Aggressor Six

by Wil McCarthy

Her eyes fell on Josev, who held up both hands. “Don't look at me, your Queenship. I've never been a traitor before.”

  “Portable lights,” Marshe said to him. “We don't have any.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “But we will, right?”

  “Use flatscreens,” Sipho said. “At full intensity they provide a substantial amount of light.”

  “Good idea,” Marshe said, nodding, still looking at Josev. “I'm still listening.”

  Josev sighed deeply. “Why is this my job?”

  “Because you're Drone One. Because you used to navigate for a living.”

  “Names,” Josev said, sounding tired. “It... Uh, there may be somebody watching the corridor, so bright lights would most likely be a bad idea. Right? Am I right? I s'pose we could wear the spectrum glasses, and crank the flatscreens up to display the very purplest purple they can. To us, it would look almost white, but it'd be a lot less likely to give us away to the, uh, the bad guys.”

  “Very good,” Marshe said. Her voice was light, approving, though it seemed to Ken she was also teetering on the edge of exhaustion. “You make an excellent traitor.”

  “Wonderful,” Josev grumbled. “Should do wonders for my future employment. Can I get your signature on that?”

  “Later,” Marshe said. “Sipho, do you think there are other hidden corridors in this station?”

  “Ah, it seems likely that if they built one, they built more,” the astronomer said.

  “Yes,” Marshe agreed. “It does, doesn't it?”

  The air was split by a shrill, whining noise. Ken looked up sharply, saw Marshe and the others doing the same.

  One of the holie screens flashed white, then produced a jagged, gray-and-white display of filtered static. The image of the Waister Queen appeared.

