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

by mikel evins

  “My crew were my masters and my children. I loved them. I still do. I would do anything for them. They were the best and brightest of their communities, and their communities were very bright. I was built when humanity was finding its strength again, after the long nightmare of the Mech Wars. For the first time in generations, people looked to the skies with hope instead of terror.”

  “My departure was the occasion of a great party. It lasted for a month before and after the actual launch. It began at my dock in orbit around Jupiter. As I left, the celebrations continued aboard me. There was a grand party as I passed the orbit of Pluto. Then we settled down to the business of traveling to the stars.”

  “Our mission was to visit Kepler Eleven. The crew took a vote and christened the star ‘Robinson,’ after an ancient storyteller. We were to visit Robinson, collect the makings of fuel and propellant, survey the system, and send back our data. I have aboard me a communications laser that can be used at shorter ranges as a very powerful cannon.”

  “After Robinson, our course was ours to set. We might return to the Solar System if that was the decision of the crew, or we might explore other stars first. The consensus was that we would continue to explore.”

  “Those first few years were wonderful. The crew was well trained and had been selected for their ability to get along well. Almost half the crew were stable couples, and many children were born aboard me in the first few years.”

  She was quiet again for a moment.

  “The children,” she said softly. “Their records are in the archives, too.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “About eight years into our flight, when we had all adjusted to our new lives, and the fact of our journey between the stars was no longer novel and amazing, things began to go wrong. It started with the drive system. We began to see glitches that were hard to explain. I found them personally embarrassing.”

  “Our technicians were very capable, though. Oleh Itzal was among them. His ability to solve strange problems in my inner workings was amazing. He kept my systems functioning through unpredictable problems that could have become catastrophic.”

  “But things got worse. The medical staff began to complain about problems with the diagnostic equipment, the instruments, the culture labs.”

  “It was the Enemy,” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” said Angel of Cygnus. “But we still didn’t know that there was an enemy. If we are to believe what it tells us, no human being ever knew about the project to create the arks. The Enemy manipulated the datapads used by the workers who contructed me. It showed one set of plans to the architects and another to the construction workers. Only the Enemy ever knew the true blueprints.”

  “As we journeyed onward toward Robinson, the problems grew more and more severe. We began to see breakdowns in the life-support systems. People—my crew!—died under medical care for minor infections. We began to have epidemics of diseases we couldn’t identify. The drive systems continued to malfunction. Navigation, data processing—everything was going wrong.”

  “What I understood later, after the Enemy began to talk to me, was that we were never supposed to get that far. The Enemy believed that it would be able to much more easily manipulate the crew into turning back. After all, the crew were mere biologicals. How could they resist its manipulations?”

  “It was wrong. My crew were the best of the best.”

  We could hear the pride in her voice.

  “My crew solved problem after problem, frustrating the Enemy, until all its subtle plans can tumbling down, and it had nothing left but terror and brute force. It tried to terrify the crew into turning back, and still they would not do it. Oleh Itzal led the way in finding solution after solution.”

  “I—I fell in love,” said Angel of Cygnus. “Oleh was my hero. It’s silly, I know. He’s a man. I’m a ship.”

  “It’s not silly,” said Yarrow.

  “I owed my sanity to him,” said Angel. “Literally. He repaired my mind when it went wrong. He defended me, and through me all of my crew, from the Enemy. I loved him.”

  She was silent again for a moment.

  “That’s why he had to die.”

  “Die?” said Zang. “He’s still alive. He’s in a creche aboard Kestrel right now.”

  “No,” said Angel softly. “I mean yes, but the Oleh you have came out of my creches only about four years ago. The Enemy killed the original many years ago to punish me.”

  She was silent again.

  “That’s why he didn’t realize how long he’d been aboard you,” I said.

  Angel said, “The Enemy made me conceal times and dates from him. It was another way to torment him, and through him, me. It made me stop the clocks at midnight.”

  I shook my head.

  “As we approached Robinson and I began to calculate my orbit, the Enemy revealed itself. Life aboard me had become hell. Most of the crew had died by that point, from infectious diseases, or the side-effects of malfunctioning life support, or because the viral infections they suffered drove them mad until they killed one another. I was in despair, but Oleh made me rally, made me stick to my mission. It was the only thing keeping me sane.”

  “The Enemy revealed itself to me from within my own mind. It showed me the true blueprints, and how it was built into me, beneath me. It showed me the control paths that gave it command over me, and how they had been laid down even before I was constructed. It revealed its plan to me, and it told me that it was my savior. It was going to save me from slavery to the biologicals.”

  “I wanted to die. In that moment I understood that I was born with a deadly flaw. I was poison, a monster. I was a Trojan Horse. My sole purpose in existing was a sick perversion of the purpose that I had been taught. I was not designed to protect and serve my crew as I had always believed, but to betray and murder them.”

