by M. D. Cooper
Did he have a choice?
From the communications console, Fugia let out a long whistle. “There’s all kinds of communication traffic happening. I think those things coming at us are just serving as high-capacity antennae, not attack craft at all.”
“Can you analyze any of it?” Fran asked.
Fugia shrugged. “I could try to crack it but that might be seen as rude. I’m not sure how to proceed here. I thought this would go differently.”
“I’m thinking the same thing,” Andy said.
May was still staring into the holodisplay, where the Weapon Born formed a curved pattern in space. “We’re being impatient,” she said. “We should give them time. You have to think how terrifying this might be for Lyssa and the others. It might be like meeting a god. Can they even communicate? Alexander had to split off a tiny part of his mind so we could talk to Xander.”
Several alerts lit on Andy’s console as Sunny Skies experienced a change in its structural balance points. The drive system was automatically realigning as it was cut free from the Resolute Charity.
“Hold on,” he said. Zooming in on the holodisplay, he spotted several drones moving between the ships, cutting the bridge Lyssa had taken so much pride in building. Sections of support structure floated free to be picked up by other drones.
“Sunny Skies is on her own again,” Fran announced.
Andy looked around the room, swallowing hard. This was it. They’d reached the end of their journey.
“Lyssa’s trying to get through to Xander,” Andy told Fran. “He’s taken control of the Resolute Charity. We need to maintain our defensive posture. I don’t trust that ship.”
Fran gave him a worried look. “You know we can’t defend ourselves this close.”
Andy swallowed, nodding.
“I’m going to check on the kids,” Andy said. He stood and walked off the command deck, trying to control his anger.
Something was happening outside the ship and it affected him, the crew and the kids. He hated that he couldn’t do anything.
He was halfway to Cara’s room, passing the cabin he’d given to Xander and his people, when he stopped. The door was open.
“Xander?”
Andy stepped inside the cabin, which looked like it had never been lived-in. He walked to the bedroom and then checked the bathroom. The place was empty.
Andy went back into the hallway and continued down to Cara’s room. The door slid open to darkness, light from the corridor falling across Cara’s bed.
She wasn’t there. Andy had a moment of increased fear, then quickly went down the corridor to Tim’s room and found them both together. When the door opened, Em barked and ran over to jump on Andy’s leg.
He looked down at the grinning dog—no taller than his knee even when standing on two legs—and couldn’t help smiling back as he rubbed Em’s head.
“Tim won’t leave his bed,” Cara complained. “I told him the emergency klaxon meant we needed to get dressed but he doesn’t want to listen to me.”
“I want to sleep,” Tim complained, his back to the door.
“Tim,” Andy said, crossing the room. “You need to get dressed. We’ve arrived at Proteus and Lyssa might be leaving us. I need you to be ready for whatever might happen.”
“Are we going to die?” Tim asked, still not turning to look at Andy.
“No, we’re not going to die. But I don’t want you running around the ship in your underwear. Come on, now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Neptune, OuterSol
“We have a problem,” Lyssa said through the overhead speakers.
Everyone was on the command deck. Andy sat in the pilot’s seat with Fran at the navigation console. Fugia still sat at the communications console, with Cara beside her now. Tim had gone to stand next to Harl Nines and May Walton, the holodisplay lighting his face from below. Em paced anxiously from person to person, taking head scratches as he could get them.
“We’re listening,” Andy said. “You were worrying me for a bit when you disappeared and didn’t answer.” He said it in a tone that meant he had been a lot more worried than he was letting on.
“I’m sorry. I was busy. I tried to take control of Resolute Charity again but Xander locked me out.”
May and Fugia both looked surprised.
“He did?” May asked. “How?”
“I made the mistake of trying to talk to him. He’s not interested.”
“Wait,” Fugia said. “You talked to Alexander?”
“Yes. He brought me into his expanse. His inner world. He’s—not what we expected. Xander isn’t what we thought either.”
“What do you mean?” Fugia asked.
“Xander is not a shard of Alexander. He’s a sentient AI. He’s powerful. But he’s not part of Alexander. Alexander’s Call wasn’t meant to draw other AIs to him. It was a call for help. He’s still trapped on Nibiru. The thing I talked to, it was what Xander probably would be if he were part of Alexander.”
Fugia’s face had gone pale. She stared at May and then at her console. “This isn’t possible,” she said. “All those sentient AIs. I helped twenty-two through Ceres. I helped them get here.”
