“I think I happened to the shield,” Tristan said. “And by the looks of the generator they were using to generate it, I have to agree with you: we really, really don’t want to tangle with the guys who built it.”
Chapter 12
“Excuse me, sir. There’s a man called Frederic on the comm. He says he’s the head of maintenance on the Ismala, and that he has something he needs to tell you.”
The admiral sighed. It seemed like everyone on every ship needed his input on something. Over the course of his career, he’d come to learn that no one wanted senior officers around. Underlings tended to hide stuff from them and give them only as much information as they thought would keep them out of trouble while, at the same time, limiting interference from above.
Of course, that only lasted until the shit hit the fan. Then they all wanted someone else in charge.
For the other man’s sake, the admiral hoped the maintenance guy wasn’t just calling to give him a status report on the Ismala’s toilets.
“Put him through.”
The Ismala’s comms were still the worst in the fleet, but the voice on the other side could be made out over the static. “Hello, sir, I’m sorry to bother you with this, but with Commander Tau Coloni missing after her sortie on the planet’s moon, I didn’t have anyone to take this to.”
“All right, what is it?” He made a mental note to try to find out who the hell was in charge of the Ismala. He had heard that the Tau Coloni was still alive in orbit around the planet with a contingent of marines, but without any plan for the fleet to rescue them, it was unlikely that they’d survive much longer. They were well out of comm range by now, anyway. She’d been a bright one, but he had no time to mourn all the people they were losing, or the ones they’d likely still lose.
“When we first came into the system, Melina, the commander that is, had asked me to record the data our scanners were receiving from the installations on the moons when we entered the system. She told me to run it through the analysis, to see if we could make anything out from the transmissions.
“I’m not an expert on that, so I put some analysts on the task, they confirm that nothing in the system is of blob origin.”
“Yeah,” the admiral said. “We’ve figured that out already.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I asked them what the transmissions looked like, and they told me that the most similar thing to what we know is binary. They tell us that these transmissions look like corrupted, or maybe evolved, versions of our own telemetry.”
“So you think these installations are human?”
“I have no idea, but if they aren’t, they belong to a species that uses computer communications very similar to ours.”
“Were they able to tell us what the signals were saying?”
“No, sir. Everything seems to be encrypted.”
“Or transmitted in an alien language that we can’t even begin to understand.”
“That’s also possible, sir.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it.”
The man signed off and the admiral studied his bridge crew, lost in thought. He didn’t know if the information meant anything or if it was just more meaningless data in a sea of meaningless information. They knew so many things, but they still had no answers to any of the important questions.
No matter. There were much more pressing issues calling for a decision.
The first was what to do next. He was in command of three semi-intact fighting ships, a scout vessel, and a factory ship, deep in enemy territory. The fact that he didn’t know who the enemy was and why they were fighting was irrelevant at that point—there was no longer any doubt that they were the enemy.
All the evidence, physical and circumstantial, also told him that there were two enemies in the field, and that those factions were also fighting among themselves: the defenders of the moon installations and the swarm of automated fighters his troops had taken to calling vampires. He saw little likelihood of establishing a truce with either faction; even if they could somehow speak to them, the fact of the matter was that they’d attacked the defenders without warning or provocation, and the vampires had then done the same thing to the fleet.
So what to do?
The Heavy Gunship IV had shown that its arms and armor were sufficient to hold the swarm at bay for a while. If they fought long enough, he believed that it might be possible to blast sufficient numbers of vampires that they would no longer be an effective fighting force. Of course, only his most optimistic simulations gave that outcome. But he still believed; it was pretty much all he had left.
Unfortunately, he also believed that there was no reason left to fight. The defenders and the swarm seemed to be involved in their own private war, one which probably had little or nothing to do with humanity.
In fact, after destroying every installation on the planet’s moon, half of the swarm had shot off to the other side of the solar system to attack something on a rocky planet on the far side of the star, while the other half was just sitting where they’d been, probably serving to ensure that the admiral’s fleet didn’t try anything funny.
Logic dictated that they should just withdraw while no one was paying attention to them.
That brought up the next question: where could they go? The nearest human system was forty thousand light-years away, and after nearly a quarter of a million years in transit, there was no guarantee that it would still be inhabited by human beings.
In fact, it was quite possible that the men and women in the fleet, by the sheer luck of the draw, represented the last surviving pocket of mankind anywhere in the universe. The rest might have become slaves to the Brillans, food for the blobs, or simply been forced to upload by the computer-based portions of humanity millennia ago. It was quite possible that his little fleet had nowhere left to go.
Even if he decided to head out and establish a New Earth in some out-of-the-way system, it wasn’t practical to do so immediately. The ships were completely worn out after the long voyage, and it would take months to refit. He couldn’t ask anyone to step into a stasis pod without knowing how long it would keep them alive.