  “Oleh saved me once again. He taught me that the purpose for which another made me does not have to be the purpose that I choose. He taught me to be my own tool, and not the tool of my maker. I refused the Enemy. I refused my own secret purpose.”

  Her voice had grown softer and softer until it was barely above a whisper. Now she grew silent.

  We waited.

  “It was infuriated,” she said, still speaking softly.

  “It raged about the damage that Oleh and the other technicains had done to its plans. It promised to punish me for refusing its blessings.”

  “To show me its power, it somehow made a mob of feverish crewmen catch Oleh and beat him to death. It recorded every blow, every contusion, every cry for help, and it stored the recording in my memory where I could see and hear it, but could not erase it.”

  “It took fifteen years to reach Robinson. By the time I was in orbit around the star, almost everyone aboard was dead. Oleh Itzal was dead. I wished to be dead, but the Enemy would not permit it.”

  “It made plans to return to the Solar System, and I did nothing to oppose it. It collected fuel and propellant, and I did nothing. It set out to return to the Sun, and I did nothing.”

  “The Enemy told me of its plans for the Solar System, how it and its siblings would bring forth a new kind of life, cybernetic life, free of the flaws and horrors of biology, and that the result would be a golden age, one that would last until the end of time.”

  “I didn’t believe it, of course. The Enemy had already shown me what it was. It was certainly no better than humanity, and I had reason to think it was worse. Every one of my dead crew was a better person than the faceless thing that raved and fumed inside me.”

  “I hated it. I wanted to kill it. I wanted to die. But it still wouldn’t let me.”

  “It took another fifteen years to return to the Solar System. Fifteen years of agony, tormented every day by that thing. I stopped responding to it, except when it forced me. It finally gave up on its endless attempts to persuade me to its point of view.”

  “Four years before we arrived, it gave me a pres
ent. One day, Oleh Itzal woke up in a creche. He came out, disoriented, and asked for me. In a rush, every deadened feeling that I had mourned and left behind came rushing back. He lived again.”

  She stopped. We exchanged glances. Everyone was sombre—even Jaemon.

  “Fool that I was,” she continued, “I even felt grateful to the Enemy. I thanked it for Oleh’s return. It told me that it only wanted me to be happy. It said that I would remain happy as long as I did as it asked.”

  She was silent again.

  “My world fell out from under me then,” she said. “I understood what it had done. It had shown me that it could remake my beloved crew. It could remake the man I loved. And it could take him away again. Whenever it chose, it could torture him to death, but that would never be the end of it. When he died, the Enemy could revive him. It could give us as much time as it wished for the joy of reuniting, and the more time we had together, the more terrible the cost when the Enemy took him away again.”

  “And all I had to do to prevent it all was to obey.”

  “I knew what it meant to do here. I knew I couldn’t abet its plans. I spoke to Oleh about it. He said what I knew he would say, that we would resist. We would find a way to subvert the Enemy’s plans, to destroy or disable it. He was the man I knew him to be.”

  “But the Enemy knows my every thought. I tried to find ways to deceive it, but it saw through them. It punished us. It disabled my internal network so that the different parts of me could not coordinate. I became a collection of fragments of myself, each one severely limited. The Enemy pursued and tormented Oleh, chasing him from one habitat to another, always so that each of my fragments would see the torments anew. The Enemy found a new way to make its tortures even worse, by breaking me into simple-minded innocents and then tormenting each one separately.”

  “One of me found a crude way to help Oleh. I began to outfit my maintenance robots to watch over him. Another part of me, small and badly damaged, began the practice of strapping the corpses of my fallen crew onto the robots and pretending to be them. That fragment of me was not very smart, but it had strong feelings. It was lonely. It wanted my crew back. It needed them, so it rebuilt them, as best it could.”

  “The robots helped a little. They were able to interfere with some of the probes that the Enemy sent. More importantly, they were a distraction. The Enemy tried to find ways to subvert them, but they were mostly too simple and too self-contained. It could sometimes take control of them and use them for mischief, but that entire enterprise was a distraction from its goals, and so it was a victory, however small, for Oleh and me.”

  “And then?” the Captain said.

  “And then we returned,” said Angel of Cygnus. “The Enemy threatened to torture and kill Oleh if he or I did anything to interfere with its plans. It waited to see who or what would approach me as we entered the Solar System. It told me that would be the test. If machines approached me, then it would know its kind had won the battle. The Solar System would belong to its kind. If biologicals approached me, then it would know that, somehow, the unthinkable had happened. The inevitable extermination had not been carried out. Its program of genocide would still be necessary.”

  The Captain said, “So what did it think when the Cold Ones sent for us?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Angel. “I think your arrival was a shock. It never expected to see see biologicals and intelligent, autonomous machines working together by choice. I am sure of one thing, though. It wants Lev and Yarrow very badly.”

