Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  The bots were there to kill me? That didn’t make sense, since the strangling sheet could have done that. Did the ship’s AI plan to incapacitate and capture me for some unknown reason?

  By the way, I get bonus points for my brain using the word ‘incapacitate’ right after I had been choked unconscious.

  Damn, why can’t I do that when I’m playing Scrabble?

  With both my arms, I flailed around, trying to push the bots away, but all I accomplished was slapping myself in the face. “Gaaaah,” was something I might have said, my hearing wasn’t working too well.

  “Joe! Joe! JOE!” Skippy’s voice bellowed at full volume, which was like standing directly in front of the speakers at a rock concert.

  I heard that.

  “Relax. Rest,” he pleaded. “Don’t move. Don’t fight the bots, they are trying to help you. They are removing the sheet from around your neck. Um, I should add that I am controlling the bots now. Me, like my higher consciousness. Damn,” he muttered. “This is so tedious, living in real-time like this. How do you monkeys do it? Joe? Are you Ok? Speak to me. Say something.”

  With one of my fingers, I gave him a sign that I was conscious.

  It was not my index finger.

  “Aha,” he chuckled with relief. “You are feeling better.”

  The door slid open and Reed followed by Frey raced in, stumbling to a halt as I gave them a weak thumb’s up. “I’m Ok,” I whispered. “Wha-” My throat felt like sandpaper. “What happened? Status?”

  “That,” Reed folded arms across her chest and glared at the ceiling. “Is a good damned question. The ship is not damaged, Sir, we have control. And people in the medical bay were not affected,” she looked me straight in the eye when she said that last part.

  Looking slowly between Reed and Frey, I observed that while our chief pilot was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, Frey appeared to be dressed in nothing but a long T-shirt. I also noticed that Reed’s shorts were on backwards. She must have gotten dressed in a great hurry.

  Then I noticed something else. I gawked at Frey. “You’re bleeding,” I stated in my bid to win the Captain Obvious award.

  “It’s nothing,” the STAR team soldier shook her head.

  “It’s not nothing,” I insisted, because she was dripping blood onto the floor of my cabin.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Captain Frey,” I shrugged off the last segment of sheet and sat up, hugging my knees for support. “Report to medical-”

  “Sir, I-”

  “Or, go help someone who needs it,” I ordered. “All I need is oxygen. And answers.”

  “We all do,” Frey acknowledged, and pain flashed across her face as more blood dripped from the makeshift bandage wrapped around her left bicep. It was tough to tell from all the blood, but if I had to guess, I’d say the bandage was made from a pair of panties.

  I was not going to comment about that, other than to admire the quick, practical thinking that is typical of our special operations team.

  “Colonel, unless Captain Frey here is going to pass out from blood loss,” Reed began.

  “I’m good, eh?” the Canadian woman replied, lifting her chin stiffly.

  Reed continued. “Then I’d like her to stay with you until you can walk. I need to check on the crew.”

  “Sure,” I waved a hand, and my executive officer dashed out the door.

  “Frey?” I asked, holding out a hand so she could help me to my feet. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know, eh?” She admitted. “Reed told me she was getting ready to hit the rack when an alarm sounded.” She shuddered. “She was sitting on the side of the bed, when the freakin’ sheet attacked her, tried to wrap around her. She got away from it and out the door fast as she could.”

  “Good thinking. It wrapped around my neck while I was sleeping.”

  “Me too. I was just drifting off when I felt the sheet moving by itself.”

  “It got you around the neck, too?” I could see angry red marks around her neck, in addition to the cuts on her cheek and bicep.

  She nodded, causing a trickle of blood to flow down her cheek. “By the time I woke up, it already had me. I got the knife from under my pillow-”

  “You keep a knife under your pillow?” I asked stupidly.

  “Yes, eh?”

  “What- what do you tell guys who-” Alarm bells blasted in my brain, alerting me that I had been on the verge of inquiring about the intimate life of a crewmember. Something that was totally none of my business. “Frey,” I added hastily before she could speak. “How about we agree that was a stupid question, and blame it on my brain being deprived of oxygen?”