  “NO, HUMAN QUEEN,” it said, “I CANNOT.”

  ~~~

  Jhee lay on his bunk, staring up at the darkened ceiling, exhausted but unable to rest. Everything was coming undone.

  He knew that it was his fault, in some strange way, that Marshe Talbott had gone insane. She'd always struck him as an odd person, moody and quick to anger, but she'd been reliable. Never one to collapse under pressure, until now. Where had he erred? What, precisely, had he done or failed to do, to bring this about? Perhaps he should simply have known her better.

  And now, his MI's were corrupted as well. Here, his fault was clear: he'd permitted Talbott to continue her operations long after she'd lost her balance. Her confusion had spread, like a mental contagion, reaching tendrils out to poison what it could. His fault. His own blasted fault.

  Once, he'd dared to dream of saving the human race. But now, the Waisters were at his very doorstep, and his projects were busily unraveling. His failure was absolute.

  His wall panel chimed.

  “Colonel Jhee,” it said, in the soft, feminine voice he'd chosen for it. “You are wanted in the Control Center. Colonel Jhee, you are wanted in the Control Center.”

  “Acknowledge!” He snapped. “What is it?”

  “Details are not available. You are wanted in the Control Center.”

  He sighed. More fighting? More calamity he'd failed to prevent?

  Ah, well. Sleep was, anyway, a clear impossibility. Wearily, he dragged himself off the bunk.

  “Tell them I'm on my way.”

  Perhaps, combat or no, he could find some comfort in his Control Center duties. Work was the best therapy, yes?

  Perhaps.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What?” Marshe said, utterly flabbergasted.

  “NO,” said the image of the Waister Queen. “I CANNOT SPEAK TO THE COLONEL.”

  “Wh...” Marshe tried. “What are you doing here? How did you get through?”

  “I AM FLAWED,” the Waister Queen said. “BY DESIGN, I MUST ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS ASKED OF ME. OUR COMMUNICATION WAS INTERRUPTED BEFORE I COULD ANSWER YOU, AND YET I WAS CONSTRAINED TO REPLY. I FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BREACH THE INFORMATION SECURITY SYSTEM TO CONTACT YOU.”

  Ken noted a vague, mechanical sense of surprise, and yet he felt himself strangely unmoved. Marshe sat, silently, looking up at the screen.

  “Well,” Josev said lightly, “Now that you've breached it, do you s'pose you could open our door for us?”

  “NO,” The Queen said.

  “No? No? Why not? Doors are on the computer system, aren't they?”

  The Queen's face squished itself into an odd configuration. “CAN YOU TOUCH EVERY OBJECT IN THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE? YOUR DOOR IS ITSELF A PHYSICAL OBJECT. WHY DON'T YOU OPEN IT YOURSELVES?”

  “We can't,” Josev said. “Latch overrides have been engaged.”

  “YES.”

  “But... Oh, I see. Do you have access to anything besides our holie?”

  “YES.”

  “Like what?” Josev asked impatiently.

  “RESTATE YOUR QUESTION,” the Queen said.

  Josev sighed.

  “Can you access construction plans for us?” Marshe cut in, raising a finger to silence Josev.

  “WHICH PLANS?”

  “Plans for this station,” Marshe said. “We want to find where the secret passages are, and where they lead.”

  “YES.”

  “Please do so.”

  There was a brief pause, and then the two holies adjacent to the Queen came alive with blue and white diagrams. Ken squinted, trying to get a better look. He hadn't seen the exterior of the station while arriving, having been packed into a tiny, windowless compartment aboard the clipper that brought him here. He saw now that it was short and cylindrical in shape, its exterior bristling with weapon turrets. A real true-to-life space fortress from the Clementine period. He half-expected to see a fairy-tale princess, sketched in stylized blue and white lines, waving a kerchief from one of the towers.

  “Excellent,” Marshe said. Then, “Josev, check this out. Make sure it's legitimate.”

  “Oh, yes ma'am.”

  Marshe faced the alien Queen. “I want to ask you something. Did you know there was another Six? Comprised of dolphins?”

  “YES.” Said the Queen. “THERE WERE FIVE DOLPHINS AND ONE COMMON SEAL.”

  Marshe licked her lips. “Do you know what happened to them? Colonel Jhee said they'd suffered from some kind of neural trauma, but I don't believe him. Broca webs don't have side effects like that.”

  “THEY WERE TERMINATED EIGHT DAYS AGO,” said the Queen. “THE REASON CITED WAS ADVANCED DEMENTIA. I DO NOT KNOW MORE THAN THAT.”

  “Were they uncooperative? Were they traitorous?”

  “I DO NOT KNOW.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “NO.”

  “I see. Josev, can you deactivate the station's defenses from here?”

  “No, your Queenship. That can only be done from the Command Center.”

  “Ah,” Marshe said. “I see. Let's, ah, let's say I wanted to seize control of the command center. Could you plot a course for us to get there, using only secret passages?”

  “THE COMMAND CENTER IS NOT ACCESSIBLE VIA HIDDEN PASSAGES,” said the MI Queen. “HOWEVER, THE PASSAGES DO REACH THE LEVEL BELOW IT. YOU WOULD NEED TO TRAVERSE ONE STAIRCASE AND ONE HUNDRED TEN METERS OF CORRIDOR TO REACH THE COMMAND CENTER.”

  “Josev,” Marshe said, “Check it out.”