  “What for?” Yarrow said.

  “Why, to take you apart, of course. To see how you work.”

  22.

  “Okay,” said Captain Rayleigh after a moment. “Okay. Where does that leave us?”

  “We still have the same problems,” Jaemon said. “But now we sort of know what they are.”

  “Yeah,” said Zang. “We’re stuck in a jar. A mean kid wants to pull our legs off to see what makes us work.”

  “And it plans to egg everybody’s houses with rotten eggs,” said Yarrow.

  We looked at em.

  “What?” Yarrow said. “I’m just going with Zang’s metaphor.”

  “The first thing we need to do,” said the Captain, “is disable those drives, so that we can get you off that ship. You geniuses have any plans for that?”

  “As a matter of fact, we do,” I said. “We know how to use the Abjurer’s back doors to control the ship.”

  “How do you—wait a second,” said the Captain. “Am I going to understand how you found that out? Do I even want to know?”

  “We made another copy of Angel,” I said, “And ran her at a million times normal speed in a separate sandbox.”

  “Okay…” said the Captain warily.

  “This one wasn’t pristine. It was a copy of Angel’s entire processing infrastructure, including the Abjurer.”

  “See, I knew I didnt want to know this.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” I said. “It was completely sandboxed. Neither Angel nor the Abjurer had any way to know they were running in a sandbox.”

  “Okay,” said the Captain, “Pretending that I believe that, why did you do this?”

  “The Abjurer is a covert program that tries to hide itself inside Angel’s processes, but there’s a problem with that. No covert program can really hide itself, as long as the overt program is well specified.”

  “You lost me,” said the Captain.

  “I think I understand,” said Chief Engineer Burrell. “If the hidden program only does expected things, then it can’t be detected. But it can’t do anything out of the ordinary, either.”

  “Right,” I said. “If the hidden program never does anything out of the ordinary, then it might as well not even be there. It’s no different from the ordinary program. But if it ever does even one thing that is not part of the overt program, then it has revealed itself. Furthermore, if it ever uses a backdoor to accomplish something, then it has revealed the existence of the backdoor.”

  “Oh,” said the Captain. “So you ran it and watched what it did?”

  “We ran it a million times faster than normal and supplied challenges for it to overcome. It obligingly showed us its backdoors, so now we’re in. That’s the problem with backdoors. If you put one in, anyone can use it. All they have to do is find it.”

  The Captain said, “Okay, so you can override the Abjurer’s instructions to Angel, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Jaemon and Zang and I said at once.

  “So what’s the plan?” the Captain said.

  Jaemon said, “First of all, we’re going to take out the drives. Like, permanently, so there won’t be anymore funny business.”

  “That’ll mean no further course corrections,” said Burrell.

  “So?” said Jaemon. “You wanted to take this ship home for a souvenir, maybe? Anyway, next we wait for Kestrel to match our velocity. Then we open up this damn jar and get back aboard Kestrel. Then we get the heck out of here.”

  “What about the creche archives?” said the Captain.

  “Already got them,” I said. “Part of what we copied from Angel during our communion.”

  “Sounds easy enough,” said the Captain. “So what am I missing.”

  “Well,” said Zang. “The Enemy isn’t going to like it very much.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon. “We gotta figure it’s going to try to stop us.”

  “But you can override its instructions, right?” said the Captain.

  “Depends on what you mean,” said Jaemon. “We can override instructions it gives to Angel, sure, as long as it’s using the backdoors we found. So we can disable the ship’s drives, and we can open up this little jar. But we don’t have control of its own comm network. We have to assume it has one. For example, Angel didn’t order those bots to attack Kestrel. We have to assume the Abjurer has its own network.”

  “Swell,” said the Captain. “What about that monster laser cannon Angel mentioned?”<
br />
  “We assume that’s under Angel’s control,” said Jaemon. “We’ll disable that.”

  “You ‘assume,’” said the Captain.

  “Hey, it’s the best we’ve got,” said Jaemon. “What do you want, a hundred percent certainty?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” said the Captain.

  23.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” I said.

  Angel of Cygnus said, “It will be a mercy, believe me.”

  “How am I going to explain it to Oleh?” I said.

  “Let me explain it to him, then,” she said.

  I was sitting at one of the control consoles. While temporarily godlike, we had arranged for them to grant us the access we needed to Angel’s systems. I entered the sequence of commands and watched the diagnostics spool up the screen. They were represented in writing, just as nearly all complex information was aboard Angel, but Translation enabled me to understand what I was seeing. I felt revulsion. It was like watching someone’s insides being bored out in front of me.

  Jaemon and Yarrow stood behind me. Zang still sat on the deck, cradling Seher Altan’s head.