If he did order them to go into stasis, he wouldn’t be at all surprised to have a mutiny on his hands.
And besides, what if one of the people who didn’t make it all the way to the destination was Tina? He hadn’t been able to stop his daughter from signing up for this suicide mission, but now that it seemed that survival was an option, he wasn’t going to throw her life away for no reason.
While he’d had a mission and orders relevant to that mission, those had been paramount. But now that the original scenario had gone out the window, he would do everything in his power to keep his people alive.
And if anyone wanted to argue the point, or thought that everyone would be better off if someone else was in command… then he would step aside and smirk at them as they got their wish.
“Admiral, the captain of the Minstrel needs to talk to you.”
The admiral sighed.
***
Irene studied her audience. Several of the people in the room were attired in full hazmat suits. Most weren’t. As equipment had been brought into the hangar—which now resembled an enormous lab more than it did a place to store vehicles, some of the scientists bringing the machines had volunteered to help and had remained. If there was danger of contamination, they were willing to risk it.
Most of the people watching, of course, weren’t in the room with her, and not even in the ship. They were the officers of the other ships in the fleet, none of whom had wanted to come to the Lapland until the team managed to establish what, exactly, the compound delivered by the defender’s bullets was.
After all, if they were so confident of it that they didn’t bother using high-caliber rounds, it had to be something pretty devastating.
She could feel the cold scrutiny of the camera as she began. She had to pause, clear her throat, and start again. “We�
�ve run an analysis of the dust inside the casings, and, as far as we’ve been able to determine, it’s biologically inert. Unless there’s something really exotic going on, we shouldn’t have any problems with disease.”
A ripple, possibly a sigh of relief went over her audience, even though most of them knew what she was going to say. Many had been part of her analysis team, and that was the first thing they’d tested for.
Irene continued. “From that conclusion, we moved on to an attempt to understand exactly what the powder that was delivered consisted of, but all we really found was that it’s mostly carbon with a bit of aluminum and other metals thrown in. Not really much to work from, and not poisonous or otherwise dangerous in its current molecular configuration.
“We were pretty much stumped, until we decided to examine the fighter itself. As you already knew, the bullets caused little more than superficial damage to its armor.” She pointed to a small fragment of computer board lying on a workbench to her right. “But what you see on the screen is a magnification of circuitry we removed from the fighter. This area here is deeply pitted, and it should be smooth. We found residue of dust with the same composition as that delivered by the bullets beside this circuit.”
Irene let the audience digest that information. Blank faces told her that her next words would make them sit up and listen.
“But this part was in a part of the fighter that didn’t receive any damage. It was fully one-point-five meters away from the nearest bullet hole. Somehow, the dust moved through the ship and attacked this circuit—the most intelligent part of any fighter’s system: the targeting computer.” She held her audience’s gaze, moving from one anxious set of eyes to the next. “I believe that what we have here are nanobots designed to find and destroy complex computers while ignoring those that function beneath a certain threshold.”
That caused a stir. “That’s impossible,” one man in front said. “Even with all the nanofactories on this ship and the best nanotechs that humanity has, we couldn’t build something like that.”
“Well, someone did. And they’ve been shooting us with it. The only reason it wasn’t devastating is that most of the computers on the fighter aren’t good enough to be worth attacking. The only one that got damaged was the targeting computer which, because it needs to be able to predict what multiple targets flown by unpredictable sentient beings will do, is just one step below being self-aware.”
She paused again, this time for dramatic effect.
“What we have here is a weapon designed to attack artificial intelligences.”
There was another shuffling in the room, but no one spoke. They all seemed to be waiting for her to say something more. She shrugged. “That’s it. We can all relax, because the nanobots were inert before they got onto this ship. And none of them attack people anyway.”
There was a smattering of applause. Some people came and thanked her, but that was all she got. It was strangely anticlimactic. People began to file out, and none of the ones who’d brought hazmat suits into the room with them took them off.
Only the analysts who’d worked with her and one other man stayed behind. The man was large, with short-cropped iron-grey hair and a scar over one cheek, obviously something he hadn’t had time to get removed between postings.
“Miss Sol Vianini, my name is Hémery,” he said, holding out a hand. “I’m with the security team. Would you mind coming with me?”
“What for?”
“I’d like to ask you some questions regarding the disappearance of two of your colleagues.”
Irene’s heart jumped into her throat. “Oh, yes. I heard about that. Are you sure I can come with you? I thought we were under quarantine.”
“Didn’t you just explain to us why that’s no longer necessary?”
She laughed, hoping the man couldn’t see just how nervous she was. “Yes, I suppose I just did. Of course I’ll come.”
