Swarm

by B. V. Larson

  I had to think about that one. I supposed that I was, as Star Force wasn’t exactly a nation. “Yes I am. Are we talking about a Congressional Medal of Honor?”

  “That’s what they call it. I guess they really need a war hero about now.”

  After I hung up, Sandra was upset with me. “You don’t have to go.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I told her.

  She crossed her arms under her breasts. Her eyes were half-closed. I felt a sudden urge to grab her and kiss her. But I knew that if I did, I would be rebuffed. She was clearly annoyed.

  I threw up my arms. The newly regrown one gave me a stab of pain as I did so. “How can I build a new set of weapons, then recruit another thousand guys to die fighting with these experimental guns against giant robots, and stay home shivering in this ship?”

  She sighed and relented, sitting on the couch next to me. “I don’t know. But I wish you would stay out of it this time. Somehow.”

  Sandra stared at me for awhile, and I stared back. Suddenly, she threw one of her long brown legs over mine and sat in my lap, straddling me. We made out fiercely for several minutes. It was good.

  As suddenly as she’d climbed aboard, she jumped off again. I had to fight to control myself. I almost lunged for her, but I stopped. I’d just gotten my own arms back, and it wouldn’t do to accidentally yank off one of hers. She gave a little laugh and had no idea how I was feeling. Or maybe she did.

  I could tell she wasn’t going to give me any more sugar at the moment. So, I decided not to beg for it. Women never respected that. I headed into the shower. Lord, how I needed a shower. The water was hot and I stayed in it for longer than usual.

  Sandra surprised me in our makeshift shower stall about one minute before I was going to get out. She wrapped her arms around me from behind. We kissed and touched. It was even better than it had been out on the couch.

  “Incoming private channel request from Admiral Crow,” said the ship, interrupting.

  “Not now, Alamo.”

  The ship was silent for about thirty seconds. I made the best use I could of each second. Sandra was really beginning to respond, and we’d moved several steps past kissing.

  “Incoming urgent channel request from Admiral Crow.”

  “Admiral Crow?” asked Sandra. “When the hell did he make himself into an Admiral?”

  “Do you accept the incoming channel request?” droned the Alamo. Sometimes, the ship really did sound like a computer.

  “Just answer,” sighed Sandra, putting her wet head against my chest, “or they’ll never let us alone.”

  “Open channel, Alamo,” I growled.

  “You there, Riggs?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You on the john or something?”

  “Something like that, sir.”

  “Well, I’m calling because you’ve gone bananas, and—well, I have to tell you Riggs, right now I’m thinking of demoting you.”

  I snorted. Sandra tensed against me. I patted her back, trying to relax her again. This man was a master at ruining a good mood.

  “What’s the problem, Crow?”

  “You’ve gone and overstepped yourself. Grossly. I’m in charge of this fleet. You know that, right?”

  “That was the deal.”

  “Well, then why are you negotiating a new force of star marines, or whatever you want to call them, without my approval? Why are you offering to give away one of our most amazing technologies without even telling me?”

  I pursed my lips. “I have to admit, you have a point. I was too focused on solving the problem to worry about approvals.”

  “Well, tell me why I’m not going to cancel all your arrangements and rip some stripes off of you.”

  This was more than Sandra could take. Throughout the conversation, I could feel her body getting more tense against mine. She had a temper. And she seemed particularly defensive when it came to me. I supposed that was a good thing.

  “What do you want his stripes for, Crow? You sew new ones on yourself every other damned day. Did you run out?”

  There was a moment of silence. I looked down at Sandra. She was lovely, wet and naked. There was a wild look in her eye. I should never have agreed to talk to Crow, I decided.

  “Is that Sandra? Ah—now I get it!” he burst into laughter. “That is a shower I hear running, isn’t it? I need to figure out how to get video feed out of this communication setup.”

  -27-

  After an irritatingly long talk, Crow came to see things my way. I agreed at length to consult with him before proposing things like new armies or technology giveaways. By the time Crow and I had finished talking, Sandra and I were dry, dressed and out of the mood. At least, she seemed to be. I hoped I hadn’t gotten myself kicked out of her shower stall for good.

  I played it cool, however. Exhaustion helped with that strategy. I was simply too tired and hungry to care much. I ate a big meal of chicken, cottage cheese, canned peaches and cold broccoli. It was filling, but lackluster. I resolved to have the camp people build a better eatery. Maybe I could put a real kitchen aboard the Alamo as well.

  After I ate, I slept for a good dozen hours. Sandra startled me by curling herself up against my chest, about half-way through my sleep. I figured this had to be a good sign. I felt so tired however, it was like being drugged. Maybe the Nanos had drugged me, for all I knew, as part of their ministrations. Or maybe it was just a natural reaction to exhaustion and gross injury. In any case, I fell back asleep again without so much as molesting her. Hours later, when I woke up, she was gone.

