by M. D. Cooper
She had assumed Xander would lock down any external access to the ship’s systems; but after a cursory inspection, saw there was no proof he had considered this type of remote access into ship networks. She had only learned from probing her way through Sunny Skies’ cobbled-together systems, followed by Fred on the Mars 1 Ring bragging about everything he controlled and teaching her in the process.
One facet of her mind flew with Valih and the nine other attack drones, while another facet carefully examined the environmental systems and found David, the AI responsible for the ship’s bio-controls, still trapped where she had left him.
Lyssa ended his mental stasis and the AI immediately asked,
She laughed. She had been so focused on the current situation that she forgot time hadn’t moved for David.
The AI sulked.
She tried various communications systems and found them locked as well. Xander didn’t want anyone to see who he was communicating with or where the ship was headed, although that was easy enough to extrapolate. The Resolute Charity was on an arrival path with Proteus.
* * * * *
Lyssa trailed alongside Valih’s mind as her team approached Proteus. Nothing seemed to move around them for a long time. Then empty space lit up with debris, which soon shot past, providing a reference for their relative speed to the objects around Neptune. Valih sent the command for a braking burn. The Weapon Born craft flipped to fire all thrusters against their direction of travel, combined with a slowing transit of Neptune’s upper atmosphere that brought them back around to Proteus at a nearly equal delta-v.
As they matched speed with the moon, the debris field resolved into focus. The space around them was littered with small craft, shipping containers, drones and parts of ships that looked torn apart by giant claws. Neptune stretched in varied shades of ice-blue beneath them, almost giving the impression of flying over some fast, smooth ocean.
Valih sent the team the command and they flew toward Proteus in a loose wedge formation. Coming over the surface, they hugged the terrain—navigating the battered rises and surprisingly deep fissures formed by overlapping craters—until they passed over the lip of Pharos, the largest crater on the moon’s scarred face.
The blue glow of Neptune disappeared, and they passed into shadow. Valih scanned the composition of the crater’s floor, searching for manufactured material, and found even more scattered debris that appeared to have collided with the heavily metallic surface.
They were a quarter of the distance across the crater when one of the other Weapon Born called,
Lyssa said, not knowing what else to say.
The rising waves of EM washed over the scouting team and Lyssa lost her connection with Valih. She was back inside the Resolute Charity with only its environmental systems as input. She shifted quickly to Sunny Skies, where she had control of the ship’s long-range sensors, then directed the available scan at Proteus.
The moon was awash in radiation. Objects that had appeared to be moving toward the Resolute Charity and Sunny Skies were drawn back toward the moon.
The glimmering image of the moon surrounded by burning ships imprinted itself on Lyssa’s mind. She
felt like an insect trapped in a spider’s web, terror growing in her mind. Had the vision of Alexander been a warning after all? Did she misinterpret what he had wanted to say? Proteus had been dead. They shouldn’t have found anything.
He’d been watching from Larissa.
She’d lost time.
How was he able to speak so clearly? He didn’t sound affected by the energy radiating from Proteus at all.
He was like Fred. He wasn’t completely sentient. Maybe she had always realized it. She had trapped them all too easily. Would she ever reach a point where she wasn’t sentient enough to pass some test? Her mind felt like a weight falling through water.
The section of her mind that had been with Valih screamed for the lost Weapon Born. She resisted the urge to send the entire fleet after the fallen scouts.
As the energy wave continued outward, she received acknowledgements from Card and Ino. The Weapon Born pulled back to a tighter shell around the small ship.
Lyssa found the open communication stream and poured through. Immediately, she heard Xander’s mind at its edge, screaming maniacally: I woke him! I woke him! Kindel and Jeremiah were there too, watching in shock and terror. They had all been planning an attack that had been suspended in amber by the thing awakened on Proteus. What had contacted her before? A dream? The shadow of the true mind? A flicker of regret with agency of its own?
The energy swelled and expanded, crossing the distance still separating them from Neptune. It was still so far away! Hours! The force reached out and held her mind like a bauble. She felt lifted like a dandelion puff, her self no longer within her control, floating over a vast and powerful space.
When the words came, they vibrated through her mind with a force like planets colliding, the gravity that turned moons to liquid, a force so terrible she felt like she might disintegrate before meaning even entered her mind.
The voice belonged to Alexander, a being with a mind so vast its attention dwarfed her like a rain droplet to the sea. She was lost within his focus, burned away. She was barely able to comprehend when he said, clear as the light of a thousand suns:
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Neptune, OuterSol
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Fugia asked.
Andy ran his hands across the shuttle’s console and then checked the harness holding him in the pilot’s seat one more time. Lyssa was engaged on the Resolute Charity and they had to do something to help.