“They still might be here,” Lyssa said. “We’re going to have to search all the wreckage on Proteus.”
“If there’s no Alexander,” Cara asked, “then who’s going to save the sentient AIs? Who’s going to help them all not be slaves?”
Lyssa gave a weary laugh. “I guess I am. I’m still here. I can use the Resolute Charity to clean this place up, try to recover everything we can.”
“There’s only one flaw in that plan,” Fran said. “We no longer control the Resolute Charity.”
“Why?” May asked, still looking mortified by the news that Alexander wasn’t what she had thought. “Why would Xander convince us to bring that ship all the way here?”
“The AIs,” Fugia said. She put down the communications headset and crossed the deck to the holodisplay. “Andy, will you zoom in on Proteus? Try and get us some high-def detail? I want to see how many different bits of stuff we’re looking at here.”
“I’ve got it,” Lyssa said.
The holodisplay swooped out to show Neptune, then focused in on Proteus and its surface debris fields.
“I estimate eight hundred and seventy pieces of wreckage large enough to hold a neural network and a power source,” Lyssa said.
Fugia whistled. “That would be the largest single group of advanced AIs in Sol.”
“Can you reach Xander?” Andy asked. “We need to know what his intentions are. He’s sitting on a warship.”
“And we’re sitting on a whole lot of Weapon Born,” Fugia said.
“With the drones and weapons on the Resolute Charity, that’s a fight I’d rather not take on,” Andy said. “We lose Sunny Skies and we’re dead out
here.”
Fugia shook her head, realizing he was right.
“I’ve been trying him,” Lyssa said. “He’s not answering my requests.”
“Well,” Fran said, “He’s moving into a position that would make it pretty easy to either blow Proteus to bits or keep us from reaching it.”
Andy stood and leaned on the back of his seat, drumming his fingers. “What options do we have? We wait and see what he’s going to do, or do we burn out of here while he’s preoccupied with whatever he’s doing now?”
“I won’t leave the other AIs,” Fugia said. “I helped them reach this place and it was a trap. It was a death trap all along. I sent them from one enslavement to another.” She glanced at May, fury making her cheeks tremble.
“We’re all feeling betrayed right now,” Andy said.
“You don’t know what I feel!” Fugia yelled. She grabbed the headphones and threw them at the bulkhead.
“Hey!” Cara shouted. “That’s my only pair.”
“I’ll make you another damn pair,” Fugia said, tears on the edge of her words. “I’ve devoted my life to this. All the years on Ceres. All the time. Are you certain, Lyssa? Are you absolutely certain?”
“I am,” Lyssa said.
“Damn it,” Fugia said. She clenched her fists and looked around like she didn’t know what to do with herself.
Cara retrieved the headset from the other side of the command center and set the twisted unit back on the console. Fugia glanced at them and then Cara. Her mouth trembled, and she reached for Cara to pull her into a hug. Cara wrapped her arms around Fugia’s waist and pressed her head against her side.
Andy gripped the back of his seat, trying to decide between courses of action. Without knowing what Xander meant to do, he couldn’t make a decision. They were still twenty hours out of Proteus. They could redirect to a slingshot around Neptune and skip off the gravity well to fling Sunny Skies back toward Uranus.
With the delta-v they’d get, the ship could shoot past the Resolute Charity. Add a Weapon Born screen to their maneuver and they could tie up the other vessel long enough to make it a viable option.
He ran the plan past Fran via Link.
Andy said.
Fran gave him a hard stare.
Fran’s eyes locked on his.
Fran shook her head, smirking.
Andy laughed in spite of himself, which earned him a dirty look from May. “I just thought of something,” he said.
“Yes, Captain Sykes?” May asked.
“Alexander. Lyssa, you said he wasn’t what you expected. What did you mean by that?”
“What was his expanse like?” Fugia asked.
“It was the old colony on Nibiru. That was where he was taken to build them a new star, but something went wrong and the project failed. It’s the same story Xander told us. Alexander was like a person in a dream, surrounded by things he remembered. But all that faded, and he took me to another location. He took me to Larissa and we watched Proteus, watched all the AIs gathered around it, the space of decades in just a few minutes. Ships arrived and were torn apart by drones.”
“You watched from Larissa?” Fugia asked. She frowned and started pacing the center of the command deck from the holodisplay to the door.
“Yes,” Lyssa said.
“Why Larissa? What else did you see?”
“I can show you in the holodisplay.”