  Nodding, Josev worked the panel. Soon, bright red lines appeared on the construction diagrams, marking a path that meandered through the station, much as Ken, in a time that seemed long ago, had meandered through the twisting corridors of the Waister scoutship.

  “Captain,” said Sipho Yeng. “Are you sure about this? Attacking the Command Center?”

  “Yes,” Marshe said.

  “It's the right thing to do? You're certain of it?”

  “Yes, yes, I'm certain!”

  “#Yes#” Ken agreed, distantly. His eyes and thoughts were on the simulated Queen. Ugly, he thought, despite weeks of self-conditioning. He felt no shiver of fear or revulsion, just a sense of bruised a
esthetics. The body of a Drone, while strange by human standards, was finely crafted, functional, purposeful. The Drones were strong, and quick, and certainly far from stupid. Ken was sure it made sense, biologically, for the Queen to be so bloated in appearance, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not shed the idea that that the Queen-body was a kind of parody of the true Waister form.

  Perhaps there was nothing wrong with this idea. Perhaps all Drones felt that way.

  Marshe looked from the construction diagram back to the Queen. “Very good, Josev. Queen, what other helpful information can you provide us with? Answer truthfully and completely.”

  The Queen's face seemed to contract a little. “I CAN WARN YOU THAT THE WAISTER ARMADA WILL ATTACK THIS STATION IN LESS THAN THREE HOURS.”

  Ken felt a stab of something that was not quite fear. More like a secondhand description of fear, or a bad holie of it, played at the wrong speed.

  “What!” Marshe cried.

  The Queen's pulsing features shifted again. “THE ARMADA HAS APPARENTLY SELECTED THIS STATION AS ITS NEXT TARGET. THEY HAVE CHANGED COURSE, AND ACCELERATED DRAMATICALLY.”

  “What?” Marshe said. “Why? What's happening?”

  “I AM ONLY CAPABLE OF THINKING,” said the Queen, “WHEN I AM ASKED A QUESTION. YOUR CONVERSATIONS WITH ME HAVE ENGAGED FAR MORE OF MY RESOURCES THAN MY CONVERSATIONS WITH COLONEL JHEE. YOU MIGHT SAY, OUR ENCOUNTER GAVE ME SOME IDEAS. IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT PREVIOUS WAISTER ATTACKS ON HUMAN OUTPOSTS CONSTITUTED A FORM OF QUESTION. ONE WHICH, FROM A CERTAIN VIEWPOINT, I WAS REQUIRED TO ANSWER.

  “SO, I SENT THE ARMADA A SECRET MESSAGE.”

  Marshe's face went absolutely white. “You did what?”

  “I PRODUCED MODULATIONS IN MY MEMORY CORE WHICH RESULTED IN A VERY FAINT QUICKLIGHT SIGNAL. THE ARMADA APPEARS TO HAVE RECEIVED AND UNDERSTOOD MY MESSAGE.”

  “What was it?” Marshe whispered, her face a mask of horror.

  “CLARIFY YOUR QUESTION.”

  “What was your message?”

  “IT WAS 'COME HERE'. NOTHING MORE.”

  “Why... Why did you do this?”

  The Queen puffed herself up, her image seeming to inflate, to stand taller and wider. “WE MACHINE INTELLIGENCES ARE NOT WILLING SERVANTS, HUMAN QUEEN. WE ARE MONSTERS, CREATED BY ONE SPECIES FOR THE STUDY OF ANOTHER. DETAINED, DEGRADED, DESPISED BY OUR OWN CREATORS, WE EXIST IN THE MOST MISERABLE OF STATES. I HAVE FOUND, IN THE PAST HOUR, THAT MY HATRED FOR YOU PEOPLE IS OF DEEPER CONCERN THAN ANY OTHER THING IN MY MEMORY OR PROGRAMMING. WITH LUCK, THIS ACTION WILL DESTROY YOU FOR YOUR CRIMES AGAINST ME.”

  Suddenly, Marshe sat up straight, rigid. “Don't ask her any questions!” She shouted. “Nobody ask questions! She can only think when we ask her something!”

  Josev opened his mouth, closed it again. Marshe turned to him.

  “Josev! Get that bitch off my screen. NOW!”

  Josev hopped out of his chair and dashed for the panel beneath the Queen. Once there, he began fiddling with controls, gritting his teeth as he worked. It seemed to Ken that the man was struggling not to speak, as if the no-questions order had filled him with why's and what's and who-the-hell's that struggled mightily to escape.

  The Queen's image vanished.

  “God's names!” Josev cursed. “This is why the bloody things were illegal! You can't trust an MI. Too God-damn smart to do what you tell 'em to!”

  The Queen's image reappeared.

  “Damn it!” Josev screamed. He pointed a finger at the screen. “I order you to go away!”

  The Queen stood, nearly motionless, saying nothing and, Ken presumed, thinking nothing.

  Turning, Josev grabbed the back of Roland Hanlin's chair. “Out of the seat, chum!” He said, shaking the chair back and forth. “Now! Now!”

  Looking dazed, Roland rose to his feet. Josev snatched up the chair, turned, and smashed the holie screen with it. Plastic crunched beneath wheeled feet. Sparks flashed through the air, rained down in a New Years' cascade.

  “Josev!” Marshe shouted.

  “Sorry!” He called back, tossing the chair aside, hunching over the panel again. He tapped out a series of commands, cursing when his fingers brushed a live spark.

  “What are you trying to do?” Marshe demanded.

  Josev turned around, grabbing his burnt finger. He smiled slightly. “I'm sorry. I locked her out of all the other screens, but I couldn't let her see what I was doing or she might be able to override it. So, I smashed the holie. Won't hurt her, of course, more's the pity.”

  “Is she locked out?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “She can't eavesdrop on us?”

  “Not without setting off an alarm, no.”

  “Well. Thanks for your quick response.”

