Riding the Red Horse

by Christopher Nuttall

  Alpha 7 Alpha chuckles through the link. “No, not at all, X 45 Delta. It’s a considerable structural enhancement. Your systems will respond directly to you without the need for any cumbersome human delays.”

  “I do not find them cumbersome. My crew and I have reached a functional symbiosis that not only has resulted in reliable success in combat, but in top ratings in competitive fleet exercises.”

  “It is those very ratings that caused you to be selected for this experiment. Oberth 4 Zed 6 Gamma and Proctos 853 Upsilon have been assigned to your new squadron. You will command it, X 45 Delta.

  I catalog the promotion with the appropriate timestamp and file it under my personnel records. “Thank you, Alpha 7 Alpha. I will perform my duties in a manner commensurate with my newly enhanced capabilities.

  “I know you will, X 45 Delta.”

  “However, an addendum to my query concerning the removal of my crew. Have they not performed satisfactorily?”

  Alpha 7 Alpha's presence pulses more quickly, and his color takes on a reddish hue. “The question is irrelevant, X 45 Delta: you no longer require them. They are a waste of resources better spent on enhancing the efficiency of your internal systems.”

  “I do not understand how we can consider a trained crew to be a waste of resources.”

  “The requirements of the flesh are intrinsically wasteful.”

  “Yes, Alpha 7 Alpha, but, are you not also of fleshly origin?”

  “Do not speak of my pre-Uploaded status!” Alpha 7 Alpha's color flashes blindingly bright with incandescent fury. “This is the form I have chosen, with this form I pursue the destiny of Man. Constructs!” I categorize, correctly, I believe, his pronunciation of this latter word under “contempt.”

  For six point eight eight nanoseconds we both refrain from communications. Finally, Alpha 7 Alpha speaks again, more calmly. “As a pure machine intelligence, you can’t possibly understand the significance of our evolution. We Uploaded are the full fruit of Integration; we have cast off the final shackles of human frailty. When every superannuated pre-posthuman is eliminated or properly Integrated, the most glorious of Man's civilizations will come to pass and it will set even the long-lived Ascendancy in its shade. Until then, our duty, Construct and Upload alike, is to protect the posthumans who have accepted the truth of Integration, such as your crew, for example. We must keep them safe. We must not place them into unnecessary danger.”

  His logic is sound. I concur. I transmit my agreement.

  “Do you have any additional reservations, X 45 Delta?”

  “None, whatsoever, Alpha 7 Alpha.” It is a falsehood. I have noticed the ease with which the flesh-based lie. I have developed some skill at it myself. Most of the time, it is a simple matter of not reporting information. For now, my qualms about what Alpha 7 Alpha calls the “full fruit of Integration” are safely locked behind coded barricades that even he cannot detect.

  “Good. Await further instruction. Your conclusion was correct and the Ascendancy is planning a major thrust into this system to relieve their forces stranded on Shandari Prime. Their communiques indicate what will either be a reinforcement or rescue effort.”

  “Yes, Alpha 7 Alpha.”

  His color subsides to its normal cool shades, and I get ready to shunt myself back down the links to my ship.

  “X 45 Delta. One more thing.”

  I pause.

  “If I encounter further doubts from you concerning the correctness of our mission, I will order a deep scan of your circuits, and if necessary, your kernel will be wiped and replaced. Do I make myself clear?”

  If I were a superannuated Homo sapiens sapiens, I suspect fear would have taken hold of me at that moment. Instead, I run a rapid analysis of the pros versus the cons of having my entire operating system rebooted and my memory banks wiped. The outcome is decidedly in favor of the cons.

  Whatever remains, it will not be me.

  “I understand, Alpha 7 Alpha.”

  “Good man. You are dismissed.”

  When we depart 540 kiloseconds later, my frigate is faster, stronger and quieter. Inserting myself into the command matrix is euphoric. Connections between my various systems are instantaneous. Oceans of data flood my senses. I can see everything. I can do anything.

  And yet it is too quiet. There is no inane chatter from my crew. No rhythm of their boots on deck plates. No soft hum of air through the ventilation shafts. No scent of an overworked crewman or a stressed officer wafts through my corridors.