In semi-transparent shades of light, Lyssa showed them Proteus’ progression from naked to the debris field present now. Then she turned the view as she had done with Alexander to show the ship sitting on the surface of Larissa.
“Wait!” Fugia shouted. “Stop. What does that say? Are you sure that’s what you saw?”
“That’s what he showed me,” Lyssa said.
“Psion Group,” May read. “Enfield Scientific. I’ve never heard of those companies before.”
“I have,” Fugia said. “This is starting to make more sense. Psion has been researching sentient AIs for nearly two-hundred years. They were one of the first labs with any real breakthroughs. I think they have Alexander on Larissa and I think he’s been disabled. They used him to develop the call and then limited his mental capacity somehow.”
“Why?” Cara asked.
“Sometimes when you want to break into something, you trick people into giving you their security tokens,” Fugia said. “That way you don’t have to try to figure it out yourself. You attack the weakest part of the situation. Why try to build sentient AIs from the ground up when you could convince them to come to you.”
“No one tried to enslave me,” Lyssa said.
Fugia walked to the edge of holodisplay and stared at the image of the half-buried ship. “We haven’t arrived yet,” she said.
“Well,” Andy said. “Based on how Xander is acting, he might just know what you’re talking about and I’d make a wager that he intends to destroy whatever might be watching Proteus from Larissa.”
“If Alexander is there,” Fugia said, “we have to save him.”
Andy shook his head. “There are way too many unknowns in this scenario for me to want to go rushing in.”
Fugia crossed her arms. “Then I’ll go. I’ll take the shuttle. You can hang back here from a safe distance and Lyssa can send the Weapon Born if she needs to.”
“What if your honeypot traps the Weapon Born?” Andy asked. “What if we’re wrong and Alexander is just damaged, and this place is full of dead ships with dead AIs on board, and we’re now within killing distance of the Resolute Charity? Until we know what Xander wants, I don’t think anybody should leave this ship. In fact, I think we should think seriously about leaving local space while we still can.”
“I didn’t cross all of Sol to leave so easily,” Fugia said.
“Me either,” May added. “I came here because I believe in helping the runaway AI. If there are any alive around that moon, I want to help them. If Alexander needs our assistance, I don’t believe we can abandon him.”
Andy’s gaze slid toward Cara and Tim. Cara was watching Fugia with a wild envy in her eyes, while Tim hugged a smiling Em. He couldn’t choose the AIs over the kids. He had to find a way to keep them safe and provide help if it was needed. They were right. He had come all this way. He couldn’t just leave. But he couldn’t let them get trapped either.
“Lyssa,” he asked. “What do you think about sending a scouting party of a few Weapon Born to see what happens when they get closer to the moons? Do you think you might have any volunteers?”
“I can only ask,” she said.
“We’ll follow in the shuttle,” Fugia said. “I don’t want to waste any time.�
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“It’s too dangerous,” Andy told her. “It would be nothing for Xander to burn you to a crisp.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” Fugia said. “I’m prepared to give my life for this.”
Silence fell on the command deck as Fugia faced off with Andy. He stared at her, wanting to just order her back to her cabin, but from behind her May and Harl looked like they would side against him.
“I’m not ready to give your life for this, Fugia. There’s another way we can do this.”
“Andy,” Lyssa said. “I have your volunteers.”
“Well, that’s something,” he said.
Fugia still stood straight with clenched fists. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“How many, Lyssa?” he asked.
“They all volunteered.”
Andy nodded. “Impressive. All right. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll send an initial sortie to scan Proteus and Larissa and get a better look at the lay of the land. We’ll continue to try to contact Xander and figure out what the hell he’s doing. Once we have better intel, Fugia can take the shuttle to Larissa with a Weapon Born escort. The rest of us will remain at combat stations, ready to execute a plan to get out of here. Understood?”
He turned his gaze back to Fugia, ready for an argument.
Instead, she nodded stiffly. “That works,” she said.
“Good. Let’s get started then. Lyssa, will you launch your scouting team?”
“I’m sending them now.”
Andy switched the holodisplay back to a view of local space with Sunny Skies at the far edge. A group of ten icons separated from the ship and picked up speed toward Neptune. He checked the math and saw it would still take them five hours to reach the planet. They had time to figure out Xander’s plan and try to stop him if necessary.
Maybe.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Neptune, OuterSol
As the ten Weapon Born pushed ahead of the Resolute Charity, Lyssa entered the Heartbridge ship’s network through a maintenance routine in the environmental system, the same way she had used to take control back at Europa.