by Tim Pratt
Stephen swiveled toward the other bed, frowning. “My tests are promising. The regenerative drugs have done remarkable work, even over the past few days – as of this morning, his brain scans are now identical to those of a healthy person who’s never had a brain-spider clinging to their skull. Whether that’s improved his personality, I couldn’t say, but he’s not brain-damaged any more. Any time Elena wants to do another simulation with Sebastien, she’s welcome. It’s possible he won’t try to murder her this time.”
Callie hmmed. “Maybe I’ll run his next simulation.”
“Really? I thought the theory was that interacting with Elena would be more effective, because they were friends – she’ll be better able to reach him, and provoke an empathetic response in his abused brain.”
“That’s the theory, but look at the practice, and the evidence from the simulation she ran with Ashok. Sebastien thinks he can trick Elena – and he might be right. He can deceive her a lot more easily than he could me, anyway. I’m not waking him up and letting him walk around on my ship in the real world unless I’m sure he’s not going to murder everyone – and even when I am sure, I’m going to have Shall follow him around with one of the little snatch-and-grab drones we brought from Glauketas.” The pirates had a cache of small bots loaded with non-lethal suppression measures, from tranquilizers to nets to stun-guns, designed to neutralize targets selected for kidnap and ransom. “Maybe it’s time to test Sebastien against the worst case scenario: me.”
“You’re the captain,” Stephen said. “You might want to mention your plan to Elena first.”
“We’ll talk about Sebastien later, assuming we live that long. We have more pressing concerns, like figuring out where this swarm came from, and how to turn it off. I need to go see Lantern, and figure out our next move.”
“Oh? You haven’t already figured it out?”
Callie smiled. Her XO knew her well. “Of course I have, but it’s always gratifying to have someone knowledgeable tell me I’m right.”
Callie floated into Ashok’s machine shop – and then fell onto the floor, thudding down hard. “Ow.” She scowled, getting up and rubbing her knee as Ashok rose from behind a work table.
“Crap, cap! Sorry, I’ve got a gravity generator going in here. Drake and Janice like it floaty, so I didn’t do the whole ship, but it’s just easier to work in here when down is down.”
“Ow,” Callie said again. Then: “Maybe we should set this up for my quarters, too, and the infirmary. Can you put it on a switch, like the lights, so people can turn the gravity on and off as needed?”
“I can cobble something together, sure.”
Callie nodded. “It’s not a priority, obviously, but when you have time. Where’s the squidlet?”
“Is that a term of endearment?” Lantern clambered up onto the same tabletop Ashok was standing behind. What had they been doing back there, on the floor? Just engineering, Callie thought firmly. Curse Elena for putting thoughts… of cross-cultural communication… into her head.
“It’s a term of endearment when I say it, anyway. Is the term offensive to Liars? I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You call my entire species Liars,” Lantern said. “The Free are used to humans insulting us.”
“In our defense, ninety-nine percent of you lie almost all the time about almost everything, including what you want us to call you.”
“That is true,” Lantern said. “Anyway, you should hear some of the things we call you.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard worse.” Callie dropped onto a stool. She could get used to this gravity-on-demand thing. “So. This swarm of nanomachines. They were made by the Axiom. Do you know how I know?”
“Yes,” Lantern said.
“Wait,” Ashok said. “I don’t know how you know. I don’t even know what you know. Why don’t I know?”
“Nobody knows everything,” Callie said. “Not even you. The reason our ship is still intact and Q’s ship is swarm food is because we have one of those, and Q didn’t.” Callie nodded toward the greasy black cube on a nearby table, hooked up to cables that snaked into the depths of the ship’s propulsion and navigation systems. Their greatest treasure, their most dangerous weapon, the reason Meditreme Station had been destroyed and the reason they’d been able to rescue Elena’s crew from the Axiom space station: their personal bridge generator.
“Yes,” Lantern said. “Many Axiom systems are designed to protect, or at least not harm, other Axiom property. There must be sensors in the swarm. They scanned us, detected the bridge generator, determined we were Axiom servants – because at the height of their empire of extermination, no one but Axiom or their servants could possibly possess such technology – and spared us accordingly. Q’s ship was… less fortunate. But I am confused about something else.”
“What’s that?”
“My working theory was that whatever killed the surveyors also killed the local cell of truth-tellers,” Lantern said. “But their station has Axiom technology on board, too, so the swarm should have left them alone. Maybe the cell has gone dark for some other reason, though as you say, it’s unlikely there are two mysterious deadly situations happening simultaneously.”
“Huh,” Callie said. “Is the truth-teller station nearby?”
“In astronomical terms, yes, but it would take days to reach it by conventional propulsion – we like to stay well away from the local population.”
Callie nodded. Lantern’s cell back home was hidden deep in the Oort cloud. “We’ll check up on the station as soon as we can, and you can see how your fellow genocidal zealot lapdogs are doing.”
“Only the elders of my sect are knowingly loyal to the Axiom, Callie,” Lantern said firmly. “The junior members, like I once was, truly believe we’re protecting the people of the galaxy from the Axiom – not protecting Axiom projects from interruption.”