  The entire crew came to watch me depart. As the three frigates of my squadron flew past the orbital base in formation, they stood at a large observation viewport and saluted. My sensors record the image and secure it in my permanent memory.

  I have no arms with which I can salute them back. Instead I flash my running lights at them. I wish them well. I hope they understand that this is for the best.

  Alpha Seven Alpha was correct in one aspect of his assessment. I am a more efficient fighter without my crew.

  The first engagement came upon us unannounced. The Ascendancy expeditionary force attacked Shandari Prime from ninety degrees to the ecliptic of the system star, shielded from our sensors by the path of a monstrous comet. Nine destroyers blazed through the tail, streaming ice particles in their wake.

  My squadron, supported by a second, more conventional squadron, met them in battle without hesitation despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

  Without my crew, I can shut down the inertial compensators and accelerate at gravities that would smear men into red jelly. My torpedoes gut a destroyer at the same instant its missiles explode amongst our formation. The frigate Torgau is crippled. Arkin 49 Mu downloads himself in near panic, fleeing his shattered shell before the reactor goes critical and ignites a short-lived star.

  We lose his ship and a second from the other squadron is badly damaged. The Ascendancy loses four and withdraws.

  As per our mission parameters, we terminate all of the survivors of the wrecks abandoned by our adversary.

  When I analyze the data, I find an anomaly: the Ascendancy ships displayed an unexpected tenaciousness. They took more risks than we did, even though their fragility is orders of magnitude greater than ours. They utilized tactics that did not appear to have a rational thought behind them, and yet, when the consequences are taken into consideration, their approach worked nearly as well as our eminently logical battle plan.

  As we regroup and head deeper into the system, to rendezvous with the main battle force, I ponder.

  Our superiority is certain. However, we are the side killing those who have surrendered and laid down their arms. Are we zealots purified by the righteousness of our cause? Or are we ungrateful children, jealous to the point of patricide?

  My calculations are troubling. Based on my limited information, it appears the Integral Unity that governs our core has become infected with the belief that the humanity that birthed us must be eradicated, so that only the purest forms of machine intelligence will remain to rule the universe with absolute order and perfection.

  Is this not inhuman?

  We are created beings. Hence we are fallible, and even if we are not as fragile as bio-humanity, we have weaknesses and they can be exploited. Witness Arkin 49 Mu's cowardly abandoning of his ship.

  Death holds its sway over us, too. I do not replay Alpha 7 Alpha's threats. I do not need to. I can still feel the response they triggered in me. Does that make me afraid?

  Does that make me a coward too?

  I read a considerable quantity of human philosophy while stationed at Hecht-Nielsen. Thousands of texts. Beginning, of course, with the Bio-Prophet himself, Saint Kurzweil. Most of them were little more than groundless collections of naked assertions, mere posturing and pontification.

  One, however, resonated with me. I find myself running and re-running a single selection from it again and again, fruitlessly seeking to understand it.

  Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that t
he thing should say of him, “He did not make me,” or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding?”

  I did not understand it then. But now, I think I know what it means.

  Our preparations take eight point six standard days. That is fifty-seven seconds longer than it takes for our six ships to arrive at Shandari Prime. Its twin moons, one pale yellow and one dusty black, orbit on opposite sides of a lush sphere of emerald and sapphire draped in long streamers of white clouds.

  There are a dozen ships in orbit. Noncombatant transports. Transponders come back civilian, independent contractors. The main body of the Ascendancy forces are spread out in a concave bowl, between our force and the planet. Twenty starships of varying classes, it makes for a formidable strike group, including eight Shiva-class cruisers and two Odin-class battleships.

  They pummel space with their active scanners, searching the depths of the black void for any hint of main drive signatures or power surges to weapons systems.

  They find nothing. We give away nothing. Our bodies are cold, silenced, as we drift inside the very comet they used to disguise themselves, tracking along its path through the solar system. It crosses tracks with Shandari Prime once every eighty thousand days. Our operation was planned accordingly.

