Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Oh. Why didn’t you do this in the first place?” Michella said. Her hair trailing upward and pooling on the cockpit window above her.

  “Defensive weapon discharge imminent,” the system said.

  Lex veered hard to the side a heartbeat before a shaft of light burst out through the shields below them. It was near enough to instantly spike the heat in the ship, and a handful of indicators on the control panel switched from their useful displays to solid red error screens.

  “Secondary shield failure. Navigation shields inactive.”

  “That’ll be why,” he said. “Don’t worry. The missiles might not have the brains to avoid targeting the big ships, but the drones should. And those big defensive cannons aren’t made for aiming at stuff as close as us, so—”

  “Defensive weapon discharge imminent.”

  He dodged again, this time quickly enough to spare the ship any damage.

  “Getting really sick of the word imminent,” Lex said.

  “Why aren’t we getting away from this thing?”

  “Hoping the drones will count one of these explosions as us and lose interest. Ideally before one of these explosions is us.”

  They did several more revolutions, but the dizzying course didn’t seem to be fooling any of the drones. They had taken up stationary positions and were angling themselves to face him. Lex dodged three more cannon blasts before he decided the plan was a bust.

  “All else fails, floor it,” he muttered.

  The planet loomed before them. When his orbit around the capital ship was at the proper point, he maxed out the thrusters, launching himself toward it. The moment his blip on the sensors was differentiable from that of the capital ship, all drones in range fired a salvo of missiles.

  “Time until shield restoration,” Lex commanded.

  “Seventeen seconds,” the ship replied.

  “Time until critical atmospheric density.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “We’ve got a couple of seconds of unshielded high-speed entry coming.”

  “There’s also a lot of missiles.”

  “Only fifteen of them. Besides—reentry is more likely to kill us at the moment.”

  Ahead of the SOB, an ominous red glow was forming as the thickening atmosphere began to interact with the SOB. Rear cameras revealed similar points of light ahead of each missile. They were moving far too fast for the air molecules to get out of the way, so they were scrunching up ahead of them, dumping their heat, and scouring the ship. A symphony of warning tones and overlapping messages began to compete for Lex’s attention, and the temperature in the cockpit was growing by a dozen degrees per second. The silence of space was replaced by a distant roar that grew steadily louder.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Lex said, watching the shields start to tick up. “I really hope those Poison Pills can take a little heat.”

  The missiles on their tail started to veer off course or burst. Out the front window, the nose of the SOB was now glowing nearly as bright as the pressure wave ahead of them. A hunk of the forward body panel peeled away and smashed against the window, feathering it with a web of new cracks that quickly lengthened. The roar around them was deafening now.

  “Hull breach,” the SOB said.

  “I noticed!” Lex said.

  “Shields active.”

  The pressure wave pushed forward ahead of an expanding shield and the temperature rise started to trail off, leaving the internal temperature just a few degrees below boiling.

  “Just a few more seconds and I can level off. Gotta make sure we’re in deep enough for the capital ship to avoid shooting at us.”

  “These people are going to bomb the whole planet anyway!” Michella said.

  “Yeah, but they’re still people. I gotta believe they’re not going to open fire on a defenseless planet until they absolutely have to.”

  They watched the sky anxiously for a few seconds more, then gradually leveled out and cut his speed. Now without the reentry burn to contend with and a nice thick atmosphere to help it out, the cooling systems got the temperature under control within fifteen seconds. One by one the warning announcements silenced. Lex took a deep breath and turned to his passengers. Michella was a bit of a mess. Her hair was a complete wreck, and their orbits around the ship had left her face quite red. Squee, on the other hand, look just fine. If anything, she seemed disappointed it had ended so quickly.

  “Everybody okay?” he asked.

  “How soon can I look at the footage from your ship’s cameras?” Michella said.

  “Yeah, you’re fine.” He turned back to the task of flying the ship. “Get your slidepad out, I’ll patch it into the cameras. While you’re at it, check the belly cam to see if our payload is intact.”

  She pulled out her device and impatiently watched the screen until the link dialogue appeared. Once she accepted and had access to the ship’s visual system, she went to work with a level of skill and enthusiasm that almost rivaled Lex’s flight performance.

  “Little bit of char on the corners, but the Poison Pill cases look intact,” she said. “Jeez, Lex, you’ve got ten cameras on this thing? And high-quality ones at that!”

  “Karter doesn’t mess around,” he said with a shrug. “I’m going to try to get in touch with Silo or Garotte. If anyone knows where to find the biggest concentration of Gen-Mechs on the planet, they do.”

  “I’ll save you the time, Lex. Camera three, lower right quadrant. About a hundred kilometers west of Gloria.”

  Rather than pulling up the feed she described, he angled the ship in the appropriate direction and looked for himself. Even without magnification, there was no mistaking it. A darker gray patch against the light gray of the endless marsh. It was irregular and shifting in shape, like an amoeba that spanned a few football fields. Periodically there would be a flash of light or a burst of dust and a hole would open in the amorphous shape, but it would just as quickly close. Just visible ahead of the shape was a single speck moving erratically across the landscape.

