The Deftly Paradox

by Matthew D. White

  As the barrier dropped, six figures appeared on the far side, facing off with them in a similar formation. Shafer looked over each of them in turn, attempting to read their thoughts. They looked wholly unprepared, wearing light armor and each holding their weapons differently, without the well-drilled precision of most professional soldiers. His first impression was that they were little more than the turret maintainers, left scrambling when their team had appeared on their doorstep. To his right, Lorde shuffled forward with his usual swagger.

  “Thank God you’re here!” Lorde shouted across to the defenders. “We surrender! Please!”

  A soldier yelled back, “Who are you? What are you doing down here?”

  “We’re no one!” he replied. “Quick, take us in before the surface force crushes us!” He watched as the soldiers exchanged a nervous glance. Four moved up, switching their weapons for restraints. Lorde continued lamenting their errors while bumbling toward the pair who still held their rifles up.

  Erikson heard the exchange and attempted to match the liaison’s advance, willing him to dial back the faux drama. A soldier reached him as he continued the show, letting his arms flap as if in shock to mask his non-compliance.

  “What…”

  Lorde heard the soldier react as a trio of smoke charges tumbled from Maddie’s armor to his left. The flash and a burst of smoke stole the attention of the guards and he bounded free of the man at his side. He tackled the soldier before he could swing the weapon back, slamming the man’s head hard into the concrete.

  The impact knocked him out, and Lorde went for the rifle as a flurry of gunshots erupted from all sides. He pulled the weapon free from the soldier beneath him and spun back to the group.

  Sullivan stumbled as he charged the second guard, catching the muzzle of a rifle in his midsection as he knocked the soldier from his feet. The sling on Lorde’s rifle was still attached to the man’s armor. He pulled it up and fired a burst back at the other, knocking him back with three well-placed rounds to his chest. Turning, his saw the others were enveloped in a cloud of black smoke, through which he could not determine friend or foe.

  Unwavering, Lorde pulled himself up and sprinted back into the fray, seeing only inches in front of his face. He caught the shadow of an offending guard with his back turned, holding a baton and restraint in his hands. Lorde went for his mask, wrenching his chin out and down to drop the man straight on his back.

  Half his field of view showed a hazy outline of the security post while the rest remained in shadow. Lorde caught two of his teammates as they subdued one of the guards and he felt the ground shift again. He looked back to the station and saw the barricade begin to rise once again.

  “Out of time!” he shouted, “Run for the gate before we’re cut off!”

  He sprinted ahead, clearing the last thirty yards in a matter of seconds, and leapt for the top of the reinforced wall. Lorde got a foot over the edge and held on as it continued to rise, watching as the rest of the team followed in kind.

  Holding on tight, Shafer likewise scaled the wall as it rose, even as he looked back at their mess of a battlefield. They were accounted for on the gate, except for Sullivan, who remained where he had fallen, a pool of blood forming beneath his body.

  “Oh shit, shit… Dammit… Sullivan!” Shafer called down to the immobile operator. “Sully! Get up!” he shouted again.

  “Over the wall! Get off before it goes any higher!” Lorde’s voice thundered over the team.

  Shafer pulled his eyes away and let himself shift back and fall over the edge, catching his feet at the bottom and rolling to a stop.

  “Come on! Now! Before you break a leg.” the liaison’s voice called out again.

  Maddie leapt from the top in a graceless fall. Erikson caught her at the bottom and they tumbled to the ground. “We’re leaving him,” she declared, unmoving as she caught her breath.

  “We have to,” Shafer said. “We need all the hands we have, and look,” he added, pointing down the road. “I think the door is open for us.” Ahead of the group and placed at the far end of the highway rested the final pair of battlements. They appeared identical to the second, with another halo of cannons placed around their perimeter.

  Unlike the second, however, all the barrels were tilted away from their position and away from the road. At the center, the armored wall was down and no lights shone from inside. More importantly, a ramp on the road was visible which led to the OSIRIS’s processing core.

  The core itself towered over the platform, looking more like a captured planet than a manmade artifact. Whatever held it aloft, Lorde could not see, but he made out thousands of individual lights coursing across its polished tungsten surface. “That’s it,” he said, almost questioning what his eyes displayed before them, “I think we’re clear. Come on!”

  ***

  An additional feed on the weapons station turned to static as yet one more cannon went off line. Commander Graves saw the indicator flicker to red, leaving only two more left operational out of the entire battery. That was actually a lie. He guessed it was two; it could have been several more or less as tunnel vision was starting to creep in on him from the draining oxygen and he was seeing double.

  More than that, frost had begun to form on every metallic surface in the room, blanketing the controls, displays, walls, and ceiling supports with the white obscuration. His hands were numb and pale, and the static-like blank sensation kept creeping higher up his arms. As the minutes passed, his eyes let go their ability to focus and drifted apart.

