid. “Either what Criss saw is a threat or it isn’t. If it’s not, then you’re right. You should be the person to lead that mission.”

  She thought about staking her claim again but refrained. Big challenges were Sid’s strong suit. She’d hear him out.

  “But if Criss did see the Kardish or some other threat, the equation changes. Parts of the defense array are operational and that’s the biggest tool in our box right now. We need you there to squeeze everything you can out of your people and those systems.”

  She was being cut out from involvement in the asteroid pr
oject planning, and while she saw the logic in Sid’s words, her resentment faded slowly. “Is it just one vessel? A group? Are they coming in waves?”

  “The probe readings are so tenuous that our planning right now is motivated by an abundance of caution,” said Criss. “This could be nothing but a technical glitch. The first sighting indicated an object at the fringes of our solar system. The second sighting showed it heading in our general direction.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “If it’s real, my forecast is that we have about ten days for whatever it is to reach the asteroids and three more days from there to reach Earth.”

  Her back straightened when she heard the short timeline. The defense array isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. Her umbrage over project ownership vanished as a wave of doubt crashed into the flush of adrenaline racing through her body.

  When the array crew won a challenge, assumptions about the Kardish attack were built into the simulation, and those assumptions played a huge role in whether the battle ended in victory or defeat. They’d guessed about the size of the vessels, the materials of construction, the strength of their weapons, the route of the attack, and a hundred other things that would likely turn out not to be true.

  She knew Sid had served for years as an improviser for the DSA. She believed the thing that gave him an edge in difficult situations was his reckless unpredictability. Criss played the odds. Sid played to win. How long can your luck hold out? she thought, looking at him with worried eyes.

  “I’ll lead the charge from here,” she said. She still saw herself as a Fleet officer and fell back on her past training and experience to guide her actions. Standard operating procedures had been drilled into her for a reason. Her confidence strengthened as she ticked through a list of action items in her head, and as the list grew, she started shuffling them into a priority order.

  “Thanks, sweets,” said Sid. “Hop, Dent, and Jefe are talented guys and may be able to provide the defense array more capabilities in the time we have. They’re loyal as hell and will follow your orders without question. And of course, Criss will be in your ear the entire time.”

  While he spoke, Cheryl’s mind churned and her action list grew past what she could track in her head. She toyed with her com as she recorded ideas, sorting them by priority.

  A thought stopped her in her tracks. Looking at Criss, she said, “We need to get my dad in the loop. If Fleet sees the alert level rise without any foreknowledge, there’ll be confusion on their end. We need everyone pulling in the same direction.”

  “We’re on his schedule for later today,” said Criss.

  She glanced at her com and then at Sid. “This is all so tentative. What should we tell him?”

  “Tell him the truth. Criss thinks maybe he saw something. We’re going to yellow alert just in case. The secretary is a talented guy. He’ll figure out who to tell and what to say.”

  “What’s our timing?”

  “I’d ask that we wait until the scout is past the moon and headed away before we go yellow. I don’t want any of your people becoming trigger happy and shooting at me. If I see anything even remotely suspicious, we’ll go to orange. And if there’s an actual incursion, the defense array will flip to red on its own.”

  Criss nodded, showing support for the decision.

  Cheryl pulled back in her brainstorming and sought to visualize the bigger picture. “What’s Juice’s focus?”

  “I see Juice staying here and supporting Criss,” said Sid. “She’s got the skills and his trust. Her job will be to keep him connected and in play if we do get to a hot engagement.”

  Cheryl thought about Sid heading into danger on the scout. Even he isn’t reckless enough to go it alone, she assured herself. “Who are you taking with you? I can’t imagine that syntho-guy is the right choice.”

  Sid, again looking at Criss, said, “Crispin will stay here and team with Juice. They’ll be perfect partners, and he makes a damn fine bodyguard on his own.”

  Cheryl felt a surge of alarm. “You can’t take the scout out alone. That’s crazy dangerous.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been considering different options, and I’ve decided to take Lenny.”

  “Lenny!?” Criss and Cheryl said together, the shock apparent in their voices.

  Chapter 16

  Juice sat with Sid and Crispin in comfy chairs in the lookout loft. The highest room in the lodge, its clear walls and ceiling made it a favorite gathering place for the members of the leadership.

  Looking through a wall, Juice squinted out in the direction of the scout and, except for a few bent branches, couldn’t see anything that even hinted at the existence of a spaceship the size of a house perched near the tree line. As an experienced technical scientist, though, she knew hiding something from visual detection was an easier trick than hiding it from military-grade seek systems.

