by Ian Douglas
Like every capital ship in the fleet, America carried a company of USNA Marines, partly as her onboard police and security, and partly for ship-to-ship evolutions like this one. VBSS, an ancient combat acronym, stood for “visit, board, search, and seizure,” which covered a variety of operations involving putting a team of combat troops or specialist personnel on board another ship—usually one suspected of being hostile. In this case, the Marines would be inserting a FiCo robot, as well as securing a breach point on Charlie One’s hull.
Assuming the aliens permitted it, of course. Gray had seen recordings made by the fighters of Concord being swallowed by that thing. The aliens had remarkable control over the material aspect of their ship’s hull, to the point that the Marines likely would be able to breach that hull only if the aliens let them.
Gray had had a long talk with the Marines’ commander, Lieutenant Menocher. They had viewed the recordings and discussed options, in particular working out what to do if the aliens proved to be uncooperative.
He sincerely hoped that some of those options would not be necessary.
VBSS Team One
Charlie One
1452 hours, TFT
The star carrier dwindled astern to the apparent dimensions of a toy as the boarding pod drifted across the yawning gulf between the two vessels. Lieutenant Menocher sat strapped to the boss’s seat in the transport bay, packed in with the rest of First Platoon’s forty Marines. The space was made tighter by the special payload—a FiCo teleobot named Klaatu.
Menocher glanced at the robot, which was strapped in next to him. It looked human. In fact, given that the Marines in the compartment were wearing Marine combat armor (obviously robots didn’t need to breathe, or worry about temperature, radiation, or pressure, and therefore functioned just fine in hard vacuum without environmental suits), Klaatu was the most human-looking one there.
Sergeant Aguilar saw Menocher looking at the robot and opened a private channel. “So, Lieutenant: what’s with Klat’s weird name, anyway? Is that an Agletsch thing?”
“No. It’s the name of a fictional alien in an old, old entertainment sim. Most first-contact ’bots are named after characters like that. Exeter. Threepio. Gallaxhar. Mac. Curtis . . .”
“I don’t get it, sir.”
“Those characters generally said something like ‘I come in peace.’ The first two contact robots they built were named ‘Buzz’ and ‘Neil.’ ”
“From a sim, sir?”
“Negative. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the first humans to set boots on the moon. Don’t you know your history? ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ ”
“Oh, yeah. Ancient history.”
Menocher shook his head, the gesture unseen inside his helmet. With every byte of information available about Humankind within each person’s immediate reach, it was appalling how little most people knew about their own culture and history. Damn it, they should know this stuff.
“Fifteen seconds, Lieutenant.” The voice was that of the AI piloting the boarding pod, a fairly simple-minded program backed up by a Navy pilot who would take over only if the system encountered something outside its narrow purview. “There is no indication as yet that the objective is opening up for us.”
“Well, it wouldn’t do to have things going too easily for us,” Menocher said aloud. “Heads up, Marines! Contact in ten seconds!”
His view ahead showed nothing now but a smooth and curving gray-green expanse. He’d been expecting that hull to blossom open to receive them, just as it had for the High Guard ship earlier, but apparently the welcome mat was no longer out. They would have to do this the hard way.
The pod made contact with a gentle thump. The docking collar engaged automatically.
The business end of the Marine transport pod consisted of an airlock mounting a circular ring charged with nano-disassemblers. The submicroscopic nanomachines bonded the collar to the target hull and ate away an opening enclosed by the airlock—a neat and muss-free means of getting aboard another ship without losing pressure within either the target ship or the transport pod.
Several tense seconds passed, the Marines hanging in zero-gravity as they waited for the nano-D to do its work.
“We have a problem, sir,” the Navy helmsman said. “The target hull is countering us.”
Shit. “Use the lasers. Burn through!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Nano-disassemblers worked by physically separating individual molecules into their component atoms. The toughest ferralumiplas barrier became an amorphous cloud of carbon, aluminum, and iron atoms in a dissociated state—a gas carrying a lot of heat. The best defense against a nano-D attack was more nano programmed to counter the first, literally rebuilding the damage that was being done atom by atom. Nano attacks and defenses happened on a very short time scale, with trillions of disassemblies and reassemblies occurring in a tiny fraction of a second.
Charlie One’s technology was unknown as yet, but that trick with the blossoming hull clearly indicated either nanotechnology or something alien but which acted just like it. Fighters like the Starblade and Velociraptor had active nanomatrix hulls that let them change shape in flight to meet various tactical needs; Charlie One appeared to be able to do the same thing, but on a much larger scale. By firing the docking collar’s lasers, Menocher was continuing the attack, but on a somewhat less sophisticated level, vaporizing the alien hull in a searing blaze of laser light instead of taking it apart with submicroscopic machines.
“Sir! The alien is opening up!”
Like water, the alien ship’s hull flowed back from the pod’s airlock, though it remained rigid around the attachment ring at the collar. Data flowed through Menocher’s in-head as the pod’s AI sampled atmosphere and pressure within the alien’s interior: hard vacuum, with radiant heat warming the sensor probes to about ten degrees Celsius. The airlock appeared to open into a vast internal cavity or chamber of some sort.
