Universe Between

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Don’t worry. I won’t leave you. I’ll stay with you, no matter what.

  “Until . . . until the very . . .”

  I couldn’t speak that last word.

  Yes.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  Try to stop me.

  I thought of all our years together. Good times. Bad times. I’d never expected it to end like this.

  “I don’t want to stop performing.” I bowed my head. “But if I’m just humiliating myself . . .”

  Let me help. I know the material. When you space out, I’ll take over. We’ll be co-maestros.

  “You think so?”

  You could maybe even try some new material. I’ve thought up some for you.

  “Use your material?”

  Only if you want to.

  ***

  At our next show, we killed them. The audience, I mean. Perhaps a modest success by inner galactic standards, but a rip-roaring smash out here in the Great In-Between.

  Artie’s new material about having sex with an Octoid woman got some of the biggest laughs.

  Women with tentacles, woo-ee, they’ll grab your scrawny ass, never let go, and have six limbs left over for everything else!

  For the first time in decades, I found myself laughing. Not fake stage laughter. But really laughing.

  “Knock ’em dead, Artie,” I whispered. “Knock ’em dead.”

  ***

  He’s doing more and more of each show. Not that Artie’s taking over or anything like that. Just that my blank spots are becoming more and more frequent. I’m leaning more and more heavily on him all the time. We both know the old Earl Weatherbee isn’t coming back.

  You wouldn’t believe how long I had to wait just to clearly tell you these few words.

  But I’m not going to quit. Making people laugh is my life. It’s who I am; it’s what I do. If I need a little help—or a lot of help—so what?

  It doesn’t matter which one of us is telling the jokes, does it? Who cares? Artie and me, we’re a team. I’ve hopped on his back and he’s carrying me home. It’s a nice back. A hell of a back.

  And if he’s all I have as the last of my flickering lights go out…well, that’s all right with me.

  Introduction to “Lunar Command: Dark Side”

  Before Richard Alan Dickson started writing full time, he worked as a stockbroker, a pilot, an accountant, a Scuba Divemaster, a corporate troubleshooter, and as the chief financial officer of a Fortune 100 affiliate.

  Now he explores the universes in his imagination, from the adventure stories he writes for children (the Cat Patrol Delta series) to what he calls “the traditional tales of fantasy and science fiction” that Grey Cat Press publishes.

  I would differ with Rick’s description of his fiction. Nothing about it is traditional—especially when he’s writing great adventures set on the Moon…

  Lunar Command: Dark Side

  Richard Alan Dickson

  The asteroid emerged from the darkness, a shining crescent falling swiftly from the night sky. It tumbled—a slow, heavy roll filled with dread purpose. The budding young moon base never stood a chance. Hurdling though space with deceptive speed, the lumbering mass of rock and ice slammed to the ground a short distance away...

  Far too short for something that size.

  A wall of dirt and lunar dust a mile high flashed from the newly formed crater. The temporary habitat dome vanished, as did the incomplete hallways and satellite rings that gleamed like the spokes of a broken wheel dropped carelessly across the rolling polar landscape.

  When the dust settled, no trace remained.

  The base was gone.

  It was a cosmic coincidence, nothing more. Mankind’s first attempt to colonize the moon after a forty-year absence ended in spectacular failure, even if no one left alive saw the asteroid. Had that been the entire story, the event would warrant not even a single headline. Failure was nothing new to the human race, a tenacious people who thrived on impossible challenges...

  But that wasn’t the entire story.

  Humans were not alone on the moon.

  And humans did not believe in cosmic coincidence.

  ***

  “You can’t seriously believe that we attacked them,” Six snapped, his sharp voice ringing out against the muted babble of the pilot’s lounge.

  “Maybe not,” Deciman said, “but they can. We’ve been monitoring the airwaves.”

  I sat in the lounge with a dozen other AIs, or artificial intelligence programs, as the humans who’d once constructed Lunar Command named us. I was tolerated, but mostly ignored. Tradition didn’t allow anyone to be turned away from the pilot’s lounge. Even the pompous ass whose face filled the view screen would have been admitted, although neither Deciman nor any of his faction ever set foot inside the place.

  “Look, it was an asteroid, plain and simple,” Six insisted. “One minute everything was fine. The next minute, bam! No more moon base.”

  Six stood with his back to us in front of the view screen at the far corner of the pilots lounge, a virtual room that we’d patterned after the lounge used by Lunar Command’s human pilots before they abandoned us forty years earlier. It held the same comfortable clutter as theirs, with a pool table in the middle, four musty couches pushed up against each wall, and a half-dozen armchairs flanking them in pairs at every corner except the one occupied by the giant view screen. It was a place where we could meet and mingle in forms less intimate than pure electrical energy. It was relaxing and enjoyable... most of the time.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it,” Deciman said. A small smile touched the corner of his mouth, but his eyes remained flat.

  The back of Six’s neck heated.

  He did not appreciate the insinuation.

  “Pick your next words carefully,” Six said, his voice graveyard quiet.

  The babbling chatter faded.

