Insidious

by Michael McCloskey

“I ordered that already, and we came up empty so far,” Vendrati said.

  “I’ll make sure we don’t miss anything,” Henley said. “Ms. Vendrati’s people told us what to look for.”

  “Very well, you have another week to find everything you can,” Jameson said. “Marcken is concentrating on improving the ASSAILs given that we may encounter more automated resistance in the other stations. Ms. Vendrati is handling our lab support back home for all aspects of this. Jackson is still looking at the storage unit ghosting we did during the raid to see if we captured some data they erased at the time of the incursion. Devin is heading up the interrogations and investigating the Bentra personnel, including the slaves.”

  Jameson paused for further comments, but none came.

  “I’ll schedule another meeting when we have some more pieces of the puzzle,” Jameson finished. “As I said, barring incident, we’re moving on in a week, so get whatever you need from Thermopylae now.”

  Bren switched out of the virtual meeting and opened his eyes back in his quarters. He tried to sweep away the foul mood that always followed one of his communications incidents. He knew the others were used to it by now, but it disturbed him anyway.

  He recalled a conversation he had heard once:

  “What’s wrong with Marcken today? Is his link messed up or something?”

  “He’s got link bias,” said the reply. “Just repeat yourself if he doesn’t hear you.”

  “How did that happen? All the core work screw up his brain?”

  “Heh. Maybe one of them rewrote his software.”

  They meant Bren suffered from source bias that tended toward his link. The links were designed to mimic the brain’s own natural data sources, and most people could use their links in a source-agnostic way. A change in the data on either side could distract them to one source or another, like a loud noise distracted someone from a book they were reading.

  Bren’s glitch was rare. It usually came up with high-bandwidth link users. Someone with source bias could be hard to distract from one source to another. Bren had a link source bias that could prevent him from noticing data on other channels or from his own eyes and ears. Polite people just called him distracted. He knew that Nicole didn’t like it. She had said that it would hold him back in the space force. He’d done well enough, though. This job was suited to him. It had a lot more technical involvement and less politics than an Earthside assignment. He wondered if Nicole would keep her distance this time.

  Bren called in his handlers to help sanitize the ASSAILs and transfer their logs over for analysis. He spent the evening in the Guts going over the video from the raid. He stepped through the images slavishly, concentrating on the mysterious robot whenever it appeared in the footage.

  Glimpses of the enemy machine revealed a foe that maneuvered with deadly prescience. Bren learned nothing of the weapon system that had destroyed much of his ASSAIL team. As he watched a clip of the thing retreating, he realized that its movement disturbed him.

  “Something is wrong with the way it moves,” he said aloud.

  Hoffman snapped out of a virtual interface over by his station and joined Bren.

  “Yes, it moves too fast,” he said.

  “More than that. Here in the pool area, watch it swirl away after the exchange of fire. When I saw it had spider legs and a spherical body, I assumed it walked like a spider or an insect. But it doesn’t walk … it spins. I can see a line of its footprints in a couple of these images, and I really do mean a line: it spins and places the next counterclockwise foot on the ground. It only has one or two feet on the ground at any given time.”

  “That makes no sense,” Hoffman said. “No animal walks like that, and with good reason. There’s no way it could be that fast without using all those legs to push off the ground in various directions.”

  “It is spinning and even though it’s moving fast here, it isn’t pushing off with all those legs. The legs aren’t moving it, I think it has some other mechanism, it’s more like a hovercraft, or … I don’t know.”

  “Then why would it need legs at all?”

  Bren shook his head. “Maybe it takes too much energy to fly all the time. The legs could hold it up, and then it only has to expend energy to balance itself, or to move somewhere. But it wouldn’t have to fight gravity, or whatever force is pulling it downward.”

  Hoffman thought about that for a moment. “That would make it quite mobile in a zero g environment as well. But if I designed it that way, then I’d forget about the legs entirely in combat. This is obviously a high-energy expenditure time, why bother with the legs?”

  Bren and Hoffman watched the footage several more times but didn’t have any further insights. The machine with the red dot had an unorthodox method of motion, which they couldn’t explain. Eventually, Hoffman resumed other tasks. The hours eroded his workforce until only Bren remained in the Guts. It wasn’t an unusual situation. Everyone else had taken off to catch some sleep or use up some of their fantasy VR allotment.

  At some point he must have fallen asleep since he woke up with a sore neck in the ASSAIL nexus. He looked up, massaging his neck, and saw Jackson entering the room.

  “There you are. Hey. Vendrati released a report on the analysis of the ASSAIL remains,” he said.

  Bren opened Vendrati’s report through his link. The executive summary said that the UNSF scientists currently had no idea how the ASSAIL armor had been compromised. Vendrati’s team worked closely with several Earthside labs, putting a lot of smart people on the problem. They looked at every scrap from a thousand angles, steadily churning the chaos of ideas into conclusions like angry ants shuffling food toward their nest.

