Misjump Page 26

  The armed merchantman had its laser turrets deployed now and fired on the already damaged Rockhammer. The radio crackled to life, the usually clear signal marred by static. “This is Tromp. We have critical damage. Abandoning ship.” The modified Camel IIs had lost their escape pods in favour of armour, but the men were suited and could survive in open space for a while. Seconds later, the airlock blew open, the explosive bolts fired and the air rushing out, blowing two suited figures out. They would be retrieved if there was anyone left to do so. Gregor gave the order to give the Tromp some room in case it blew. He sensed a shift in the pattern of the attackers. They were changing targets to the Sarafina. They must have worked out that it was the flagship and giving orders. Gregor thought of what Lori had said. They are more intelligent when there are more of them together. “Fumi, I—”

  Fumi cut him off. “Already on it. Defensive. You direct the battle. I will fly.” The Sarafina started random precessions, the display changing to a tactical to avoid confusion. The battle was clearer like this. Gregor could see the cutdown Rockhammers weaving through the debris and making themselves almost impossible to hit. The two paired greenie ships were trying to take them out with laser fire, but the predictive algorithm didn’t seem up to the job. The new type of missile boat was trying to rise above the debris field while targeting the Sarafina. The two shell ships that just contained missile racks were swinging wide to bring fire from a different angle, trying to confuse the opponent and overload their attention. Given what they now knew about greenies, that seemed unlikely to work. The other Rockhammers were giving supporting fire. The flingers seemed to be holding weapons tight—with so many ships in close proximity, firing into the mass was dangerous. The big flinger would still be recharging.

  Suddenly, the two cut-down Rockhammers changed course, making a run on the greenie merchantman. That was a mistake—it was a big ship but represented the least threat. The ships wove and bobbed, following a drunkard’s path as if they planned to ram. They were firing lasers, but they had missiles, and they should have released those already. They were too close now. If they launched, the blast would take them out too. He reached for the comms, about to give an order that it was already too late to follow, when the ships skimmed over and under the enemy merchantman, firing their missiles in salvo, into the flank of the missile boat. The launcher on that side disappeared in a bloom of flame as the two attacking ships peeled off, pushing the limits of their structure. A chain of secondary explosions rippled through the missile boat and the halves of the hull separated. The two missile rack dummy Rockhammers shed their shells a moment later and started firing into the mass of enemy ships at the jump point. The merchantman changed target, using the lasers defensively for the first time. It took out a missile and then another, the beams almost invisible, sparkling when a fragment of debris crossed into their path. Another missile failed to dodge debris and exploded, showering shrapnel and taking out the missile behind it in a secondary explosion. The remaining weapons kept closing, accelerating hard even as they reached their target. Four slammed into the top hull of the merchantman, the second pair disappearing into the body of the ship before detonating. Secondary explosions bloomed for moments before the greenie ship became still, flames following the escaping air, clearly dead.

  The paired greenie ships started to pull away from the centre position that they had held and Gregor realised that they must have been acting as a command ship. That was why they had hung so dangerously close to each other. The sensible action for them would be to jump back and report, but they would need to pump fuel across for the jump if they had not already done so. Had they been in normal space long enough to have done that? It was dangerous to do in jump because it changed the centre of gravity, but it could be done. Would they be turning for the re-entry to Tau space?

  A gout of plasma appeared on the side of one of the ships, lancing through the body of the craft and into the other one of the command ship pair. That had to be the big flinger. Had it just recharged or had it been waiting for a clear shot? Gregor didn’t know, but it wasn’t important just then. He gave the order. “Target the paired ships, all weapons free.” The twin ships drifted but returned laser fire for a few seconds before falling silent. The attacks of the Rockhammers pummelled the hull without the greenie ships returning fire. It slowly became apparent that there were no more enemies to fight. The pilots of the friendly ships desperately searched for a target, their bodies telling them that there was still danger, but no new enemies appeared. The battle of Ironstone was over. There was a moment of peace, an impossible calm after the pace of the rapid battle, nothing moving but fragments. A moment later, the Tromp’s reactor blew, showering the area with fragments and several of the surrounding ships were hit.

  Gregor looked down at the display, his hands still shaking with adrenaline that had nowhere to go and saw the message indicator. He had missed it in the heat of battle. He touched it with a wavering finger and read the message from Ivo. Slowly and quietly, he began to weep, alone in the cockpit.

  Chapter 29

  The crew of the Tromp were posted to the Sarafina. After losing Jax and Fumi, the ship had spare quarters. They were bloodied and bruised, mostly from the ejection from the airlock, but they would heal. The damage to the surviving ships was relatively minor and they would be fully operational in a few days. The psychological injuries were worse. For some of the rockhounds, that was the first time they had seen a battle, and this was not some abstract chess game in space where one ship tried to gain position on another. This had been close and hard fought with corpses drifting in space after the victory. It felt all too much like defeat even if they had only lost two ships.

