Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

by David VanDyke

  “Because,” responded their father, “you are intellectually the equals of the average human doctoral candidate, and we believe you will continue to develop well beyond all but the most advanced geniuses. The time of artificial challenges is over. Humanity needs you, and you need to accomplish real things.

  “Okay,” Charles said, as if today were no different from any other. “What’s the situation?”

  Rae waved a hand, and the cutaway image of a complex machine appeared on the dais in the center of the theater. “This is the latest mechanical fusion drive. The EarthFleet space program desperately needs to perfect a reliable reaction motor that approaches the efficiency of the cloned Meme engines.”

  “Why? Meme engines are better,” Andrew asked.

  “Because, dummy, there aren’t enough of them,” Leslie replied.

  “No name-calling please,” Alan said firmly, and the girl looked sour for a moment. “But Leslie is right. Manufacturing large numbers of effective fusion engines is vital to expanding space industry and eventually building the large number of warships we will need to defend the system. Can anyone come up with another reason?”

  The four children went into thinking mode, each in his or her own manner, looking up, or down, or closing eyes, or staring into space. Andrew, the most intuitive, spoke musingly. “Because…they need to stop relying on you to make their stuff?”

  Alan nodded encouragingly. “You’re getting warm, yes. For their own societal development and confidence, they need to be able to do this themselves, or at least feel like they are.”

  “But now they’ll be getting help from us to solve their problem!” Stephanie complained, always the contradictor.

  “Yes, but you are human. A different version of human, but still of the same species.”

  “You are too, Dad,” Charles stated.

  “They wouldn’t think so,” he replied.

  “So it’s about the confidence to do it themselves?” Charles went on.

  “They must stand on their own feet, even if we help them step upward much faster than they would otherwise.”

  “Then this is that help. And it will help us build confidence as well.”

  “Yes, Charles,” Rae waved an airy hand, “if you can solve the problems in this design, or come up with another. This is not all for them; it’s for you as well. We have only about seven years until the Destroyer arrives. We have to take shortcuts.”

  Andrew, whose eyes had been closed for the last moment, opened them up with a strange expression on his face. “That’s what we are, huh? Shortcuts. That’s why you made us.” Comprehension dawned on the faces of the other three, and a certain amount of distress.

  The parents found themselves at a loss, glancing at each other before Alan sat down and waved the others to come closer for a family huddle, holding hands. “We made you and Ezekiel because we wanted a family. No matter what, you were all destined to be brilliant. For now, we have to harness that brilliance to save everyone. That doesn’t make us love you any less.”

  All four looked thoughtful. Within herself, Rae wondered and hoped they could absorb this kind of life lesson half as well as they absorbed academic ones. “You can all think about that in your off time,” she said, hoping that focusing them on the task at hand would allow them to process the emotional aspects at their own paces. “For now, start taking apart this model, study the specs, and see what you can come up with. Call us if you need us.”

  With that, the parents bowed out, leaving the four precocious children to work. They knew from experience that removing themselves from the equation worked best; when they did not, the results always got skewed in a Heisenberg-like fashion. Even observation itself seemed to affect the end product.

  Outside the virtuality, in the connection chamber, Alan the avatar looked down at their progeny lying in their open sarcophagi, nervous systems linked to the ship that he was, even while his unconscious and automatic processes tended to everything else. Rae took his hand and led him out of the room and into their bedchamber. When they were firmly out of earshot she spoke.

  “Do you think they’ll be all right?”

  “We discussed all this, love,” Alan replied. “They have to keep growing up as well as just growing. Realizing that you bred them to be supergeniuses was inevitable.”

  “But I didn’t expect it so soon.”

  “I know.” He took her hand. “It has to be done. Humanity is pushing its technological development as fast as it can, but it may not be fast enough. They need the help the quads can give.”

  “My head knows that, but now…my mother’s heart hates the whole thing.”

  “That’s why I love you,” Alan said, kissing her forehead.

