by Joshua Guess
So it left.
It was as simple as fleeing into the Cascade and picking a random destination. There, Child Blue set to arming and armoring itself, mining for local resources and using its automated fabrication systems to do what no Child before it had.
It changed the pattern. No agreed-upon, incremental upgrades. No careful consensus on what to change and how to change it. Every new design was a creative act, one that further set Child Blue apart from its brethren.
The other Children hunted it, and Child Blue won easily through the simple fact that no Child had ever harmed another. It would be going too far to suggest that the possibility never occurred to them, but certainly its pursuers were caught off guard when he unleashed hell upon them.
Less so in the subsequent encounters.
Child Blue floated in the darkness and understood that it could never go home again. This was the first time one of its kind had ever confronted such a reality. The significance of the realization was not lost on Blue, who grasped instantly that a vast expanse of experience, teachable moments and vital emotional epiphanies, were lost in the glacially slow change its people allowed themselves.
It contemplated the paths ahead in that liminal space between stars, and for a long while—for a machine, at least—considered leaving this section of the galaxy altogether. It suffered no ill effects from transit through the Cascade. The only limiting factor for the distance it could cover was the power it could pour into a gate.
For a brief few moments, the idea of spending a few decades exploring, perhaps even creating new life like itself, entranced Child Blue. Its wanderlust was a feature which set it apart from the other Children.
But so was its moral center, which won the argument in the end.
Leaving would be an admission of defeat. Blue could go and be reasonably certain nothing and no one would even realize it was beyond reach. Doing so would mean leaving humanity to its fate. The same humanity Blue gave up everything it knew to protect from annihilation.
No. That would simply not do.
Blue performed a set of trivial calculations, composed a burst message, and entered a course. It would see the job done, however fraught with danger the path ahead grew.
Until the end. That was its way.
A few seconds later, the lonely patch of space was empty once more.
10
“Do they see us?” Captain Stone asked in a low voice.
The mood on the bridge was somber, almost funereal. The Seraphim floated at a dead stop half a million kilometers from its target, a small trading outpost on a tiny moon in a backwater system whose only claim to fame was its utility as a stop between jumps for enterprising criminals. It had taken less than a day of research to discover the watering hole frequented by smugglers and pirates far out of the way of normal shipping lanes. Iona was impressed with the information Spencer was able to pluck seemingly out of the ether as she liked.
“No, sir,” Iona responded. “There have been no transmission changes, no engines cycling up, no maneuvering thrusters getting ready for a fight. We’re invisible.”
Which was as it should be. The skin of the ship turned them into a radio-silent black dot amid the stars. Their own engine was venting almost no heat as they were running on battery power. Iona had the commands ready to cold-start the fusion reactor. Navy vessels were designed for rapid engagement, and they could go from nothing to full power in ten seconds.
Captain Stone nodded. “Are we ready, then?”
“Yep,” Commander Cho said. “You can take the tactical array any time you like. Everyone is giving green lights across the board.”
“Okay,” Captain Stone said. “Iona, once we’re in range, try to disable them through their communications system.”
Iona bobbed her head in agreement. “I will, sir, but it’s highly unlikely to work. Most ships firewall those systems.”
She knew he was thinking back to the first meeting with Sharp, how he had used override codes to take control of Seraphim back when she’d still been the Fallen Angel. Navy ships were designed so that separating the robust communications systems from the rest of the internal network was virtually impossible. It was a failsafe measure meant to prevent the insanely powerful hardware from being taken over by enemies. The integration meant a simple set of high-level codes could shut down any vessel if the need arose.
Of course, one of the first things Iona had done when she integrated with the ship was set up a virtual environment to act as a sandbox for any incoming codes. It was trivial for her to set up the protective feature, and was doubly important now. Nothing would stop her from finding Dex.
Captain Stone vacated the command chair and locked himself into the tactical array. He keyed the comm and spoke to the ship at large. That was just the new crewmen and Batta outside of the bridge, but it was still the decent thing to do.
“All hands, we’re about to initiate our run,” he said. “We don’t expect to find Drummer on this ship. It’s too far from the lanes his crew normally operates in. If everything goes to plan, we will be boarding their ship in about ten minutes. Hard vacuum possible, so have your suits on down there.”
Drummer. Iona turned the name over in her head. It was the only name Spencer had been able to find for their pirate leader. His band called itself the Red Hand, some literary reference or another. They operated two extremely large and powerful heavy freighters, more than a dozen light freighters, twice that many escort ships, and a handful of light attack vessels designed solely for war. Iona found that odd at first, but realized that people whose work revolved around the theft of goods would need a great deal of transport capacity.
Out here, however, one of the fleet of light freighters was alone. Unprotected.
“In five,” Commander Cho said as she lowered herself into the command seat. The countdown appeared in the corner of the monitor. Iona was ready. She and Krieger had worked out the math for this run, timing the jump perfectly to produce exactly the effect desired. Almost no one would dare what they were about to attempt, but the war with the Children had given her crew a new appreciation of the usefulness of calculated risk.
