Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “Well, unless you’ve got enough firepower to melt down every last one of these robots once they’re in one place, I have a feeling communication is going to be necessary soon.”

  “I’m afraid I’m fresh out of the big stuff, hon. The local military’s cupboard is bare when it comes to tactical and strategic weaponry,” Silo said.

  “Then at least some bombs are going to have to drop.”

  “Ronzone here’s going to have to work on your com, then. It turns out VC keeps spiking the communications to keep them dead and thus keep the robots from flooding population centers. He’s got a built-in communicator, but with main communications down it’s got to do direct connections, and it hasn’t got the oomph to talk to anything more than a few dozen kilometers away. The SOB’s radio should be able to handle it, if he authorizes it.” She glanced at the scanner in her hand, then swept it around a bit and looked to the horizon. “He’s going to have to hurry. You definitely got their attention.”

  “Ronzone,” Lex said, “do what you have to do and do it fast.”

  The VectorCorp agent stood with his mouth half-open for a few seconds. One could almost see his mind feverishly working on some way to refuse to help Lex without appearing to be some combination of smug, spiteful, evil, and stupid. Finally he gave up the fight and squinted his eyes. After a few seconds of delivering commands with his implant, he growled, “Your communicator is authorized to ignore communication spikes. But only until I change my auth code. Don’t go thinking you’ve got some special privilege forever.”

  “I’ll try not to get used to it,” Lex said. “Could you give me a boost, Silo?”

  She cupped her hands and, when he stepped into them, practically launched him to the waiting SOB.

  “Remember, the goal is to get all of the robots, all of the robots, into one big dog pile. They should completely ignore you, so all you have to do is pick off the ones who seem like they might get away.”

  “That’ll be the flyers, then. Can do. What’ll you do after you get Garotte on the com?”

  “I guess I’ll snag one of the poisoned Gen-Mechs and take it on a tour around Movi trying to round up and corral any stragglers. This plan hinges on getting every single one of these things.”

  “Well, get moving then. Those things are getting close enough to hear. Best to give them some space.”

  Lex settled into the pilot’s seat and made ready to depart, squinting against the low sun.

  “Hang on, Lex,” Michella said. “I think I should stay with Silo. If the only communicator they have is the one in the agent’s head, being on the surface will give us better contact with each other. I’ll take Squee, too.”

  Lex eyed her warily, then looked at the vague form of an approaching horde of robots.

  “I honestly don’t know which is safer, inside the SOB or in the tank, so you may as well,” he said, helping her out and down.

  Michella stood unsteadily on the tank while Lex put some distance between the SOB and the mound of pills, though he angled the tractor beam and its struggling prisoner down to keep it near the pile. From his new elevation, he didn’t need a fancy scanner to know the pills were doing their job. Shifting, shapeless mobs of robots were charging in from all around them.

  “This is going to be a heck of a thing…” he said, eyes sweeping across the approaching chaos.

  “Promise me you’ll get at least one tight flyby,” Michella said over the communicator. She’d never stopped reviewing the footage they had so far, and was now beginning to remotely tweak and adjust the settings on external cameras that had survived entry. “This is the sort of stuff people need to see.”

  “I’ve got a feeling I won’t be able to avoid tight flybys.”

  Lex opened up the menu for the SOB’s communicator and was pleased to find that it was indeed fully functional and with a few new frequency and codec settings available. He made a mental note to be choosy about his words until he could get Karter and Ma to make sure Ronzone hadn’t done anything sneaky while he was accessing it. The Declaration’s communicator was listed as available, so he selected it and hoped for the best. Almost immediately the connection established, but rather than the sound of Garotte’s voice, Lex was greeted with a text readout: “Awaiting acknowledgment.” It was a message that one seldom encountered these days, mostly because it might as well read “Your message is currently being screened.” Most people found either sneakier or more direct ways to avoid unwanted callers. Fifteen seconds passed before the message was replaced with a video feed of Garotte.