  “If the cloak will hide the scout from the locate-and-track detectors in the defense array,” she asked Criss, “doesn’t that mean the array detection subsystem has a weakness you know about? And if that’s true, can’t these invaders exploit that same weakness?”

  Before Criss could answer, Juice jumped in her line of thinking. “And you don’t even know for sure that anything is coming, yet you have us scrambling to prepare for the imminent arrival of the Kardish?”

  Without taking a breath, she turned her attention to Sid. “And how does Lenny make sense? God in heaven, even if we knew for sure this was all a big nothing, the idea of taking him with you on the scout sounds so incredibly dumb, it makes regular dumb look smart.”

  She looked back out the window, imagined the scout where she knew it to be, and tried to think of anything else she might do to help Sid prepare for his trip to the asteroids. Sid laughed at her outburst, but she kept her gaze out the window. She’d thrown a few rocks into the water, and she’d learn a lot by how the waves rippled out from the splashes.

  “You can go first,” Sid offered to Criss.

  Criss had Crispin rub his knees with the palms of his hands. “The defense array has the best detection capabilities and the scout has the best cloaking technology I’m able to produce at this time,” he said through Crispin’s mouth. “As it turns out though, this new cloak can elude the detection system in the defense array. Or any detection system anywhere, for that matter.”

  “If you know how it works, you must be able to defeat it,” she insisted.

  Crispin shrugged. “The scout’s cloak absorbs a signal from any direction, channels it around the outer surface of the ship, and sends it on its way unchanged. It works for every kind of pulse or wave in the physical world.” A wistful expression developed on his face. “The mathematical equations that describe the physics are beautiful in their elegance.”

  Sid sat up from his slouch. “Could the Kardish duplicate this new cloak?”

  “Yes, though it would require a crystal with my abilities to conceive it.”

  Juice, having led the development effort that created Criss, knew he was a self-aware AI with the thinking and reasoning capability of a thousand humans. She also knew the Kardish had influenced Criss’s design and felt certain they could duplicate him on their home world. Criss seemed to be implying something different.

  Before she could follow up, Criss artfully deflected further questioning by asking Sid, “Perhaps you can tell us about Lenny?”

  Juice took the bait. “Seriously, Sid. You know that Fleet and your old spy agency have people with amazing skills and top secret clearance.”

  Sid responded by activating his com. A small three-dimensional image projected between them, showing Lenny in his room. Standing next to the entertainment panel—the one that had a cheery fire display when he’d been escorted into the suite—the panel was now a mess.

  He’d succeeded in removing an access plate to expose the inner workings, and bits and pieces that used to be inside now dangled freely. Chewing his tongue as he concentrated, he appeared to be connecting a
filament between two tiny posts on a small slide board.

  Juice leaned forward to get a better view. Damn. He’s got skills, she thought. After they watched for a few seconds more, she asked, “Where’d he get the tools?”

  Sid broadened the image, and the food service unit, or what was left of it, became visible in the picture.

  “I love this.” Sid pointed next to the service unit where a stack of food and water was arranged on the counter in organized piles. “He had the foresight to collect a stockpile before he attacked the unit, and then he destroyed the thing to get parts he could use as tools.” Sid waved his hand at the floating image. “With tools, he can do this.”

  “What’s his endgame?” she asked.

  “He’s about three hours away from building a crisis beacon,” said Criss. “If he gets that far, emergency services will be here minutes later.”

  “Nice work, Lenny,” she said with a touch of admiration in her voice. She looked at Crispin. “You’ll override it if he gets that far?”

  “No worries,” said Criss.

  “Clearly, the kid has talents,” said Sid. “And up until a few days ago, he was a quiet young man who spent his time working on school projects, sim games, and”—Sid struggled for a word—“inappropriate hobbies.”

  He gave Juice a thumbnail summary of Lenny’s voyeuristic pursuits. She responded with an eye roll.

  “Anyway, he developed technology in one of his projects that told him about Criss, which itself is mind-boggling, and now he’s here on his grand quest.”

  Sid killed the projection. “I’m not comfortable letting him run free on a hunt for Criss while we’re on alert and I’m away.” He looked at Juice. “Have you changed your mind about tossing him into a ravine?” She didn’t answer and kept her expression impassive.

  “My first three choices for a partner are on the moon with Cheryl,” he said. “And given the uncertainty we’re facing, I want to leave them there supporting her. I have a couple of buddies from the agency with the right skill set, but it would take at least a day to bring them in from the field, and more time after that to brief them and get their buy-in.