“Had to be done.”
“Hmm. If we had more officers on the cruiser, it might have been done by someone other than the XO. Rank, I am told, has its privileges. I have yet to actually experience any of them.”
“Lanoe really leans on you, I know,” Valk told her. “You know it’s because he believes in you. That you’re capable of everything he hands you.”
“I suppose that’s a sort of compliment. Very well. We need to repeat this futile performance for the other destroyer. But first—Valk. I need to discuss something with you.”
“Yeah? Okay, well, I guess we have time.”
Candless inhaled sharply through her nose. “I spoke with your other selves, before. The copies of yourself that you wedged into our BR.9s.”
“A bunch of charming guys, I bet,” Valk said.
“Hmm. One of them sacrificed himself to save my life.”
“Oh,” Valk said. “Listen, before this gets awkward, I mean, I get you want to thank me, but—”
“Thank you?” Candless said. “Hardly.”
“Okay, so then …”
“I was disgusted,” she said. “You put them in those fighters like it was a Procrustean bed. Tortured them. You tortured versions of your self.”
“Limited versions,” Valk said. “A BR.9 doesn’t have the memory capacity to hold all of my files.”
“That makes it better somehow? Stunted reflections of your self are less worthy of existence? They can be thrown away with abandon?”
“You don’t understand,” he told her.
He’d always known it would come to this. Candless had never hidden her feelings about artificial intelligences—or Valk personally. Her antipathy was hardly surprising. Possession of an AI, or simply harboring one, was a capital crime on every human world. Giving an AI access to weaponry was an automatic death sentence.
The Martians had built an AI, back during the Century War. They’d installed it on a dreadnought, a kind of super-battleship. They’d given it the mission to win that war and bring Earth to heel. It had acted according to pure logic—flying to Earth and shelling the homeworld until half the human race was dead. It only stopped because it needed to reload. It made perfect sense, of course. If everyone on Earth was dead, Mars would win the war by default.
Candless hadn’t even been alive back when it happened. As far as Valk knew, he was the only artificial intelligence built since that time. Yet something in the ancestral memory of humanity had kept that fear—and thus that hatred—alive. Lanoe had forbidden Candless from confronting Valk directly, but she’d never grown to like him.
“What are you?” she demanded now.
“A ghost,” he told her. “The memories of a man named Tannis Valk.”
“I know about the Blue Devil. The hero pilot of the Establishment. That’s not what I’m asking,” she replied. “I’m asking who you are. I’ve spoken with Engineer Paniet. He tells me you’re changing. Becoming less human over time.”
What could he do? Valk decided he would be honest with her. She already hated him. Nothing he could say would change that. “It’s been a process of discovery. That is, I keep discovering things I don’t have anymore. Things I don’t have to do anymore, too. I don’t have to eat. I don’t have to sleep. One day I realized I didn’t need to breathe. That was a real shock.”
He looked for Candless’s reflection in one of the destroyer’s carbonglas viewports. He saw her shake her head in confusion.
“Are you … are you more intelligent than we are? Humans, I mean.”
“No. I don’t think so,” Valk said. “I can do some things better than you can. I can talk to computers without needing an interface. I have better reaction times. But smarter? I feel about as smart as Tannis Valk was. I guess.”
“You could be, though. You could make yourself smarter.”
It was an old belief about AI that because its mental processes could be understood, they could be improved upon. That the first action any AI would take would be to search out additional processor power, faster file handling protocols, ways to overclock its processes. That if left unchecked, any AI would increase its intelligence exponentially, until human beings could no longer comprehend its thoughts. That it would become something better, bigger, than the people who created it.
“I’ve never tried. I won’t,” Valk said. “You—and I mean people in general—hate me enough already. All of you except Lanoe.”
“I don’t understand it,” Candless told him. “How he thinks he can trust you. If you wanted to kill me right now, you could. Couldn’t you?”
It would be pretty easy, actually. Candless’s suit was protecting her in all kinds of ways. It gave her the oxygen she needed, it regulated her body’s temperature. It shielded her from radiation. He could change any number of parameters in the suit’s software and she would be dead within minutes.
“Yes,” he told her. “But I wouldn’t do that.”
“And one is expected to believe you. Simply because you say so.”
“Because—because the same reasons you don’t just walk up to Ehta and strangle her with your bare hands. I know you’ve considered that.” The two lieutenants, one the cruiser’s executive officer and the other its warrant officer, had been at odds since they first met. “You don’t do it for one simple reason, because there are consequences to actions. Lanoe wouldn’t like it if I hurt you. He would never forgive me.”
“His opinion means that much to you?”
Valk lacked the ability to sigh. He could only play an audio file of what it sounded like when Tannis Valk used to sigh. Before he died.
“Lanoe’s the only reason I’m still here,” Valk told her. “You think I’m an abomination, and you know what? I get it. I do. I think the same thing. Tannis Valk hated AI as much as you do.”
“Oh,” Candless said. “But then—”
“I want to die,” Valk told her. “I want to be deleted. I’m not allowed to. Not until Lanoe is done with me. Not as long as I’m still useful.”
