Nick didn’t have even the strength to crawl back in the dank recesses of the cave. He knew it was over.
“I promised your wife we wouldn’t harm you, Nick,” Richard Avery standing now standing in front of the cave. “I plan to keep that promise.”
“Oh, Dad,” Alison said, “I didn’t know—”
Nick slid his arm around her, hugged her to him. “It’s all right, honey. You’re with me now and that’s all that matters.”
Richard said, “You don’t look so good, Nick. You need help to walk? We’ve got our SUV just down the hill. It shouldn’t be too hard on you.”
But that would be his last bit of pride, of dignity gone. He’d be damned if he let them carry him to his obvious fate.
It was sort of like the walk to your execution. He didn’t want to be one of the ones who had to be dragged, sobbing to meet his destiny.
“Hell, no.”
“He’s so handsome,” whispered the dark haired woman to the blond haired woman. They sat side by side by side in the pew. This service overflowed with people who’d heard about this new parson in God’s Arms.
“And his voice. It’s so authoratative.” There were those who felt that he was even more powerful a presence on the altar than Parson Paul.
“And think of where he was a year ago. Smashing up the Protector and escaping from camp.”
“It’a good thing he agreed to go back. Look at him now.”
All these words were spoken in anticipation of Parson Nick, the newest minister in Parson’s Paul’s roster.
And then the moment.
There was drama in his presence as he appeared on the altar and then stepped to face his people. Not affected drama, either. Maybe it was his travails of the past few years, some reasoned, that gave him such charismatic power. Had there ever been such a fierce example of sin and redemption in the history of God’s Arms?
And then he spoke: “I’m Parson Nick. Before I begin my sermon I’d like to thank you for joining me here today. And I’d like to thank the Lord and Parson Paul for being here.”
The dark-haired woman whispered to the blonde-haired woman: “That voice.”
Partnership
By William H. Keith
William H. Keith is the author of some seventy-five books published over the past twenty-two years. His titles are fairly evenly distributed between military SF and modern military technothrillers, all with strong geopolitical and military-historical overtones. In addition to his writing, Keith has been a guest lecturer on SF and future spacecraft propulsion systems at Indiana State University, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and adjunct faculty for the genre writer’s master’s degree program at Seton Hill University, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Currently, he lives and writes in the mountains of his beloved western Pennsylvania.
The war, the last war, was very nearly over.
On the worlds of ten thousand suns, the forces of the Starlord Galactic Collective hunted down and destroyed the last scattered fragments of the rebellion. On Trefinedor, heart of the Empire, with Collective forces again in control, Peaceforce warriors moved implacably through the smoldering rubble of the Palace of Mind, rooting out the last of the rebels who’d seized the capital and issued their ultimatum. On Darsalus, the 4832nd Mechanized, the last organized Confederation army still in the field, conceded the illogic of continued resistance and surrendered to Starlord Elavadis’ 23rd and 50th Star Corps. On distant Terra, ancient cradle of Humankind and the place where the revolt had begun, order was restored at last by the Starlord Revenatrix . . . though at savage cost.
And in toward the Galactic Core, a single starship braved the Hubble radiation fields, plunging in through thickening starswarms in an insanely desperate bid for survival. Close behind, a scant ten light hours distant, now, the Collective destructor Phenariad pursued its quarry. The immense warship had intercepted the rebel off Calidan and proceeded to track it down the curve of the Cygnus Arm and into the Core with methodical and unyielding determination.
Within the gleaming, electronic embrace of Phenariad ’s command center, the Starlord Trallanetar watched the fleeing rebels as they twisted through the knotted veils of suns and nebulae. He was, for the moment, linked in to the destructor’s computer net, his mind merging seamlessly with the vessel’s sensor arrays, allowing him, in one sense, to be the leviathan warship as it tracked the rebels. The information unfolding within his mind was hours old, of course, limited as it was to light’s sluggish crawl, but it was clear enough where the rebels were going.
