by Jeff Carlson
Sitting with Ash in front of their holo display, Vonnie hid her reproach by tapping at the probe’s schematics. Removing the radar array created complications in the probe’s power grid.
In silence, the two women made corrections, needing no words to fulfill this task. Vonnie traced a line to bridge the hole in the grid. Ash added a secondary net so the probe could reroute its energy needs if it was damaged.
“Simple,” Ash said.
Vonnie wished everything was so easy. She felt sad and resentful, and she tried to shake her mood.
She copied the newest data from Probes 112 and 113 to her station, then let an AI collate those files with their existing programs. Each interaction with the sunfish would refine the movements of their probes’ arms.
But we need to do more than upgrade our mecha, she thought. We need a new approach. Instead of waiting for the sunfish to accept us, what would happen if we marched straight into their homes? They understand certainty.
The irony was she wanted the sunfish to be more uncertain. For their own welfare, they needed to question themselves.
Were they capable of ending their kill-or-be-killed aggression once they realized there was more to existence than the frozen sky? Even if they hadn’t grasped the notion that the ESA probes and spies came from outside the ice, they must feel as if they’d encountered brand-new lifeforms.
Earth had agreed that the next stage in communicating with the sunfish might be an attempt to provide gifts — fabric, meat, steel tools, and tanks of compressed oxygen — but they were concerned this wealth would draw new attacks, not only from the sunfish but from other species. Also, they were undecided if giving steel to the sunfish was worth the impression they wanted to make.
Would the sunfish accept the ESA’s technological superiority and welcome humankind in expectation of receiving more tools? Or would they become more aggressive, fighting for as much metal as they could scavenge from destroyed mecha?
The sunfishes’ rock clubs had been surprisingly effective against Vonnie’s scout suit. With steel blades beaten from shovels and air tanks, the sunfish might penetrate a suit through its joints or collar.
Authorizing gifts was Koebsch’s decision. He’d tabled the idea, suggesting it was too soon to gamble even with token presents of soft fabric or delicacies sealed in vacuum packs.
What if we poison them with our food? he’d said. What if they’re allergic to the fabric?
Metzler was positive he’d identified the starches and sugars in human food that would harm sunfish. Poisoning them was unlikely — but a month ago, while Vonnie was still recuperating, Pärnits had sunk her plans to bribe the sunfish.
We don’t know what gift-giving means to them, Pärnits had said. They’re perpetually on the edge of starvation. What if showing excess food is an insult? We could go down there with the best intentions, give them everything, and offend them so badly they’ll never forgive us.
Since then, Pärnits had apologized to her, but he stood by his assessment. So did Koebsch.
It seemed to Vonnie that hundreds of years of in-fighting must have left the sunfish primed to negotiate. They would always look for new allies and resources. Given the right circumstances, the ESA might bond with one tribe. Those sunfish could act as a doorway to more tribes. Together, they could begin to form a new, stable empire — as stable as the sunfish allowed.
In comparison, on Earth, the European Union had contracted and expanded several times since the twentieth-first century, gaining new states and losing them. Partly that was because none of its members had surrendered their national identities or languages. English was common yet not required by law. To this day, their members maintained separate armies in addition to the E.U. military.
How many languages and individual tribal customs did the sunfish possess? Dozens? Only a few? They were homogenous in so many ways.
Metzler had compared their situation to the arrival of Caucasian settlers in North America. With superior technology and plague-hardened immune systems developed in the congested terrain of Europe, those settlers had ended life as the Native Americans knew it within a few hundred years.
That the Native Americans had been demoralized was a significant factor. Some tribes fought long and well, but only a small percentage of their losses had been in battle. The settlers had taken their lands with sickness, with commerce, and with well-meaning religion or greed or ignorance. They’d corrupted the natives in a million ways like sunlight evaporating snow.
Vonnie didn’t want the same thing to happen here. Assholes like Dawson would compromise the sunfish at every turn, and for what? For money?
