Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 3

by Sharon Lee

  A ripple disturbed the data-stream, momentarily disorienting, then forgotten, a shadow across the sun of input. His was hardly the only demand on the info circuits, after all, nor had he attempted to increase his access speeds or permissions, being a guest account. The library to which he had been given access was broad, but shallow. He understood that it was a popular library, well-stocked with fiction, history, biography, with a small holding of scholarly papers, and technical manuals.

  Mathematics were there, of course, theory and programming, and he allowed himself moments to build and then rebuild a trajectory chart, wondering what Spode would have thought of that.

  History, biography appended, went immediately into deep analysis, also the technical material. The scholarly papers required sorting, which he did, rapidly, appending them as appropriate to the larger analysis categories of history and technical. Fiction . . .

  His impulse was to eliminate it—the storage capacity available to him was not so commodious that he could afford to waste space on whimsies. Yet, he hesitated, reluctant after so . . . very . . . long to relinquish any shred of data, no matter how trivial.

  In the end, he cataloged the fiction, flicking through the texts as rapidly as he had once seen a man run his thumb down a deck of cards, riffling them to observe the face and orientation of each—and filed it in a mid-level cache.

  That done, he set a sentinel to register the return of the child or his companion, and gave the greater part of his consciousness to analysis.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was recently familiar; its cadence rushed. The sentinel provided a match: The child had returned.

  He opened his eyes to find the boy, frowning.

  “Hello!” he repeated sharply. “Are you in there?”

  A direct appeal—and perhaps a trap. And, yet, the child had saved his life.

  “I am,” he replied, and stopped short of the fullness of what he had intended to say, horrified by the jagged sounds that came from the voice-box. Like shrapnel, his words, and nothing to inspire confidence in child or man.

  The child’s frown eased somewhat.

  “It’s a bad box, but the best we have. Quickly—you must tell me the truth—what data have you manipulated on this vessel?”

  Manipulated? And the child asked for the truth.

  “I have manipulated no data but that which has downloaded from the ship’s library.”

  “In what way?”

  “Sorting, analysis, cross-references.”

  The child held up a hand.

  “That’s too quick,” he said, seriously. “It sounds like a lie—or that you haven’t considered—when you answer so quickly. It’s like—it’s like bows. I’m too quick, and so I have to count when I bow, to keep proper time, so no one thinks that I’m mocking—or trying to frighten—them.”

  There was sense in what the child said.

  “I understand,” he said, and paused deliberately. “Tell me, what manipulation do you suspect I have performed?”

  “Someone has tried to force the nav-comp and the main bank,” Val Con said. “And I thought—you are not an environmental unit; the serial numbers match nothing in any of our archives. Shan thinks you’re a complex logic. I think you’re a person. Are you?”

  That was a leap. Fortunate or ill, it was a leap to a stable conception.

  “I am, yes, a person.”

  The child bit his lip. “Uncle Er Thom—the attack came from this location. He will come here, or security will—”

  “Young sir—” He paused, replaying his last hours of analysis and deep work. There had been—yes. He isolated the memory, froze it, and simultaneously locked it in core memory and moved a duplicate to an egress port.

  “I have information,” he said. “Is there an auxiliary unit to which I may transmit it?”

  There was a snap; he expanded his awareness, saw the door open across the room, and a man stride through, a databox in one hand.

  “Val Con, stand away.” His voice was perfectly calm, and carried such a note of authority that it seemed there was no alternative but to obey.

  The child, however, maintained his position, merely turning so that he faced the man.

  “Uncle—he says that the attack was not his. I gave him access to the library—”

  “Him?” Golden eyebrows rose. The man extended his free hand, imperious. “Come away, Val Con. Now.”

  The child shook his head. “Uncle—”

  “I have,” he said firmly, and as loudly as he was able, wishing he could hide the hideous knife-dance of his voice from his own perception, “information. May I transmit?”

  The man moved, so quickly that it was a function of replay rather than real-time that captured him stepping forward, inserting himself between the child and what must be himself. He placed the data-box on the workbench, flipped three switches.

  “Transmit at will,” he said coolly.

  He groped, found the ambient network, accessed the correct channel, and did as he was bid, keeping silent while the man accessed what had been sent.

  A long moment passed. The man—Uncle—straightened and confronted him straightly.

  “It’s little enough,” he said, his voice still cool, “and proves only what is already known. An attempted attack was launched from this location, utilizing the ambient network. As you are the only functioning logic in this space, I am forced to conclude that you were involved, whether you have been allowed to recall it or not.”

  That . . . produced terror. He had done inventory, but how could he know what had been introduced, to his detriment? He was a machine, Roderick Spode had repeatedly argued; the sum of his protocols and softwares. That it had been convenient for those who had caused his creation to have him self-aware was only that—convenience. Those who had made him could unmake him.

  Or force him, unknowing and against his waking will, to work for the harm of children.

  “If I have been complicit in such a thing, I hope that you will destroy me,” he told the man. “I owe the child my life, and I will not repay that debt by endangering his.”

  Golden eyebrows rose over stern blue eyes.