Air rushed past Maggs’s head, rustling the sack that obscured his vision. All external sounds went away and he understood. Someone had just opened a hatch onto hard vacuum. His straps were undone and he was hauled out of his seat. Someone kicked his legs until he jerked them forward and found his feet planted on solid deck plates.
Gravity. They’d taken him somewhere with gravity. That meant either he was onboard a ship that was undergoing acceleration, or he was on actual terra firma. The gravity didn’t waver or feel unsteady at all, which suggested the latter.
The protocomet, then. They’d taken him to the protocomet. As good a place as any. It was a tradition that when the Navy executed someone, they had to be buried or ejected into space immediately afterward. Most likely this tradition had begun because there was so little room on Navy ships for the storage of corpses.
Maggs also thought that Lanoe might want to carry out the executions somewhere other than on the carrier for another reason. He wouldn’t want all the Centrocor employees there to witness the deaths of their former officers. It could be bad for morale.
Hands grabbed his arms and legs and he was pushed through a narrow opening, then hauled back up to his feet. Someone stood on either side of him, holding him, forcing him to march forward. There was so little gravity on the protocomet that Maggs was forced to shuffle along, careful to keep from bounding off into the sky.
They didn’t go very far. Maggs was forced to his knees. He felt as light as a feather, no doubt due to the low gravity of the protocomet—it couldn’t possibly be fear that made him feel so empty and sick.
Maggs had a bad habit of being sarcastic even in his own internal monologue.
For what felt like a very, very long time he was left there, kneeling on smooth ice. He attempted to use his suit’s communications faculties but soon discovered—with not a shred of surprise—that they’d been blocked. He was left unable to speak to anyone, unable to see anything, unable to think of anything but
what was about to happen.
He supposed that keeping a stiff upper lip had its limits. And surely he could be excused for breaking down a little, now, when no one could see him.
“Dad,” he said. His voice sounded, to his own ears, hoarse and weak. “Father. I beg your pardon for what I said before. I’d very much like to speak with you again now. I don’t want to be alone.”
There was no response. The voice that had lived in his head for years failed to manifest itself.
“Please, Admiral,” he said to his decorated father. “Please. You always have such good advice. Especially when I don’t want it. I could really use some now.”
He felt a distant rhythmic vibration, perhaps footfalls coming toward him. Perhaps that was the step of the executioner.
“Daddy!” he shrieked. “I’m begging you! I’m your son, your only son! Please—please come speak with me. Please, just—just tell me it’s going to be all right. It doesn’t matter that it’s a lie. It would make me feel so much better. Please, Dad.”
He closed his eyes to hold back the tears that pooled in his eye sockets, surface tension overcoming the miniscule gravity.
“Please,” he begged.
Someone pulled the sack off his head. He saw a human form, silhouetted against so many, many stars.
He blinked rapidly to clear away the tears. Looked left and right, and saw he was kneeling in a line of people, some of whom he recognized—Shulkin and Bullam, and the IO from the bridge—and some he didn’t. They were grouped in a very shallow semicircle, a meter away from the rim of a deep crater with steep walls.
Maggs craned his head around, trying to see more. He quickly located Lieutenant Ehta, the warrant officer from the cruiser. He saw several marines he vaguely recognized from the Hoplite, people whose names he’d never bothered to learn. Weapons slung loose in their arms.
Then he looked up again and saw Lanoe. It was Lanoe who’d taken the sack away. Lanoe who was holding a pistol in one hand.
And smiling at him.
Candless took her fighter over to the carrier, a few million kilometers away. Valk stayed with her, linked in through her suit. “We will have further words, you and I,” she told him as she flew.
He didn’t doubt it.
“For the moment, however, we have to stay alert. We can’t very well make the entire crew of the carrier wait outside while we perform our inspection. Nor will I be able to complete this task on my own—the vehicle is just too large. It looks like I need your help now. I worry I’ll find you as convenient as Lanoe does.”
“Always glad to be of service,” Valk said. Tweaking the tone of his voice to convey some sarcasm.
As they approached the round maw of the big ship, Valk couldn’t help but feel a little apprehensive, even after the carrier’s flight deck crew signaled that they were cleared for approach. He could see the old scar along the hull of the ship where Candless had struck it with a disruptor round. The damage was severe and only partially repaired. Still, compared to the cruiser the carrier looked to be in far better condition. If Lanoe hadn’t taken the chance of infiltrating it, Valk knew that they never would have stood a chance. Centrocor would have killed them all.
Candless eased her BR.9 inside the carrier’s flight deck, a vast steel cave lined with docking berths for fifty fighters. Only about two-thirds of that complement remained now—repeated battles had thinned their numbers considerably—but still there were enough Sixty-Fours and carrier scouts to make the flight deck a place of long, sharp shadows.
“They want you to put down over there,” Valk said, indicating the approved berth by superimposing a yellow rectangle on her canopy.
“I’ll dock where I wish to,” Candless told him. She called over to the flight controllers and indicated she would use a berth she must have chosen at random. “It’s important to remind them who’s in charge now, I think,” she told Valk. “As for you, please do not interface with my craft’s computers any further. I don’t care for it.”