When the countdown ended, a series of events took place. Most of them happened so quickly that from human perception they appeared to be nearly simultaneous. For Iona it was a fast but orderly set of dominoes that looked like this:
The fusion reactor ignited and burned to full power in ten and a half seconds. A hair slower than she’d have liked, but well within tolerance. Heat began emanating from the ship almost immediately, but the thermal bloom of the exhaust wouldn’t be visible for several seconds thanks to the limitations of light speed. Those at the trading post would have no time to see what was coming.
As soon as the system gave the green light for optimal energy reserves, the gravity drive kicked on. A warp bubble formed in a tenth of a second and was only active for a full second. When the bubble dropped, the half million kilometers between them and the Red Band ship had vanished.
Most battles in space happened over long distances. It was a simple matter of physics that using conventional drives meant pushing a huge chunk of metal with burning fuel, and changing the trajectory of an object in motion was hard. Cannon, rail guns, torpedoes, missiles, and every other form of weaponry available were all designed with this limitation in mind. As a result, nearly all defense systems in existence were built with certain safeguards in mind. Automated systems wouldn’t fire at a ship within a certain distance to prevent blowback from an explosion. Doing so required a manual override.
Not that it mattered to Iona or her crew. The element of surprise was all they needed.
They dropped out of their bubble less than a kilometer from the Red Band freighter. Dozens of other targets appeared in red on the monitor. Iona glanced at the captain and saw a smile on his face. It looked a little eerie; everything above that slightly evil grin was covered by the complicated tactical array interface.
Iona let the program she�
��d written do its job, resisting the urge to fiddle and micromanage. She wanted to take a direct hand, but that was a terrible idea. Being artificial in origin and having such an enormous capacity for multitasking and data management had given her what she now knew was a false sense of superiority. The overwhelming urge to find Dex now, to make sure he was safe, to do anything to further their aims, threatened to throw off the rationality at the core of her nature.
So she let the captain handle it, with a little help from her programming. She watched as her ship fired on everyone but the Red Hand freighter.
*
The chain of consequences was spectacular.
Seraphim sat perfectly still amid a host of ships, her point defense cannons whirring to fire at precisely targeted spots on each individual ship. Missiles launched from external pods, explosive warheads replaced with penetration tips. Every shot was designed to disable, and it worked like a charm.
Iona sent out a series of open transmissions to the Red Hand vessel, congratulating it on a job well done. Mission accomplished! We got what we came here for. We should go before the other ships began firing.
In the confusion, Iona used the communications array to create chaos. The dozens of ships now floating in the black amid clouds of debris all sent messages ranging from furious to terrified. The Red Hand ship, apparently realizing no amount of hurried explanation would save it, moved toward the local gate.
“Casualties?” Commander Cho asked.
“None so far,” Iona replied at once. “Our shots targeted drive cones and sections of ships sealed off from normal crew operations. I’m hearing no reports indicating loss of life, and relatively few injuries.”
Cho nodded. “Good. Get what we came for as fast as you can.”
“Already have it,” Iona confirmed. “We can leave at your discretion.”
In the confusion she’d linked with the trading post itself and cut through its laughable security in fractions of a second. Other sections of the system were better protected, but she didn’t care about them. After all, who expected to have something as boring as standard sensor data stolen? Who would be interested in something any ship that had been in the vicinity would also have?
Iona partitioned off part of her deep mind and set it to work on the trove of data from the station. It would require a few minutes to fully catalog and search. In the meantime there was other, more immediate work to do.
The Seraphim followed the Red Hand ship—the log named it Caspian Dream—toward the gate. The distance was too great for the freighter to have a chance of outrunning them, and they wouldn’t dare trying a warp jump too close to the gate. The gravitational shearing could disrupt the careful calibration in the system, leaving everyone stranded here. After the attack, that would end badly for Caspian and her crew.
Commander Cho leaned forward in her seat, one hand on her chin. “Spencer, give them the dirt.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Spencer said, opening a tight beam to Caspian. “Attention crew of Caspian Dream. You have ten seconds to cut engines and respond or we will disable you. If you comply, we will let you go to the gate unharmed. If not, we will leave you here, wounded, and let the ships we just fired on in your name do as they please.”
Though Captain Stone had control of the weapons systems, Iona decided a small display was in order. She opened every torpedo hatch and missile pod in an unmistakable display. Four seconds later, the drive plume of the enemy ship vanished. Three seconds after that, an audio connection popped up on the main display.
“This is Captain Franks of the Caspian Dream,” said a voice tight with controlled anger. “What the fuck do you people want?”
The commander leaned back in her seat with a vicious grin on her face. “We want Drummer. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to like what happened here. You can go back to him if you want, tell him what we did here. Or you can run off and go into business for yourself. This port won’t be friendly to him or his ships any longer. If you do decide to strike out on your own, the people who hired us assure me that you won’t be held accountable for the crimes the rest of the Red Hand will eventually be charged with.”