Callie nodded. “I know, I know. It was a bad joke. We won’t go in with weapons hot or anything… and I hope the innocent junior truth-tellers turn out to be OK. Maybe the station is just suffering communication problems. For now, though… tracking down the source of that swarm is the most important thing. It’s going to keep eating ships, and Almajara is going to keep sending ships to look for its missing property, and eventually the Corp will send a force too big for the swarm to eat all at once, and some will make it back alive, and then word will get out. I’m not just worried about the Axiom in that situation. Uncle Reynauld would love to get his hands on gray-goo-level nanotech. He is not a responsible individual. He has a strip mine for a soul. If he managed to isolate some particles, study them, and program them to his own ends? Ugh. That would be the worst.”
Lantern said, “Dealing with the Axiom requires discretion and delicacy – if they feel threatened, if their security systems even feel threatened, they could destroy Owain. Does your ex-great-uncle-in-law possess those qualities?”
“Reynauld is about as discreet as a spaceport crash and as delicate as a sledgehammer.”
Shall cleared his non-existent throat over the room’s speakers. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Uncle Rey. We have a more pressing issue. I’ve done some calculations, and it won’t be long before the swarm finishes chewing through that segment of the asteroid belt and moves on to eat Owain.”
Chapter 17
There was a moment of shocked silence, which Callie broke, rather inelegantly, by saying, “Wait. What?”
“Based on my limited observation of the swarm’s activity, I’ve made some extrapolations,” Shall said. “The swarm was devouring its way through the asteroid belt, but along a fairly narrow path. The swarm doesn’t seem to be following the ring around, which would keep it occupied for a long time. Instead, it’s chewing its way straight through. I think it’s just devouring the asteroid belt along the way to its actual target: Owain itself.”
“How the hell does a swarm of dust-sized machines even know there’s a planet in the system?” Callie said. “I thought the s
warm was purely reactive, just eating anything in its path?”
“In its path,” Lantern said. “That suggests it has a path. The Axiom have a bridgehead here. They had charts of the system. Even their automated systems are smart enough to examine the available data and direct the swarm accordingly. Owain is the greatest conglomeration of matter in the system, and is the obvious target. Converting an entire planetary mass would be faster and more efficient than picking at asteroids here and there. A planet’s worth of mass spread across thousands of kilometers of space in a huge orbital ring is harder to convert than a planet’s worth of mass neatly compacted into an oblate spheroid. The swarm is just consuming and converting anything it encounters on the way to Owain, because that is convenient.”
Callie did not like this theory. She’d been feeling pretty smart and pleased with herself for figuring out why the swarm had spared them, and now she felt two steps behind again. “Are we sure the swarm has a plan? Maybe it’s just some ancient machinery that got turned on accidentally, and it’s just drifting around eating what it finds. Hell, it could have been chewing on the asteroid belt for decades, and it’s just that nobody noticed until surveyors stumbled on it and went missing. Right?”
“Ah, no,” Shall said. “Not right. Wrong. Because of exponential growth.”
“Yes,” Lantern said.
“That’s true,” Ashok agreed.
Callie scowled. “Use your words, people.”
“The swarm should be larger than it is,” Shall said. “Much larger. If it’s been operating in the asteroid belt for a minimum of six weeks, it’s converted countless metric tons of matter into copies of itself already. The cloud should get bigger with every asteroid it eats, and once it’s bigger, it can eat even more asteroids even more quickly, and so on, exponentially, until it goes from consuming a few asteroids an hour to a few asteroids per minute to a few per second – and so on. The classic exponential growth curve for self-replicating machines was laid out by the ancient philosopher Eric Drexler, who posited a single such machine, making copies of itself, with every subsequent copy making copies of themselves. Say it takes a thousand seconds to make one copy – in the first thousand seconds, one copy is created. In the next thousand seconds, each of the two replicators makes another copy of itself. In the next interval, those four replicators build four more, and then those eight build eight more. Within a day, there are tens of billions of replicators, and despite their microscopic size, they weigh more than a ton. Before two days pass, the replicators have more mass than the planet Earth. A few hours after that, they have more mass than all the bodies in the solar system combined – including the sun. The growth rate curves that fast.”
Callie thought about that. “Damn,” she said at last.
“The swarm seems to replicate rather faster than one copy per every thousand seconds,” Lantern said.
Ashok nodded. “This entire system should have been converted by now – instead, the swarm has been slowly munching its way through the asteroid belt for weeks, at least.”
Callie considered. “Right before we thought we were going to die, Shall, you said the swarm, what, has a tail?”
“Yes,” Shall said. “I detected a steady stream of hot particles, moving away from the system, toward the outer darkness.”
“So most of the matter the swarm is converting is being sent back someplace,” Callie said. “That’s why it hasn’t gone all exponential on us. Why? Where’s that matter going? What’s it being used for?”
“I shudder even to speculate,” Lantern said.
“Huh,” Callie said. “Sounds like there’s a trail, though. And we can follow a trail, right back to its source.” She smiled. “This is just like your thing about the ants, Lantern.”