  Rae pushed him to arms’ length, searching again for an answer she’d never find. I wish I knew who you really were, she thought, and then damned herself once more for creating him the way he was. At what point are you really you, Skull? Or will you always be just a copy of the man I loved? She squeezed his arms. A damned real-feeling copy. “So, how long before they call for one of us?” she asked.

  “Oh, I give it several hours just to familiarize themselves.” He pulled her in close again. “If they do call, we will just have to take a few minutes to disentangle ourselves.”

  Chapter 15

  Ezekiel Denham was now two and a half, though an ordinary human would have pegged him at about fifteen, he figured. Testing would have revealed an emotional-social age in his early teens and the intellectual equivalent of twenty. His younger siblings had already surpassed him in raw brainpower, but his parents had prepared him for that eventuality his whole life, so it didn’t bother him much. He could still kick their butts.

  Besides, he didn’t want to be a scientist, researcher, brainiac. What he really wanted to be was a fighter jock, or a space pirate. That’s why he’d named the little ship he now piloted Steadfast Roger. Not jolly, but instead loyal and true.

  Roger was a tiny thing, barely the size of an atmospheric fighter plane or an ICBM, with the intelligence of a puppy, but that would improve over time. Just a baby, he had been gestated by a deliberate act of cloning, a miniature and immature copy of the Denham scout ship that was itself just an adolescent in the scheme of Meme living ships.

  Like a puppy, Roger had a tendency to be playful and get himself into trouble if Ezekiel did not keep him on a short leash, but right now he gave the ship his head as the two zoomed toward the asteroid belt at high Gs. Earth’s voracious appetite for space-based resources meant that prospecting for high-metal asteroids topped the list of his many potential duties.

  Three other ships, manufactured grabship hybrids with Meme engines glued on, did the same work in three other areas of the belt, but they were clumsy and slow compared to Roger. Ezekiel and his vessel did more work than all the rest of them, especially on each mission’s first run, when he had a fresh engine to use.

  EarthFleet grabships had to seize asteroids in their claws – resembling ants latching on to potatoes – and carefully push the rocks toward their destinations. Early on those had been sent to Earth, until hundreds of the things orbited the planet. More recently some had been placed in lunar orbits, as well as in those of Venus and Mars. In fact, Mars’ moons Deimos and Phobos had been coopted and now, just like on Earth’s new satellites, contained experimental Pseudo-Von-Neumann bases, or PVNs, eating into the rocks and churning out parts to eventually make copies of themselves.

  Some asteroids had been placed in solar orbits behind and in front of Earth and Venus. In short, EarthFleet now had hundreds of steppingstones, many with PVNs manned by small teams of minders to provide intelligent control. That was why they were called Pseudo-Von-Neumanns; true VNs were theoretical self-replicating machines, but these needed a few humans to keep them working properly.

  Ezekiel sped up his relative time-sense, allowing him to experience the nearly daylong journey out to the belt in what his mind interpreted as a half hour. Linked to Roger’s nervous system,
this was among the least of his tricks. Living ships like this developed sentience slowly, by design, but they were biologically hardwired with abilities ready-made for a Meme – or in this case, a Blend – controller.

  Once they arrived in the vicinity of a new clump of rocks, Ezekiel synchronized himself back to realtime, the better to manage his tired and hungry mount.

  Like any young animal, the prolonged exercise of acceleration and deceleration had exhausted the little ship, so Ezekiel’s first order of business was to graze him on the pebbles and ice chunks stuck to the surface of some of the midsized rocks, the ones perhaps a hundred meters long. The simplest technique to get the food was to nudge an asteroid at one end, giving it the slightest of spins. This caused all the detritus that had accumulated on its surface to spill off it like water from a woman’s tossed head of hair. All Roger had to do was maneuver into the stream and open his forward intake, what passed for his mouth, and ingest like a whale through a school of fish.