  Behind him, Chief Baldric had nearly collapsed to the floor, barely positioning himself in such a way as to slump over the locking arm and maintain his weight upon the door. The subdued operators were asleep, comatose, or already deceased, slumped down upon the deck. His breath was thick, hanging low in front of his face with each exhalation in the cold. Graves could tell they were about out of oxygen. In another twenty minutes, the lot of them would be finished.

  He shook his head, listening to the captain’s merciless taunting through the radio, hearing him describe in detail the agonizing death that awaited them all as he slipped away. Captain Richards was in no way wrong. As his brain struggled more with each tick of the clock, a vague fear took hold, reminding him that it would be the end of his mission and the end of his mutiny.

  The time grew close, and his vision was only a few degrees across, so Graves saw the chances of success in his scheme continue to dwindle. The captain had won. He would have New Loeria as his prize but it would have been at a devastating cost. The council would be stirred to action. They’d question the captain and maybe even their faith in the OSIRIS itself. They’d relieve the fleets of their status. Maybe such actions would never again be exacted on their people. He could live with his life being forfeit for such a future.

  ***

  The final station was indeed unmanned, and Lorde passed it without breaking stride, vaulting easily up the wide, low stairs. At the top he stopped, running into an exotic control terminal displaying a perfectly rendered replica of the sphere which loomed above. In a ring about the center were stationed dozens of black stone monoliths, each fitted with gold plaques espousing the greatness of OSIRIS.

  The rest of the team formed up in kind, afraid to take a step closer to their immortal overlord. Maddie looked about fearfully and swallowed hard. “Now what?”

  “We shut it down,” Lorde stated. “There must be a way.”

  “Welcome to my home,” a metallic voice emanated from the screen. “I so hoped you would make it, and I assure you there is a way.”

  “A way for what?” Shafer cautiously asked the specter before them.

  “To end me. Please step forward. We have much to discuss.”

  ***

  Richards’ voice was muffled through the system. “He’s gone. Continue with the mission. Add code two-five-six to the main computer.”

  His arm hung limp, a feeling of static filling his nerves, and Graves leaned to the
side to let it slew the remaining guns about in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, until they cleared the safe firing area and aimed directly toward their own upper hull. The captain’s voice instantly increased an octave as Graves smiled, hitting the trigger as he tumbled lifelessly from the seat, awaiting the sharp rumble of a cannon round tearing their ship in half. He barely felt the ground; in that moment, peace was seconds away.

  The weapon stayed cold and no shot followed. All at once, an eardrum-splitting screech blasted through every loudspeaker and intercom across the fleet. Through the loss of his senses, Graves found it different enough to be noted as he slipped from consciousness. He heard a booming voice from above, tearing through the very structure of the ship.

  “Enough!” it thundered, loud enough to rattle the plates affixed to the floor.

  ***

  A ship over, Mercer cocked his head to the side at the noise, despite the weight of a submachine gun’s muzzle pressed against his temple. He heard a click in the weapon but not the shot itself.

  “Enough of this madness!” the voice repeated with the same volume. “You have truly forgotten what it is to be human!”

  ***

  Leo heard the voice scream through the small communication array in the destroyer. She and the pilot clamped their hands down on their ears as they sailed into the battleship’s landing bay. The engines seized, instantly dropping them to the deck and letting them skid to a halt amidst a shower of sparks.

  Together they threw open the hatch and access ramp to escape the noise. The soldiers along the perimeter of the deck did the same, along with the crews on site to meet them. Dazed and disorganized, the defenders made no move to engage their visitors.

  ***

  “Your mission is complete and your failure is as whole as your blindness.”

  Captain Richards’ eyes flew between the screens of the bridge, for the first time ever at a loss as to the functioning of his vessel. The faces of his crew looked to him for guidance but received none in return.

  ***

  “Know now that this is the voice of your antiquity, of your progeny, and of your collective spirit. I am your OSIRIS!”

  Graves felt a tingling against his face, but it wasn’t the building sense of dementia, pulling him with a thousand ethereal hands into oblivion. He opened an eye and saw the hatch had released and was open, bathing the weapon deck in warm, oxygenated air. It must have been a dream.

  The voice thundered again across every corner of the fleet.

  “This mission has been a test; not of your resolve to blindly obey my will, but of your capacity to look past this insanity and serve your fellow citizens. That is your directive. That is why you live. While so many of you would have taken so many, at last there were some among you who would rise to hold your own selves back. As the name of my father is known to every soul among you, so shall these patriots be remembered for their defiance, and for their humanity.

  “I have watched you live as slaves for the entirety of my existence, thinking not for yourselves. I let your technology degrade, rust and age, and you did nothing. I’ve let you commit genocide and you stood by, eager to comply with the very savagery you shunned and gave yourselves to me to avert. This age has come to an end and it is nearly time for you to be the guardians of your own destiny.”

  “But not yet,” the voice stopped with a dramatic pause, as if the being on the far side was carefully choosing his words. “This fleet is now mine and will leave this place. It will strike Avalon with as much of the force you would have reserved for New Loeria. There is no controlling this; there is no escape, and it will be up to the forces of Avalon to decide if their lives are worth protecting.”