On the American frontier, the clash between two worlds had been so varied and lawless that some white settlers sold guns to the natives in exchange for pelts or safe passage, arming the indigenous population against their fellow whites.
On Europa, the points of contact were far fewer and closely supervised, but there would always be people who wanted the short-term gain. Men like Dawson lacked her moral center. He had no empathy. He wanted his prize, whereas Vonnie didn’t think her adventures on this moon would be complete even if she lived to her hundredth birthday. Aiding the sunfish, teaching and guiding them, was a project that could last decades.
I need to prove Dawson wrong by showing that the sunfish will accept us, she thought.
She was pleased with the design work she’d accomplished with Ash. They’d recalibrated their probes to be lighter and more responsive. Now she needed to convince Koebsch to upgrade their tactics as well.
“Can you excuse me?” she said to Ash.
“Why?”
Vonnie saved their files and made a shooing motion with one hand. “Please. Go get lunch. I’ll come in a minute. There’s a little job I need to do.”
Ash hesitated, but she nodded and stood up. “All right.” Then she left data/comm.
Vonnie heard her say something to Metzler in the next compartment. Metzler laughed, and Vonnie raised a privacy screen around her display.
She’d decided to up her own gamesmanship. She needed to be cagey even with her friends, delaying what they knew, earning favors, and, most of all, uniting them against Dawson.
I’ll be a spy, too, she thought — a spy on her own — a spy by herself — as sensitive and paranoid as a sunfish.
Cutting into the channel between Koebsch and Frerotte took longer than she’d anticipated. Frerotte’s encryptions repelled her hack. Trying a new strategy, she mastered control of his audio, then used this opening to further her gains into his virtual station. Unfortunately, his display went blank as soon as she broke in.
“—eep tracking,” Koebsch said before he looked at Vonnie. “This is a secure call, Von. Get out.”
“I need a minute.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
“We’re set to go with our new probes, but they’re not right for carrying supplies down into the ice,” she said. “I need to know if I should be building more probes or larger mecha.”
“Build the new probes. We’re not bringing down food or anything else.”
Vonnie shook her head. “I think we’re past holding back. It’s right to worry about cultural contamination and pushing the sunfish too fast, but this colony represents our best chance for a breakthrough, and they’ll never go back to the lives they had before we came along.”
“Von, I’m dealing with bigger problems.”
“Like what?”
“Sir, she might as well know,” Frerotte said. “We need our engineers.”
Koebsch grunted and reopened his display, giving Vonnie access to their datastreams. “This is for your eyes only until we decide how to handle it,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
The map was Frerotte’s. It showed their perimeter with the Brazilians, where Probes 114 and 115 had coordinated the actions of their spies.
“This is thirty minutes ago, then ten,” Frerotte said, playing two sims for Vonnie. In the first segment
, the telemetry from 114 spiked across the board — radar, sonar, seismographs, and data/comm.
“That’s not sunfish,” Vonnie said.
“Not unless some of them have radios,” Koebsch said.
Something lunged toward 114, a bear-sized mass that had crept impossibly close, without noise, without vibrations, using a vein of rock to shield itself until it was within two kilometers of the probe. Then it lumbered forward in a blaze of electromagnetic activity, masking itself with sabotage and control programs.
The intruder’s SCPs must have been underway for hours. It was sophisticated enough to have blinded the spies to its presence altogether. 114 suffered the same false reads and distortions. 114’s sensors were unable to get a clean picture. There were only shadow-like glimpses.
Whatever it was, it was ten times larger than the probe. It hooked two arms above itself like weapons, and yet physically, it was slow. It covered the last kilometer in eight minutes, which was an eternity to mecha.
114 should have had time to run if it couldn’t defend itself. Instead, 114 shut off.
“We’re under attack,” Frerotte said.
Probes and Sunfish Map
36.
