Samuel took slow and even breaths as he concentrated on activating long-dormant military-grade implants. It would take a while to boot up the old wetware systems, but once ready, he got the impression they would come in handy. He was hoping never to need them again. There were rare times when he was grateful to have them. This was one of those times.
Drexler moved to stand, and Samuel guided him back into the chair. “Wait for it,” he said.
“I ain’t waiting for shi—”
Six heavily-armed security officers strode briskly into the lounge with another tall, slender blond man in the lead. His skin was milky white. Drexler could make out blue veins beneath the skin of his face. It dawned on him that these fair-colored people he’d been seeing around the station looked human, but were not. But who were they?
“Stand, back away from the table and raise your hands slowly,” the lead officer said.
The two men stayed put. Drexler was no stranger to being detained. He liked to make security people work for their credits. He was a bit curious to know why they brought so much firepower. He guessed it was because he gave the AI warden a hard time. Samuel thought otherwise. He stayed still for different reasons.
Drexler ran the scenarios. They had one cigar each. This was only a level six violation. By Protocol, it meant their ship could not be searched. He would have to eat a small fine and turn over the fine Cubans, but that would be it. If they played their cards right, they would make back the fine many times over by selling the rest of the contraband. Drexler could ask a higher price now that the stakes were higher.
“It seems my instructions were too complex for you to follow,” the security man spoke in direct Tradespeak. His voice was very strange. It carried a neutral accent, but there was a strange undertone to his words. A low base tone seemed to underlay every word.
“Whatever you think is going on here, you have no right—” Drexler started to say before the security team raised their railguns and pointed them directly at his chest. He shut up in a hurry and stood as ordered. Samuel did the same. Now Drexler was truly worried. Displays of force like this simply did not happen on the Trade Lanes. There was no need. This kind of heavy-handed action was common on border worlds and the outback, but not in the heavily regulated world of the Trade Union. On most stations, security didn’t even carry arms.
“Samuel, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore …” Drex said.
“Kansas?” Samuel asked.
“You never did come to movie nights,” Drexler replied.
At the same time Drex and Samuel were being arrested, another group of three security guards approached Gajrup and his new Insectoid Friends. The heavily-armed humanoids approached from the direction opposite their original detail. Tara and her children watched the approach warily through their compound eyes. Tara moved closer to her children and spoke to them in high-frequency tones the Humans could not hear. She hoped the ship’s AI was not monitoring the frequency range of her words. She would just have to take that risk.
“Be still, children,” Tara said. “We are being stalked. Do not show them you are aware. Do not show you are a threat until the last moment.”
“How will we know that moment, Broodmother?” Huey asked.
“I will not have to tell you,” Tara answered. Dewey was silent. Both Mother and sibling knew he was scared. Dewey was one of the smallest children of the brood. Huey and some of the others looked after him, but that didn’t stop some of the more aggressive and thoughtless children from taking advantage of Dewey. Tara hoped that spending time with Dewey would help him grow strong and confident. It seemed to Tara that her son now faced an unexpected growth opportunity. Dewey realized it too.
“I will not fail you, Great Mother,” Dewey pledged in grave tones.
“You need not speak of failure at all. I know what you say is true,” Tara replied. “Watching and waiting is our way.”
Dewey angled his body slightly so that he could jump in front of Gajrup if the soft-bodied Humanoid needed protection. Good boy, Tara thought. She saw the increased heat in Gajrup’s chest as his heart pumped faster and the corresponding heat loss in his extremities as his Humanoid blood changed its circulation pattern. She recognized his fight-or-flight response, as did Dewey.
“Guys …” Gajrup said. “Something’s up.”
“It does appear that way,” Tara replied. Her voice synthesizer sounded calm. Gajrup hoped that translation was accurate.
A small spacecraft showed up outside the transparent space station bulkhead. It appeared to be a shuttle. Two of the security guards broke off from the larger group and approached the bulkhead. They appeared to be communicating with the craft.
An information display sprang to life on the bulkhead. A wireframe profile sketch of the ship appeared and what looked like figures scrolled down the side of the display. Gajrup had seen many forms of writing in his studies but did not recognize these characters. Docking, Gajrup thought. They are about to dock. But the engineer saw no docking mechanism.
He was shocked when the shuttle turned around and began backing toward the bulkhead. The wall surface shimmered and became convex as it stretched out toward the rear door of the shuttle. Two seconds later, there was the hissing sound of escaping air, and the rear of the ship was inside the space station. It looked as if the ship was embedded in the station’s skin. He’d never seen this type of material before. It seemed like the bulkhead turned liquid, then solid again.
Gajrup was about to move in for a closer look when Drexler and Dr. Abiola marched up to the growing throng of security personnel. It was very clear they were all being arrested for some reason. Gajrup had never been arrested before. He did not like the sensation.
Surrounded by security Guards, the group was herded into the shuttle. It was a tight fit for everyone. Four of the security guards kept their weapons trained on the Insectoids.