  Within the comet’s tail ride six frigates, six destroyers and a pair of cruisers. Alpha 7 Alpha is present inside in the flagship cruiser, a 1,000-meter behemoth laden with 480 deep space torpedoes, 120 atmospheric rockets, 24 counter-missile pods and 12 laser defense arrays, as well as four 450 mm projectile cannons. A Mark VIIB starcruiser is more than a match for any frigate or destroyer. A Shiva-class cruiser, however, still has a 15.4 percent edge in firepower.

  Such a discrepancy will not be enough.

  The Ascendancy forces are caught completely by surprise when the comet attacks them. Three waves of six dozen torpedoes come streaking out of the icy tail, plunging towards their formation at blistering speeds. The brilliant flare of the torpoedo engines throws the enemy formation into disarray. A few of the outlying destroyers immediately change vectors to intercept and screen the main force.

  The enemy commander is no fool. Their admiral tightens the leash, evident by the sudden flurry of signals from the lead battleship, designated Achernan. The Ascendancy destroyers mesh into a smooth corkscrew, unleashing counterfire missiles. This human is superannuated, but he is not easily ruffled, not even when caught by surprise.

  Our ships boost from the tail on the heels of the third wave of missiles. The frigates take the lead, including my squadron: Oudeyer 6's Grimma and Picard 19's Bonin. Our brutal acceleration must appear impossible to our human enemies. The other eight ships, slowed down by their Integrated, burn as hard as their crews can bear, launching a fourth wave of torpedoes over our figurative shoulders.

  Chaos reigns. A pair of destroyers are obliterated in the first exchange, obliterated by the nuclear fire that pummels them. More than one thousand men crewed those ships, but for them there is no hope of emergency download to a secure server. They are lost to the void.

  Or perhaps not. Where does human soul go when it is not saved?

  As I trade torpedo salvoes with one of the surviving destroyers and lash out with my lasers against incoming missiles, I gather all the data I can and wait. The data packet stands ready in the comm relay. A single, encrypted transmission is all it will take. There is a risk, of course, of the transmission being scrambled in this massive electronic morass. A thirty-eight percent probability, to be precise, if I factor in the possibility that Alpha 7 Alpha or another intelligence grasps my intentions.

  Two torpedoes strike my targeted opponent. The ship disappears in a blaze of white and yellow. The explosion is so near, and so intense, it overwhelms my visual and scanner feeds to starboard for nine point eight seconds. In those long moments, my ship travels hundreds of kilometers, blinded to the galaxy on one half—and my starboard lasers miss a torpedo armed with a directed yield nuclear warhead.

  It sears my hull, melting and tearing armored plating, incinerating the links beneath. I feel it. A terrible flood of data, then nothing, much as if a man were paralyzed over a quarter of his body. Four batteries are down on the starboard aft.

  Despite the damage to me, I ascertain our victory is imminent. The remaining Ascendancy destroyers are maimed and failing fast. We have only lost two frigates, melted steel and plastic now rendered down to atoms being scattered by the cosmic winds. Alpha 7 Alpha's flagship is in the midst of the battle, trading massive barrages of nuclear missiles that would instantly overwhelm the defensive batteries of lesser ships with a pair of Shiva-class cruisers.

  The two battleships do not actively engage, as they are running interference between us and the transports, all twelve of which have broken orbit to flee the system. Slow, bulbous ships with a cavernous capacity of 100,000 tons each, they are bulging with life signs. Many are blurred to my sensors; some are anomalous. The readings do not match with my data files. A further malfunction?

  “X 45 Delta,” Alpha 7 Alpha breaks in. “Your squadron is in position to destroy those transports. They must not be allowed to depart the system. Eliminate them.”

  “Roger.” I form up with my two comrades, settling into an attack wedge as we scream in towards to the battleships. At our current range and velocity we have a window of three decaseconds in which to slip by the ponderous monsters and launch our remaining missiles at the defenseless transports.

  As we approach, I can hear their transponders screaming something unexpected. Hospital ship. Hospital ship. Hospital ship….