  The ships still covered the volume of space where the jump point was but it was unlikely that another attack would come so quickly. If the greenies had additional forces readily available, they would have sent them. It was more likely that they had not had meaningful resistance for many years and that they would need time to ratchet up the response. The advantage was with the defender, but the limiting factor was manpower. The defence force had an entire system’s worth of resources, but they lacked manpower. The next stage in reclaiming Ironstone should solve that problem. Meilin called the meeting as usual. There was a sense of order to her that made her well suited to organising things.

  Gregor opened the meeting. “So, we won. Whatever else, remember that we won. We took losses and that is shitty but it happens. We held against the best they could send and we should be proud. It won’t be last fight we have. It won’t be the last one we win. We took six ships for the one they took. We lost Blade to surface fire, but what we do next means we won’t lose any more ships that way. Dr Hernadez and Ms Takahashi, report please.”

  Lori spoke. “The mission to spread the nanites was a success despite losing the Blade. The Fist managed to deploy all of their packages. We don’t know how many the Blade managed before it was shot down, but it was apparently most of them. We will need to get closer to the planet to get telemetry, but we have reason to think that better than fifty percent of the nanites would have made it to ground level and, if they have reproduced as programmed, the majority of the hosts are now infected. Within seventy-two hours, we expect to have virtually no hosts over about twenty-five kilograms free from nanites. We will be throwing the switch as soon as it is safe to do so. We planned to enter the atmosphere with multiple ships and broadcast the trigger command, but given the attack from the ground, we have changed this. We will be dropping relay transmitters from orbit and relying on them to send the signals. Ivo Kevic is working on them currently and we should have them available within the next forty-eight hours. Are there any questions about that?”

  “Zeek here, House of Orange. What’ll be the first thing that we want the controlled greenies to do? I understand that we will have millions of them, but what the heck are we going to do with them?”

  Fumi took the question. “First off, restrain any greenies not under our contr
ol. The second thing will be to disable any defences that we find. The third is to stop the conversion of any humans. We would like that to be the first priority, but we are talking about minutes here and we need to secure control before we can do anything else. After that, we are looking at longer term goals, but the first will be to replace the radiation sources with microwave relays. They are not great for human health, but they will be a lot better than radiation. We also need to change the purpose of the hosts. The parasites ran the planet for their benefit. We need to convert it over time to a human purpose as well as providing more materials to help us to hold the system. We are about to win a foothold, but it is a big galaxy. The fight is just beginning.”

  “Yeah, okay, I get that,” said Zeek, “but it seems to me that we are replacing one master with another. They are still slaves. I don’t feel all that easy about that.”

  Lori took the question. “I would be worried if you did, but what we are doing is better for the hosts. Without the hard radiation, they will live longer. Maybe some of them could, with proper stimulation and treatment, become self-aware to a degree, but Oscar isn’t and couldn’t be without a lot of changes. We think that they are effectively vegetables with maybe the potential to be more, but the important thing is that the next generation will be fully human. We have a responsibility here. We are rebuilding a society, practically a whole species. We need to do it right, and we have no idea how. I am not just uneasy about that. I am frankly terrified. We don’t have any better options. It is this or kill them outright”

  “Yeah, I take the point, but how do we know that there are not other systems that have managed to seal themselves off? There might be other people out there,” said Zeek.

  Lori shrugged. “Maybe. I certainly hope so. I don’t see any way that we can know at this point. We can search, and we will take back other systems. The fight is not over. We have barely started.”

  #

  Three ships fell inward, the Sarafina, the Fist and the Iron Maid. The holds were mostly empty, the twenty transmitters that each carried only filling a fraction of the space. Deployment would be simple. A crewman in each cargo hold was suited up and would toss them out of the open hatch, much as had been done with the nanites but from a higher altitude. The placement would not be precise, but they would have enough overlap that this shouldn’t be a problem. Each ship would hold back three transmitters to fill any gaps. The Rockhammers performed orange peel orbits with some gaps in deployment since the transmitters were all required to be on land. The Iron Maid flew closest to the point where the Claw had been brought down as it had no actual crew. Oscar was launching the packages from that ship, controlled by the AI.

  Each of the transponders reported back when it landed. Only one failed, and the gap was quickly patched. Fumi frantically checked and adjusted the orders that would be going to the modified nanite AIs, increasing the priority of obtaining food and water. They would need to look at improving the available supplies, but they had at least a few days for that. Finally, she was happy with the orders and slowed down to a human time frame. Nearly three minutes had elapsed. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Is anyone not okay with me sending the order?” she asked.

  Gregor looked around at Ivo, Lori, and Meilin. No-one seemed to have anything to say. He nodded to himself and looked at Fumi’s face on the screen. “Okay. Do it.”

