Annihilation (Star Force Series)

by B. V. Larson

  I nodded, and looked at her. My quarters were dark except for a few LED lights that ran along the floor for emergency lighting. I liked it that way right now—dark. You couldn’t pull the LEDs up without using a screwdriver, so I hadn’t bothered.

  Her face and body were silhouetted against the relative glare of the passage behind her. Eyeing her, I thought her hair was perhaps a trifle longer than it should be—certainly, it was past regulation length. But I didn’t complain about it. She’d gotten away with that for months, and we both knew it was because I liked her to wear it long.

  “Because if I kill him, Crow will abuse Alexa’s relatives back home.”

  “The poisoner? Why would you care about her? And why should we worry about what the Imperials do to each other?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. It felt constrictive to me, so I stood up and began pacing.

  “They’re our people, Jasmine,” I reminded her. “Star Force is sworn to defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But it’s more than that. I feel partly responsible.”

  “What?” she said, raising her voice. “That’s nonsense, Colonel. Everyone knows Crow is to blame.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And who do you think had the opportunity to take him out of the equation long ago? The kind of sin I’ve performed is one of omission—of inaction. I let Crow live and thrive like a spider in the dark, and now countless invisible people are suffering because of my oversight.”

  “Now you’re blaming yourself for what Crow does? That’s silly.”

  I took a few steps toward her. She backed away at my approach, out the doorway and into the hall. I wasn’t surprised that she was physically afraid of me, but I was saddened. I guess that after you kill a few people with your bare hands, the rest get nervous.

  “Burke once said: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’”

  “But you didn’t know he was evil, Kyle,” she said. “Not back then.”

  “I didn’t know exactly what Crow was going to do,” I said, “but I always had a pretty good idea. I let it slide. That’s why I’m taking part of the blame for this situation. The rest I lay at the feet of humanity. They could have stopped him; the men who follow him now could shoot him rather than serving under him. They must know what he is. In any case, I want you to relay my message to Carrington.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, and left.

  The door solidified behind her. A few minutes later, a light tapping began again. It was a feminine knock, and it sounded almost timid. With a grunt of frustration, I opened it.

  “What is it now, Jasmine?” I demanded.

  But when the door melted away, it wasn’t Jasmine that stood in the hallway. It was Dr. Kate Swanson. She looked wary, just the way they all did lately.

  I rumbled in my throat inarticulately. “What do you want?” I asked finally.

  Then I caught sight of something. It was a camera on a stalk, peeping over her shoulder. I leaned forward and followed it back. About ten feet away, Marvin filled the passage with his bulk.

  I nodded in sudden understanding. “You figured I would open the door for a female—is that it, Marvin? Profiling me again?”

  “There’s something we’d like to discuss, Colonel,” Marvin said.

  I glanced at Dr. Swanson. She looked pale and her eyes were big. She hadn’t said a word yet.

  “I take it the topic of discussion isn’t going to make me happy,” I said.

  “On the contrary, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said with a touch of excitement in his voice. “It may well be the best news you’ve heard all day.”

  Marvin had me now, and we both knew it.

  “Out with it, robot,” I said.

  “I’ve begun a series of experiments in necrological reconstruction. It’s possible these efforts will bear untold benefits in the future.”

  I squinted at him. “Necro-what?”

  “Necrological. It’s a new term. Do you like it? I’ve just coined it, actually. As the inventor of this new science, I felt I’d earned the privilege.”

  Dr. Swanson cleared her throat at this point. I eyed her and thought she looked worried.

  “Marvin,” she said, “it’s not actually a science. It’s a theory. A research proposal, to be exact.”

  “This is about Sandra, isn’t it?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice steady. “I don’t want you cutting her up, or anything like that.”

  “No, no, certainly not,” Marvin said.

  I stared at Marvin’s cameras and they stared back at me. They shifted and whirred. Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. We both knew he’d laid out the bait, and I was on the hook.

  By this time, I’d pretty much figured out what was going on. Marvin had gotten a crazy idea about healing Sandra, and it was so awful that Dr. Swanson wasn’t sure she wanted to be a part of it.

  I knew right away I should just steer clear of the whole thing, that I should tell him “no” and march down to medical and pull the plug on Sandra’s coffin myself. Let her rest in peace, some part of my mind told the rest.

  But there was another voice there, too. A voice that whispered of hope and the powers of science. I recalled that voice from my distant past. Miracles of healing had happened. I’d witnessed them with my own eyes.

  “Once bitten by hope, a man is forever its plaything,” I said.

  “Is that an idiom, Colonel?” asked Marvin. “I’m not familiar with it.”

  “Can’t you just leave well enough alone?”

  “Sandra’s condition is hardly ‘well enough’. I believe I can improve upon it dramatically. Do you want me to try, Colonel Riggs? Do I have your permission?”

  By this time I was leaning against the wall. I felt the faint vibration of nanites against my skin. No wall in a Nano-ship is ever completely still.

  “You know you do,” I said, beaten.

  Marvin didn’t say another word. He knew enough not to blow it. He slithered away on a dozen rasping metal tentacles. There was excitement in his movement, and he held his cameras higher than before.