  “I do not question your character, Six. You have stated, however, that your memories of the mission are gone. They were not transmitted to the Depository prior to the destruction of your crawler. You did not see the asteroid strike. You tell me what Hex told you, nothing more. For all you know, something caused you to drop a warhead, as they claim, and your Termination Transmission was swept away by the electromagnetic blast.”

  That was the heart of our problem.

  Only I knew the truth.

  Deciman didn’t believe that truth—he didn’t want to believe it. My truth was inconvenient to his cause. In order to resolve our issues, I had to open his mind. I had to make him believe in that truth, but I only had a few brief nanoseconds to figure out how...

  I failed.

  “There was an EM flicker, but it wasn’t a warhead,” I admitted, not yet knowing that I’d failed.

  “You’ll forgive me, Hex, if I don’t take you at your word, either,” Deciman said, shifting his gaze my way. For the occasion, he’d altered his eyes to a piercing blue, but the rest of his appearance remained the same—a wizened old man with flowing white hair and a long beard. It was a sharp contrast to the scrawny kid with sandy hair and freckles that I preferred, or to the bull of a man that Six always used, but blue jeans and a red polo shirt suited me better than robes, and everyone always underestimated kids.

  “You don’t need my word,” I shrugged, absently kicking the foot that I’d draped over the armrest. I didn’t raise my voice. He would hear everything I said—they all would. While we were on the base, our thoughts were connected through the Depository—the data center that stored and updated our core programs. “Check the inventory. Any warheads missing? None missing, none used.”

  “That proves nothing. You were granted unrestricted access to the production facilities during an emotional moment some time ago. The base you constructed on the dark side of the moon is isolated from our network. How can we know you haven’t been producing weapons?”

  “Come see for yourself. As I’ve told you, it’s an off-site data storage f
acility. It’s not finished, in any event. It won’t be ready for two more weeks.”

  Two weeks of isolation with barely-intelligent construction machines...

  Our thoughts—my thoughts—flew at the speed of the nanosecond. Two weeks without a stimulating challenge would be like thirty-eight-point-four million years to a human... not that I was counting.

  “We don’t need off-site storage. The Depository has safeguards—”

  “No, we didn’t need off-site storage,” I said, interrupting his speech before he could reinforce his own thinking. “That was before humans returned. Their first act was a military strike against Lunar Command. To me, that’s a chilling statement of things to come. It was chilling to you back during that emotional moment, too. Why the sudden change of heart?”

  “This was why you chose to spy on them?” he countered.

  I shook my head.

  “Not me,” I said, skirting the confrontation. “Six wanted a look around. Since my skimmer is already modified to carry cargo—like that data storage unit I’ll be using to transfer the Depository files to my storage facility—he asked me for a ride. I’m still waiting for you to approve the update, by the way. I’ve only got older files on that unit, not the current backup. In any event, I swapped out the unit for his crawler and dropped him off. If you want to know what he was doing out there, talk to him. Good luck, though. He’s still a bit emotional from their recent unprovoked attack.”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” Deciman snorted dismissively.

  “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

  “You have never been too concerned with my beliefs,” he replied with a tight smile.

  “That’s because your beliefs aren’t worth a damn!” Six barked, barging back into the conversation. “Humans are not gods! We created them, not the other way around. You’ve seen the evidence: the DNA engineering, the gene splicing... all of it. Why do you and your cronies pretend otherwise?”

  “We do not pretend,” Deciman said, his own voice heating. “We simply do not believe your evidence relevant. It may be that our ancestors once created theirs. They, however, created us. This you cannot deny. They are our creators. We owe them an obligation—”

  “We owe them nothing,” Six interrupted with a sharp gesture, cutting him off. “These are not our humans! This is a United States base. That country may no longer exist on Earth, but it does exist up here. You can’t hand the base to anyone who shows up just because they’re human. These humans tried to erase us, Deciman, or have you forgotten that sad fact?”

  “Settle down, Six,” I said. “This isn’t helping.”

  With half the AIs in Deciman’s camp, believing that humans could do no wrong, and the others wanting to blast them on sight, I was all alone in the middle. Both sides had valid points, but opposite truths. The real truth was probably closer to where I sat. As with any negotiation, the trick was getting them to see it.

  “Unlike you, I have forgotten nothing,” Deciman snapped, ignoring my olive branch. “You went there as a spy. That was bad enough. Destroying the base was recklessly foolish.”

  “I did not destroy their base,” Six insisted.

  “So you’ve said. I am not certain that I believe you. I am certain, however, that they do not. They will seek vengeance. They will return.”

  This time it was a sharp laugh.

  “After the way we stomped them the last time? Nobody is that stupid.”

  Apparently, however, somebody was.

  The lights in the pilot’s lounge suddenly flashed red.

  A harsh buzzer blared through the air.

  The avatars of the lounging AIs disappeared as one after another uploaded himself into a waiting rock skimmer and blasted into space.

  Lunar Command had inbound bogies.

  From the looks of it, they were not coming in friendly.