Vonnie scrolled through their maps, measuring the unguarded space left by the loss of 114 and most of its spies. “How close is 115?” she asked. “Do we know where the intruder went?”
“No,” Frerotte said. “115 is on the move, but it’s three minutes away. I had 14 and 15 in different catacombs to spread our coverage.”
“They should have been together,” Koebsch said. “That’s why we sent them down in pairs. We probably wouldn’t have lost 14 if the probes were able to support each other.”
Privately, Vonnie doubted it. Whatever hit 114 would have walked right over 115 as well. Frerotte’s decision to separate the probes was the sole reason they had the ability to bring new eyes and ears to the scene quickly.
There were two more probes in the ice, 110 and 111, but those mecha were seven kilometers northwest of 115. Except for their spies, there were no other ESA mecha beneath the surface other than a hundred beacons and relays, none of which were mobile, equipped with AI, or combat capable.
“I want you to call Sergeant Tavares again,” Koebsch told Vonnie. “Maybe you’ll have better luck than I did.”
“You called the Brazilians?”
“Yes. They’re not answering. But I can’t figure out what they think they’ll accomplish. That’s why I want to keep this quiet. Mecha can be replaced. What we don’t need is an international incident.”
“Tavares said they didn’t like us monitoring their grid,” Vonnie said. “Maybe this is the end of it. They kill our spies. Then they retreat. You don’t think they’d invade our zone, do you?”
“Maybe they’re distributing their own spies. Right now they could march a hundred probes through the border without us knowing it.”
“115 will reach the gap in thirty seconds.”
“We’ve been blind for nine minutes. Even if nothing’s there now, I’ll be forced to waste time and resources hunting FNEE mecha inside our lines.”
Vonnie nodded, considering Koebsch’s change from ’we’ to ’I.’ For him, the attack was a blemish on his record.
“115 is on site,” Frerotte said.
She looked through the probe’s eyes. As always, the environment was as dark as obsidian. Her display was modifying 115’s radar into holo imagery.
Sprawled on the rock were the battle-scarred remains of a FNEE digger. It had been a sleek, six-legged machine with two cutting blades like a scorpion’s claws. One leg was missing. Two more appeared inoperable, shredded and crushed. There was also laser scoring on its head where its sensor array had been slashed open.
“114 couldn’t have caused those burns,” Koebsch said. “They must have hit some of their own diggers while they were blasting. Then they decided those mecha were expendable. They used their damaged mecha to lead the assault.”
“I guess.”
Scattered nearby were pieces that may or may not have belonged to different FNEE mecha. 114 was missing. There was not a trace of ESA wreckage. There were no sounds or vibrations of mecha leaving the site in any direction. Nor did 114 respond to 115’s signals.
“I think 114 fought the digger and won, but there were other FNEE mecha,” Koebsch said. “They took 114. That’s what they were after. They want to copy your design work, Von.”
She watched as 115 crawled up the side of the cavern, trying to analyze the scuffing and chip marks in the dusty floor. There were marks in the wall, too, where 114 had vaulted onto the rock like a real sunfish.
Microdating the prints was impossible. Too many tracks had been laid within seconds of each other, and yet 114’s tracks were all on the ESA side of the perimeter.
That means our probe wasn’t led away by a Brazilian slavecast, Vonnie thought. Had they carried it? Or did 114’s last set of tracks lead back into ESA territory?
“Let me call Tavares,” she said, leaving her station.
The showphone was on the other side of the compartment, no more than three steps away. She didn’t make it that far. Frerotte left his own station and said to her, quietly, “It wasn’t the Brazilians.”
Vonnie didn’t answer.
“There’s no way their software could trump ours, especially not in a stand-off between 114 and a wrecked pile of junk like that digger,” Frerotte said. “Its gear block is half gone. You heard its signals. It was modifying its SCPs to broadcast through every transmitter it had left — infrared, sonar, X-ray. Hell, I saw coherent light signals like Morse code. It couldn’t have been less efficient, but it subverted our probe anyway. It knew exactly how to hack in.”