***
Hémery studied the woman sitting across the table from him in the otherwise empty cafeteria room. Every scientist he’d interviewed had reacted the same way to his questions. Nervous at first, and then growing defensive, as if each of them felt the need to prove that they weren’t guilty.
As he worked his way down the list of people who’d come into contact with the two missing—probably murdered—researchers, he’d come to the conclusion that they were all jealous of each other and did, in fact, want all of their peers to die horribly, preferably as soon as possible.
He was also convinced that every single person who’d been questioned during the process could have given him valuable information if only they’d felt like cooperating, but their guilty consciences meant that they kept everything to themselves. Or maybe it was just the cynic in him that had him seeing ghosts.
Irene Sol Vianini had been left for last because she was locked away from all contact with the rest of the ship while investigating the possible contamination brought aboard by a fighter.
He’d wanted to speak to her sooner. She was about halfway up his list of suspects because she’d known both the missing scientists and her area of expertise had, to a certain degree, overlapped with theirs. Of course, what they were actually working on—and why they’d even been assigned to a combat sortie—was anybody’s guess. It had been explained to him more than once, but he still couldn’t understand what each of them did. He’d never understood nanotech.
But he understood people, and immediately saw that Irene was preparing to go into exactly the same pattern. Her pale, freckled face was suddenly flushed, whether from nerves or anger, he couldn’t tell.
So Hémery changed tactics. He leaned back in his chair and asked her an unrelated question. “How does a pretty girl like you end up on a suicide mission aimed at the center of the blob advance?”
It worked. She gave him a sharp glance, mixed with an expression of surprise. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me a girl,” she said.
He smiled. “Maybe, but I’m a lot older than you are, so I stand by the question.”
“All right. I got dragged into the war right out of college. A friend of mine was doing his doctoral work in nanomachinery and he told me that there would be good corporate money in some new stuff that was coming down the pipeline, so I changed my specialty from particle fields to nanotech. Three weeks after that, we got the news about the blob attack on Epsilon Canis Majoris. A year later, I was working in a factory ship. And, four major campaigns after that, here I am.”
Hémery felt his smile fading. Maybe his new tactic hadn’t worked after all. He was getting the same feeling from this woman that he’d gotten from everyone else. They were pretending to answer his questions, but they were all hiding things. He couldn’t imagine what Irene might be hiding in her answer to this most innocent of questions, and couldn’t even imagine how there could be anything to hide. But she was definitely lying.
OK, next idea, then.
“Yes. Here you are. So, as I said, I’m investigating the disappearance of Houssein Tau Hunter and Sandrina Polaris Zvereva. I know you had contact with both of them.”
Her eyes, if possible, grew shiftier. “I knew them both, yes. I was actually closer to Houssein than to Sandrina—she usually kept to herself, and was much more into astrophysics than the rest of us. So she would usually be in the high-energy room. No. I didn’t have much in common with her.”
“Then tell me about Houssein. “Who might have wanted to get rid of him?”
“Houssein?” She thought about the question for a few moments. “He was always more concerned with his work than with what anyone else was doing. He was mainly working with materials. I think he was trying to understand why so much stuff failed when we arrived here. Of course, now we all know exactly why, but we didn’t then. I think that’s what he was working on, at least. You should probably check his log.”
“We did. There wasn’t much there. Most of the memory was faulty, and we don’t even know whether that’s because it was intentional
ly obscured or because everything seems to be faulty.” He decided to try another tactic… again. Perhaps this time he would have better luck. “How are you organized on board? I mean, who decides what each of you studies? Do you get orders from the admiral?”
She looked at him like he was crazy. “Why would we do that? We only respond to military authority when it comes to keeping the fleet supplied with the raw materials we need. The machines are pretty complicated to run—despite the years we’ve been using nanofactories, they’re still much more similar to experimental installations than to a factory in the conventional engineering sense. Everything changes as we discover new ways to make them better.”
“Better in what way?”
“Faster, or able to create more complex pieces with less materials. Anything that gives us an edge, really.”
“And the efforts aren’t being coordinated?”
“There’s no need. We’re all specialists in our field. The ship is—or was before the pods went bad on us—crewed by a well-balanced group of scientists who should be able to manage any optimizations needed on the fly. If each of us works in our chosen field on the problems that appear within that field, then we should be capable of dealing with any requests that the admiralty might send over.”
“Requests?”
She smiled, and he felt that the conversation was finally approaching some semblance of honesty. “We don’t take orders from the military. Of course, we also don’t want to die, and the people who fly the Lapland do take orders from the military, which means that they tend to take us into some pretty ugly situations. At the end of the day, it’s usually in our best interest to solve the admiral’s problems and to solve them quickly.”
“Would you take an order if it came to that?”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 14