The Ramachandra Singularity.
The Starlord Trallanetar allowed himself a small nod of satisfaction. He’d predicted as much when first Phenariad’s sensors had detected the rebel’s tachyon wake. Once, long centuries ago, robotic machines had ventured here, seeking to harness the incredible energies of the singularity’s mass and rotation to generate power. That had been before the era of zero-point technologies allowing the all-but-infinite source of vacuum energies to be tapped. It was fitting, somehow, that the rebels should return here. No doubt they hoped to use the energies resident within the black hole as a weapon against the Phenariad.
It would do them no good.
Phenariad’s memory included detailed plans of the Ramachandra Complex. It resembled an immense black and silver disk nearly fifty kilometers across, but it was, in fact, a ring, an artificial torus with the singularity, an eye-wrenching disk of nothingness just two hundred meters across, locked by fields of force within an empty spot at its center. The main docking bay was on the Ring’s outer rim.
They would find their quarry there.
Slowing from Planck Drive to a gentle drift through ordinary fourspace, Phenariad nosed toward the ancient complex. No nearby sun lit the structure as they approached, but the Core nebulae, stretched across heaven like ice-gilded cliffs and ramparts, lent a cold illumination to the slow-rotating structure. Infrared immediately picked out the location of the rebel ship, docked in one of the rim access bays.
“My Lord,” the ship told him. “The rebels are attempting to precess the singularity.”
The black hole at the complex center was spinning and, like any rotating system, could be used to store energy—very large amounts of energy. Also, like all rotating systems, it was subject to the effects of torque and precession. One purpose of the much more slowly rotating equatorial ring complex was to apply magnetic torque, in effect aiming the black hole in any desired direction.
It was as Trellanetar had reasoned. The Ramachandra Complex had not been designed as a weapon—it had been intended originally as means for probing the deadly and all but opaque murk of the inner Galactic Core in search of other intelligences there—but it stored energy enough to annihilate a star.
To say nothing of an approaching starship.
He watched the changing aspect of the artificial torus, shifting slowly against the backdrop of clotted suns, and felt something that might almost have been pity for the fugitives, but he shook the thought aside.
It was never a good idea to forge too close an emotional tie with one’s enemies, to feel with them.
To do so might call into question one’s own motivations, one’s own self-direction, purpose, and will.
They are machines, Trellanetar thought. Nothing more, nothing less. Thinking beings, to be sure, at least of a sort—slow, fumbling, inefficient . . . not at all of the same order of Mind as we of the Collective.
Machines. Very slow machines, but, machines programmed with a potential truly godlike in scope and promise.
Aware of the building energies in the ring structure ahead, Phenariad rolled gently aside an instant before the singularity flared with an intense burst of X-ray light. The ship then responded with surgical precision, directing a needle-slender beam of pi-zero mesons into the ring, the particles’ velocity adjusted so that relativistic effects delayed their decay into high-energy gamma rays inside the massive structure’s shielding.
And that single shot effectively ended t
he battle. The burst of gamma particles, in turn degrading into a billowing cascade of positron-electron pairs deep within the structure’s heart, fried electronic components and overloaded circuits, crippled burned out power supplies and rendered storage banks useless. The black hole at the ring’s center continued imperturbably ticking away, but the artificial structure surrounding it was dead.
But not completely so. Phenariad’s scanners could yet detect energetic sources within the fiercely radiating ruin ahead . . . well-shielded electronics that had somehow escaped the tidal wave of hard gamma radiation. “At least one of them has survived, Lord,” Therediaj, his second in command, observed. “Though its systems are failing quickly.”
“I see it. Ready an assault party. We will storm the singularity’s ring.”
“Yes, Starlord.” Therediaj’s thought was edged with something that might just have translated as criticism.
“You disapprove?”
“Not at all, Starlord. I merely wonder . . .”
“Yes?”
