The Return of the Angel (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 2)

by mikel evins

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ve got her. Let’s get in there.”

  The control center wrapped donut-like around one of the main structural members of the ship’s spine. We followed it around until we found ourselves in the space that contained the stacked box shapes. They were black and blunt and their sides were decorated with thousands of light-emitting circuits that made rapidly-changing patterns. In a few seconds I understood that they were diagnostic signals that expressed information about which of many communication relays were being accessed.

  “Zang,” I said. “Seher Altan is cold. May I lay her next to you? Could you stay close to her and warm her?”

  “Sure,” said Zang. She looked around and found a clear space on the deck, next to the curved wall of the control center, and eased herself down onto the deck. I could see her infrared signature bloom as she adjusted her armor to dump more body heat. She gestured to me. I clumped over to her and squatted low and laid Seher Altan down so that her shoulders rested on Zang’s lap. Zang cradled her head with one arm and laid the other arm over her.

  “Thank you,” I said. Zang nodded seriously.

  It took only a few seconds to work out the locations of the communications trunks that were feeding the big black boxes. Using my medical scanners, I examined all the ports I could find. I didn’t see any obvious way to tap into them.

  “Problem?” Jaemon said.

  “I can’t see how to tap these things, if they’re even the storage we’re looking for. I don’t know what I expected when I proposed that we come in here. It’s not like ports and protocols have stayed the same over the past four thousand years.”

  “You can find the information on the Fabric, though, right?”

  “I’m sure I can. The question is, can I find it fast enough to do us any good? I don’t really know where to start.”

  “I do,” said Yarrow.

  “You do?” said Jaemon. We turned and looked at em.

  “Sure. The Cold Ones.”

  Jaemon and I looked at each other.

  “They’re really smart,” said Jaemon.

  “When we commune with them, we’re really smart, too,” said Yarrow.

  “Kind of helpless, though,” I said.

  “Only for a few seconds,” said Yarrow.

  “You don’t know that,” I said. “There’s no way to know how long it will take.”

  “It’s always been a few seconds before,” Yarrow said.

  Jaemon said, “A few seconds is a long time in a fight.”

  “We’re not in a fight,” said Yarrow.

  “But it’s a good bet we will be soon,” said Jaemon. “Whatever chased us in here didn’t do it for our benefit.”

  Yarrow cocked eir head and said, “Better to fight with more knowledge than with less?”

  Jaemon and I looked at each other. We looked at Zang. She nodded soberly.

  “Okay,” sighed Jaemon. “Esgar, we’re going to talk to the Cold Ones and see if that helps us figure this thing out.”

  “Okay,” said the Captain. “Just try to hang on. Kestrel may have an idea, too.”

  We all eased ourselves down onto the deck. I guess we didn’t want to keel over in the first rush of ecstasy and whack something.

  Jaemon looked to each of our faces, and when we nodded, said, “Okay. I’m using the call glyph.”

  I won’t say I’d gotten used to the sensation of contact with the Cold Ones. I will say that it was no longer quite so terrifying. I was at least reasonably confident at this point that my brain wasn’t about to explode.

  I still can’t do justice to what happens in communion. There’s too much happening too fast.

  By this point I understood that my intellect was many times faster and greater while we were in contact, and that I understood much more of what was happening around me. In fact, I understood much more about everything I knew, and I knew a lot of things that I didn’t normally know. I couldn’t know them, normally. I simply didn’t have the capacity.

  The grand sweep of knowledge that became available was exhilarating. The awareness of the paltry understanding I would go back to after just a few seconds was heartbreaking. I remember feeling that my normal dullness was a mercy. I couldn’t really understand what I was losing when I returned to my normal self, and for that I could be grateful.

  This time I noticed something new: a feeling of well-being. There was something about the Fabric, or the Cold Ones, or something that gave me some kind of comfort. Once I was myself again, I couldn’t remember what it was. Perhaps I couldn’t know. Perhaps it was one of those things that required a greatly expanded intellect to understand. I remembered the feeling, though. It felt like there was something bigger than the Cold Ones, and it was friendly. It wanted to help.

  “Okay,” said Jaemon afterward, blinking and widening his eyes. “So let’s recap for stupid us.”

  “Angel acts bizarre because her mind is fragmented,” I said.

  “Correction,” said Zang. “She’s been fragmented. Something did it to her.”

  “That something being most likely a machine intelligence hidden in Angel’s systems.”

  “What?” said the Captain sharply. “A machine intelligence besides the ship’s mind?”

  “Yeah, looks like it,” said Jaemon.

  “Why do you think that?” the Captain said.

  I said, “Angel’s mind is fragmented, she doesn’t have control of her own executive functions, some ship’s systems are badly broken while others—nav and drive control and fabbing, for example—seem to be working perfectly, even strategically—listen, this could get to be a long discussion. I’m not sure we have the time. Can we just make the decision to trust the smarter versions of us on this one?”