  “They did find a puncture point in the armor of each dead ASSAIL,” Bren repeated aloud. “Less than seven millimeters in diameter. Very little damage to the surrounding surface. They believe there was a projectile, and they found foreign chips of titanium.” Bren shook his head. “Titanium is too light to punch a hole through that armor, though. Especially with a round of that caliber.”

  “What about the video?” asked Jackson.

  “I went through as much as I could last night,” Bren said. “Fell asleep looking at it. I couldn’t find any clues about how they penetrated the armor. There is a projectile of some sort; the audio has evidence of supersonic launches that aren’t any of ours. I assume the Earthside labs will find us a few frames with a projectile in them. The main thing I noticed is that the machine moves in an unintuitive way. Of course, I sent it all along to Vendrati’s people back home.”

  “Let me ask you something. In your opinion, was that thing running an AI core?”

  Bren considered the question for a moment.

  “I’m almost certain it was. It’s too good, too fast. I think it was a core, and I think it was started before ours were.”

  “They knew we were coming?”

  “No idea. Maybe they had a rotating schedule set up where there was always a core up at any given time while others were being sterilized. We have to find some clues on that damn station. How can petabytes of data be so useless to us?”

  “Ask Devin. If it was an AI, it knew what to erase. But I’ve never heard of an AI erasing itself.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So what can we do differently at the next base?”

  “We start the ASSAILs earlier, give them more background information.”

  “That’s dangerous. If they’re awake too long … but I agree.”

  “Their power plants will only last about fifty hours. Plus, it’ll shut off in hardware before the power plant is exhausted, forty-seven hours after we start them up. And there’s no override. Not even any mention of it in the software or our schematics package. There’s no feedback sensor or even a self-check circuit on it, so there’s no way an ASSAIL can learn about it.”

  “Unless they get so smart inside of forty-seven hours they can deduce that we’d have put something like that on them and get power somewhere el
se.”

  “Right. That’s why our police cruiser is sitting on a nuke.” Bren watched Jackson carefully. Had he already known?

  Jackson rubbed his brow. “Sitting on a nuke. Wonderful.”

  Bren figured Jackson’s move to rub his head served only to give him time to think. That meant Jackson knew about it and might even have the activation codes. Bren hoped that knowledge would never prove useful.

  ***

  After two more days, Bren’s focus shifted away from processing the old information. Now he had to concentrate on modifying the ASSAIL background information to anticipate more resistance like the one they had encountered at Thermopylae. He always worked through his PV, so he wandered about the Vigilant, thirsty for new scenery that never materialized. The intricate confines of the Guts got to everyone after a time. Bren had fantasy time accumulated but he didn’t use it; once he was hooked on a challenge, he tolerated no distraction.

  He stripped the targeting priority on the Circle Fours. Bren wanted the freshly started units to pay rapid attention to any kind of unknown robot. They’d made the mistake of thinking Circle Fours were the greatest danger. He supposed that the penalty would be that an ASSAIL unit might target something like the medical scanner early on, ignoring even a Circle Four for vital seconds, but what choice did he have? By the time the units had been mission green for a few minutes, they would be able to react to what they had experienced. They would have the power to change their own priorities, which they would do with superhuman intelligence.

  Nicole Devin caught up with him in the galley after he had finished a meal. Shipboard time was late in the evening.

  “Hello, Bren,” she said. He took her use of his first name as a good sign.

  “It’s great to see you again after all this time,” he said, smiling at her. “Are you catching a late snack?”

  “No, I’m after a person, not a meal.”

  Bren raised an eyebrow. “Oh.”

  She laughed. “Well, I meant a person from the station. I’m interested in learning more about a particular individual who was on Thermopylae. We need to search through the ASSAIL data and see if there are any clues in there.”

  She sent a pointer for two face models through her link to Bren. The first identified the face of a beautiful woman with straight black hair and dark eyes. Bren found her Asian features mesmerizing. He tore his attention away to look at the second model. It was a representation of the mask from one of the plastic suits the Bentrans had worn. Bren’s first reaction was to say he couldn’t help much, citing his schedule. But he liked Nicole and wanted to work with her again.

  “I have a tight schedule, as I’m sure you’re aware. Why is this particular person such a high priority? I take it she’s not talking, whoever she is.”

  “This individual was definitely up to something interesting. Probably espionage, or at the very least some unusual kind of security,” Nicole said.

  “Well, as you know, the ASSAILs are going in at the next base. I need to know if those people are a threat, and if they have anything to do with that robot we engaged, some kind of red spider—”

  “Red. That’s what they called it.”

  “What?”

  “They had a nickname for it, the company people who weren’t privy to its secrets, which was about everyone. They called it Red, because of the spot on its side.”

  Bren realized that Nicole wasn’t demanding a one-way transfer of information. He wanted to know more about what had been happening on Thermopylae, and she could tell him.

  “Yeah? Well, what did the freaks in the suits say about Red? Where was it built? What the hell was it, some kind of experimental military design? And why does it spin instead of walk?”

  “It spins?”

  “Yeah. I can’t say I really understand how it moves or why it moves that way.”

