Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Mechanically? As if these pieces had been used as weapons?”

  “No, sir. The distribution was too uniform. More like—well, sir, more like you’d sat down and sanded the outside of the frame with a roughskin rat. I’m sorry, sir, I know that’s rather unscientific.”

  “You said the cells were unidentified.”

  “Yes, sir. And they may stay unidentified. The leading theory is that they may be artificial cells, a mechanism rather than an organism. The genetic sequences are much too short and seem to have little extro material. With your permission, we’d like to use one of Glorious’s hyperspace probes to send a sample back to the Exobiology Institute on Coruscant.”

  Pakkpekatt bared his teeth. “See to it, Lieutenant,” he growled. “It should have been done when you first thought of it.”

  The agent hurriedly left the room under the heat of Pakkpekatt’s glare, and the colonel turned his attention back to Taisden. “Was anything else recovered from the location where these were found?”

  “No, sir. Nothing else. Stendaff is still on station, sweeping the area, but it looks clean down to decimeter resolutions.”

  Pakkpekatt picked up the short section of sled frame. “A most curious kind of flotsam, Agent Taisden. Difficult to construct a scenario to account for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are all of our people off Marauder now?”

  “Yes, sir. The section came over with me, and Captain Garch had quarters assigned to them on X Deck.”

  “Then I suppose I have delayed as long as I can, hoping that these foolish orders would be withdrawn,” said Pakkpekatt. “Advise Captain Hannser that I am releasing Marauder from this command effective immediately. He is to return his ship at best possible speed to Krenhner Sector Station and report to the commodore there.”

  Taisden nodded. “I’ll see to it immediately, sir.”

  Left alone in the wardroom, Colonel Pakkpekatt slowly cupped his right hand and began to smack it against the table, driving his friction pads against the retracted points of his nails. The pain proved unequal to the anger he was wrestling, so he methodically increased both the force and frequency of the blows.

  There was an eerie deliberateness to his self-abuse, and his face remained expressionless throughout. He did not stop until the pads were swollen and pulpy-soft, and the pain shooting up through his arm and deep into his chest had bled off the restless need that impatience and frustration had bred in his pedrokk gland—the fighter’s heart.

  By that time Marauder was ready to depart, and Pakkpekatt waited until he had watched it go, jumping toward Krenhner the moment it cleared convoy radius.

  Then he turned to his recording log and began at last to dictate a report he did not want to make for a supervising committee he no longer could say he respected.

  Four little ships, groping through the dark for a few short days. That is all your lives are worth to them. I never would have thought I would see such dishonor. I never thought I would feel such shame.

  Over the next several hours, Artoo added twenty chambers to his map of the vagabond, numbering each in turn as the team visited it. To help them remember where they had been, he also recorded for each a fish-eye holo of what Lando had dubbed “the pop-ups.”

  So far, they had discovered two basic patterns for the pop-ups. Eight of the chambers were like the first—one side of the chamber would reveal a large figure that might have been a sigil, a sculpture, or symbolic writing. The opposite face would reveal a finely detailed geometric design that Lando and Lobot both were convinced was the map of a temple or small city. Somewhere in every map room was a key that triggered Qella music, though every “song” was different from the others.

  Apart from the music, the pop-ups in the map rooms appeared to be static. They remained on display as long as the team lingered; when the team moved on to another chamber and the connecting portal closed, the pop-ups collapsed and vanished as quickly as they had appeared.

  Next in sequence after every map room came one or more of what Lobot dubbed “gadget rooms.” In them the team found a variety of mostly mysterious pop-ups that might move, change color, hum, or change shape when touched. But with a very few exceptions, the gadgets had no decipherable function, and none caused any detectable change in the status of the ship.

  “I still think these could be control rooms,” Lando said as they prepared to leave chamber 20. “We just don’t know what we’re controlling. We could be driving the custodian crazy, lowering the heat in the ’freshers and changing the channel on his CosmiComm service.”

  One welcome discovery was that when they entered a chamber by conventional means—through the portals—the chamber provided its own illumination. Power had become critical enough for Artoo that, back in chamber 11, Lando had coupled him to Threepio for an energy transfusion. The protocol droid, carried everywhere by Lobot or Artoo, was consuming very little power directly.

  “Yes, by all means. You should take it all,” he said, looking down at his chest as Lando snapped the transfer cable into the recharge coupling. “I’m nothing but a burden to you. I don’t know why you ever brought me on this mission, Master Lando. I’m completely useless to you. Give all my power to Artoo and go on without me. Leave me here in the dark.”

  With a will, Lando resisted the temptation to take the droid at his word.

  Chamber 21 was another map room, the ninth. The sigil resembled a feathered V embracing a cluster of fist-size spheres. The map was an irregular pentagon, with one side twice as long as the others and the same shape echoed in the open area at the very center. Neither Lobot nor Lando could find a music key, but their attempts seemed to trigger something quite different, and startling.

  At first, there was just a pale pink glow slowly pulsing in a structure near the long outer wall. Then, suddenly, that part of the map erupted in a gout of fire that leaped a full meter up from the wall.

