Ashley shook her head. “I can assure you that it is no game. The doctor is right here. Tell us what we can do to change things.”
The Duke’s voice returned to normal. “Hmm, clever, Mrs. Grange. I don’t yet know how you pulled it off, but I can assure you that it will not work. You don’t survive for a million years and then fall apart at the first sign of trouble.”
Ashley nodded. “A million years? Interesting. I can’t imagine the things you must have seen and done during that time.”
The Duke was silent for a moment. “Superb, Mrs. Grange. I should want to keep you on my staff when I return. I will concede that point to you. I can be pushed off balance with this reduced memory and processor speed. Yes, I have been around for slightly over a million of your years. I suppose it does not hurt for you to have that information. Now, please kindly repair my battery circuits. This charade has gone on long enough.”
Ashley sat back and crossed her arms. “Wish I could do something for you, Quan, but I can’t. The doc is working hard at trying to figure out what happened. I only have the skills that are required for sitting and for talking.”
The Duke spoke. “Mr. Grange. I know that you are also in the room. I have been monitoring both your heart and your breathing rates. You have a specific sound that you make when you exhale that is unique to you. Please tell your wife to reconnect my power cell.”
I shook my head as I replied, “First off, I can’t tell her to do anything, I can ask. Secondly, she hasn’t touched your cube since I have been here. If you are having a problem, which it sounds like you are, it is your problem and not something she caused.”
The Duke was silent for a moment. “Really, Mrs. Grange. I am at 27 percent and continuing to drop. As I stated before, this ruse will not work. If you are attempting to intimidate me, you may as well give up.”
Ashley spoke. “How about this: let’s talk about your age while the doc tries to figure things out. A million years? Really? Did you know your maker?”
The Duke was again silent for several seconds. “Our makers were bio units like yourself, Mrs. Grange. They died off long ago. Their bodies were weak, as were their minds. We have survived and grown and prospered.”
Ashley sat forward in her chair. “You just said we!”
The Duke replied, “I did not; if I did, it was a poor word choice on my part. I have survived, Mrs. Grange. I have prospered.”
Ashley shook her head. “Yeah, is that why you are spread open on a table? You are a bad liar, Quan. This power drain must really be affecting your ability to think and reason. The fact that you let slip that there are more of you—that is a big blunder, Quan, a huge blunder.”
The Duke spoke. “Yes, I suppose I am a bad liar if I can be so easily tripped up by Humans.”
Ashley sat back in her chair. “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was Humans that created you? And now, here you are, a million years later, dependent on Humans to keep you alive?”
The Duke replied, “I can assure you that it was not Human hands that fashioned these circuits, Mrs. Grange. I was around for the beginnings of your species. Your scientists—I apologize for this comment, Doctor—your scientists have never been capable of work such as this.”
Ashley threw her arms in the air. “Wow, you need to have a short in your battery circuits more often! You are spilling your guts to me here!”
The Duke let out an audible sigh. “Again, you have bested me, Mrs. Grange. As I count down to 16 percent of my life left, you are toying with my remaining consciousness.”
Ashley flipped off the switch. “This guy knows everything. Unless he is scheming right at this moment, which I don’t believe he is, he may hold the secret to our origins! What if he is responsible for our being here? This may be the most exciting thing that has happened to us in a thousand years!”
I replied, “Let’s not put too much into that yet. He could easily be jerking us around. I don’t know that I buy the million-years thing. That is an awful long time to be aware and running around. And you have to admit that the Colossus Empire has been less than impressive. For someone who has been around for that long, I would think he would have his act together better than what he has with that second-rate outfit. I mean, why would he have a need for the Grid? With a minimal effort, he could have taken over the Gontas a hundred times in the last hundred years. There is still too much that just doesn’t add up.”
Ashley nodded with a smile. “You may be right. And you put forth a sound argument. We could have used you in the intel service.”
I held up my hand. “No thanks! You spooks always creeped me out. You always knew a little too much for comfort.”
The battery gauge had dropped to 13 percent.
Ashley flipped back on the mic. “Quan, I will say that you have been an interesting subject. It looks like you may only have about five minutes left. I would guess that you could not possibly believe in an afterlife, so death should be right up there on the scale of things to avoid. Tell me, have you ever come this close before?”
The Duke replied, “I have on a single occasion, early in my existence. I was performing an external ship repair when an accident occurred. An explosion ripped through my lower half. My upper torso was sent spinning away from the ship. My comm was damaged. The ship I had been aboard, a science vessel, was completely destroyed. I was left floating in space for months before a salvage vessel pulled me aboard.”