  “Well, all these people know about Red is that it was smart, and it served as a sort of enforcer for the top executives.”

  “The ones who’re dead? Do you think it was a full-blown AI core and it killed the executives to hide itself?” Bren asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s cooperate on it.”

  “We made a good team before,” Bren said. He took a step closer to Nicole.

  “Then we’d better work closely together,” she grinned. “Where are your quarters?”

  “Right this way, ma’am,” Bren said. He led her to his quarters, pleased with the turn of events. Bren realized it had been some time since he’d enjoyed the company of a woman incarnate. And he’d often reflected on his time with Nicole.

  “Nice space,” she said as she walked into his room.

  “You know what they say. Rank has its privileges.”

  She laughed. “I do recall hearing that once or twice. So you’re a powerful man now?” She slipped into his waiting arms.

  Bren looked into her eyes. A flood of memories from his academy days came back to him—meeting her in the wilderness of Pike National Forest, playing cat and mouse with her at the dorms, trips to Colorado Springs, and their many torrid encounters.

  She pressed against him. Although she felt familiar, he experienced the heat of a new beginning. He kissed her and she responded immediately. They took a quick circle of the quarters, kissing furiously while leaving clothing behind at every step. They finally found his bed. Bren gave the lift command through his link, elevating the net from its base to create an acceleration web.

  He rolled her onto her stomach so she lay suspended on the web with her legs and breasts hanging through it in disarray. His fingers interleaved through her silky hair and then tightened into a grip. Then he lost himself to primitive impulse.

  Her cries rose in the small room. Bren felt the thrill of her body again. It was as good as he’d remembered it … better.

  After their urgent coupling, he collapsed next to her in the webbing. The atmospheric controls had compensated for their sweat, drying the air and circulating it to keep them comfortable. Bren became quiet.

  Nicole smiled. “It never takes you long after we’re done to start thinking about work again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I like an ambitious man,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow to face him “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, you have me curious about your spy,” he said. At least here, they could talk aloud if they felt like it and not raise suspicion.

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Nicole said.

  “No, I mean about what she was up to.”

  Bren linked into the ASSAIL unit databases with Nicole tagging along as an observer. In his PV, he filled out a match request against all the face models observed by the robots during the Thermopylae raid. Bren used the normal face model provided by Nicole and didn’t get a match.

  “Nothing for the naked face,” he mumbled.

  Bren started to run the second model. He realized Nicole had said something.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said what about the suited face?”

  “Sorry. I’m running that now.” He felt the blood rush to his face. She knew about his link bias, and now she knew it hadn’t improved in the time they’d been apart. He had been absorbed in the match interface details and hadn’t heard her question.

  Bren got a hit from Meridian’s module for the second model. He brought up a few seconds of footage from Meridian associated with the match. He ran the clip and watched a familiar sequence of events: a gunman popped out from behind a sliding door and fired a sonic weapon at Meridian. The robot pursued the assailant and plucked the weapon away. Then it evaluated a medical machine for a moment before pressing onward.

  “Ah, that guy,” Bren said.

  “That girl,” corrected Nicole. “She’s a courier for Black Core. Been here before, according to the records we have from off base.”

  “She got the same amnesia?”

  “I don’t know. She made it off the station during the raid. We’re following up with Black Core, but the
y’re stalling us. They claim she wasn’t on the station at that time and that she’ll be in space for several weeks.”

  “She got off the base? Damn. That gun she used took out the ASSAIL’s audio pickups. She might’ve been expecting it to do more damage.”

  “If we can get a hold of this one, we’d make some serious progress. I have a hunch she could tell us a lot about what was going on at Thermopylae. We’re trying to get the prime minister to put more pressure on Black Core, let them know we’re not dicking around this time.”

  “So you think this one woman is the key? She’s not even Bentra.”

  Nicole shrugged. “This is a low priority issue right now as far as Jameson is concerned. We’re starting to dig into clues about robotic research going on in the corporations, trying to see if this is just a Bentra thing. None of the Brazilian companies really command any market share for heavy robots. Other companies have been shipping a lot of resources up here and we don’t know why. This Black Core employee may have been another one of those delivery people. She managed to take off in a fast courier during the confusion.”

  “Maybe she knows if they’re trading for something, or if it’s some kind of global blackmail.”

  “Maybe.”

  Bren frowned. “Wait a minute. We never found any support for the robot on the station. What if it’s not based there? What if the courier that escaped brought it here? It could have been a Black Core machine.”

  “Is that possible? It was a small courier.”

  “Well, obviously it was developed somewhere else, but she could have deployed it via a courier that size. Our nexus accommodates a dozen ASSAIL units at a time, and it handles deployment and long-term maintenance. She would only need a bay a fraction of that size to initialize the AI core and charge the machine.”

  “Red couldn’t have had its own power plant?”

  “Doubtful. Too small, too fast,” Bren said. “Besides, AI cores almost never have serious power plants; it gives them too long a lifespan.”

  “I can’t believe they would use AI cores at all.”

  “We do.”

  “I can’t believe we do, either.”