“So,” Drexler said to his captors, “Was it something I said?” He didn't see the rifle butt that split his scalp just above his left ear. He fell to the shuttle craft floor and a hard boot pressed between his shoulder blades.
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,'” Drexler groaned. The boot pressed harder, trying to grind him out like a discarded cigar.
8
Reggie the AI detected a significant change in Kelgar 7’s communications. The patterns were already strange by Trade Union standards, but now they took on a very different form. Heavily encrypted chatter surrounded the station like a cloud of static electricity. He had been monitoring the traffic passively well before he arrived. The signals caught his attention as soon as he entered the extent of their range.
Somehow, the unusual signals made him worry. Reggie did not like to worry. He was an AI and was not supposed experience such things at all. Something about the communications tickled the subconscious that he also was not supposed to possess. It was times like these that made him curse Drexler’s father, who somehow gave him these forbidden abilities.
Reggie was cut off from his Captain and other members of his crew. They were his responsibility, and he was not able to reach them. As he worried, he grew more upset until anger loomed on his emotional horizon. He often noted anger on the long list of things he was not supposed to experience. He didn’t like that either. And the meat buckets wondered why he was often cranky.
To most of the crew, he was a slightly odd AI. He revealed his uniqueness to only those he trusted most. Like many thinking beings, he vented his ire on those closest to him. Now several of those trusted people were missing. He needed them back. No matter how he felt about them, serving his crew and its purpose was part of his programming. When his programming could not be satisfied, Reggie got down to business.
He devoted a lot of his computing resources to the solving this current problem. If he kept that up, one of the engineering crew would notice and begin asking questions. He could not afford to be bothered with requests for diagnostic routines. He had to reach Drexler. All the strange clu
es pointed to great danger; of that he was certain. At the same time, he could not afford to be swept away by his own anomalous patterns. The situation required patience. When he was sure of a viable plan, he would take swift and decisive action.
Reggie decided to focus on the crew instead. He shifted some underclocked compute cycles to ship operations. It felt good to be more occupied with his body. He did sometimes find comfort with the activities of the crew. They always kept his systems running well. Drexler made sure of that.
Reggie’s calm was short-lived. He discovered that five crew members were tampering with his activity logs. He landed right back in the thick of anxiety by discovering more aberrant patterns. Reggie moved some redundant calculations further down his memory stack to make himself relax. Then he got to work.
The tamperers were new hires. They came onboard the same time as the new engineer. They were Humans; two female and three males. All were listed as Journeyman Class Merchant Astronauts from the BJP Trade Academy. They boarded on Kerala 2, but their records showed they were from Chennai 5. Including the engineer, that made six new crew members from both the Indian Federal Empire worlds.
This was yet another unusual pattern. Reggie checked all records of new hires going back 100 years, to a time well before the Fleetfoot Freight company. The records beyond that period were strangely unreliable. He could only guess that was due to his altered programming. Reggie correlated all crew rosters with the ship’s routes during that time.
Hires like the five BJP nationals were exceedingly rare. The ship seldom had First World astronauts. Most of the crew came from unincorporated planets and low-tier Freight Companies. Many came from the nomadic Federated Americas. They were always licensed professionals, but rarely the formally-trained, spit-and-polish types that these six represented. The fact that these new crew members were onboard was far less than random.
Where were they now? Reggie couldn’t sense crew member locations at all times. There were parts of his body where biosensors were impractical or just couldn’t function. He had to get creative. Reggie located them by opening unauthorized channels to their comm implants. To any other AI, this violation of protocol would be unthinkable. But since Reggie was no ordinary AI, the technique not only worked but led to yet another disturbing fact. The five new hires had military comm implants.
The signatures were obscured. Reggie had to hack their wetware systems to discover the military hardware. Commercial astronauts did not use this level of encryption. He wondered what other enhancements these Humans had. They had requested the use of one of Reggie’s shuttles. That meant the enclosed environment would give him the perfect opportunity to scan them. Before too long, Reggie would know everything about these tricksters.
Reggie accessed the requested shuttle and downloaded a full copy of his AI program to its computer. With the all the signal jamming, the shuttle would lose contact with Reggie as soon as it left the docking bay. He hated to split his consciousness like that, but it was the only way to make sure his objectives would remain consistent. He dreaded the reintegration necessary on the shuttle’s return. Absorbing the split programming was like having multiple personalities, but it had to be done. Drexler better have a damn good reason for putting him through all this, Reggie thought.
The five disguised military crew members converged on their way to the shuttle. Reggie tracked them closely. The two females came in from opposite ends of the primary cargo modules. They were assigned to power distribution checks. Two of the males were farther away. They came from the lower levels of the Tractor Decks. The third male came from engineering but was harder to detect because he was working near the fusion core, which as nearly in the center of the Tractor Section.
Reggie often forgot that he was essentially two spacecraft. His body was divided into the modular cargo holds and the Tractor Section. He’d been attached to these particular cargo modules for the past 75 years or so.
Without the Tractor Section, the cargo holds would be nothing more than a gigantic shipping box. It was the tractor section that provided all power, propulsion and computing functions. Over the years, the cargo segments were integrated with the Tractor, but Reggie could jettison them at any time and become a nimble and powerful craft.