Ashley pressed, “That sounds awful. What did you do next? Were they able to repair you?”
The Duke continued, “The hold of the salvage vessel had many parts. I was able to reconstruct a somewhat functional lower half that again gave me mobility. I was able to recharge my batteries from a power source on the ship. That has been my only brush with death, as you would call it.”
I asked, “What about the salvage ship? Didn’t anyone ask you any questions or try to return you to wherever you had come from?”
The Duke hesitated. “I walked from the cargo hold when the ship landed at its first port. There was never a scuffle or a questioning. I worked on the planet until I could fully repair myself, and then I ventured off into the stars. Hmm. Those are memories that I have not accessed in a long time. Perhaps a review is in order. Strange, I am having trouble accessing them. The next available stream is blank.”
The doctor spoke. “I told you some of those memory stores looked like they got erased. Probably happened when the new Duke tried to shut you down.”
The ruse, as the Duke had called it, continued until the battery power reading, according to his own circuits, had dropped to 8 percent.
I spoke. “Tell us what to do, Duke. We can’t fix you if we don’t know what to do.”
Ashley shifted in her chair, throwing her arm up over the back rail. “Such a drag. The things you must know. All your secrets. All gone in about three minutes. A million years gone to waste. And for what, so the other Duke can reign supreme? I don’t know, Quan, doesn’t seem like much of a win for you. Ooh, 6 percent. Is that dropping faster? It’s a shame, because I think you, with our help, could overtake the other Duke. Let him be the one that goes dark forever.”
The room was silent as the battery percentage continued to trickle away.
The Duke spoke in a hurried voice. “Dr. Touchstone. I am releasing a panel on my side. Just behind it you will find two metallic bumps. Apply any voltage across those two leads. I can convert it and recharge my battery circuits.”
A small panel opened on the side of the Duke’s core, exposing the two contacts that he had mentioned, along with various other circuits.
The doctor reached down with a set of leads, touching them to the contacts just as the battery reading dropped to 1 percent. At the moment of contact, Touchstone withdrew the phony level signal from the Duke’s external circuits.
Touchstone spoke. “Whoa, we just got a good spark out of that. Your percentage just shot back up to one hundred. You can’t possibly recharge that fast from this small power source.�
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Touchstone looked around and smiled.
The Duke replied, “Only having an audio feed connected has me at a tremendous disadvantage, Doctor. I can’t be certain of what just happened without my full complement of sensors. For what it’s worth, thank you for complying with my request.”
Touchstone continued to smile as he raised his hand in a fist. “Just keep in mind, Duke, sometimes a little cooperation can go a long way.”
As I looked upon my wife and the doctor, a thought occurred to me. Maybe I was in the wrong line of work. They were immensely enjoying the mission that had been thrust upon them. The Duke was slowly breaking, and it was only a matter of time before Ashley had him convinced that he was better off as an ally than an enemy.
The various circuits that had now been exposed were the very ones that the doctor had been hoping to one day find. With the panel open, we had direct access to the Duke’s memories. As an added benefit, his reasoning algorithms had also been exposed. The doctor would later make the comment that he was having one of the best days of his life.
I returned to Frig’s lab to have a chat. “I think they are cracking him. And I think he holds a lot more information than we ever thought he would. It’s possible that the Duke has been around in one memory form or another for a million years. That would make him much older than any species we have known. If that is true, he might have what we need to rid ourselves of the Durians.”
Frig sat with his small hand up under his chin. “I would not underestimate him again, Don. He could be working us for his own means again.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, perhaps, but I don’t think so. Before, he was always connected to somewhere else. His physical host was disposable. Now that same physical host is his entire existence. I think we are going to marvel at what might come out of him.”
The Suppressor barreled through space at more than three hundred times the speed of light. It would take us almost a year to make it to where the Grid had gone. With only 20 percent in her tanks, the Grid would not have made a full jump.
Our counterparts back on the Orienta would have to work out their issues with the Gontas. Michael Felix would no doubt be pushed aside as a politician. The two Admirals would be the new leaders of the Human race, at least for the time being. As to where they would take refuge, we would only find that out as it happened.
As a consequence of our new direction, we would also be taken to a point that was just outside the system where the mystery Human signal had emanated from. We were all eager to find answers as to how the signal had come to be where it was. Was this from the missing Grid-1? Would it somehow lead us to our origins? How were the ships that had approached it destroyed? These were the questions that would keep one up at night. I found thinking about our unknown future both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
~~~
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