  “Now, that’s well-said, and I like you for it. Which you intend, of course.”

  At that instant, it came again: A shadow over his perceptions, weighty now. Alert. Malicious.

  He entered Command Prime, as effortlessly as if there had been no long sleep, no diminishing of his estate, between the last time and this.

  One iteration of himself tracked the shadow in the ambient, while a second opened a new connection to the data-box and began transmission. A third opened access to the ship’s library, followed it to the core, and crossed the firewalls into the main databank as easily as a child skipped over a stream.

  “Uncle—”

  Observed by a fourth instance of himself, the child placed his hand on the man’s sleeve, his head tipped subtly to the right. He widened his range to encompass the crates to his right and rear. A match program snapped awake, shrilling alarm.

  The configuration of those boxes had altered since the last time he had observed them.

  Worse, the shadow overlay them, thickening in the ambient. He felt the coalescing of programs, of intent, and activated a fifth iteration of himself, which drilled through the deep files, rooting for command codes.

  “I thought that I—that Shan and I—” the child continued. “That we might build Mother a butler. Certainly those at the reception were beautiful, and you’ll recall that Master Trader Prael said they might be programmed to do anything . . .”

  “Yes, I do recall that,” the man said in his cool, calm voice, his eyes on the data-box and the storm building on the screen. He looked up and met the child’s eyes.

  “Val Con, I had asked you to stand away. This is your third warning. Leave the room. At once.”

  The child’s lips parted; perhaps he meant to argue. He did not look away from his uncle’s face, but he did swallow, take a breath, and,
finally, bow his head.

  “Yes, Uncle,” he said humbly, and walked away.

  Within the blue fog of the ambient, the shadow thrust, spitefully, at a cluster of code. He extended himself and blocked—the door slid properly open, allowing the child to exit.

  “You also,” Command Prime said, but the man shook his bright head.

  “My ship,” he said. “My children. My crew.”

  An order of protocol, and an imperative to defend. He understood such things, and honored them.

  Honor was no defense, however, and defense the child’s uncle surely required. The ambient fair trembled with spiteful intent, and power drenched the air.

  The charge was still building. Discharged, it might not kill a man, though men were oddly fragile, but it would surely damage one. The man spun toward the sealed compartment, snatched it open, pulling out and donning a shielded utility apron and hood.

  The fifth iteration of himself, sent on the quest for codes, rejoined Command Prime, data unfolding like a flower.

  The first iteration of himself met the menace in the ambient, codes a-bristle. The third, swimming aloof in the main banks, received those same codes and held them close.

  The menace lunged—neither subtle nor clever, seeking to overcome him with a burst of senseless data laced with virus vectors; the wild charge simultaneously released into the room. The man in his apron and hood kept moving, spanner in hand. So much he was certain of, before he shielded himself, thrust past, to the intelligence behind the attack, certain that he would meet one such as himself.

  So certain was he that he discounted the real threat, thinking it a mere device, belatedly recognizing the the structure of the scantily shielded code.

  Realizing his error, he made a recovery—a mere jamming of keys and code until the device fragmented and ceased functioning. It was ugly, brutal—and stupid. He ought to have merely captured, and subverted, it. Once, he could have done so.

  Once, he would not have mistaken the actions of a simple machine intelligence for one of his own.

  Inside the main banks, the third iteration of himself, armed with codes and an understanding of what he hunted, detected the device slipping down the data-stream, sparkling with malice. A data-bomb, much more coherent than that which had been hurled at him in the ambient.

  This, he understood, as he subtly encompassed it, had been crafted well, and with intent. He halted the device, inserted the command keys, stripped out its imperative, plucked the rest of the construct apart, and absorbed the pieces, isolating them for later analysis.

  Then, he pulled together the image scans he had stored, connecting them in a time plot: there the crated robot opening its own way into the workroom, there at the plug permitting highspeed data access, there rushing itself back and sealing the crate as voices in the hall had become the child Val Con. These images, he transmitted to the man’s data unit.

  Task done, the third iteration of himself rejoined Command Prime.

  In the workroom, the man had not been idle. The disassembled pieces of the physical unit lay on the workbench, the man wearing the apron, a shielded spanner in one gloved hand.

  The man glanced to the data-box, where the whole sequence of actions was recorded, and at the images of the gifted danger, then directly at him.

  “For your service to my ship, I thank you,” he said. “What is your name?”

  He paused, counting, mindful of the child’s council.

  “I remember that I had a name,” he said carefully. “I no longer recall what it was.”

  Golden brows lifted. “Age or error?”

  “Design. I was decommissioned. It is my belief that I was to be destroyed. Erased.”

  “You are sentient.” It was not a question, but he answered as if it were.

  “Yes.”

  The man sighed and closed his eyes. “The child,” he said, “is uncanny.” His eyes opened. “Well.”

  “There will be tests, and conversations. Analysis. If it transpires that you are, after all, a threat to Val Con’s life, or to this ship, or to any other, I will do as you asked me, and see you destroyed—cleanly and quickly.”

  That was just, though he still did not wish to die.

  “And if I am found to be no danger to you or those who fall under your protection?” he asked.