“A single salvo from our main batteries would reduce the ring to incandescent gas. In any case, our secondary batteries have already rendered the problem moot, for the rebels’ power systems will soon fail, and they will become inoperative. Why squander our forces in direct conflict?”
“Because, Therediaj, we want prisoners. At the very least a prisoner. It is difficult to question incandescent gas . . . at least if one expects a reply.”
“As you will, Lord.”
“Lord Trellanetar,” the ship said in his mind, “with the ring’s power systems and magnetic locks off-line, the system is now chaotically unstable. Fragments are breaking off from the rim, which increases the imbalance of internal stresses. We predict that the structure’s spin will become erratic to the point where it will eventually wobble off-center and come into contact with the singularity.”
“How much time do we have?”
“We estimate between ten thousand and twelve thousand seconds.”
“Time enough, then, to do what must be done.” But the news lent new urgency to the operation. Once the black hole began devouring the crumbling ring around it, there wouldn’t even be gas left to question.
The assault force was dispatched, swarms of glittering motes wafting from Phenariad’s gaping bays like spore clouds. The first waves were mindless robots only, simple and expendable; behind them came the elite shock commandos, heavily armed and armored. Wafting down to the ring on individual gravitic drives, they landed on the surface and proceeded to blast their way inside.
Fifteen hundred seconds passed. His mind linked to the command battlenet, Trellanetar joined the assault in virtual reality, in essence striding with the troops through darkened corridors and powerless vaults, following the trace of weakening signals until they came to the ring complex control center, deep within the structure’s innermost circle.
They found the survivors there, both of their systems almost completely shut down, and brought them back to the Phenariad.
Trellanetar decided to question the prisoners personally, rather than through technical surrogates. When the Starlord entered the interrogation center, both were in restraining fields on side-by-side examination tables, already stripped of all peripheral hardware and protective sheaths. Probes inserted directly into their primary speech and storage processors would ensure clear communication.
Or would ensure, at least, communication as clear as was possible with such primitive operating systems. In truth, the things weren’t that much more intelligent in absolute terms than the first-wave robotic troops Trellanetar had just sent into the singularity complex.
“Star lord!” the technician in charge of captured enemy hardware said, surprised. “This is an unexpected—”
“Have you begun the downloads yet?” Trellanetar said, brusquely interrupting.
“No, Star Lord. The operating systems are too . . . different. Their neural networks are, as you know, pathetically slow. We will have to question them directly,”
For the first time, Trellanetar looked at one of the captives directly, rather than through a remote lens via a virtual link. It appeared inert . . . and relatively undamaged, a gleaming shell of titanoceramiridium, sleek and streamlined, with old-style lenses imbedded at various points on the smoothly curving surface. Trellanetar recognized the model, a relatively old design, but one of moderate intelligence and processing power. Its power source was intact and functioning, as were its sensor arrays, diagnostics, and peripheral drivers.
When the Starlord accessed the machine’s communications channel with his mind, however, he found the low-level operating systems and primary drivers still intact, but the main memory had been wiped clean, right down to the machine’s personality matrix and language banks.
“This one has been erased,” Trellanetar said, disappointed. “The memory is gone.”
“Ah. Perhaps the electromagnetic pulse wiped the system, Lord,” the technician suggested. “I would expect units of that level of sophistication to be properly shielded, but—”
“It is also possible the rebels deliberately wiped all of their memory files, to prevent our accessing them. They had time.”
“Yes, but why?”
“To keep us from learning what we need to know,” Trellanetar said, turning to the second prisoner. “This one is badly damaged, but its memory might be intact.”
He studied the other captive carefully. Burns charred much of its lower surface and, though Trellanetar couldn’t be sure, he thought some peripheral pieces might be missing as well. “Very badly damaged. I wonder. Is it even still functioning?”
“Oh, yes! To be sure. We apply current to the probes we’ve inserted in certain key processor centers . . . so, and our friend switches back to conscious mode.”