  The team fell back in surprise. “They’ve found us!” Threepio cried. “Artoo, save yourself!”

  “It’s a holo—a recording,” Lobot said.

  “No, it’s real,” Lando said. “Look at your suit sensors—wait, Artoo, don’t!” He lunged toward the droid, who was busily unlimbering the nozzle of his fire extinguisher. By the time the struggle was over, the entire map had been replaced by a five-sided black scar, and the chamber was half choked by a white-soot smoke.

  Lando herded them back into chamber 20, where they waited the two minutes they had learned it took for a room to reset. When they reentered 21, the black scar was gone, and with it the smoke. With their backs practically pressed against the sigil, they then watched a replay.

  The initial blast came from the same structure, after the same pulsing glow. As the pillar of fire rose, the shock rippled out through the rest of the city, destroying the neat symmetry. The fire quickly fell back but spread into a firestorm that raced across the shattered city and consumed it. In a matter of seconds the wall was scorched black as before, the map destroyed.

  “Artoo, please run an analysis on the atmosphere in here,” Lando said.

  Threepio reported the results. “Oxygen five percent—oxygen eight percent—oxygen eleven percent—would you make up your mind?” the droid asked, clanging Artoo on the dome with his working arm.

  “It’s not him, Threepio,” said Lobot. “The ship is restoring the chamber to its status before the fire, for the next demonstration.” He looked to Lando. “These are history lessons. Something terrible happened to the Qella city that was under this sign.”

  “Maybe this is our first clue about what happened to them,” Lando said. “But there’s something else going on, too. Artoo, what’s the oxygen component now?”

  The answer, relayed through Threepio, was fifteen percent.

  “Son of a—Lobot, Threepio, you stay here. Artoo, come with me. There’s something we have to check.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to chamber one, express lane. Sit tight—it
won’t be so long. We won’t be sight-seeing this time.”

  The patrol frigate Bloodprice bore the colors of the Prakith navy and the crest of Governor Foga Brill. Both were more prominent than the sigil of the Imperial Moff for Sector 5, which was consigned to the armor panel above the frigate’s chin turrets.

  The displays mirrored the allegiances felt by Captain Ors Dogot and his crew of nearly four hundred. The officers owed their commissions and their postings to Brill, not to Grand Moff Gann. It was Brill who collected the commission fees and the annual posting assessments. It was Brill who paid off favors to wealthy families with command ranks that drew pay in goods and gold instead of Prakith scrip.

  The specialists and ratings, draftees all, owed the security of their families to Brill’s promise of the protection of the Red Police for the daughters and wives of those who protected his power with their lives. To be drafted into the navy was a far better thing than to be drafted into the slit mines or the foundries, or to be one of the hundreds rousted nightly from the riverbanks in Prall and Skoth to dig their own graves.

  Graft and fear were inferior flavors of fealty, but they were the best Foga Brill could command, and they sufficed.

  “Course change maneuver complete, Captain,” the navigator reported in a clear, loud voice. “Now heading nine-zero, mark, negative four-five, mark, two-two at deep patrol standard.”

  “Towmaster, report,” said Dogot.

  The listening array Bloodprice towed behind it on deep patrol was a hundred times longer than the ship itself. It was a spiderweb of passive antenna cables, tiny noiseless amplifiers, steering jets, and tension vanes, with a drag gondola the size of a troop transport at the end of the antenna’s main cable. The three crew members in the gondola had the difficult job of flying the array through the turn when Bloodprice changed heading.

  If there was too little tension, the elements could tangle, or the whole array could tear itself apart in what the manuals called dynamic destabilization and tow crews called tail whip. If there was too much tension through the turn, the likely result was an overstrain disconnect and a two-hour delay for the recapture procedure.

  The towmaster on Bloodprice’s last patrol had allowed two disconnects. Along with the gondola crew, he had spent the last half of the patrol in the brig, awaiting the return to Prakith and a court-martial on a charge of treasonable incompetence.

  So it was with great relief that his replacement announced, “The array turned cleanly and deployment is nominal.”

  “Very well,” said Dogot. “Lieutenant Sojis, you are master of the bridge. I will be in my quarters, working on crew reviews. Inform Yeoman Cligot that she is to report to me there immediately.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  When the portal closed after Lando and Artoo, Lobot watched, fascinated, as the smoke thinned and disappeared, the scar faded and vanished.

  Even the tiny white bits of soot smudging the outside of his faceplate seemed to evaporate. He watched on his suit monitor as the temperature plummeted thirty degrees, to the slightly chilly norm for the vagabond.

  “Pardon me, Master Lobot—”

  “Yes, Threepio, what is it?” Lobot said automatically, still distracted.

  “I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me—do droids meet the conditions of the test?”

  Lobot’s head snapped around. “What did you say?”

  “The test of intelligence,” Threepio repeated. “Am I sentient, like you, or simply another work of great ingenuity, like this ship?”

  Taken aback, Lobot looked away from the droid’s waiting face as he groped for an answer. “Ah—Threepio, you know, most droids are built to have self-aware artificial intelligence. Especially third-degree droids like yourself.”