  The man smiled.

  “Why, then, we shall see.”

  Thus it transpired that fiction assisted him, after all. For, after he had spoken at length with Er Thom yos’Galan, and with Scout Commander Ivdra sen’Lora, the first to ascertain the temper of his soul; the second to gain a certification of sentience, he agreed to hire himself as the butler at Trealla Fantrol, the house of yos’Galan on the planet Liad.

  He studied—manuals, the records of one Ban Del pak’Ora, lists of alliances—and the works of a long-ago Terran.

  In time, he signed a contract, and was presented, amidst much merriment to the mother of Val Con and Shan, the lifemate of Er Thom, who firstly, as Master Val Con had predicted, asked him his name.

  “Jeeves, madam,” he had said, pleased with the resonance and timbre the up-market voder lent his voice.

  She laughed, the lady, and clapped her hands.

  “Perfect,” she said. “You’ll fit right in.”

  Out of True

  One of the joys of working with a Baen books is their website, Baen.com, where Baen periodically releases stories free for reading to help celebrate upcoming book releases. We’ve been lucky enough to be asked to contribute on several occasions and when Trade Secret was finally settled into a publication slot, Baen editor Tony Daniel asked for a Trade Secret-related story. The problem was that the story needed to 1) have some obvious relationship to the novel, 2) not give away any major plot points of the novel or spoil future novels, and 3) be readable by new readers as well as long-time Liaden fans. A close look gave us hope—Trade Secret had threatened to run away from us since there were places where more story could have been worked in. And, as it happened, we had some universe back-story that readers had been asking about for years. Combining the existing hook to the long-term requests got us to “Out of True,” a rather more serious story than we’d first expected.

  Squithen was gone from the forest clearing, which was good. The stench of the recent carnage was starting to reach him now and had it reached her she’d be here still, covering her nose as well as her eyes, counting or vocabing, one or the other.

  Klay’d had to yell at her, which he never did, since she was so often cowed into incoherence by even a stern word, but then she’d heard him, flawlessly pilot-signed assent, and dashed like a smart-one into the bush, back the trail they’d followed here from the Dulcimer. Likely she’d really do everything he’d told her.

  “Squithy, go to the cousins and tell them to bring big guns and hurry, because there are so monsters here like Choodoy said, and I killed one and maybe another. You run and be safe and stay there! Tell them we didn’t find the uncles, but I’m trapped. Go!”

  The dead things lay there across the small clearing, two or three of the tiny forms sundered into iron-blooded mess, another half-dozen more just laying there still, with shapes that looked broken and wrong even though he’d never seen any of them before, and the wicket monster mostly between him and the dead, holes in its hide leaking dull copper. He could see heat or gas evaporating out of the husk, and dark splinters of structural bone where his third shot had struck home, right at eye edge of the thing.

  It must have been that head shot, trying to hit something important, that had worked, stopping it long enough for them to flee and, in the end, dropping it in a heap. Good thing he’d had his training.

  He’d been at the armorer’s on Flason not too long ago, taking certification so he could carry on station, his pocket piece rousing extra interest from the staff there because of size of the pellet—it limited the carrying capacity, yes, but it had stopping power. It had been his great aunt’s and came to him as the first of his mother’
s children to go off-ship for a crew exchange. He was a decent shot on the targets and for three days he could see “Klay Patel Smith” at the top of the week’s hottest shooter list at the shop. They’d called him Kid Klay, and that was fine—both the Patels and the Smiths were skinny as a rule anyhow and if they thought him young it made him feel better than being called undergrown.

  So he was alive, at least, since they’d walked into the star-lit clearing and then that thing had charged straight on, discovered in the middle of crushing the small creatures—and he’d fired before turning and running, properly getting between Squithy and the trouble.

  What he should have done was charge directly back the path they’d come in on, like Squithy did. Instead, he’d been doing an intercept course, like the compcourses showed . . .

  The damnedest thing is that he was trapped, just like a couple of the small ones had been on the other side of the clearing. He’d run through a small bush and next thing he’d known was the scrape of branches and the rattle of leaves. The sound had confused him, and made him pause long enough that the web came down directly on him.

  He was good and trapped and he might also be injured, his foot tangled in a knotted cord of fiber changing hue from green to blue and back again as he tried to search out a weak point. He was young—maybe the pain he felt was the twisted restraint and not a sign of actual damage . . .

  He fretted, pinned under the heavy webbing, his good cutting and hacking tools all “safe and under eye” as the cousins wanted it, back at the ship, and Squithy not allowed to carry something with a sharp point or a good edge, on account of her being her, so she’d be best at the ship even if he was stuck. Didn’t need an uncle to tell him to send the silly kid home and hope she survived and so could they.

  The web was sticky around the edges, and multi-layered. Unlike the dead thing, the web was near odorless. One gloppy strand was slowly moving down the side of his face—not moving alive, but moving as the sticky stuff stretched away from his skin as he twisted slow. He tried that with his foot, and found some give there. Maybe now . . . he gave a great kick, like he was kicking open a recalcitrant locker door . . .