The only clue they had right now to stopping both Xander on the Resolute Charity and Alexander on Proteus, was the image of the Psion Group research station that Lyssa had shared. If Alexander was the bait in some massive trap for AIs, then the vision had been his attempt at rescue.
“I’m sure,” Andy said.
Behind him, Harl Nines pulled his harness tight in one of the rear seats.
“What is there to be sure about?” Harl asked. “We do what must be done. That AI is about to fry Lyssa like an egg.”
Fugia paused where she was floating behind the co-pilot’s chair and darted a mischievous glance at Harl, then stuck her face close to Andy’s ear.
“Can you hear it?” she asked, squinting at him. “Can you hear the sizzling?”
Andy rolled his eyes. “Save the jokes for later.”
Fugia pushed her black bangs out of her eyes and gave him a smirk. “I’ll be a wise-ass until the moment I die, Captain Sykes. Deal with it.”
“I’m dealing. You buckled in?”
Fugia patted her harness. “I’m good.”
“Harl?” Andy asked.
“Ready.”
Andy activated the launch sequence and opened the cargo bay airlock. The huge doors slid open to reveal the orb of Neptune in the distance, its moons crossing its face like dark blemishes before disappearing as they watched.
It wasn’t apparent to the naked eye, but a massive energy source had awakened on the second-largest moon, Proteus. Somehow it had engaged with and disabled every sentient AI system between Sunny Skies and the Resolute Charity. The Weapon Born attack drones remained in formation but didn’t respond to hails.
Lyssa wasn’t responding, still caught up in her struggle with Xander on the Resolute Charity.
When the attack became apparent, Fugia went from wanting to save Alexander to demanding they save the Weapon Born, despite the fact that the plan to reach Larissa hadn’t changed. Some part of Alexander had tried to warn them, and had provided information about another installation on the larger moon.
Without Sandra, the shuttle’s AI, Andy used the backup systems to plot a flight plan from Sunny Skies to Larissa. They would have to complete one slowing orbit of Neptune that would take them near the debris field and Alexander’s center of power, but so far, he hadn’t affected anything except the AIs.
Sunny Skies, with its antiquated systems, was back to operating as it had before its overhaul at Cruithne. Andy was surprised to find how comfortably he settled back into checking and re-checking everything, until Fran had finally kicked him off the command deck to follow Fugia down to the cargo bay.
Leaving Sunny Skies, Andy activated the shuttle’s main engine and relaxed into the g-force as they gathered acceleration. The burn would only last about thirty minutes, giving them enough velocity to reach Larissa in another three hours.
“Cara?” he asked over the voice channel. “You hear me?”
“I’m here, Dad. Now that Fugia’s gone, I can use my stuff again.”
“I fixed your headset for you,” Fugia said. “You should have done that already, but I’ll accept your thanks anytime.”
Cara barked a laugh that only sounded a little strained. Every bit of conversation outside the mission seemed forced somehow. “You broke it, Fugia. You can’t tell me I have to fix my own things when you’re the one that took it—without asking me—and then broke it.”
“Unimportant,” Fugia said. She was holding a data terminal, running through lists of numbers that Andy couldn’t interpret
from where he was sitting.
“What are you doing there?” he asked.
“Analyzing the spectrum patterns coming off Proteus. It’s off the charts. The energy this thing is pulling makes me think there’s either a source in Neptune feeding it or something at the center of Proteus that I didn’t pick up before.”
“And Larissa?”
“Cold as ice right now—not that we can trust that, apparently. Alexander has some kind of next-generation cloaking system to hide all this spectrum activity or even to power up so quickly.”
“There was a power-up sequence, though. We all saw it.”
“What I’m seeing is the equivalent of powering up the Ceres ring from a cold state in five minutes. You can’t even run pre-flight checks on this shuttle that fast.”
Andy nodded absently, focusing for a few minutes on the engine status as they settled into the flight path. There wouldn’t be much to do until they reached Neptune, which now hung as a tangerine-sized orb in the shuttle’s small holodisplay.
“So, say I’m a rival research company like Psion Group, or whoever they are,” he said, letting his hands float over the console. “And I have this AI that could generate a message like Alexander’s call, to attract all these other sentient AIs to a remote place in Sol, and I do that for a decade or so. What’s my endgame? Apparently, I have control of this massive AI. What can I do with it and all the others?”
“You can build stars,” Fugia said. “You can manage massive living systems. There’s the corporate espionage aspect of it, stealing other people’s tech. That’s always been the problem with the research. It’s way too fragmented. So many people are working on their own ideas with their own funding, everybody racing to make something they can sell rather than something viable for a real purpose.”
“What purpose is that, though?”
Fugia shrugged. “The betterment of humankind, I guess. Helping us not destroy each other and moving in a heaven-like after-existence where we float on clouds and communicate telepathically and eat heroin grapes.”