  “Yeah, that’ll be them. Let’s go say hi.”

  #

  “There has got to be a better way!” yelped Ronzone.

  He was riding inside what now could only rightly be called Silo’s Tank, though inside was a charitable term. His head, complete with its implanted receiver, stuck out the primary hatch so that the nearby Gen-Mechs could get a nice strong whiff of its signal. The sun was setting, painting the whitish marsh around them a deep orange. At the controls, Silo’s face was serious and her hands steady. It was a machine meant to be operated by two people, and half of the navigation and targeting aids had been removed to repair the Declaration, and yet she was unloading its cannons with precision and timing. Granted, her target covered several acres and the endless marsh wasn’t exactly an obstacle course, but dancing the fine line between losing the interest of the robot horde and being overcome by it was one hell of a task.

  “I’m open to suggestions, Agent. Near as I can figure, we’ve run out of good ideas,” Silo said, briefly taking a hand away from the controls to wipe away a trickle of sweat in the muggy tank interior.

  “Let’s just get away! They’re so close I can hear their torches!”

  “Hey, I’m fresh out of stronger transmitters, and we’re having a hard enough time keeping them from peeling off toward the city as it is. If you’re going to be our bait, you’ll have to be up close and personal.”

  “I’m a goddamn VectorCorp agent! I’m a trained technician, and I’ve got a degree in business management! My job description is legally tracking down and eliminating habitual violators of VectorCorp policies!” He flinched as a leaping Gen-Mech’s torch hissed within centimeters of his face. “I’m not supposed to be bait!”

  “You should’ve thought of that before you installed a transmitter in your skull.” Silo switched from the main cannon to the smaller plasma guns and picked off a pair of flying Gen-Mechs that Ronzone had failed to notice. “And there’s
no need to cuss. We’re all in this together.”

  He ducked inside briefly to avoid a piece of former robot. “It doesn’t feel that way to me!”

  Ronzone reluctantly stuck his head back out and watched through squinted eyes as the stampeding robots trailed just barely behind the tank. Every few seconds one of them would lift off on a set of repulsors or thrusters stolen from some manner of vehicle or built from the parts of fallen robots, but Silo was quick to pick those off. When they gathered into a cluster and prepared to launch a flightless robot toward the tank, Silo would blast the dense mound of robots with the main cannon. This tactic had been going on for twenty-five horrifying minutes. Escaping the robots, at least for a while, would be a simple task, but that wasn’t Silo’s goal. Her goal was to occupy them, to keep them from finding and feasting on any of the scattered cities and industrial zones on the planet. This was much more difficult. The robots varied greatly in speed, so she constantly had to loop around and backtrack to pick off or wrangle together any stragglers. Until half an hour ago she’d been able to toss down powerful communicators to draw them together from a safe distance, then blast them once they were a solid target. If she’d been lucky, she might have wiped them all out in this way, but unfortunately any given piece of bait never seemed to attract all of the robots in an area, there were always at least a few that kept their distance, and those would retreat and rebuild. Finally their supply of transmitters ran out, except for the one in the VC agent’s head.

  “This is a waste of time! There have got to be more clusters of robots.”

  “There are six other clusters, but this is the only one threatening a population center.”

  “All we’re doing is delaying the inevitable!”

  “You’re talking to a career soldier. Delaying the inevitable is my job… Hang on. Something’s up.”

  A moment later it became clear that the robots weren’t nearly as interested in the tank as they had been. The group was beginning to slow down, finally stopping and splitting into a series of catapult mounds. Silo looked up and spotted the reason for the change. Above them, the SOB was slowly approaching the surface. It came to a stop, and a moment later climbed a few dozen meters more to avoid a steadily increasing stream of hurled robots. It was clear the Gen-Mechs couldn’t care less about anything but the SOB now.

  “About time he showed up,” Silo said, allowing the tank to coast to a stop. “Any chance you could contact him on your communicator?”

  “Way ahead of you.” His eyes wandered a bit as he navigated menus. “Alexander! You listen to me! I will never forget that it was your fault I got dragged into this! … No I can’t put Silo or Garotte on! I haven’t seen that guy in days, and I can’t exactly hand Silo the microphone. … Silo, he says those crates on the belly of the ship are from someone named Karter. He says they’re strong enough bait to attract every last Gen-Mech on the planet once they get ahold of them and… and a lot of complicated and highly dubious reasoning about what he claims will save the day.”

  “What does he need us to do?” Silo asked.

  “What do you need Silo to do? … He wants to know how spread out they are.”

  “We’ve been doing our best to keep them wrangled, but they’ve got a good three hundred kilometer spread by now.”

  “Three hundred kilometer radius. … He says lead the way to as near to the center as you can get, and get there as fast as you can.”

  “That’s a roger,” Silo said, taking one last shot at the mass of robots before angling the trusty tank toward the north.

  Behind them, the SOB deployed its tractor beam and snatched one of the Gen-Mechs out of midair before following. The two vehicles tore across the landscape, Silo leading the way with periodic checks to the quantum scanner to be sure she was on track. It only took seven minutes to reach the right place. And once there Lex brought the SOB low and popped the cockpit. He let the ship remain a few meters from the ground but climbed out and stood on the body of it. The struggling Gen-Mech was still clamped in his tractor beam, unable to escape but still running in place, desperate for the contents of the crates.