  The spy was looking calm. More so than he ever had. Garotte was always one who looked confident and at ease in any situation, but at this moment he seemed positively serene.

  “Lex, my boy. So wonderful to hear from you,” he said.

  “Garotte. Are you okay?”

  “I am quite well at present, though I can’t say much for the immediate future. The Declaration and I are in what you might call a compromising situation…”

  Chapter 27

  Garotte sat in the pilot seat of the Declaration, eyes focused vaguely on the communication panel. He had not lived his life lightly. Death had stared him in the face on a fairly regular basis for most of his career. Long ago he’d accepted that his end would be an untimely one. From time to time he’d wondered how he’d react when the cards up his sleeve finally ran out. He was rather pleased to find his brain didn’t have any patience for the five stages of grief. It had skipped over denial, anger, and the rest, landing him comfortably in acceptance.

  “Have you ever seen a planetary bombardment vessel?” he asked, eyes now shifting to the cockpit window.

  “No, Garotte, but I don’t think this is the right moment for story time,” Lex said.

  “Likely not, but permit me this one indulgence. Bombardment vessels are really something to behold. Leveling a whole continent is not a task to be lightly undertaken. It takes a special sort of ship, one that’s designed for precisely and exclusively that purpose. The most glorious thing about them is the simple fact that continents, on the whole, haven’t changed much in quite a while, so the level of ordnance and its delivery method is charmingly nostalgic. The Teeker version of the venerable planet-buster is little more than a container for antimatter weapons. They call it the Arbiter, a bit pompous for my tastes, but humility is seldom a trait of those equipped to end a world. Inside are bombs composed of bombs composed of bombs, each breaking apart into wider and wider grids after launch until the desired coverage is achieved. And that first bomb, the mother of all the others, is delivered via a large cannon. Quite large. Large enough, I’ve found, to comfortably fit the Declaration with shields raised.”

  “… You’re in a cannon.”

  “Quite far in, as a matter of fact,” he said.

  From his point of view, the barrel of the weapon seemed more like part of a transit system than the delivery mechanism for nuclear death. It had a diameter large enough to fit three Declarations side by side with room to spare. Sets of spiraling rails ran around it, giving it an almost playful appearance, like the inside of a barber pole, though in this case the stripes were thin and glowing an ominous orange color. He’d positioned himself at the midpoint of the barrel, far enough in to avoid being caught off guard by fighters approaching from the outside, but far enough out to be able to avoid being taken by surprise when the weapon fired.

  “I can see the launch mechanism. It is active. We are at this moment a button press away from Armageddon,” Garotte said. “Well, I am. By virtue of my positioning, should this particular Arbiter choose to launch, it will suffer from an exceptionally premature detonation. And, might I add, a gratifyingly spectacular end to my career. For you the end of times will have to wait until the next Arbiter arrives, which they estimate will take another two hours.”

  “We might need more than two hours.”

  “It is all I’ve got to offer, I’m afraid. If I leave my present position, they will launch.”

  “Lis
ten, Garotte. We’ve got something going down here. We might be able to wipe the robots out, but we’re going to need some help from the Teekers. Is there any way you can get in contact with them?”

  “They have thus far been markedly reluctant to engage in conversation, and I’m in something of a standoff right now. I can offer you the code to broadcast directly to their command ship’s com system, but I very much doubt you’ll earn a response. The Teekers have their weapons held to our collective head. I’d hoped to get them to the negotiation table by putting my own gun to theirs. It wasn’t my most successful plan.”

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Lex growled, more to himself than anyone else. “No way am I going to get this close to pulling this off and have it fail because they won’t listen!”

  “This is straight from the history books. Mutually assured destruction only works as a bargaining tool when you can actually assure mutual destruction. You didn’t put a gun to their heads, you just stuck your finger in theirs,” Michella weighed in. “If you want them to negotiate, you’ve got to meet them with equal force.”