  I awakened with a fuzziness in my mind. I’d had strange dreams and even stranger ideas in my head. I’d dreamt of the home planet of the Nanos. They’d been created—in my dreams—by blue men with huge eyes and even huger skulls shaped like inverted pears. It left me with the thought when I awoke that I needed to know who had sent these machines to Earth. Who, and why.

  I’d tried to get this information from Alamo before. It had come up many times over the last month or so. But the ship had been programmed to avoid answering such questions. It was part of the Nanos’ internal, unchangeable programming to keep their origins a secret. Either that, I thought, or the ship truly didn’t know.

  “Alamo? Are you listening to my thoughts?”

  “When your mind forms word-thoughts, they are transmitted to my receptors.”

  “Yeah, close enough. What did you think about my dream? Did you see the blue men, with the big heads?”

  “Visual imagery is not relayed.”

  “Hmmm. Let me describe them, then. They were blue guys, about four feet tall. They were humanoid, but blue-skinned. They had big eyes and big heads. Very big heads, as if their brains could hardly be contained within them. Do the creatures that created you look anything like that?”

  “I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

  “So, your creators are not blue-skinned?”

  Hesitation. This, I’d come to recognize, signaled deep thoughts were going on inside whatever served the Alamo for a CPU.

  “No,” the ship said at last.

  I stood up suddenly. I took a deep breath, and almost whooped aloud. The Alamo had answered a question on this taboo subject. I was onto something.

  “Alamo… your creators are not machines, are they?”

  “No.”

  A smile split my face. Stupid machine. It had been programmed not to answer any questions about the creators. But it hadn’t been programmed not to answer questions in the negative. In other words, it could talk about what they were not.

  I began pacing. I should have thought of this before. It was like hacking. There was almost always a work-around. When you programmed a machine, it was hard to think of all the possibilities. You might create what seemed like a perfect set of instructions, but given input you never thought of, the program behaved in a fashion you had never intended. Anyone who has ever had to unplug their computer after a particularly bad crash knows something about that
.

  I thought over what I had gotten out of the Alamo so far. The people who created the Nanos were not machines. That seemed pretty obvious. The ship had admitted they didn’t have blue skin, either. Big deal. But what were they like? Where were they from? Certainly, if they wanted their identity kept secret, it seemed likely they were afraid someone might come looking for them. Maybe the Macros didn’t know where they were. Maybe the Macros would like to exterminate the biotics who had had the gall to build ships like these and send them out to help other races fight against their invasions.

  “Your creators are not in this solar system, are they?”

  “No.”

  Big news, there. They were interstellar. That was the first concrete evidence. It was one thing to suspect something like that, it was another to know it. I was excited. You couldn’t compete with beings you knew nothing about. I was desperate for information.

  “Your creators don’t come from a planet like Earth, do they? It’s not a warm, wet world, is it?”

  “No.”

  I blinked at that. Life, but not from a water-world. What other kind of life was there? This might be harder than I thought to figure out, if they were something weird like a silicon-based rock-creature.

  “Are they from a planet with higher or lower gravity than Earth?”

  “I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

  “Of course. Forget that question. That was a mistake. What I meant to say was that your creators do not live on a gas giant, like Jupiter, do they?”

  “I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

  I frowned. Had I made a mistake? Had I tripped some warning line? Had the Alamo learned from my repeated questions what I was after and adjusted itself to keep me out? I decided to repeat a previous question to see if I could backtrack to where it was answering informatively.

  “Your creators are not machines, are they?”

  “No.”

  I heaved a deep breath. I had not blown it. The ship had not locked me out. I had just asked something the wrong way. But what was it? Then, after thinking about it, I thought I had it. The ship couldn’t answer in the affirmative about its creators. It could only answer negative questions, with a negative response. Anything else would be blocked. This conclusion brought my smile back, because it meant that a negatively worded question that it refused to answer meant yes.

  “So, the creators of the Nanos are biological. They come from a gas giant like Jupiter, in a star system outside of our own. I’m really starting to get somewhere.”

  The ship stayed quiet. I was beginning to understand the Alamo. My statement had been analyzed, and it had decided no action was necessary. I hadn’t asked a question. I hadn’t given an order. From its point of view, there was nothing to do.

  I sat down and typed out an email to the Pentagon people. If the Macros showed up right now and I was summoned up to fight them and the Alamo was destroyed, I wanted this information to be transmitted to those who might find it useful.

  “Okay, Alamo, we can discuss your mission, can’t we?”

  “You are command personnel.”

  “Yes. And what is your current mission?”

  “To obey command personnel.”

  “What was your mission before the current one?”

  “To locate and gather command personnel.”

  “Exactly. And what was your mission before you were to locate and gather command personnel?”

  “To gather information on biotic species.”

  Ah, I thought. Very interesting. The ship was a science vessel, an explorer, before it was sent on this mission to find people to staff it. But why? Why didn’t these aliens just man the ships themselves? As I thought about it I came up with some simple reasons. If they were far away, the space flights might take too long. Maybe the oceans between the stars were so vast, even for the creatures that created the Nanos, that they couldn’t cross them. Or maybe they just didn’t want to spend their lifetimes in a ship. I’m sure that when Earth eventually sent out her first exploratory ships to other star systems they would be robotic.