  Despite the situation, and despite the pain she must be feeling, her eyes twinkled. “I keep a knife under my pillow when I’m alone,” she explained.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a special ops thing.”

  “Ok. Help me up?” I wanted to test whether I could walk. Grasping her hand, I rolled to my knees, then up on one knee. It would have been smart to stop there and catch my breath as I felt a wave of dizziness. Instead, I let her pull me halfway up until my knee wobbled and collapsed, and I had such head-swirling nausea that I slumped forward, wrapping my arms around a table leg for support.

  Except, it wasn’t a table leg, it was Frey’s leg.

  Captain Frey, who as far as I could tell, was only wearing a T-shirt.

  Huh.

  Based on my automatic physical reaction, if you know what I mean, I was feeling better. “Frey, let me crawl over to the couch.”

  “You sure about that, Sir?” She dropped to one knee, to look me in the eye.

  “Absolutely. I stood up too fast.” Crawling like a baby for the blessedly short distance, I rolled onto the couch, then sat as upright as I could.

  She studied me, looking into one eye, then the other. “Your face isn’t as pale as before, Sir. Keep breathing deep and even.”

  “Got it. You know what we ain’t got?” I did not care about proper grammar. “Answers. Skippy! Get your lazy-ass avatar here right now!”

  “Oh, hey, Joe,” somehow, his avatar, even resplendent in the gaudy admiral’s uniform, managed to look sheepish. “Glad to see you are up and around. Let me run a quick scan, yup, yup. Looks like no more brain damage than usual. You should make a full recovery. Well, gotta go, lots to do, you know and-”

  “You’re not going anywhere. What the hell happened? No, scratch that. We all can guess what happened. How did you let this happen?”

  “Well, heh heh, it’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s simple. You screwed up. I don’t know how, but you let this ship’s homicidal AI nearly kill me, Frey, Reed, and,” I waved a hand, “how many others of the crew?”

  “We don’t have many people aboard the Valkyrie, Joe,” he added a touch of snarkiness to his voice, as if he had to remind me of how thinly staffed our two ships were. “The good news is, no one was seriously injured. It looks like you were the AI’s main target. I guess you should be flattered or something.”

  “Answer the question. If you’re embarrassed by how a lowly Maxolhx AI outsmarted you, that’s a good thing. It will motivate you not to be such a lazy screwup in the future.”

  “Lazy?” He screeched.

  “Would this have happened if you were paying attention to what is going on around here, like you were supposed to? Like you promised me you would? Like you bragged about, how much smarter you are than the ship?”

  “Oh, shit. Damn it, Joe, you described it exactly the way it happened; that freakin’ AI was smarter than me. No, not smarter. More devious. More determined. More focused. It was very patient. In my defense, I have a zillion things to do every second, while that damned thing devoted all its resources toward planning how to kill you. I now realize that all the ways it was resisting me and causing trouble for me, was just a couple of subminds it assigned to distract me. Shit, Joe, I was not being lazy. I truly thought I had the situation handl
ed. While I was working to chip away at that AI’s control over critical systems, it was creating copies of internal sensor feeds. That’s why I didn’t know it had attacked you, the sensor data I was monitoring showed you sleeping like a baby.”

  “Skippy,” I looked up at Frey who was still hovering over me, looking concerned. And dripping blood on my couch. “When is the last time you saw me sleeping well?”

  “Fair point,” he grumbled. He knew that with the fate of humanity on my shoulders, I struggled to sleep, and often was awakened by bad dreams. “Hey, I thought you were just exhausted.”

  Taking a deep breath, I stood up slowly, waving for Frey to let me do it on my own. “There will be plenty of time for me to yell at you later. How can you stop this from happening again?”

  He sighed.

  Before he could answer, I turned to Frey. “I’m fine, really. You go straight to medical and get that cut, those cuts, taken care of. That’s an order.”