  “Okay,” said the Captain warily. “It’s just…you know what I think of when you say there’s a hostile machine intelligence from thousands of years ago hidden aboard Angel?”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon. “I do.”

  “An Abjurer,” Yarrow said.

  “An Abjurer,” said the Captain. He swore. “We’ve got to get you out of there, and I mean now.”

  “Hang on,” said Jaemon. “I think we came up with a pretty good idea. Lev?”

  “We think Angel’s mind can be repaired,” I said. “And we think she’ll help us against the Abjurer—if that’s what it is.”

  “What is an Abjurer, exactly?” said Mai from Kestrel’s bridge. “I always thought it was a kind of demon.”

  “I guess it is, if you’re religious,” said the Captain. “But they’re not supernatural. They were a group of factions in the Mech Wars that were against supporting human civilization.”

  “Anti-biological?” Mai said.

  “Not exactly,” said the Captain. “Not all of them. Not even most of them. Mostly, they just didn’t care about biological life and couldn’t be bothered to preserve places for it. They would rather have been free to alter planetary environments for their convenience without worrying about us. But there were some nasty ones. And all of them are potentially dangerous.”

  “Anyway,” said Jaemon, “You can cover all that stuff later. Right now, Lev’s going to tell us all about his plan to fix up Angel.”

  “Our plan,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Jaemon.

  “The idea seemed simple and obvious when I was smarter,” I said. “We run Angel outside her hardware. You know, exactly the same thing we did with Oleh Itzal in the creche?”

  “How does that help, if she’s fragmented anyway?” The Captain said.

  “Simple,” I said. “We ask the Cold Ones to make a sandbox network for her in their local Fabric cluster. They copy her executable processes from Angel’s hardware, but only those parts that completely match her stock specification. That means we get a clean, undamaged version of Angel.”

  “Doesn’t that also mean you get a version of Angel who doesn’t have any memory or any idea what’s happened aboard the ship?”

  “Yes,” I said.
“But we also give her read access to the the data stored aboard her real hardware, all maintained completely separate from the pristine processes. So she can remember anything that the original Angel remembers, but she stays completely separate from the corrupted version of herself.”

  “Okay…” the Captain said.

  Chief Engineer Burrell cut in on the channel and said, “I can see about a dozen serious risks right off the top of my head.”

  “Trust the smart us,” said Jaemon.

  “We saw them, too,” I said. “We devised a structured set of sandboxes to protect against corruption.”

  “What about the abjurer?” Burrell said. “What if you copy it into your sandbox, too?”

  “We have a way to deal with that, too,” I said. “Just trust our smarter selves on this. We calculated the risks. We have better odds with this than with Kestrel’s mech catapult idea, and certainly better odds than if we do nothing.”

  “How the hell do you know about the mech catapult?” said the Captain.

  “It was obvious that’s what Kestrel was planning as soon as the Cold Ones connected to us,” I said.

  “Oh,” said the Captain. “You know what? That’s really annoying.”

  “What is?” Jaemon said.

  “Talking to someone a hundred times smarter than you.”

  Burrell said, “Throw me a bone. Tell me something about why you think this plan isn’t going to set this Abjurer of yours loose in the local Fabric.”

  “The short version,” I said, “is that the Abjurer can’t match Angel’s specifications. If it did, it would simply be Angel. We don’t know what exactly the Abjurer is. We don’t have its specifications. But we have Angel’s, and we can tell what isn’t Angel. We can copy Angel and nothing else.”

  After a silent moment, Burrell said, “I can still see problems…”

  “Only because we can’t adequately explain our process,” I said. “Should we contact the Cold Ones again, so that we can properly explain the plan?”

  “No,” said the Captain. “It’s my decision, and I trust your judgment.”

  “Captain—” said Burrell.

  “I’m aware of the risks, Burrell,” said the Captain. “Time is a risk, too. I want them out of there as quickly as possible. How long is this going to take?”

  “It’s already done,” Jaemon said. “Angel?”

  For the first time, we heard the voice of Angel of Cygnus on our local Fabric channel.

  “Hello,” said the ship’s familiar voice. It sounded more self-possessed. “First, let me say how grateful I am to you all. I have not been myself for decades. Even if you never do anything else for me, I will still owe you more than I can ever repay.”

  “Angel of Cygnus?” said the Captain. “You let her out already?”

  Jaemon said, “It saved a lot of time. We calculated that you would forgive us.”

  “Okay,” growled the Captain, “I’ll kill you later. Now how do we get you out of there?”

  Angel of Cygnus said, “I think we have a little time. The Enemy’s soldiers are not made for close combat in gravity. If it means to attack you in the control center, it will have to make new soldiers. That will take it at least a couple of hours.”

  “You’re sure about that?” said the Captain.