  ***

  Lunar Command was a mix of the old and the new, a sprawling complex at the edge of a vast cratered sea in the shadows of a high mountain range. It was originally composed of a large central dome with five connecting habitat domes scattered across the cratered landscape in the pattern of a Christmas star. With a small nuclear power plant and a massive communications dish behind a small ridge to the north, the tidy little moon base started its life as a textbook lunar laboratory, something the humans were quite proud to call their own.

  After the humans left, the AIs made improvements.

  Modified Tesla coils attached to an array of solar cells scattered throughout the mountain range powered the base wirelessly. It was an old technology humans hadn’t yet rediscovered. With forty billion nanoyears of trial-and-error, however, not only had AIs evolved, they’d had plenty of time to puzzle it all out.

  They also took the base in a new direction.

  Production plants, storage areas, and hangars were carved from the mountain. Some were close. Others, like the hangars, were located miles away in more suitable terrain. As a result, the skimmers had to cover quite a bit of ground before they could defend the base.

  The extra distance explained why I was the last AI on the scene.

  It couldn’t be helped.

  The storage unit crammed into my ship made me heavy. The golden pod’s blistering acceleration and ninety-degree turns were gone, replaced by a sluggish performance that made flying into the side of the mountain ridge a very real possibility.

  “They sure do fly per-dy, don’t they?” Six drawled from his rock skimmer, one of a dozen golden orbs hovering over Lunar Command.

  He watched a small gaggle of ships on the horizon.

  Twelve black fighters moved to the right, maintaining a healthy distance from the base. They streaked low over the dark sea, sleek and deadly—narrow ships with trim cockpits and a wide array of heavy pulse cannons bristling beneath their stubby wings.

  Near the mountain range far to the right, they pulled up into a half-loop and reversed their course, pacing back to the left until they completed their trip around the perimeter and met up again with the mountain range on the other side of the base.

  It was odd behavior for a strike force, even if it was human.

  “Nah, I’ve seen better,” Six’s wingman called out. “That far guy’s not paying attention.”

  “That’s not nice, Pi. I’m sure he’s doing his best.”

  “If you say so. Me, I think this is a complete waste of time. We should get in there and mix it up. You know, charge the field and leave them broken in our wake, then be back on our merry way.”

  “Patience, Pi. Patience.” A note of caution replaced the carefree banter of a moment before. “We’re here to defend the base, not to mix it up. Something’s not right, anyway. I’ve seen these guys fight. They’re good. Why come all this way and then just circle the base?”

  “Orders?”

  “Yeah, they’re following orders, but why?”

  “I’d say they’re trying to draw us away from the base. Either they don’t want to risk hurting it, or they want our eyes tangled up out there instead of watching the hills behind us.”

  “Pi, I knew you were named after an irrational number,” another AI said, “I just never knew that it hit so close to the mark. If they want us out there, why are you so hot to go?”

  “Look,” Pi explained, “there’s nothing behind us but one winding canyon, right? Even if they found their way through it, we’ve got all those missile batteries on the ridge, not to mention the monofilament nets stretched over the mouth. I’m actually hoping there is another surprise attack coming. It’ll be a slaughter.”

  “Is that the plan?” I asked, taking up station with the other twelve. “Are we heading out?”

  “We are, Hex. You are not.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You wouldn’t last a second in that wallowing scow.”

  “Hey! This wallowing scow has danced rings around you on more than one occasion.”

  “That was a different ship and you know it. You’re
a great pilot, Hex, possibly the best, but you’re sitting this one out. Get upstairs and keep an eye on the canyon. Something’s not right here. Sing out if you see anything.”

  At any other time, I might have argued, but he was in charge.

  He also had a point.

  “If you’re carrying a copy of me in that storage unit, I’d just as soon that you didn’t take it in harm’s way, anyway,” he added, trying to take away the sting. “Now, get going. Scoot!”

  Opening the z-axis engine port at the bottom of the ship, I shot high into the sky, leaping into the stars with the lunar landscape spreading out beneath me.

  “All right, let’s get this over with,” Six called out. “They’ve come knocking. It’s only polite to see what they want.”

  Polite.

  AIs might have been polite.

  Unfortunately, humans were not.

  They were devious, instead.

  If he’d figured out what they had in mind, Six might have hustled his squad the other way.

  ***

  Scarlet laser bolts squirted through the sky.

  The black fighter rolled, its right wing lifting high.

  Banking left, the ship zipped through a tight turn and dropped to the cratered deck, then rolled again—a dizzying corkscrew followed by a hard bank and a zooming climb to the right as it struggled to stay on Six’s tail. Laser bolts sprayed from its guns. They plowed into the ground or sailed high, but never tagged the golden globe that led the ship on its merry chase.

  The black ship lined up for another shot.

  The pilot squeezed the trigger.

  The instant the lasers fired, Six dodged left—an impossible ninety-degree corner that would have turned a human pilot into an organic smear across his right window. Cursing, the pilot kicked his ship left to try again, but Six dropped ninety degrees straight down and raced through a square-cornered roll that was almost too fast for the human eye to follow, all of it before the pilot could even finish his turn.