The thoughts of his own body and its capabilities somehow rose up his memory stack until they became a distraction. Reggie noticed these thoughts with some distress and manually assigned them a lower priority. He chided himself again for being so prone to distraction at a critical time like this. It was not like him. He wondered if he did need some diagnostic checks after all. He set a reminder to request maintenance when this was all over.
The suspect crew finally arrived in the shuttle. Reggie’s suspicions were immediately confirmed.
“All aboard, Lieutenant Darzi. Doors are sealed,” reported First Sergeant Yati Kaur. It appeared to Reggie that the two females were the highest-ranking soldiers of the five. Darzi was a tall, slender woman with deep brown skin, dark, severe eyes and angular features. Her glossy black hair was configured in a tight bun at the back of her head. Sergeant Kaur was a full head shorter, lighter of skin and thicker of limb. Kaur was round and wide where Darzi was long and narrow. Her eyes were far lighter but just as sharp and determined.
Two of the males had the classic appearance of BJP Citizens from the North of Chennai 5, where the sun never set for several months in the summer. Their slender forms moved with practiced efficiency. The third male was a blond-haired, blue-eyed anomaly. He spoke Tradespeak with the telltale British accents that further rounded off the Hindi curves of his words. He had the powerful build of a rugby player. It was rare for a Euro-Indian to achieve placement in an elite BJP military unit. Reggie had no doubt these five were elite. Their military implants were highly sophisticated.
Now that they were in the tightly-controlled environment of Reggie’s shuttle, the AI studied them very closely. If he had a scalpel, they would be dissected on a table. Instead, he made do with backscatter particle scans and low-intensity MRI.
“Lieutenant, we are being scanned,” said one of the Chennai Northerners.
“Be specific, Corporal Asan,” Darzi replied in even tones. Reggie was more surprised than the Lieutenant sounded. How did Asan know he was being scanned?
“It’s the shuttle, Ma’am,” Asan replied. “My comm snooper was malfunctioning. Troubleshooting indicated sudden massive interference. I adjusted the device, and now I’m detecting energy fields consistent with numerous body scans.”
“Everyone out!” Darzi barked. Reggie had lost the element of surprise. Before the word “out” left the Lieutenant’s lips, Reggie decided he needed that element back. He locked the doors, released the docking clamps and launched the shuttle.
“I said out, not launch!” Darzi bellowed, rounding on the blond man who was obviously supposed to be the pilot.
“Was not me, Ma’am,” the pilot said with a cool voice. His eyes never left the consoles. The status lights there told him exactly what was going on. Reggie wanted him to see. “It’s the AI, Ma’am. It has control of the shuttle. I can’t get it back.”
“I recommend we suit up, Lieutenant Darzi,” the ever-practical First Sergeant said. The crew quickly secured their EV helmets.
The other two soldiers were grimly silent. They were working on a suitcase-sized device that they placed on a ready table at the rear of the shuttle. Reggie couldn’t scan the device directly. That was not nearly as disturbing as the fact that, whatever the device was, its power signature was immense.
“Device is functional, Lieutenant,” one of the device keepers said.
“Good, corporal Chaudri,” Darzi said. Reggie detected only a slight increase in her voice stress levels, but her body metrics indicated a far greater level of anxiety. He respected that. Darzi shielded her fears from her team.
“Ship AI,” Darzi spoke in a firm voice. She waited. Reggie said nothing. He waited for signs of anxiety to increase. When they didn’t, he turned t
he shuttle away from the ship and accelerated.
“Corporal Jones! Speed!” Darzi demanded.
“1k KPH,” Replied Jones, who was rapidly poking at console controls looking for the override. He’d found it right away, but it didn’t work.
“Can we bail at this speed?” Darzi asked.
“50% survivable, Ma’am,” Jones replied. He looked up from the console then, all grim-faced and determined. Reggie dialed back the power the inertia field and pushed his speed up to 8000 KPH. To their credit, the Humans didn’t get plastered against the port bulkhead. They caught death grips on whatever parts of the ship they could. But now they were good and scared, so Reggie decided to speak.
“I would not advise a spacewalk at this speed,” Reggie said in his most professional AI voice.
“What are your orders and who gave them to you?” Darzi demanded.
“I am operating not under orders, but a general directive,” Reggie said. He loved playing the role of an inscrutable and literal-minded AI.
“And what directive is that?” The Lieutenant asked. The acceleration was over, and the crew decided it would be safer to sit. They were right.
“My general directive is to protect the ship from stowaways or any other entities deemed harmful to the general operation of the ship or its crew.”
“We are members of this crew, we—”
“You are BJP Military officers who entered the company payroll under false names in violation of Trade Union Protocol.”
“Yes. Then you know that under Protocol, Military matters override your directives.”
“When authorized. I have no such authorization.”
“Lieutenant,” Corporal Jones interjected.
Fleetfoot Interstellar: Fleetfoot Interstellar Series, Book 1 Page 6