  “Ah… the lovely Ms. Modane. I do so love a student of history. Right you are about equal force, but I’m sorry to say I’ve left all of my doomsday weapons at home.”

  “Hold on…” Lex said. “… I do have a weapon of mass destruction. I’ve got a Gen-Mech in my tractor beam right now.”

  “Yes, my boy. There are some number of them down there, I seem to recall.”

  “But I’ve already gotten past their blockade twice.”

  Garotte considered the words. It didn’t take long for realization to dawn. A slow smile curved his lips. It wasn’t the faint smile of simple serenity that had graced his face until now. It was the cocky, swaggering, overconfident grin that seemed to have been a fixture on his face since birth.

  “Stand by for the com code, my boy. And do patch me in to the conversation. I believe this is a discussion I’m eager to hear.”

  “Silo, this robot’s got to stay with the bait. You think you can keep it active but disabled while I go fetch another one?”

  “I’ve gotten pretty good at clipping the legs of these buggers, sugar. Go ahead and drop it.”

  #

  A portly bulldog-faced woman in her fifties sat rigidly in an austere metal chair. She wore a simple gray uniform, one sleeve sporting an emblem comprising eight concentric rings and a ninth sharply angled one. Her name badge labeled her Captain Paltrowe, though her stance and demeanor would have made her rank clear at a single glance. Her bridge wasn’t the sprawling, well-lit stage that so many dramas depicted on starships. It was a small room with designated stations for a core command crew of six including the captain. With the exception of the captain’s chair, it looked more like the control room of a television studio of old than the sort of place where dire battles are fought and life-or-death decisions are made.

  Each member of the crew was busy at his or her station, mostly reviewing data as it crept across screens and displays. The communication officer, a similarly rigid but much younger man, sat at the station directly to the captain’s left. He wore a headset and was gliding his fingers across an input screen a bit more furiously than he had been a moment earlier.

  Paltrowe glanced to him, noting an increased level of activity. When her eyes came to rest upon him, a brief flash of hot anxiety flickered across his features. It clearly had more to do with what he was hearing than the attention of his commanding officer.

  “Something coming through on com, Commander?” she asked. “Another message from the obstinate fool in the Arbiter?”

  “Not directly, Captain. It’s someone new… he’s… he’s got a fairly firm knowledge of the specifics of this mission.”

  If this information was the source of any concern for the captain, she didn’t let it show on her face. “Playback his message from the start, time shifted to catch us up.”

  He issued a few simple commands, concluding with one that pushed the audio to the loudspeakers set into the ceiling. Lex’s voice played back with a subtle jitter introduced by slicing out fractions of each syllable to compress the playback time a bit.

  “Attention captain of the Teeker command ship. My name is Trevor Alexander. I am the pilot of the unmarked Cantrell Aerospace Intrasystem Interceptor that recently broke your blockade. Please respond. I know that you have been tasked with containing the robot threat on the surface, even if it means wiping out every last living thing. You must listen to me. We can save lives. Please respond. I repeat, please respond.”

  “Maintain radio silence,” the captain advised. “We have our orders. Put the ship on screen.”

  A zoomed image of the SOB skimming swiftly across the marshy wastes appeared in the corner of the screen.

  “You must have quantum scanners on board to monitor robot activity. By now it should be clear that something is happening. We have found a way to lure the robots irresistibly to a single point and delay them there, possibly for hours.”

  “Tactics?” Captain Paltrowe said.

  “We are seeing considerable activity,” said an older man seated at a station over the captain’s right shoulder.

  “Put it on the main viewer.”

  A satellite view of the continent appeared on the largest of the screens arrayed along the front wall of the room. It looked like a largely featureless blob of gray with smaller blobs of green. An overlay of yellow points was superimposed, scattered sparsely across much of the stretch of unbroken gray land. The dots were moving, but almost imperceptibly.

  “Can we extrapolate projected paths?” the captain asked.