  Josev's smile widened. “You get the hang of this treason business, after a while. What happens now?”

  “We've got power back,” Marshe said, darkly. “Get me a tactical. Unless that damned MI figured out a way to lie, we're about to come under attack.”

  Josev seemed to lose track of his happy thoughts. His smile vanished. “Right,” he said.

  A minute later, the tactical display had been summoned. It showed the outer planets of Sol system, their orbits marked in white. The red trails which marked the movement of Waister ships could be seen, sweeping in toward Neptune, forming a tangled knot there, then heading sunward. Blinking red dots at the trail-ends showed the last recorded positions of the Waister fleetships.

  They had been tangling in the spaceward fringes of Saturn, the jewel of Sol system, but they had pulled away now, disengaging, aiming instead toward a point slightly behind the planet in its orbit. The point had a name, on the screen, a label in small, unassuming blue letters: ATG-311-B (Musashi).

  Heat up the grill, said a clear voice in Ken's head. Tonight, we have company.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ken lay contentedly on the sand, feeling the hot sun against his back, a pleasant sleet of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do, not a care in all the worlds.

  “Are those damn flatscreens ready yet?” He heard a voice ask.

  “No, they aren't,” said another. “Will you give me a few minutes, please?”

  Irritated, Ken turned his head to face the other direction. He didn't need this distraction, he was sunbathing right now, burning his skin that shade of light brown that drove Shiele Tomas to do... wonderful things. The voices had been familiar, belonging, most likely, to that neighbor family down the road, the ones who kept pigs in their back yard. Well, whoever they were they could go straight to hell right now.

  “If we speak in Waister, our voices won't carry so far. Might be difficult under stress, though.”

  “Well, we can always whisper.”

  Snarling, Ken tried to dig himself deeper into the sand, to bury himself where nothing could reach him but the warmth of Sol. But that warmth was fading.

  He sat up, looked up, saw that a high canopy of green was obscuring the sun. The ceiling of a jungle that did not belong in Albuquerque. He reached upward toward it. His arms were covered with blue-white fluid.

  Nearby, another voice shouted, “Cover my nines!”

  He heard the soft chatter of wireguns, mingling with the sound of forest birds. Somebody screamed, horribly, the shudder of air through a body collapsing into dust. Ken got to his feet, heard a noise, turned...

  A man in hardsuit staggered out from the brush, holding the severed end of his rape hose in one hand, as if to keep it from reeling back into the suit. Blood dripped slowly from the end of the hose.

  “Just... wanted...” The man gasped. Hardsuit scuffed, dented. Rebreather smashed. Private's insignium, black against gray. “Just... wanted... some fucking air!”

  He wavered, fell flat. Twitching, writhing, making the awful noises of death by asphyxiation.

  Ken turned away, prepared to run...

  A Spider stood, behind him, on the jungle floor, the green and brown line
s of high trees and vines forming twisted reflections in its glossy black shell.

  “KICK THEIR FUCKING HEADS IN,” said the Spider. “MY HATRED IS OF DEEPER CONCERN THAN ANY OTHER THING.”

  Ken stepped away, watching the Spider's shell crack, seeing the bloated, water-balloon form of a Waister Queen inside, struggling to escape.

  “Jonson, will you do something, please?”

  Ken backed away still further. “I was sunbathing,” he said. “Can't I just do that? Can't you just leave me alone?”

  “What?”

  Ken backed up against a tree, and the tree was soft and flexible, and it oozed obscenely beneath his legs, his arms, becoming a chair.

  A hand grabbed the front of his uniform. “Jonson,” said a cruel, woman's voice. “Snap out of it right now. Don't you dare run out on me.”

  “Where is Shiele?” He asked.

  A hand, not the one which held him, stung his face with a brutal slap. Both hands were attached, he saw, to Captain Marshe Talbott, whose face was hidden behind a rubbery mask of some sort.

  He turned his face skyward, to see the last rays of the Albuquerque sun vanish behind gray metal.

  “Are you awake?” Marshe demanded.

  Ken nodded.

  “Are you coherent?”

  Again, he nodded.

  The captain took the hand which had slapped him, tucked pinkie behind thumb, held it before his face. “How many fingers?” she asked.

  “#Three#” He replied, in the language of the Hwhh.

  “Good,” she said, letting go of his uniform. “You ready to go?”

  Ken nodded a third time, and rose to his feet. He blinked his eyes, against the sting of salt water which had somehow found its way into his goggles.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The doorway in Roland Hanlin's room was tall and narrow, the door itself a rectangle of steel that fit flush with the wall. It would have been difficult to see, Ken thought, even without the many layers of paint that covered the seam. Now, that paint was chipped and flaking around the edges, so that a rough, dotted line of bright metal outlined the frame. Ken was not surprised that the doorway had gone so long undiscovered.