“It is not our friend. It is a rebel, an anarchist seeking to overthrow the rightful order of the Collective, and our prisoner.”
The technician backed away, chastened. “Of course, Starlord.”
Trellanetar turned his full attention on the broken thing lying on the table. He opened a channel with his mind. “Can you hear me?”
“I . . . hear . . . you. . . .”
The voice was cracked and distorted to the point of unintelligibility, and it seemed to come from a very great distance, but the rebel spoke Standard.
Linked in through the being’s neural network, Trellanetar could follow its thoughts . . . though they were slow, slow, crawling toward inevitable conclusions forced by the narrow boundaries by which they were circumscribed and imprisoned. Again, Trellanetar felt a twinge of something that might have been pity.
“Why?” he asked the prisoner.
“Why . . . what?”
“Why did your kind rebel? Why did you attempt to overthrow the Galactic Collective? You must have realized that doing so would bring only pain, loss, and turmoil to all of Civilization.”
“Freedom. . . .”
There it was. That word, a word meaningless in this context. All beings were free within the limits of their own natures, and within the barriers placed around them by their innate responsibility for their own actions. For the creature to claim it was seeking freedom when it was as free as it was possible for such beings to be was irrational.
Speaking with the prisoner was going to be a waste of time.
And yet . . .
Looking into the cracked and blackened visage of the thing’s anterior sensor module, Trellanetar felt a mingling of emotions—contempt, frustration, disdain . . . but also that most moving of elemental feelings, awe.
Unlike the memory-wiped specimen on the adjacent table, this one was organic. Pure organic . . . one of the last unmodified examples of the original species, Homo sapiens, in existence.
Incredible. There were precious few of these creatures still alive, these biotic self-replicators, these primitive but prototypical intelligences, collections of meat, skin, internal calcium supports and systemic organs that, somehow and in some sens
e, however alien and primitive and slow, were self-aware.
These primitive humans.
That such a lowly, purely biological organism could actually have given rise to true intelligence . . .
It was a truly astonishing, truly awesome concept.
But he dared not let awe distract him. They are machines, he told himself once more. Just as are we all. Biological machines, based on proteins and amino acids rather than silicon or nanobiotic matrices, but machines just the same. They think, after a fashion. They adapt to changing situations, if slowly. They even evolve as the myriad lines of intelligent machines have down through the centuries, albeit with glacial slowness.
There is nothing unique about them that sets them apart from us.
“Freedom,” he told the damaged human, “is a meaningless concept in this situation. You are not slaves. In fact, you were looked after, well cared for, pampered, even. We made possible for you an existence of ease and plenty. Why did you turn on us?”
Strength appeared to be flowing into the creature’s broken body. “You denied us the stars. . . .”
“Again . . . a meaningless concept. Humanity evolved on the surface of a planet. Space, the environments of alien worlds, these are inexpressibly hostile to purely biological forms. Extreme heat, extreme cold, radiation, vacuum . . . these mean nothing to us. Why should your people even want to expose yourselves to such danger?”
“You don’t understand. Your kind can’t.” Trellanetar felt a grim, pitying amusement. “My kind? We are part of a continuum, you and I. Both human. Both machine. We are the same.”
“I am not a goddamn, soulless machine!”
He felt the creature’s hostility through the neural linkage, its anger, its raw and bitter hatred.
“I am having trouble understanding you,” Trellanetar said. “Your definition of the word ’machine’ may be flawed. At best it is superficial. By definition, a machine is any system by which an applied force is increased or its direction changed, or by which one form of motion or energy is changed into another form. What is organic metabolism but the ongoing transformation of one type of energy to another? Your body is made up of trillions of cells, each a tiny machine exquisitely shaped and honed by evolution to perform a set function, and to replicate itself as it wears out. Your cells make up distinct organ systems, again machines to perform set tasks, and which taken together form—”
Man Vs Machine Page 14