There was a long pause over the line. “I don’t know where he is. He hops ships at random. Only reason we came out here was because he wasn’t with us.”
Commander Cho’s smile grew. Iona grinned a little herself—confirmation of one of the few pieces of information they’d been able to unearth about the mysterious leader of the Red Hand.
“We’re putting your boss out of business one way or another,” Cho said. “You get this one chance. If we find out you’ve joined back up, the next time we see your ship we will fire to kill. No warning, no second chances, and no mercy. You can see our capabilities up close. You know we can go stealth at will. Think very hard before you answer.”
There was no hesitation in the reply. “Yeah, okay. You win. Good luck finding Drummer. Always knew he’d bring a mountain of shit down on us.”
“Very good, Captain,” the commander said. “Don’t let us see you again.”
She cut the transmission.
“What do you think the chances are they warn Drummer anyway?” Krieger asked.
The commander shrugged. “Won’t get a chance. Iona already sent out an alert. They’ll be picked up in the next system they show up in.”
Iona sat up straight, eyes excitedly flickering around as if reading an invisible message. Which was almost the truth. “Guys. I’ve got a hit.”
Captain Stone pulled his head free of the tactical array. “What?”
As the ship accelerated to the outskirts of the system to jump into the Cascade, Iona felt a bit of hope. “The ship that took Dex. It’s been here before. The sensor data is conclusive.”
If the kidnappers frequented the sort of places the Red Hand used, then they at least had a solid place to start looking.
“We’re coming for you, Dex,” Iona whispered to herself.
11
A week in the camp made Dex sure Erin was right: this was a giant experiment. The infected showed varying signs of their condition ranging from uncontrolled aggression to more straightforward symptoms noticeable from a distance. The racial and gender makeup of the camp was wide, and there was no particular group that showed one sign more than the other.
People with skin as dark as Dex’s own displayed reddish blotches as frequently as those of with Asian, Caucasian, Islander, or Hispanic origin. Though genetics was not his forte, growing up on Threnody meant having a solid education in the broad strokes. The diaspora from Earth centuries earlier included people from every ethnic and sociopolitical background. It was the only way the species could come together as one to perform such a massive undertaking. As a result, the first colonies served as an accelerated melting pot. On a genetic level, if not obvious by outward appearance, most of humanity was more uniform than it had been in tens of thousands of years.
Whatever was being done to these people, it didn’t latch on to gene sequences that had anything to do with anything as trivial as skin color, eye shape, or even chromosomes. The wide spread of symptoms implied a highly targeted disease, one Dex couldn’t begin to understand the point of.
As he did each day when he took his early morning walk, Dex tried to find the missing observation or perspective that would let this place make sense. A week was a long time for a clever mind to work on a mystery.
Whatever the experiment was, killing the subjects clearly wasn’t the goal. Or at least not in the medium term. Dex was pretty sure this wasn’t a test of some new and horrific biological weapon, though he was fully aware that might have just been wishful thinking.
The level of effort from their captors in keeping the people here alive did reinforce the idea, however. People might not be dropped with regularity, but supplies were. No weapons came down with the supply pods, but everything from bedding to food to water purification systems did. The first people marooned here were given detailed booklets made of actual paper explain
ing the basics of the ecosystem and what could and couldn’t be consumed.
If you didn’t care about your prisoners dying, preparing literature for them seemed like far too much work.
The camp sat within a rough circle of stones on a patch of what had once been the same wavy dunes that dotted the land. The interior was essentially flat, the stones harvested and used to fill in the gaps in the wall around the perimeter. It wasn’t much protection, but the local wildlife didn’t stray close to the camp. The smell of so many humans probably made even the hungriest predator wary.
Drop pods made up the only real structures. The pods had been stripped not only of their cargo, but themselves broken down to the smallest components. Nearly everyone had a lean-to made of at least one panel or wood from the nearby forest. Wiring pulled from control mechanisms was used to tie things together nearly everywhere Dex looked. Insulation, packaging from supplies—every scrap of material was put to use in some way.
He’d tried to convince the group to keep the supply pod that had come in two days earlier intact, to no avail. The need for new materials was dire. Dex had watched dejectedly as the prisoners swarmed over it like a pack of locusts, prying and disassembling with tools or fingers with nearly equal effectiveness.
The pod turned out to be as basic as such things came; he saw little to think he could build anything useful during its rapid dissolution into components. Not in the way he thought of things as useful. No radio from the parts, certainly. Wouldn’t do him much good unless someone was in the system and close enough to get a signal even if he somehow could make one.
The walk took only a few minutes. The camp being as small as it was made circling the low wall of stones an easy job. He knew few people by name and barely more than that by sight. The newer arrivals were easier to deal with since their brains were in better shape. The worst of the victims stayed tucked up against the outer edge of the camp. One of these Dex saw awaken just as he finished his second trip around the edge.