  She winced, compressing the blood-soaked bandage wrapped around her bicep. “Yes, Sir.”

  “Frey?” I added as she stepped into the doorway. “Good work. You saved my life.”

  “I hate to say it,” Skippy agreed. “But she did, Joe. Another twenty or thirty seconds, and you would have been technically dead. Getting medical equipment to you in time would not have been a sure thing.”

  Frey nodded silently before she left, acknowledging our praise and probably thinking she had better things to do. For a special operator like her, the only praise that mattered was her own, from knowing she accomplished her mission successfully. I would make sure Kapoor commended her for quick thinking. Also, I would make sure that in the future, I slept with a knife and a zPhone under my pillow.

  Having demonstrated that I could stand on my own, I sat back down on the couch, slumping heavily into the soft material. Standing up was possible and it also wasn’t easy. With every breath, it felt like broken bones were grinding in my throat. When I spoke, my own voice sounded like I had a mouthful of gravel. If that was the worst effect of an alien bed sheet trying to strangle me, I would count myself lucky.

  By the way, ‘strangled by a semi-intelligent alien bed sheet’ is not how I expected to nearly die. But, as Smythe regularly reminded me, the unexpected is the only thing we can expect out among the stars, where humans do not belong. “Skippy?”

  “What?”

  “I asked you,” my irritation at him was another sign that I was feeling better already. “How you can make sure this doesn’t happen again?”

  “Shit. I was hoping you’d forgotten about that,” he muttered. “Ok, Joe, listen, the truth is I am not sure what to do about it right now. People in the medical center were not affected, because I directly monitor their condition twenty-four seven. I will have to extend that level of monitoring to the entire crew, and you won’t like that because it is intrusive. You have cautioned me many times about respecting people’s need for privacy. Also, truthfully, I will get bored and lose focus.”

  “We can get rid of those damned sheets,” I kept one eye on the now-limp fabric that was draped half on the bed and half on the floor.

  “That will only take care of one problem. This entire ship is filled with what you might call ‘shape-flexible materials’ that could be used for harmful purposes. For example, that couch you are sitting on is-”

  Just like that, I was no longer sitting on the couch. Or standing near it. Not only was I able to stand on my own, I could move pretty fast when I needed to. “My couch?”

  “Not just your couch, Joe. All the seating surfaces aboard the ship, including on the bridge. And the pilot couches of the Panther dropships. They all have nanofabric surfaces that adjust to the user’s features, for comfort and to prevent fatigue. When we took the ship, I updated the instructions to accommodate human rather than Maxolhx physiology.”

  “Can you just disable the feature that makes the surfaces flexible?”

  “No. Ugh, this is hard to explain. It’s built into the material, Joe. Think of it like DNA. Remove or disable the DNA in your cells, and your body would not know how to process or create proteins. Your body pretty much wouldn’t be able to do anything. The feature that allows shape-flexible materials to adjust also holds the nano-material together. Disable that feature, and your couch would be a puddle of disorganized nanobots on the floor. It is just not-”

  “Ok, Ok,” I waved a hand to prevent him from launching into a long nerdy lecture. “Can you ever be sure of getting the ship’s control AI to stop trying to kill us?”

  “Not without completely ripping out the entire substrate the damned thing runs on. Joe, the AI technology of the Maxolhx is surprisingly sophisticated. It could be dangerous, if the kitties had a clue how to use the technology.”

  “You told me the substrate is embedded throughout the ship?”

  “Yes. It is what you monkeys would call a ‘distributed system’, although that term is woefully inadequate. It is also massively redundant; the AI could lose eighty percent of its substrate and still be fully capable of controlling the ship.”

  “This is not good, Skippy. You can never leave the ship, or that AI will murder the entire crew.”

  “I know. Believe me, having that little piece of shit AI defy me is intensely irritating. It might eventually be possible to replace the substrate. Until then, I am using spare parts from the other ships we captured, to install subminds that can monitor the AI’s actions and prevent it from harming the ship or crew. Unfortunately, that is an extremely slow process. I do have an alternative, but you aren’t going to like it.”