  Fumi sent the order, and it was relayed to each transmitter, beaming out to the countless millions of nanites. The first orders were the simplest: “Take control of the parasites. Report in. Assess the situation based on your programming and act.”

  The first reply took forever to come back to the overclocked Fumi but less than a second for the rest of the crew. It read “Control established.” Billions more messages streamed back, queuing for transmitter time. A few reported problems, but the conversion rate was better than ninety-nine percent.

  The victory seemed almost perfect. Where control over individual greenies failed, they were usually rapidly overcome by sheer force of numbers, the AI using the controlled hosts to mob the resisting greenie. In a few places, the greenie was in control of systems that could be used offensively and the results were more mixed. If there were enough uncontrolled parasites, the greenie retained enough intelligence to be dangerous and, in those cases, the AI reacted quickly but inhumanly to eliminate the threat. The programming of the emergent AI was goal based and there was no concept of morality or mercy. Fumi had always been pragmatic but she found that some of the solutions developed by the AI turned her virtual stomach. She altered goals to avoid some of the worst excesses of efficiency and looked for ways to atone, all the while reminding herself that they were working for the greater good. When all else failed, she reviewed the footage of the nurseries that they had found. That helped her resolve but didn’t make her any happier.

  An early job had been installation of the microwave emitters that would replace the portable hard radiation sources as a power distribution system. The parasites were expected to die in greater numbers without direct power although the nanites would feed them energy. If any died, their jobs could be done by nanites not connected to a parasite body or reverted to organic control. It was here that the first sabotage was discovered. The first attack was utterly unexpected. A number of controlled greenies left the AI network and stole a radiation source. Monitoring for sabotage had not been one of the AI goals. The AI grid had only flagged it as an efficiency loss that it was unable to explain. It raised the issue for human attention. Ivo was the first to notice and routed an inspection drone over to investigate. None of the crew had visited the surface in person yet even though it was known to be safe. The modified Sarafina would be tricky to land and the radiation levels were still problematic but most of all, there was something undefinably awful about the AI controlled greenies silently working on tasks, not nearly inhuman enough for uncompromised humans to see without shuddering. The probe slowly floated over the microwave transmitter tower, the image bobbing slightly on the monitor in front of Ivo. He frowned and adjusted the controls, following the power lead. There was a furry creature, about thirty centimetres long next to the cable and another next to it, the coat pale brown like the local grass. Insects or something that filled the same ecological niche buzzed around them. He moved the drone in closer and saw that the power cables had been chewed until they had shorted out.

  “Hey, Fumi, do we have any record that local critters eat insulation? It looks like a couple of them got fried snacking on a power cable,” he asked, addressing the room. He knew that Fumi had triggers set up to alert her if she was called.

  “Not that I know of. What sort of cable?” she asked.

  “Whatever we are using for the microwave emitters,” he said.

  “That would be local make so whatever the locals normally use. If it were yummy, you would have thought that they would use a different formulation. How much did they eat?” asked Fumi. Ivo gestured at the screen and Fumi mirrored the image to one of her virtual displays. “Zoom in a little more on the cable for me, please,” she said. Ivo moved the drone closer until it was almost touching the charred corpses. “Ok, it is the same bit of cable. It must have zapped the first one and the second one pushed the body aside to finish the job. There may have been a third that got away with it but probably not. I don’t think that they were after the insulation. We need to get a closer look at the critters.”

  “Intelligent?” asked Ivo.

  “Controlled, I think,” replied Fumi.

  The normal way of examining a native life form was to take it into the medical bay and use the equipment there but no-one felt ready for that. As a compromise, Iron Maid landed and Oscar went to collect the corpses. He was still controlled from the ship rather than being a part of the planetwide AI and somehow that seemed to make him less uncanny to use. He operated the medical bay equipment under the guidance of Lori, translated into orders by the AI. The results were displayed over several monitors in the Sarafina’s bay. Ivo was alr
eady in the room watching so Lori interpreted the results for them.

  “They are small predators. From their teeth, I would guess that they are oblate carnivores or nearly so. Nothing suggests that they would have any interest at all in eating cables. There are multiple parasites through-out the tissues, most of them dead and the rest dying. I think that we screwed up,” said Lori.

  “Uh, how?” asked Ivo.

  “Dumb mistake and I should have known better. I treated the symptoms that I could see and thought that I was treating all of the disease,” said Lori.

  “Ah, crap! We told the nanites to focus on anything over 20 kilos. We assumed that what we saw the parasites controlling was all that they were controlling but there is no reason to think that smaller lifeforms might not be suitable. Individually, the parasites in a smaller body are too dumb to do much but there is no reason that you couldn’t pile them up,” said Fumi.

  Ivo winced. “Remember how we didn’t see animals on Neuholme? I should have thought of that.”

  Lori nodded. “We all should,” she agreed.

  Fumi’s voice had a wheedling tone. “Please may I be excused by reason of being dead at the time?”