  “But that must be something different than sentience,” Threepio said. “Otherwise, the Senate of the New Republic would not consist solely of organics, served by droids.”

  “It is different,” Lobot said, as gently as he could. “Artificial intelligence is programming. Wipe a droid’s memory and it disappears. Replace it with different programming and a translator becomes a tutor, or a med droid becomes a chem droid.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Threepio; he was quiet for a long moment. “Then can you tell me how it feels to be sentient? How is it different from what I feel?”

  “I’m not sure that I can say,” Lobot replied slowly.

  “Perhaps it is a thing that you just know, because you are an organic and not a machine? Perhaps if I were sentient, I would not need to ask you these questions. I would know who I was.”

  Lobot said nothing for a time. “What do you think, Threepio?” he asked at last.

  “I do not know, Master Lobot,” the droid said. “But I have noticed that when someone speaks of memory wipes, I am seized by an inexplicable panic.”

  “I don’t find that inexplicable,” said Lobot.

  “Really, sir?”

  “Self-preservation is an elementary part of self-awareness—even artificial self-awareness. It’s the part of us that feels that awareness which matters to us,” Lobot said. “I expect you would give that up”—he pointed at Threepio’s immobile arm—“to keep your programming intact. As I would surrender this”—he pointed through his faceplate at his neural interface—“to preserve my consciousness.”

  “I do not recall having this reaction when I was younger, sir,” Threepio said. “Why, I have seen many droids of my acquaintance taken for memory wipes. I felt nothing but gratitude that their masters cared enough for their well-being to schedule proper maintenance.” The droid cocked his head. “My own maintenance record, I’m afraid, is something of a horror. It’s a miracle that I can still function at all.”

  Lobot mused on that answer for a while. “Just out of curiosity, Threepio, have you thought about asking other droids what they think about this?”

  “Yes, Master Lobot,” Threepio said. “But they seemed not to understand the question. Why, one even had the ill manners to call me a computational defective with deviant specifications. Can you imagine?”

  “I know something of such prejudice,” said Lobot, then sighed. “I don’t have any answers for you, Threepio. All I can say is that the questions would seem to be worth revisiting when some time has passed.”

  “Thank you, Master Lobot,” said Threepio. “I will do so.”

  Except for blind spots caused by Bloodprice and the drag gondola, the towed array could scan several light-hours in every direction. As the outermost of Prakith’s three concentric spheres of defense, the first purpose of the deep patrol was to detect possible military threats long before they could come near the planet. For that reason, the ship’s patrol route took it through the most likely final staging areas for an attack on Prakith, outside the range of its ground-based and orbiting sensors.

  But an equally important purpose was to intercept and claim as a prize any merchant or private vessel unwary enough to pass within reach. Ship seizures were not only an obligation, but an opportunity. A rich enough prize could advance the entire crew to a better post. And every deep patrol captain knew stories of other captains who had come home with a prize rich enough to earn the favor of Foga Brill himself.

  So when Captain Dogot was called away from his examinations of the new female crew members and saw the size of the contact on the optical displays, he quickly forgave the interruption. “What identification have you made?” he asked, peering over the shoulder of the security master.

  “None so far,” said the officer. “The image is too crude, and the target is silent in all spectral bands except the optical.”

  “Interrogate the navigation transponder.”

  “There is no transponder response at that location.”

  “Range?”

  “Three-point-eight light-hours—nearly at the limit of detection.”

  Captain Dogot weighed the possibilities. A warship of that size would be more than a match for a patrol frigate. He would need reinforcements fro
m the inner fleet. But a freighter of that size would be a prize of the first rank, and one he would much prefer not to share with other captains.

  For a brief moment he considered cutting the array adrift, rather than allowing the hour necessary to reel it in. Abandoning the array would ensure that Bloodprice was the first ship to reach the target. But if the contact proved spurious, or the target escaped, the loss of the array—or even any substantial damage to it—would cost him his post, if not his life.

  “Bring in the array,” Captain Dogot ordered. “Prepare the ship for hyperspace. Notify patrol command that we are in pursuit of an unidentified contact, vector zero-nine-one, zero-six-six, zero-five-three.”

  The navigation master turned at his station. “But, sir, the last coordinate for the contact is zero-five-five.”

  “I am sure you are mistaken,” Dogot said evenly. “Communications master, send the message as I instructed. Patrol command will want to send additional ships to support us. Navigation master, what would an error of two degrees over this distance mean?”

  “The, uh—the ships would be hours away at sub-light, but too close to safely microjump.” Understanding belatedly came to his eyes, and he glanced down at his console. “Yes, sir, zero-five-three. Thank you for catching my error before it had any undesirable consequences.”

  “Sleeping on the job again, I see. Did you know that you snore like a power saw in ironwood?”

  Lando’s voice, sharp and clear in the helmet’s comm speakers, startled a dozing Lobot awake. He looked up to find Lando and Artoo back in chamber 21, the portal quickly closing behind them. Lando was holding his helmet under his arm and grinning broadly.

  “Lando—what are you doing?”

  “Master Lando, have you gone mad?” Threepio demanded in alarm. “You must replace your helmet immediately, or you’ll suffocate!”