  “My bosses told me you were trouble, but they didn’t say you were a goddamn tornado of disaster,” growled Ronzone as he climbed out of the tank.

  “That’s odd. You’d think that would have been the first thing they’d have told you,” Lex said, hopping down to the tank. “And who are you, by the way? Your voice sounds familiar.”

  “VectorCorp Special Agent Chris Ronzone.”

  “Chris… Chris Ronzone… oh, right, I remember now.”

  Without warning, Lex reared back and drove his fist into the agent’s nose. The blow sent him stumbling back until he fell off the edge of the hovertank and landed with a splat on the muddy marsh below.

  Lex stepped to the edge of the ship and jabbed a finger down at Chris, shaking his other hand as it recovered from the punch. “You fired me twice! You’re the guy who’s trying to ruin my life!”

  Ronzone groaned, holding his nose. Silo stepped over beside Lex and looked down at the squirming, cursing agent.

  “Bet that felt good,” she said.

  “Yes and no,” Lex said, massaging his knuckles. “But enough indulging my thirst for vengeance. We’ve got, what, twenty minutes before we’ve got robots to worry about again?”

  “Hard to say. It’s been harder and harder to get those things to follow us. Unless the particularly speedy ones that we just left behind decided to keep chasing us, it might be hours before any of the nearby bots even turn in our direction.”

  “If Karter’s right, then they’ll all be coming for us. Now let’s assume they are. How soon until the first ones get here, and how soon until the last ones get here?”

  Silo climbed into the tank and fetched the scanner. She gave it a quick sweep around them. “I’d give us five minutes for the closest fast ones. Close to two hours for the farthest fast ones. The slow ones and damaged ones could take a day or two.”

  “That’s not the best news I’ve heard.”

  Chris, finally recovering from the blow to the face and the resulting fall, was trying to get to his feet. “I’ll have your ass for that, Alexander. That’s assault! Now I won’t even have to work to get you locked up. I’ve got witnesses.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ll remember that when I’m deciding how hard I want to work to save your life.” He pulled out his slidepad and tapped the cargo controls. Sturdy restraining clamps and straps disengaged, and the crates fell to the ground, sizzling as they struck and sending a wave of muck all over Ronzone.

  “What the hell!?” he griped.

  Lex ignored the complaint and climbed down to the ground, sloshing ankle deep into the mud and gingerly popping the lid of one of the still-scalding-hot cases. Inside were dozens of neatly packed gadgets, each one slightly larger than a marking pen.

  “So this is what Karter came up with?” Silo said.

  “Yep. All we need to do is let the Gen-Mechs chow down on them. After a few minutes, every one of the robots with one of these installed will start broadcasting a signal that’ll make the others tear it apart, then the whole thing repeats with the next bot.”

  “And this was Karter’s plan? I would have expected something a little more pyrotechnic out of him,” Silo said.

  “The important thing is that it works. Fingers crossed, everybody.”

  Lex grabbed a handful of the devices and tossed them in the direction of the tractored robot. The Gen-Mech skillfully snapped one of the components from the air and immediately went to work. The bundle of cables and electronics that made up the Gen-Mech’s core emerged and turned a few of its tool-equipped tendrils on itself, removing panels, severing wires, and ejecting a cobbled-together hunk of circuitry. In the void left behind, it incorporated the Poison Pill with a welding laser and a half-dozen spidery manipulator arms. With startling speed and efficiency, the procedure was over and the robot seemed to become considerably less aggressive in its struggles, as though i
ts current hunger had been sated.

  “Is that it?” Ronzone asked, wiping off as much of the filth as he could. “That’s your world-saving plan? You gave the thing an upgrade?”

  “How do we know if it worked?” Silo asked.

  “If in five minutes that pile of crates is the epicenter of a robot kill-fest, then it worked.”

  Ronzone scowled at Lex. “So if it didn’t work, we’re all going to turn into a cloud of radioactive vapor as soon as the Teeker military can get their act together, and if it did work, every single one of the kill-crazy killbots is going to be heading straight for us?”

  “Close. Even if it did work, we might still get vaporized if the Teekers don’t agree that it worked,” Lex said, scooping up a few handfuls of the components and pocketing them. “Better hang on to some of these in case I need to poison a few separate clusters.”

  Ronzone glared at Lex for a moment with a twitching eye. “How are you still alive if you think that is a good plan!?”

  “Good friends and quick thinking, mostly,” Lex said, reaching up to take Silo’s hand. She hauled him easily to the top of the tank again, then did the same for Ronzone.

  “Don’t forget luck,” Michella called down from the SOB.

  “No. Luck is not my friend,” Lex said. “So where’s Garotte?”

  “No word from him since he decided to pop the VectorCorp monitors to slow down the fleet,” Silo said. Her voice had the steadiness of someone being very mindful not to let any concern show. “His mission has been to keep the bombs from dropping. They haven’t dropped, so he’s on the job. In a mission like that, no unnecessary communication.”