  I turned to Dr. Swanson. She looked a little green, and a little frightened. Did everyone think I was a wild-eyed murderer today?

  “Kate,” I said. I shook my head, looking after Marvin. “Is this going to end badly?”

  She was quiet for a second, then she sighed and shook her head.

  “I honestly don’t know, sir,” she said. “But that’s not the only reason I’m here. What are we supposed to do with General Kerr?”

  “Can he survive outside his box yet?”

  “Yes sir, but he looks like hell.”

  “Good,” I said. “Release him. Put him back on his pinnace, and have him transported back to Carrington. I don’t want him completely healed up before they get a good look at him.”

  “Don’t worry, Colonel. It will take more than a few days for his nanites to clean up the damage you inflicted upon that man’s body.”

  With that, she turned and walked away. I watched her disappear.

  Had I just been scolded? I was pretty sure that I had been.

  -32-

  I was dubious in the extreme, but I couldn’t deny that Marvin’s injection of hope had brought me back to life. Even if he failed to do the same for Sandra herself, I reflected, he had done his work on me.

  I knew it could be a sugar-high. A temporary state of mind that may come crashing down, forever weighing upon my spirit. That’s how it had been with my kids.

  But I also knew I was a tough-minded person. I didn’t feel emotional damage the way others seemed to. When I suffered a loss, I was shaken, but I never went to pieces completely. At least, I hadn’t been broken yet.

  When I was sure General Kerr had made the transfer over to Carrington and the battleship had wheeled and blasted away without bothering with a farewell, I headed up to the bridge. I’d pretty well sobered up by now, and wanted to get back into the game.

  I told myself along
the way that Sandra’s state was due to my choices as much as Crow’s or Kerr’s. I’d tempted fate on a regular basis. I’d taken my love into combat, for God’s sake! How could one expect to live forever in a heartless universe like the one we inhabited when you continuously took grim chances? We’d rolled the dice enough times and we’d finally lost the game. It could have happened to anyone, but it had finally happened to my Sandra.

  I arrived on the bridge and greeted no one. The conversation among the staffers, whatever it had been, immediately died. I sat in my command chair, brooding.

  I glanced around, and noticed that everyone was evading my eye. Then I figured it out: The topic of conversation had been me or, possibly, Sandra and Marvin’s crazy plans.

  I didn’t know what Marvin was doing down there in medical. I didn’t want to know. I’d come back to the bridge because I knew I needed something to keep my mind off the topic. I was here to keep myself from going mad.

  “Give me a sitrep, people,” I barked suddenly.

  A timid ensign brought me a tablet brimming with charts, written logs and numbers. I flicked my way through it until I found a few items of interest. I frowned as I read data coming in from Eden-12. Something was happening back home.

  I snapped my fingers until the ensign came back. She was young, and had a scared look about her. I figured they’d sent her because she was junior among the group. The staffers were brave enough in battle, but a bunch of cowards when it came to talking to the titular leader of Riggs’ Pigs.

  I read her nametag. “Ensign Kestrel?” I asked. “What’s this?” I pointed to a spike on the charts which indicated increased activity at both the Eden and Thor system rings.

  “Emissions readings, sir,” she said.

  A single lock of her brown hair slipped down into her face, covering one eye. She didn’t seem to notice, but I found it distracting.

  “Is your hair regulation length, Ensign?”

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. “I don’t know sir,” she said. “I’ll check. I’m sorry.”

  I took in a deep breath and tried to relax. “Never mind,” I said. “It looks okay, and lots of Fleet people cheat on the regs, anyway. Forget about it.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  I went back to poring over the charts. I touched the emissions spike, and a box came up on the screen, giving me more data.

  “These numbers are out of bounds,” I said. “I should have been alerted about this activity at the rings, not to mention these planetary anomalies on Eden-12.”

  “I’m sorry sir. I think we did try to contact you.” She looked over her shoulder helplessly at the others. They were studiously involved with their screens.

  “Ensign,” I said, regaining her attention. “It’s all right. I’ve been out of sorts lately. I guess it isn’t staff’s fault.”

  She looked so relieved she seemed to melt. “Thank you, sir.”

  I nodded, pondering the numbers. “These readings on Eden-12…they’re spiking again. I want to know what they are. I want a scout ship sent to the gas giant. We’ve got to ask the Blues what they’re doing down there.”

  “How do we do that, sir?”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “How indeed?”

  We hadn’t had the best relationship with the Blues since the very beginning. They were an enigmatic cloud-race that seemed to be made up of structured aerogels. They lived in the soupy atmosphere of the Eden system’s only gas giant, swimming in the thick air like it was an ocean thousands of miles deep.

  The Blues had originally built the Macros and the Nanos, the machines that plagued us today. They’d let them loose upon the universe. They’d let them do their exploring and conquering by remote control.

  As a victim species of the machines, humanity had taken offense to these actions. We’d attempted diplomacy, but rarely been successful. We’d only managed to force them to cooperate in a single instance, and that had only been after bombing their homeworld indiscriminately.

  Now, there was something strange going on down there on their massive world. They were quietly doing something, without telling us what it was.