“Bleed off pod atmosphere!” Menocher yelled. “Ready, Marines—okay! Kick the hatch!”
The lead fireteam propelled themselves through the forward opening, landing heavily on the other side.
“What the fuck?” Corporal Barnett yelled. “Sir, there’s gravity over here!”
Human ships created their own gravity by spinning portions of their structures, like the rotating hab modules on America. It was known that some alien technologies made gravity to order at the figurative flick of a switch, but how they did so was still not known. The singularity projectors that propelled human ships did so by manipulating space in gravity-like ways, but how to do that throughout the vessel remained a mystery, and most of the Marines had never encountered it.
“How big a drop, Barnett?”
“About four, maybe five meters, sir.”
“Everybody okay?”
“Yessir! Marines are fucking tough!”
Yes we are. It also helps that we’re wearing good armor.
“Everybody watch your step!” Menocher ordered. The other Marines began filing through, moving more cautiously to avoid a misstep on the other side. They would use maneuvering thrusters to manage a softer landing than Barnett’s team.
“Holy shit! Lieutenant, are you seein’ this?”
Menocher linked in to Barnett’s helmet camera for a look. The chamber was so huge the far bulkheads were lost in shadow, and glancing up revealed vast arches spanning empty space—but no sign of an overhead. Directly ahead, however, was the Concord, three hundred meters long and looking like a toy lost within all of that empty space.
Except that the space wasn’t empty, not completely. A silvery mirrored cigar twice Concord’s length hung just above her, as if holding her in a kind embrace.
And, much closer, the aliens were approaching the travel pod’s breach point.
Chapter Seven
29 June, 2425
Outer Sol System
1458 hours, TFT
Sandy Gray was linked into the data feed from the boarding party, riding transmissions from Lieutenant Menocher that included the camera views from one of his Marines. He’d just seen one of the aliens, and was using a side channel to talk with America’s AI.
“Damn it, is there anything in the records like that?”
He felt the system’s negative response. Although the ship’s computer could converse with him in English, it generally passed on impressions and feelings that came close to making the ship’s artificial intelligence a part of Gray’s own mind, saving time and, more important, reducing confusion and misunderstanding.
“Admiral?” Dr. Truitt’s voice said. “Those can’t be organic. I think we’re looking at robots.”
George Truitt was the civilian head of America’s xenosophontology division, the shipboard unit tasked with gathering data on alien cultures, biologies, and technologies.
Gray zoomed in on the image appearing in one of his in-head windows. The alien—one of eleven visible at the moment in the vast, open chamber in front of the Marine VBSS team—was an upright cigar, tapering at top and bottom, and appeared to be floating with its lower tip centimeters above the deck. Swellings and sponsons emerged from different areas of the gleaming, opalescent body, and tentacles whipped and shifted around it. Gray could see several eyes, remarkably human in appearance, located at apparently random points up and down the shining column.
“What makes you say ‘robot,’ Doctor?” he asked. “The color? It might be a cyborg. Or that could be a natural pigment.”
“Each one is unique, Admiral,” Truitt replied. “The placement of eyes, sponsons, tentacles—they’re different in each one.”
Gray shifted his point of view to several of the others, zooming in as closely as the system permitted. “So, each one individually manufactured? Instead of mass produced, I mean.”
“Mass production was an artifact of the earliest period of the industrial revolution,” Truitt told him. “Once you get AI and nanotechnology, you can grow machines to spec one by one. We do that now.”
Interesting, Gray thought, that people—himself included—still thought in terms of mass production when it came to robots, armies of machines indistinguishable from one another despite the far-reaching changes of the nanotech revolution. Most, Gray included, still carried in the backs of their minds the cultural trope of identical machines with interchangeable parts.
The fact that the being was floating above the deck meant nothing, of course. The H’rulka, though far larger, were intelligent gas bags evolved in the upper atmosphere of a planet like Jupiter. More likely, the levitation was due to a technological twist of some sort, possibly involving the alien vessel’s artificially generated gravity field.
Still . . .
“Those eyes look organic,” Gray insisted.
“They do. Doesn’t mean anything. Sir.”
True, it didn’t. Another aspect of the nanotech revolution was the ability to grow biological machines as well as the more traditional kind, and incorporate them into other structures or devices. Most humans carried inorganic components nanotechnically grown inside their brains and hardwired into other parts of their central nervous systems. The opposite was possible as well—growing organic parts connected to assembled machinery. The FiCo robot with the Marines was a case in point: a plastic body, but with eyes distinguishable from organics only if you looked at them very closely.
Of course, real organic eyes would have been completely desiccated in the hard vacuum out there, turning mummy dry and useless in seconds. So maybe Truitt’s guess was smack on the money after all.
Gray opened his channel to Lieutenant Menocher. “I suggest you send in the FiCo, Lieutenant.”
“I was just thinking the same thing, Admiral. Jones! Get the damned robot up here!”