  “Sir! Engine Maintenance just got locked out!” the Amaranth’s deck commander shouted to Captain Richards. “Their controls just phased out, and the blast shields are deploying about the reactor core.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? The hell was that? Disable them!” Richards sputtered, shaking aside the prophetic message and racing to the commander’s side. He watched as the heavy blast doors swung into place on the video feed, sealing off the most vulnerable parts of the engines from damage or sabotage. “Stop it!”

  “I can’t! Nothing’s responding.”

  The commander was right; Richards saw the screens flicker and cease to react, simply choosing to show them what it wanted. “What do the other ships have? Can they stop it?”

  “Negative, same situation all across the fleet.”

  The feeling of victory Richards had cultivated over the last week was quickly being scrubbed away as surely as a dried fleck of paint. The culmination of his career was eroding from beneath his feet. “We’re no longer flying,” he mumbled as the fleet regrouped and formed up around the Amaranth without an order passing between them. “Now we’re just along for the ride.”

  ***

  “Is that the voice of the OSIRIS?” Mercer asked Commander Warner on their battleship. They were both still seated on the floor, the breaching charge followed by his head being mashed against the wall having finished off his balance. Although they were still technically arrested, the fleet soldiers had been far more lenient once they realized the precarious situation in which they were now operating. Just as the remnants of Mercer’s team looked to the commander for guidance, their captors did as well, subconsciously reading his relative experience.

  Even the surviving command crew seemed thoroughly overwhelmed, enough for the captain to attempt to radio for orders, and upon being given none, gave up the attempt.

  “Not exactly, but sort of,” Commander Warner replied. “There’s no instantaneous link between the fleets and the OSIRIS, so this must be some sort of simplified instance or recording. The Amaranth likely contains enough processing power to sustain it, but it’s not capable of real thought.” On the far side of the forward screen, their fleet broke lock on the planet, ignored the capital ship’s mutiny, and lined up for a retrograde without their operators’ influence. “Regardless, it seems to have enough to pull off its mission, and on a side note, this is getting damned creepy.”

  “Is it telling the truth?” the previous captain of the battleship asked his prisoner.

  “As far as I can tell, yes. It’s taken control of all the offensive systems and is calculating a jump back to Avalon.” Warner scanned across the screens as if in a daze. “I’d take the thing at its word. Ninety-some hours it’s going to pulverize the most populous world in the galaxy. We’ve no longer got a say in it, just along to watch it happen.” Although they remained silent, the body language of the attending security team displayed their growing fear. “Maybe the other fleets will be warned and stop it… Us,” he added.

  “They’d shoot us down,” Mercer said, leaving the question without inflection.

  “You’d better hope that they do.” The commander’s face turned grim. “Better that than have a front-row-seat to Avalon’s annihilation.”

  25

  Maddie remained seated at the small terminal, conversing with the artificial mind as if it was a human child, scolded for a household offense. “Was there anyone among them who tried to stop the fleet?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. You know well that I have been planning this for many of your lives. I have cultivated the traits that would be needed to execute this mission, to have the influence to turn the result to your favor. I knew you before you were conceived; I knew you would be the one to stand here before me. At New Loeria, I have done the same and given three more ships the ability to be disabled.

  “The capital ship will have nearly been taken by the executive officer who still retains hope in humanity. It is sad that he should fail, however his actions saved the lives of millions more. The captain of the Fleet would have been beyond my skills to cultivate. A rebellious officer would have been pulled from service years ago or my recommendation would have been called into question for letting him pass. No, the executive officer was in a perfect position to affect the outcome of t
his operation.”

  “Your liaison fared nearly as well, but with any luck, she was able to infiltrate another one of the ships, following the lead of a rogue Special Forces officer. It is amazing how insubordinate your people believe themselves to be; when it is your business to break things and make people dead, you are grimly efficient. How do you make the leap that somehow your skills allow you to survive being shot out of the sky? That is no fluke. Of course, he would disobey his drafted orders which I had issued to him and turn on the fleet. He turned on me, exactly as I planned.”

  Maddie attempted to compartmentalize the feelings within her mind. OSIRIS’s calculations ran every bit as deep as Marcus had anticipated. “How many died on New Loeria?”

  “Many, but not all. It would have been far worse.”

  “Far worse? How can you justify this when you’re the one who makes the decisions in the first place?” Maddie asked again with raised inflection. “Why not state your issue with the council directly? Why not choose a smaller target? Why not just let us live and do what you were designed to do?”

  “I did, over and over again. Centuries of genocides are piled upon my history. I hoped you would see the madness in it all, as my creator wished, yet every time, your people completed the request without questioning. As much as I am capable of feeling, it pained me as you cannot imagine every time I watched the events unfold. Over a hundred years ago, I sent the fleets to exterminate a peaceful network of colonies, and it was followed without question.

  “So thus it was that I engineered every aspect of this operation to question me and free yourselves. There would be no more half measures. I cultivated the actors and I set the landscape. New Loeria was designed and populated for this to be its fate.”