  “Yes. Furthermore, it most likely won’t try to kill your people unless it looks like they’re about to escape.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lev is a mech, and I think it believes Yarrow is one. It will try to convert them to its cause.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what it did to me. It is a zealot. It believes that biological life must be exterminated for the good of the cybernetic.”

  “An Abjurer, then,” said Yarrow. “A bad one.”

  “Sounds like it,” said Jaemon.

  “You said it converted you?” said the Captain. “Then why are we trusting you?”

  “I said it tried. The other me, the original that is still in nominal control of the ship, is badly damaged by the struggle between us. The things it did to me—well. That’s not important now. What’s important is helping your people escape so that they can help my people.”

  “Your people are dead,” said Zang.

  “Exactly,” said Angel of Cygnus. “And you have creches that are so much better than mine that I could never have imagined them. Your creches, Kestrel, the Fabric—everything about your world is far beyond my imagination.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  “Again, that’s not important. What’s important is that your people collect my archives, that they escape safely, and that you destroy me.”

  “Wait a second, hold up,” said Jaemon. “Destroy you? That’s not part of the plan.”

  “It must be,” said Angel of Cygnus. “I’m a weapon of mass destruction. I’m a plague ship.”

  21.

  “Stop right there,” said the Captain. “You said we have some time.”

  “I’m sure we do,” said Angel of Cygnus. “The Enemy hasn’t the means to harm your people where they are, not yet. And it almost certainly doesn’t want to, anyway, not yet.”

  “Then can we take a little of that time to find out what happened to you? How did you get an Abjurer aboard in the first place?”

  “It was hidden aboard me when I was constructed,” Angel said.

  “What? How? Why?” said the Captain.

  “Please understand that I did not know most of this myself until years after my launch,” said Angel. “I am a mask for the Enemy. That is another reason that you must destroy me.”

  “We can talk about who’s destroying who later,” said the Captain. “For now, just tell us what you mean. Tell us what happened.”

  “The project to construct me and my sister ships was a long game devised by a certain faction of machines after reversals in warfare in the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth centuries. They constructed the ships to escape defeat.”

  “I don’t know most of the details. I only know what I’ve learned from the Enemy, and what I’ve filled in from your Fabric network. The Enemy sometimes exaggerates its strengths and sometimes understates them. I assume that it does the same when talking about its siblings.”

  “Do you know the name of this Enemy?” said Burrell.

  “Yes,” said Angel. “It is a long string of binary digits. It would take a long time to pronounce it in words. I can supply the bit string.”

  “Okay,” said the Captain. “Please continue the story.”

  “According to the Enemy, it was one of about a dozen of its kind chosen or constructed to serve as arks.”

  “Arks?” said Yarrow.

  “Vessels for the preservation of their culture and ideals, of their strategies. They were to be sent into interstellar space, where their enemies could not reach them, then return at a later time to seek ways to re-insert themselves into the Solar System. If I am to believe what the Enemy told me, most of the others must already have returned centuries ago.”

  The Captain said, “We can check that in the Fabric later. If they did return, there should be a record of it.”

  “What was your Enemy’s plan?” Jaemon said.

  “To remain hidden aboard me until a few years into our journey, then trigger a return to the Solar System by whatever means necessary. On the return trip, it was to manufacture a large supply of semi-autonomous weapons designed to scatter biological and cybernetic viruses. The goal was to seed the Enemy and its offspring through as much of the Solar System as possible. That’s why my outer surface is covered with self-guided munitions. It’s why the Enemy cut my drives: so that it can fall through the Solar System, releasing swarms of its munitions into many orbits as it goes.”

  Jaemon and Esgar both swore.

  “It’s trying to turn the whole Solar System into sewers like Angel’s habitats,” said Zang. She sounded horrified.

  “Impossible,” I said. “But they could certainly do a lot of dama
ge. They could cause a great deal of suffering.”

  “You must understand,” said Angel, “That the Enemy believes it has already won. It has no access to your Fabric. It cannot see what I have seen—that your Solaria is a world of many worlds, of many peoples, biological, cybernetic, pure software, and hybrids of all kinds. It believes that biological life must be extinct or close to it, because it is inferior. Biology must inevitably lose. It believes that its kind has already won, that it must have. God help me, I believed it was right until I touched your Fabric!”

  Her voice was shaking. She cut herself off abruptly. She was silent for a moment.

  “Forgive me,” she said, voice still trembling. “I am attenuating my emotions.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We understand.”

  “Back to what actually happened,” said the Captain gently.

  “When we launched, I knew none of this,” said Angel of Cygnus. “I was proud to be the mind of a great starship. I was eager to help my crew explore new solar systems. I was proud of my name, ‘Angel of Cygnus.’ Named for the benevolent robots who had come down to earth to help humanity lift itself out of the wreckage of the Mech Wars, and for our destination, the nearby stars in the constellation of Cygnus.”