  Once he’d been taught this method, Roger could easily handle it on his own, so Ezekiel turned to another check of the package that took up all of his internal cargo space. A cloned fusion engine from his father’s ship, it was one reason he was able to acquire so many asteroids for EarthFleet so quickly. All he had to do was slap it on his best find, program it, and off it went.

  Once the engine had pushed and then parked the rock in its preselected position it would signal for pickup and a ship would rendezvous, dropping off a PVN and recovering the precious motor for reuse. In the meantime the Ezekiel-Roger team would choose another asteroid and give it a slower, more careful push designed to send it along a path toward whatever target EarthFleet had chosen, and then another and another. If he had to, Zeke could stay out almost indefinitely as long as Roger could find food and water. The Meme ship could easily manufacture sustenance for his master. The only real limit was his fatigue and cabin fever.

  After Ezekiel finished inspecting the engine for the fourth time, finding all in order, and once the ship had eaten his fill and rested, he turned his attention to looking for a suitable rock. “Come on, come on,” he hummed to himself, and Roger responded like a retriever that knew his master wanted him to find a downed bird. The ship metaphorically pricked up his ears, heightening his senses to maximum and sending out frequent low-level radar pulses – in essence, shining an electromagnetic light all around himself.

  Roger also used his relatively weak biolaser in lidar mode, scanning the surfaces of each nearest asteroid in turn. That tiny beam of coherent light was useful for communication and sensing, but useless as a weapon. At point-blank range it could be focused hot enough to take a rock sample, but that was all.

  In fact, Roger had no offensive weapons at all. He had the molecular template to gestate a small hypervelocity missile, and could come up with a tiny fusor powered by his own fusion engine within minutes, but he had never had to fight anything in his short life.

  Ezekiel had from time to time wondered what he would do if he came upon something hostile, but these were in the nature of daydreams rather than real plans. Everyone knew the Destroyer was years away, after all. His best tactic would be to use the sun-like heat of Roger’s drive against whatever threat may arise, simultaneously employing it for what it was designed – to run like hell.

  So it was quite a shock when the radar pulse came back showing an unexpected Doppler shift on one of the rocks at close range. That asteroid, perhaps fifty meters across and ten kilometers away, had subtly changed direction. He never would have even noticed it if Roger, primed like a dog after a scent, hadn’t focused his lidar on it and reported his confusion at the thing’s odd behavior.

  Rocks don’t maneuver on their own, Ezekiel stated the obvious to himself. Another ship in the area giving it a push? Or did something fast collide with it and we missed the impact? He called up the intended locations of the three grabships working asteroid repositioning and found, as expected, they were millions of miles away.

  He commanded Roger’s lidar to expand, taking in the area around the rock, and found a further anomaly: byproducts of some kind of reaction drive, in the direction opposite the chunk’s movement, as if something rather like his own cloned engine had given it a push and then cut off. Had Roger not been in full-on eager-beaver mode and sniffed it out, he probably would have missed it.

  Ezekiel found himself chewing the inside of his cheek, a nervous habit that jarred him out of full immersion in the virtuality of synchronization with Roger. This reminded him that he was not actually a space-going creature, as the link made him feel, but was a rather frail human being whose body could be killed much more easily than the living ship in which he rode.

  But curiosity was strong, and combined with the psychological makeup of a brilliant, immortal and, in his own mind, invincible teenager, he naturally decided to investigate. He began to maneuver around behind the anomaly like a sheepdog circling an unknown animal, Roger’s lidar constantly painting the rock and its surrounds. After all, whatever it was already must know something was in the vicinity; otherwise, why move?

  About a quarter of the way around, the lidar detected material that was not rock, just for a moment, before it disappeared. Because the only place to hide was behind the asteroid, this confirmed the presence of something that was trying to do so.