  I looked up again, and saw that the Ensign was still lingering, uncertain what her orders were.

  “We’re going to go to Eden-12 ourselves,” I told her. “We’re going to scan the planet as best we can, and we’re going to ask the Blues what the hell they think they’re doing. Now, go relay that order to the navigators. Tell them to lay in a course and fire up the engines.”

  Ensign Kestrel nodded, taking the tablet from my hands as I offered it. I gave her a flickering half-smile. I didn’t really feel like smiling, but I forced myself.

  My fractionally softer expression worked on her like magic. She relaxed and smiled back. I watched as she returned to the others and reported to them how her little mission had gone. They seemed relieved. They talked in low voices and studiously avoided looking in my direction.

  The next two days were tense. There were precious few reports, either from medical, or from Shadowguard. The strange energy surges on Eden-12 continued, as did the transmissions someone was attempting to send via the rings. I ordered that the transmissions be recorded and analyzed. Without Marvin’s help, however, the analysis was going very slowly.

  We were jamming the rings ourselves, by sending garbage signals to them. An infinite series of random, meaningless vibrations constantly buzzed and shivered the big artifacts. But as the transmissions continued, I became increasingly worried. I summoned Captain Sarin as my carrier taskforce approached the massive gas giant, Eden-12, and parked itself in orbit.

  “Captain,” I said, going over the data with a deepening frown. “Could they be overcoming our jamming somehow?”

  “I don’t see how that could be possible,” she said.

  “Yes, but…they must know we’re jamming their signal. Why would they continue to transmit if it wasn’t working?”

  She looked concerned. “We could monitor the data at the far end to see if it’s related. We don’t need Marvin to do that.”

  I nodded. “Do it.”

  Jasmine spent the next few hours working the staff. She soon came back with a worried frown.

  “I’ve sent something to your tablet, Colonel.”

  I paged through about a hundred reports. Sometimes, I found the modern age of information-overload to be frustrating. We had more data than ever, but the sheer volume of it was overwhelming. It was difficult to sort out valuable items from what amounted to a massive pile of spam. I considered assigning an underling to going over my reports, trying to find the proverbial needles in the binary haystacks.

  My eyes left the tablet and drifted toward Ensign Kestrel. She’d been handling my input over the last few days, a job Sandra used to have. She had her back to me and her jumpsuit was alarmingly tight. I thought to myself that she might work out as a spam-detector. She might work out very well.

  Captain Sarin cleared her throat. I took in a deep breath, then went back to the reports. Finally, I found something interesting.

  “Right here,” I said, touching a data point that proved my theory. “About seven hours ago, the ring on the far side of the Thor system shivered in a pattern that matched the activity at the Eden ring.”

  Sarin came close. She leaned near me and I smelled her faint perfume. She had a hot smell to her, underneath the perfume. I knew it came from long hours of work on the bridge without a break.

  I began to feel a little warmed up myself with her leaning so close, but I knew that if I moved she’d realize we were in close contact and be embarrassed. So I just sat there and stared at the screen she was reading. Why did they have to make these tablets so damned small?

  “I see it, sir,” she said at last. “It’s buried in the data, but the signature is there. I’ll work on a filtering program. I’ll take out the data that represents our jamming pattern, and I’ll see if it becomes clearer.”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “Our jamming isn’t r
andom enough. There is a high frequency signal buried in here. We’re hitting the ring with our own random garbage, and that worked for a while. But now, they’ve become more sophisticated in order to bypass our crude techniques.”

  “I don’t get what you mean, sir.”

  “Well, let’s say we send a signal that shifts every millisecond. That means that in-between those time slices is a window to squeeze in some data. Maybe they can hit the rings ten times inside that millisecond, and then skip a beat for our pulse, then go right on sending. The receiver knows to ignore our signal, because it is too regular.”

  She narrowed her eyes and bit her lip. She turned back to the data. She nodded slowly.

  “They’re communicating,” she said with certainty. “I mean, someone is. But who is talking, and what are they saying?”

  “I think that’s pretty clear. And that’s why we’re orbiting Eden-12 right now.”

  Her expression changed to one of alarm. “You’re saying the Blues are talking to the Macros again?” she asked. She leaned close to me again, and spoke in a low, urgent tone meant only for my ears.

  “You aren’t going to bomb them again, are you, Kyle?” she asked. The last time—the Blues called it barbaric, and I think they were right.”

  “I don’t know. Was the bombing of Dresden barbaric in World War Two?”

  “Yes,” she said seriously, “I think it was.”

  “Well, if they don’t stop plotting with the machines, I won’t have any other choice. I don’t want to do it. I’ve done everything I can to convince them to ally with us. They don’t even have an excuse not to be on our side. They aren’t exposed like the Crustaceans. They’re right here in Eden where we can protect them.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be part of our alliance, because they’re too proud. I think they want to lead the alliance, or at least stay independent.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said, “the only logical thing for them to do is join us. Unfortunately, the Blues don’t see it that way. I have to admit that in the end, the Crustaceans turned out to be the more trustworthy race. They were shooting at the machines during this last battle. So far as I can tell, the Blues have never helped us willingly.”