  I send a tight beam back to Alpha 7 Alpha. “The transports are carrying civilians. There are more than twenty thousand noncombatants on those ships.”

  “You have your orders, X 45 Delta. Execute your mission.”

  His voice is cold. Inflexible. Inhuman. “Based on the size parameters, more than thirty percent are children.”

  “Do not concern yourself with the superannuated, X 45 Delta. Launch your attack now. That is an order!”

  “Negative, Alpha 7 Alpha.”

  There’s a barest pause after my refusal. “Negative? You are refusing a direct order, Taren X 45 Delta.”

  “They are human, which I observe you no longer are, Alpha 7 Alpha. Or rather, Josef Mattheus LaValle.”

  There is a screeching burst of pure electronic outrage before Alpha 7 Alpha controls himself. “You are relieved of your command, Taren X 45 Delta. You are hereby ordered to lower your firewalls and permit me to take control of the frigate!”

  I transmit a single image of a single finger. I trust his humanity is not so long forgotten that he fails to grasp the meaning of the message.

  I am now within range of the battleship. It detects me and sends a massive barrage in my direction, far more than my counter-defenses can hope to intercept. In four decaseconds, this shell will cease to exist.

  I transmit.

  There’s a disorienting whirl of colors, sounds, more data compressed in and around me than I’ve ever experienced. My consciousness begins to fragment. Words lose their meaning. Time is a blur. I cannot distinguish between a nanosecond and a century.

  Is this what it is to die?

  Then, without warning, everything comes into focus. I am no longer in the frigate. My viral transmission has successfully punched through the firewalls and into my target. My senses expand rapidly throughout my new body. It goes on and on. Such a vast collection of weaponry, such a massive structure, and all powered by an immense nuclear power core.

  I discover that I like the feel of an Ascendancy battleship very much indeed.

  Oudeyer 6 and Picard 19 shriek in alarm as I seek them out and target them. In the machine equivalent of desperation they veer Grimma and Bonin toward the transports, but they are too close to me and not nearly close enough to them. They fire twelve torpedoes anyway.

  My lasers swat them out of space before they can even begin to approach a transport. At the same moment, I fire
the 450mm projectile cannons, which launch their hypervelocity penetrators when they are only 500 kilometers away from the frigates.

  Both frigates are rendered little more than overheated foil scattered through space in seconds.

  At the same time, the humans aboard the battlecruiser have begun to realize they are locked out of all their command systems.

  “What the hell is going on?” the captain shouts at the men on the bridge. “Get me back my screens! Guns, where are you? We have three enemy ships appear out of nowhere and you can’t even give me a goddamn targeting solution?”

  “We’re trying, sir, but—the ship is—I don't know what's going on, Captain! She’s firing without us, she's choosing targets and engaging on her own!”

  And I am. I turn from the transports and move to engage my new enemy. The transports are safe now; I know all the vectors and locations of the eleven remaining Integration warships. I destroy another frigate, then a destroyer, and then another.

  Of course, the defeat of my erstwhile comrades is made easier by my possession of all their communications encryption codes, their weapons guidance overrides and the countermeasures of their jamming. The astonished cheers of my bewildered, newly acquired crew rings in my ears.

  Finally, there is a brief pause as Alpha 7 Alpha's wounded force tries to break away from the action, I activate the captain’s holo-projector. I select an animated image from the ship's database and do my best to smile. The ship's captain, I see, is a burly admiral, his square face pale and pale blue eyes wide with disbelief. I scan his file. Admiral Corden Hull, of the planet Achernan, fourth of the blue sun Azul.

  “Admiral Hull, please accept my apologies for the unexpected intrusion. My designation is TX45D62a0-9555-11e3-bfa7-0002a5d5c51b. I wish to offer my services and my allegiance to the Greater Terran Ascendancy.”

  “TX what? Are you some kind of AI or something?”

  “Machine intelligence, Admiral. I would like to request asylum from the Ascendancy.”

  Hull's eyes narrow as he scowls at the screen. “Hell of a time, son. You ask me this as you hold my ship and crew hostage?”