The robot emerged from the pod, dropping lightly to the alien ship’s deck as it entered the local gravitational field. It looked nakedly helpless crouching next to the heavily armored Marines to either side.
Gray thoughtclicked an icon, and his awareness shifted to the robot, which was being teleoperated by a Marine robotics tech still on the travel pod.
“You want control, sir?” the Marine’s voice said in Gray’s head.
“Negative. Shift control to Dr. Truitt’s department.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Though possessing an onboard AI capable of autonomous behavior, the real strength of a robot like Klaatu lay in its ability to serve as a remote body for a human teleoperator and as a mobile viewpoint for an observer, like Gray.
Gray watched through the teleobot’s eyes as it rose and walked slowly toward the approaching, upright columns, hands spread to either side, palms open.
We come in peace. . . .
Gray had researched the movie that had produced the name Klaatu a little less than five centuries ago. The fictional character had, in fact, been organic; he’d been accompanied by a robot named Gort that, the story had implied, could have destroyed the Earth.
Gort hadn’t said anything in the old movie, however, and it had been Klaatu who’d implied peaceful motives.
Modern technology, Gray thought, had gone a long way toward blurring the boundaries between organic and inorganic, between life and non-living machine. Many speculated that the Sh’daar proscription of the so-called GRIN technologies—genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—had more to do with the blurring of those lines than it did with any theoretical technology singularity. Some had speculated that Sh’daar motives for their ultimatum might have been more religious than practical.
Gray doubted that. He’d been there, outside of the galaxy and more than 800 million years in the past, when America’s battlegroup had actually met with the Sh’daar—the ancient ones, at any rate—and witnessed the passing of their progenitors, the ur-Sh’daar, in a catastrophic metamorphosis the Agletsch called the Schjaa Hok, the “Transcending.” The Sh’daar Collective as a group was terrified of another Transcending; there could be no doubt about that. That terror might well have carried with it religious implications that had utterly transformed the way the Sh’daar looked at themselves and their cosmos, but they didn’t seem to be especially worried about the line separating life forms from robots. Such distinctions, Gray thought, were almost charmingly archaic now, at least for most humans. What mattered overwhelmingly was not whether a life form had evolved naturally or been artificially grown or assembled. What mattered was mind.
And he was thinking about this as the teleobot approached the nearest of the Charlie One entities. Was it a robotic worker? A soldier? Or ship’s crew? Such distinctions might well be meaningless. Probably were meaningless within an alien context. There were no clues in the appearance of the thing, which hovered motionless a few meters away.
Interesting. Several of those disturbingly human eyes were moving through the opalescent shell of the device, as though gathering to focus on Klaatu.
An in-head readout showed that Klaatu was receiving a rapid-fire string of radio transmissions, and he was responding in kind.
The language lessons had commenced.
Gray knew from experience that this might take a while. “Dr. Truitt?” he said. “Can you do a search in the E.G. using the shapes of those things?”
The Encyclopedia Galactica was the human name for a vast repository of information about worlds, biologies, and cultures across the entire galaxy—descriptions of alien races, of their home systems, of their arts and technologies and philosophies. Much of that database had come by way of the Agletsch, and as such, understanding what was being said was more often than not an exercise in futility. In the last few decades, though, Humankind had learned to tap into the invisible web of laser-light transmissions among key nodes an
d, with Agletsch help in the translations, had begun listening in. Those portions of the E.G. that had already been translated, comprising an immense, powerful, and priceless resource, were carried within Humankind’s starships, where humans were gradually getting meaning out of them.
“We’re not seeing anything based on the ship design, Admiral,” Truitt told him. “We’ll need something to go on—a name, an entry code, something.”
“We’ll see what we can do.”
And that was the problem: finding anything at all within the Encyclopedia was like searching for a specific drop of water in the ocean. Armies of AIs on Earth and at the xenosoph lab at Crisium on the Moon combed the through the mountains of data continually, calling humans into the process only when they found tidbits of particular interest to them. Other than that, unless you knew just what to look for—and possessed the appropriate access codes—finding the entry on any given specific race was very nearly impossible.
These aliens, the crew of Charlie One, were almost certainly somewhere in the galactic database, if only because they likely were Sh’daar, and the Agletsch knew most of the species within the Sh’daar Collective. It was finding them somewhere within all of those millions of entries that was going to be a problem and a half.
And, Gray admitted, it was also distinctly possible that they were not Sh’daar, and the Agletsch traders had never heard of them. The Grdoch, for instance, had not been part of the Collective.
Gray scowled at the memory of those obscene, sucker-covered scarlet bags with the supremely unpleasant eating habits. He turned his attention back to Klaatu’s feed and once again pondered Charlie One’s aliens.
If they could find the E.G. entry for them, they might be able to manage full contact. Gray had a long list of questions if they could manage that, starting with what the hell they were talking to the Confederation about.
And if they weren’t Sh’daar, maybe they would make better allies than the belligerent and bloody-minded Grdoch.