“Okay,” Valk said.
Candless was an excellent pilot. She set down without so much as a thump. Long metal restraining bars craned down over the fighter to hold it in place, and a narrow hatch opened up next to the berth, spilling light into the gloom. Candless lowered her canopy and then pushed her way into the hatch, which closed behind her with a hiss.
Every berth in the flight deck had its own dedicated airlock. That way the pilots could get to their ships faster when it was time to scramble. “Have you been on a Hipparchus-class carrier before?” Candless asked him.
“A couple times,” Valk said. “Once as a pilot, during some campaign or other. Once as a prisoner, at the end of the Establishment Crisis. They made us turn our fighters in so we could be processed in the demobilization. There were so many of us they had to bring in a bunch of carriers just to hold us all. We were worried we were boarding prison ships, but the Navy treated us okay. Right up until they stripped our service records and cut us loose to try to find jobs where we could.”
“That wasn’t the Navy’s decision, to leave you out in the cold,” Candless suggested. “That was the Sector Wardens.”
“I guess that ought to make a difference.”
He felt Candless’s irritation through her suit sensors. There was still some bad blood between the Navy and the pilots who had fought for the Establishment. This wasn’t the time for dredging up bad history, though.
The airlock opened into a maze of corridors inside the hull of the carrier. At first no one was there to greet them, but soon a PBM with hexagons painted on his shoulders came puffing up toward them, kicking off the walls.
“Lieutenant?” he asked. “Ma’am? I’m, uh, I’m Sergeant Foulkes. I’m supposed to help you with … with your …”
“Inspection,” Candless told the young man. He couldn’t be over twenty-five. “In the future, when you announce yourself, simply state your name and rank. When you hem and haw like that it makes you sound like you have something to hide.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the marine said. His eyes were trembling in their sockets, he was so scared.
“Ease up,” Valk told Candless. “We have to work with these people.”
Candless did not respond. Perhaps she didn’t want Foulkes to know she had a passenger riding on her shoulder, so to speak.
“Take me to the bridge, Sergeant. Now.”
Foulkes didn’t even say “Yes, ma’am.” He twisted around in the corridor and kicked off the wall, his hands out in front of him to catch the edge of a hatch up ahead. He led Candless into a much larger passage, one lined with hatches. Most of those hatches were open, and people were poking their heads out of them, staring at the newcomer.
Candless didn’t look at them.
“They’re worried, ma’am,” Foulkes said, as if she’d asked. “Worried about what’s going to happen to them.”
“Just a couple kind words now,” Valk suggested, “and—”
“With any change of command,” Candless told Foulkes, “there will be uncomfortable transitions.”
The bridge wasn’t much farther. Foulkes brought them up short at another hatch that opened into a broad space where several corridors came together. At the exact center of the space was one very large hatch.
Or at least there used to be a very large hatch there. Shards of it remained in the frame, triangular lengths of metal with bright, smooth edges. A dismantler had dissolved the rest.
The walls around the broken hatch were stained. Ribbons and splotches of pink had soaked into the padding. There were scorch marks and bullet holes all around, and the air was full of semitoxic chemicals. Complex organic compounds, the residue left over when very nasty weapons went off in an enclosed space full of bodies.
Candless passed it all by, kicking her way into the bridge beyond. The room wasn’t in bad shape, considering. There were a few ruined displays, and one wall looked like it had been scratched by a very large, very ferocious tiger. Valk recognized the trails left beh
ind by the rounds of a particle rifle. Otherwise the bridge was intact.
And almost empty. A pilot and a navigator were seated at their respective positions. There was no one in the captain’s chair.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Candless said. “Please leave me alone now.”
Valk expected Candless to take the captain’s chair, but instead she went to the IO’s position and strapped herself into the seat. She tried to bring up some displays—schematics of the carrier, personnel manifests, damage reports. Only a few of the displays she requested actually appeared. She leaned forward, over the IO’s console. The display surface there was cracked and riddled with bullet holes. Candless reached inside the broken gray plastic of the console. Valk looked inside along with her and saw smashed and burnt-out emitters.
Candless sighed, long and deep.
“I can bring up all that information for you, if you want,” Valk said.
“Very well. Again, the convenience of your abilities trumps my disgust.”
Valk tried to ignore that. “You could have been nicer to Foulkes,” he said.
“Not if I expect these people to respect me. They lost a battle. However, because Lanoe was very clever, it didn’t look like a battle. Most of them didn’t even know it was going on at the time. It wasn’t real to them—they woke up this morning working for Centrocor, and now, without so much as having had a chance to fire a shot in their defense, they are prisoners of the Navy. They need to know something serious happened here. They need to know they lost.”
“I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” Valk said. “Did you … did you see all the blood out there?”
“The reports, please,” Candless said.
“Yeah.” Valk worked with what emitters he could find, any console that was still functional. The displays popped up in the air around her. While she studied the reports, he scanned the room, and then the corridors around them, looking for booby traps.
“Hold on,” he said, because he’d found something. Though not what he expected. “Under the navigator’s position. There.” She got up and moved across the room, following his directions. “There’s something lodged against an air intake there. I don’t know if—”
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