  “The motion is limited to only the last few minutes. The extrapolations won’t be precise.”

  “Do the best you can.”

  The officer tapped and swiped away. A net of red lines traced out from each yellow dot roughly toward a region near the center of the expanse.

  “I want continuous updates on the projected paths.”

  “… few hours all of the robots will be there, or nearly there,” Lex’s voice continued. “All you need to do is wait until they’re concentrated and fire on that spot. You’ll get them all, and the planet will be spared.”

  “We’re real-time with communication now,” the com officer said.

  Captain Paltrowe’s face was impassive as ever. “Tactics, can we confirm that all targets are moving in the same direction?”

  “At this distance we don’t have the sensor resolution to be sure. We can only estimate the position of large groups. We’d need a short-range scanner on the surface to confirm that.”

  The captain watched as the net of predicted lines worked closer to a single point. It certainly seemed they were being drawn toward something. But communications with central command were impossible now. In order to reverse her orders, proof would have to be utterly incontrovertible. As though sensing her reluctance, a second voice spoke up on the connection.

  “You’re dealing with the military, my boy, not diplomats. Now is a time for ultimatums, not negotiations,” Garotte said.

  At the sound of the voice, the captain scowled slightly. That was a voice she’d heard far too many times in the last few days.

  A shaky breath fluttered across the connection. “Fine,” Lex said. “I am in possession of a fully functional Gen-Mech, and I’ve illustrated my ability to circumvent your blockade. I can and will break your quarantine if you don’t listen to what I have to say.”

  “Target the source of the transmission and be ready to fire on my order,” the captain said quickly.

  “Multiple weapons lock detected,” the SOB stated, audible over the connection.

  “Wow, that was fast,” Lex said. “Okay…” There was the sound of a rustling wrapper. “We can do it that way,” he continued, his mouth a bit more full than before.

  “Fire!”

  A volley of weapons launched simultaneously. Most spectacular among them was a bright red column of energy, a coherent light beam with a diameter clo
se to the size of the SOB. It sliced through the atmosphere, burning through clouds and converting a swath of the sky into a brilliant orange haze of plasma. Unfortunately for the captain and fortunately for Lex, lasers were primarily a space-to-space weapon. The air molecules spread the blast considerably. Lex’s split-second maneuvering spared him all but the very edge of the blast, which had been weakened enough to barely knock out half of his recently restored shields. The laser banks depleted and began to recharge just as the second half of the salvo plunged into the atmosphere—two large ship-to-ship missiles.

  These weapons were far more sophisticated than the comparatively tiny rockets hurled by the drones. They were the size of telephone poles, equipped with most of the same navigational and target-acquisition capabilities as the drones themselves, and designed with atmospheric flight in mind. What they lacked was the immediacy of the laser, taking considerably more time than light to reach Lex. The seconds ticked by, and the bridge crew watched the indicators on the screen. Two white dots represented the missiles. One red dot represented their target. Normally a live video feed from the missiles would be provided as well, but the total radio silence order was still in place, so the missiles weren’t broadcasting. The dots began to weave around on the screen.

  “Captain, I appreciate that you have your orders, but believe me when I say that Trevor Alexander will get past you,” Michella said across the connection. “You haven’t seen anyone who can fly like him, and you never will again. Our only aim is to save lives, but we will do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

  “Give me maximum optical resolution. I want to see what’s going on down there,” ordered Paltrowe.

  A small square traced around the three dots and pulled out, filling the view screen. Lex was tying the missiles in knots, but they were giving him a run for his money. Plowing a ship through an atmosphere at anything approaching the speeds the SOB was capable of achieving was like trudging through mud, and the brilliant wake of burning-hot atmosphere pelting the ship’s shields only made him an easier point to track for the targeting systems. Nevertheless, the missiles had the same problems to cope with, and computer navigation is a good deal more conservative in its maneuvers than a hotshot pilot flying for his life.