“Ants?” She sounded baffled.
“Right after we met, when you were first telling us about the Axiom, and trying to convince us to leave them alone, you said humans were like ants. If we see a single ant walk across a picnic table, we ignore it. If we see a couple of ants, and they’re heading for our food, we brush them away. But when it’s ten, twenty, a hundred ants, or a thousand, swarming all over our food, crawling into the house, getting into our clothes – then we get pissed off, and follow the trail of ants back to their nest, and burn them out. You were afraid that if humans kept messing with Axiom facilities, we’d become that swarm of ants, and the Axiom would wake from their slumber and destroy us.”
“Ah, yes, I remember,” she said. “I still think it is an apt metaphor.”
“Me too. The swarm went from nibbling on rocks to nibbling on ships to nibbling on people, and we’ve noticed, and we’re pissed off, and we’re going to follow the trail back to their nest… and burn it out. Shall, coordinate with Drake and Janice, and let’s start following that trail, at a respectful distance. I don’t want to test our immunity to the swarm too vigorously.”
“Aye, captain,” Shall said.
Callie turned and strode out of the machine shop, thinking, “This time, we’re the exterminators, and the Axiom is the ants.” She stumbled when she hit the null-gravity in the corridor, momentum carrying her until she banged up against the far wall. “Ow,” she said. Way to spoil a good exit line.
Elena waited in Callie’s quarters, sitting in a chair (thanks to thrust gravity) as they powered along, following the tendril of heat swarming above them. The door opened and Callie stepped in, smiling, and then stopped smiling when she saw Elena’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“I asked Stephen how Sebastien was doing, and he said good, and I said I was ready to do another simulation, and he said you want to do it.”
Callie raised up her hands. “I was going to talk to you about that. Like, right now. As in, I came in here to talk to you about it.”
“So talk.”
Callie explained – in rather more diplomatic terms than Stephen had – that it might be time to test Sebastien a bit more stringently, against a less sympathetic audience. Elena didn’t think that, after being attacked in one simulation and locked in a shower in another, that she was all that sympathetic any more, but she conceded that Callie was even less so. She also recognized that Callie was trying to protect her from another round of pain and heartbreak. “What if I said no?” Elena said finally.
“I’d respect your decision and try not to worry about you too much,” Callie said.
Elena sighed. “I know you would. I know you’re right – or at least, not entirely wrong. Even after everything, I still have a soft spot for Sebastien. But you have a hard spot for him.”
Callie scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue. “That sounds kind of dirty.”
Elena shook her head. “No jokes. You hate Sebastien, don’t you?”
Callie seemed to consider the question seriously. “Hate? It’s not that strong. I don’t have a reason to feel good about him, though, Elena. I hope you’re right, and there’s a good person in there, and that we can bring him out again. I hope your friend can be recovered. It’s not hate. It’s… caution. I approach the situation with a certain amount of skepticism. Which could be a good thing, if we want to make sure he’s really himself again.”
Even if she met with Sebastien and he seemed fine, Elena had to admit, she would wonder if he was just playing her again. She made her decision. “Just give him a fair chance, all right? Expect the worst, be prepared for that, I know you always are – but leave yourself open to the possibility of the best.”
Callie bowed her head, then looked up. “All right. I will. I just… don’t want you to get hurt. Hope is great, until it becomes…”
“Delusion?” Elena said.
“Dangerously unrealistic, let’s say.” She softened. “Do you want to sit in and watch? You could plug into the simulation without an avatar, just an invisible observer hovering on the ceiling, looking down on us, yelling in my ear if I do a bad job.”
Elena considered, then shook her head. “No. I trust you. It’s important that I trust you. I’d like y
our opinion. About whether it’s worthwhile to keep working with Sebastien, or if it’s a waste of time. Whether Sebastien should just be locked up in a cell on Glauketas, or plugged into the Hypnos for the rest of his days. I still don’t think he deserves punishment for the things he did, but he might require… containment. I know that.”
“I’ll observe with an open mind and tell you what I think,” Callie said.
“When are you going to do it?”
She shrugged. “The trail extends into space for quite a distance, as far as our sensors can tell, and we don’t want to jump ahead via wormhole bridge, since we don’t know what’s waiting for us at the other end, so. No time like the present, right?”
Elena rose from the chair and gave Callie a kiss. “Thank you. I know having Sebastien on the ship feels a lot like having a ticking bomb on board to you.”
“We’ll disarm him,” Callie said. “Don’t you worry.” She stood up, then frowned and lifted her arm, gesturing to the corner. “Did you see, it was like a shimmer…”
“What?” Elena looked, and didn’t see anything but an empty corner.
Callie shook her head. “Nothing. My eyes are tired. Just a touch of space madness.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Elena said.
Elena helped fit the Hypnos diadem onto Sebastien, then came over to adjust Callie’s, looking into her eyes for a long moment, fingers lingering at Callie’s temples. “Good luck in there,” she said.
When in doubt, fall back on bravado. “Luck is for amateurs.” Callie gave Elena a wink, then closed her eyes.