  Ezekiel wondered whether it could be some kind of space pirates, real ones, or at least rogue actors trying to make themselves some money. He couldn’t really see how that could be, but in his imagination, fuelled by many old science-fiction stories about asteroid miners jumping each other’s claims or buccaneers seizing valuable cargoes, it seemed possible.

  With little fear of such things, as Roger could move at least ten times as fast as any EarthFleet ship ever built, Ezekiel’s curiosity burned ever brighter, fuelled by the symbiotic feedback with his ship’s even more youthful eagerness.

  In other words, the boy and the puppy couldn’t help but stick their noses in.

  Chapter 16

  Despite best efforts, the cowardly Meme Sentry had not avoided discovery, its most basic directive. However, it was confused. The ship that approached seemed like a friendly vessel, with emanations extremely similar to the Survey craft that had gestated and launched it, but that could not be. It was much smaller, and it was not beaming out the proper recognition codes, and so fear and desire warred within it like a housecat gone feral, causing it to pursue neither impulse effectively.

  Had fear won out, it could have run away, fleeing along the same path as the escape drone, eventually to be picked up by the oncoming Destroyer. Even this half-familiar relative could not have caught it, as the Sentry was designed for maximum speed and stealth.

  Had curiosity prevailed, it could have shown itself to the questing other, and who could predict the outcome? Perhaps it could have rejoined the fold of living Meme craft, reporting as it should and receiving the instructions that would give its rudimentary life meaning.

  Instead, it tried to keep to a middle course, afraid to flee or approach, playing cosmic peekaboo from behind its chosen asteroid.

  ***

  All the evidence told Ezekiel there was definitely something out there. Whatever it was kept peeking out from behind the rock, just a sliver of it. Perhaps it was showing just enough of itself to get a look every now and again.

  Torn between charging in and running, like his quarry he did neither. Rather, he and Roger kept sniffing around, edging closer and circling even while he tried to deduce what it could be.

  Fusion byproducts he detected told him it used a Meme engine for sure. That didn’t help too much, because Earth had yet to manufacture a good such motor itself. The intermittent lidar and radar returns showed very little, as if the thing had absorptive stealth coatings on it.

  For the past hour Ezekiel had been working on something new, and now he was ready to try. Taking a metaphorical deep breath, he fired off his creation at right angles to the asteroid and the whatever-it-was.
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  Ezekiel had used the small hypervelocity missile template and added a simple wide-spectrum optical sensor and bioradio – essentially, an eyeball with a video link, a spy drone. Hoping the thing would not spook right away, he kept its engine at low power and curved it around the rock to the right even as he sidled Roger to the left.

  With a screen in his mind’s eye, Zeke saw what the drone saw and what Roger saw simultaneously. In this case, what he saw first was the stern of the Sentry backing around the rock, its attention focused on the threat to its existence, the hyper. Too late, it must have realized it had shown itself, and seemed to hesitate, caught between two seemingly friendly but frighteningly strange things.

  Like an animal gone to ground and too frightened to run, it froze, and Roger was on it in a flash. Ezekiel hardly had time to rein in the little ship before it seized the Sentry in its two forward fins. Without specifically ordering it, his craft had divined his desire and grown barbed claws, which now gripped the smaller creature tight.

  Wild excitement coursed through Ezekiel and his ship, and like a boy who had hooked an enormous fish, he had no other thought in his mind than to land it and carry it home proudly as a trophy.

  The Sentry lit off its engine, causing the two ships to whirl and spin crazily. Zeke told Roger to hang on while he did his best to counteract the bucking prize with his own engine and thrusters.

  For over an hour the two struggled, but even though Roger was small, the Sentry was smaller, and had far less fuel in reserve. It was a housecat to a lynx, and once caught tight it was only a matter of time before it tired.

  Once the gyrations ceased to little more than fearful shudders and he had control of the Sentry, Ezekiel decided to try out an idea. He commanded Roger to try to make direct contact with the thing’s nervous system, confident that between the two of them they could overwhelm it, or at least learn something.