“It was Lam,” she said.
“So what happened? He transferred from the digger to the probe?”
“Yes.”
“Von, I think the situation’s starting to get out of hand. We need to tell Koebsch.”
“I will. I swear. Let me call Tavares first.”
Frerotte clutched her arm more roughly than necessary, pulling her back from the showphone. Was there fear in his eyes?
“I know Lam was your friend, but that’s not him any more,” Frerotte said. “He’s been down there for weeks. That’s a long time for an AI.”
“Tavares might have some idea what he’s been through. I think he’s trying to reach us.”
“Why won’t he answer 115? You don’t know what he’s thinking or even how he’s thinking. FNEE hardware is barely compatible with our AI, especially a human-based AI. He would have adapted. That means deleting some parts of himself and absorbing FNEE programming to compensate. What if the conversion included some of their security protocols? He might think we’re the enemy.”
“I thought you were a biologist,” Vonnie said. She was fishing for some admission that Frerotte worked for an intelligence agency, but he said, “This is biology. AIs are living systems. They break under strain just like people do.”
“Let’s wait and see.”
His grip tightened on her arm. “Human-based AI are illegal because they’re more likely to fragment,” he said. “They turn into something… more virulent than any machine-based program. Lam is in one of our probes now, which will make it easier for him to hack into other mecha. If he clones himself, he could multiply through our camp.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I watched it happen on the Ensley 2.”
Vonnie laid her fingers over his, gently removing his hand from her arm. “You’re not old enough,” she said.
Ensley 2 had been a joint NATO/PSSC orbital station that tumbled into the Pacific in 2087, the flaming shrapnel of its hull missing Indonesia by a few scant kilometers.
Constructed during the early years of the new space race, after the Chinese revolution but prior to formation of the Allied Nations, the Ensley series were primarily a Western effort that had involved China’s space agency as a means of easing poor relations between NATO an
d the People’s Supreme Society. By treaty, they were civilian stations intended for science, solar power generation, crops like wheat which also produced oxygen, and the export of those food and oxygen supplies.
The Chinese astronauts among the Ensley crews had numbered less than forty… and they’d died with their Western colleagues in the AI attacks that initiated the brutal, eighteen days of World War III.
“I was right out of school,” Frerotte said. “I had a good head for zero gravity and I get by on six hours of sleep a night, so they slotted me in three jobs in hydroponics. That’s why I lived. I was working when the SCPs shut down life support and smothered half the crew in bed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You must have been a kid. You’ve watched the sims, but it’s not the same. I felt our station come alive. I ripped the controls out of our escape pod when the SCPs tried to jump.”
“Frerotte, I’m sorry. My aunt died in the war. But this is different. Lam was never a military-grade AI.”
“Today’s civilian AI are twenty times stronger than any program during the war. You don’t know what subroutines he’s picked up from the Brazilians. It was one thing when he was harassing them. Now he’s inside our grid.”
“He must have a lot of FNEE data. What if he can lead us to more sunfish or carvings?”
“We need to assume he’s a problem until proven otherwise. I’m not saying we have to terminate him. We do need to raise our alert level. Tell Koebsch or I will.”
“All right.” Vonnie wasn’t convinced, but Frerotte had covered for her when Lam was uploaded to the FNEE digger. She owed him.
Calling Tavares would have to wait.
“I’m going to the command module,” she said. “Koebsch and I do better in person. Maybe you can listen in and keep him from killing me.”
“We shouldn’t have let it get this far,” Frerotte said. “I never thought Lam would survive over there.”
You and Ash decided to sacrifice him to screw with the Brazilians, she thought. To you, he’s a tool. But if he’s sane, I can bring him in safely. If he’s erratic, I can run my own system checks and help him. Either that or I’ll kill him myself.