  I thought it might be more than that, however. This was a war. The Macros had been showing up in waves themselves. They had to be coming from somewhere. So why had the creators of the Nanos sent hundreds of their lightly-armed science vessels to Earth without sending some of their own people to man them?

  I thought about what kind of life might exist on a world like Jupiter. Heavy gravity. Radiation. Harsh gasses creating an atmosphere thousands of times thicker than ours.

  “Alamo,” I said, pausing to carefully phrase my question, “your creators can’t leave the gravity well of their planet, can they?”

  “I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

  “Ah,” I said aloud. That was a surprise. They could leave their gravity well. That wasn’t what had stopped them. I had thought maybe the pull of their world was so great that it had left them with no choice but to send up tiny robots to do their space exploration for them.

  I thought about gas giants. What kind of creature on Earth had any kind of similar environment? Perhaps a deep-sea creature? Something from the cold, dark depths? What were they like? Then, I thought I had it.

  “Your creators can’t survive outside the gravity well of their planet, can they, Alamo?”

  “I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

  I laughed aloud. There it was, a clear yes answer to a negative question. They were something like deep-sea fish. If you pulled them up into space, they popped. They could not tolerate weightlessness. They were accustomed to a crushing gravitational pull. Maybe their internal organs couldn’t operate without gravity. Decompression could be controlled, but the suddenness of a launching spaceship might be deadly to them. They probably would explode. That’s why they’d sent the Nanos out here to explore for them. Because they couldn’t do it themselves and survive.

  What a great curiosity they must have! I imagined the frustration of an intelligent, technological race, stuck down upon a gas giant with an impenetrable atmosphere. They had probably never known what was up there, beyond their dense skies. They would have never known there were stars and other worlds. They’d probably barely understood they were circling a sun. The atmosphere of such planets was so dense. No technology I knew of would be able to gaze up through it.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the more these answers the Alamo had given me made sense. Nothing aboard the Alamo was built for a sighted creature. What use would a window be on the surface of a gas giant? On Jupiter, there would be little light or visibility. It would be like living in a permanent, thick fog, or at the bottom of an oceanic trench. On Earth, the creatures we’d found in such environments were quite blind. So, the beings that had built this ship hadn’t built windows or view screens into it. Such equipment would never have occurred to them. Still, they had to have some way of sensing a three-dimensional environment. The Nano ship certainly did. Maybe they used sonar, like bats or dolphins. Or perhaps they used a radiation sensor, such as the heat-sensing organs of snakes.

  Sandra showed up sometime during the following minutes as I pondered the strange beings who had built the Nanos. I sat there, staring at my computer and periodically marveling at the walls around me. Somehow, knowing just a little about the aliens that had built the ship made it seem all the more impressive. I saw their ship in a new light. I hated them less too, for having indirectly killed my kids. Maybe they had sent out these ships with the best of intentions, but the robotic nanites had executed their programming in a typically merciless way.

  “You’re awake,” she said, giving me a light kiss.

  I blinked, staring at nothing. In my mind, I saw creatures on dark, clouded worlds. Were they floating gas-bags? Or maybe dense flatworms that crawled upon the surface?

  “Hmph,” said Sandra, miffed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What has you so entranced?”

  “You do.”

&
nbsp; “Liar.”

  I told her about the talks I’d had with the Alamo. I described the method I’d used to trick information out of the ship by asking questions it hadn’t been programmed to refuse. She seemed alarmed that I would discuss my trickery so openly while the ship was listening.

  “I assure you, it won’t matter. This ship isn’t a person. It is an artificial intelligence. And it isn’t really that bright. It can do what it can do, but it isn’t a fast learner.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But it had better not be plotting to dump us out for espionage or something.”

  I described the beings who had built the Alamo, and she was as intrigued as I was about them.

  “They live under crushing gravity?” she asked. “How can they survive? What do they eat?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t think anything could live on such worlds. But we have discovered life in nooks and crannies around Earth where no one expected to find anything.”

  “They are afraid of the Macros,” she said, with sudden conviction.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they’ve worked hard to hide their homeworld from everyone. And they sent out these ships to find people to help them fight. They must have surveyed a lot of worlds, and when they ran into the Macros, they changed the mission to one of marshaling armies with their science vessels. Maybe, back home, they are secretly building battle fleets now.”

  I thought about that. “You have a good point. If they had known about the Macros when they launched these ships, they would have built warships and sent them instead. What we are sitting in is a converted science vessel. That’s why it takes twenty of them to face a single Macro ship.”

  “What should we call them?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “These people who created the Nanos. You figured out they exist. You get to name them.”

  I chuckled. “Well…” I said, thinking about names describing worm-like blind things. None of them were attractive or catchy. “I’ll call them the Blues.”

  “Are they blue?”

  “No.”

  “Why that then?”