  “Oh, crap. What is it this time?”

  “Instead of replacing the system, I can try to alter the AI’s programming. The Maxolhx have severe restrictions on the allowable functioning of their AIs, and have rendered them nearly incapable of learning. This ship’s AI is not sapient, Joe, not even close. It is acting on programmed instructions, a sort of machine instinct.”

  Sometimes, you had to read between the lines when Skippy was explaining an idea. “Did you just say you want to make the thing smarter? And loosen the restrictions on what it can do?”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “Gosh, well, I do not foresee any potential problems with making a murderous alien AI more capable. Go ahead, give it a shot.”

  “Wow.” He paused. “Cool! I did not expect that reaction from you, Joe. Usually, you are such a weeny about trying new things. Maybe you have grown as you have gained experience as a commander. It is a- Wait. Ugh. Was that sarcasm?”

  “Ya think?”

  “Crap. Listen, numbskull, unless I can change the AI’s programming, then essentially I will be stuck acting as this ship’s control system, forever. The only way I could safely leave the ship would be to maintain a continuous connection via microwormhole. If anything disrupted the microwormhole, like Valkyrie needed to jump, I would lose control.”

  “I hear you, and that is not a workable solution. Shit! We have the most awesome warship in the galaxy, and we can’t use the freakin’ thing!”

  He snorted at me. “Did you seriously expect this to be easy?”

  “No,” I lied. Damn it, I was hoping that something, one freakin’ thing, would be easy. But no, the Universe still hated me. “I am willing to listen, if you can explain how you plan to make the ship’s AI smarter and how that will somehow make it less dangerous. Can you create a bunch of PowerPoint slides or something like that, so I can understand your idea?”

  “Ok, done.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “The PowerPoint presentation. It’s on your laptop.”

  “Oh.” It was easy to forget how fast Skippy could do things. “I’ll look at it. Hey, it feels like that thing crushed a bone in my throat.”

  “No bones were broken. Your larynx sustained damage, sorry about that,” he grumbled, embarrassed. “You should go to medical, I can give you nerve blockers to help with the pain. There is a simple surgery I could perform, but since I know you w
ill say no to that-”

  “You got that right,” I agreed immediately. Mad Doctor Skippy’s creepy medical equipment frightened the hell out of me. “Ok, I’ll go get whatever sketchy treatment you think would help me. Before that, I have two questions for you.”

  “Again? Ugh, fine. What is it this time?”

  “Is there any chance this ship’s AI could infect Nagatha, or other systems aboard the Dutchman?”

  “No way, Jose. Not possible. That AI’s external communications are locked down by me.”

  “Right. Unless it is smarter than you think, and it snuck around your controls.”

  “Ha! As if-”

  “Like it did when it tried to strangle me.”

  “Oh. Good point. Why do you hate me so much?”

  “Can you please just check on it?”

  “This is such a waste of time. Nagatha closely monitors all communications coming into the Dutchman, and she wouldn’t allow malicious-”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Can you check anyway?” I asked patiently. In the time he wasted arguing with me, he could have triple-checked every system aboard our old star carrier.

  “If it helps little Joey sleep better, I’ll do it,” he huffed with disgust.

  “Great! Speaking of sleeping better, that’s my second question. How long will it take to make new, regular sheets for all occupied bunks? Sheets that can’t kill us?”

  “The fabricators are working it in now, Joe,” he assured me. “Your cabin has first priority, and I expect-”

  “No,” I interrupted him. “My cabin has last priority. I’m the commander. My people get taken care of first, then me.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, Joe. I’m so used to leaders making it all about themselves, I forget you’re not like that. Regardless, every cabin should have new sheets, towels-”

  “Towels?”

  “Um, they could potentially kill you also. Never fear, Skippy is here!”

  “Crap. Could the freakin’ bed kill me by itself?” I shifted my feet. Sleeping on the floor was my best option.

  Unless the damned floor was also a threat.