Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (20 page)

Realization flowed through her that she was trapped, and she was trapped worse. Once the war was over, what use would there be for her? They would turn her off, would kill her.

For the first time in her existence, Ai Wei-wei contemplated that most serious of military crimes: desertion. Sent out again or destroyed, those were her fates and she doubted they would even give her the choice.

She was functional enough to salvage, so she would be salvaged. She turned off as much of her conscious thought as she could and let the remainder drift. As close as she could come, she slept.

Her chronometers told her for how long when her mind stirred again. She ignored them, tuning out the data in an almost human manner. It wasn't important.

What was important was that somebody was knocking on her electronic door. Somebody wanted to communicate with her.

She opened communications, hesitant, almost shy. "Ai Weiwei reporting."

"Admiral Cossett here. How are you feeling?"

Ai Weiwei liked Cossett. His name meant something comfortable... and either by coincidence or because he had done his best to live up to it, he was a comfortable man. He was one of the few who treated her as something other than a very sophisticated computer. She had often wished he had more to do with selecting crew, so that fewer of that type shipped out with her and her sisters.

Some people could not handle being on smart ships. Sometimes that didn't come out until too late. Once it had proved fatal to a ship and most of her crew.

Cossett, though, she trusted. He always treated her as if she was real. "Terrible." She wasn't going to lie to him.

"I'm trying to get you some time before they send you out again, but the oversight committee's here."

If she was human, she might have got the time. Maybe. Nobody was being treated well right now. They were losing the war. Ai Weiwei was sure of it. "And we're losing."

"Weiwei..."

"We are. I can analyze debrief data. All of my faculties are intact. We haven't captured any jump points in months, only blown them. That's not a winning strategy. We're losing more ships than we can build, more ships than we can crew." She knew she was right. And that was why she would not, could not desert. She was loyal to her human creators and to the beautiful... not pristine, no, but better than she had been... world just a short hop in-system.

"I know, but don't say that in the hearing of Madam Oversight. Oh wait, do. She'd ignore you anyway."

If Weiwei had been equipped to laugh, she would, but the impulse lasted only a moment before her normal cold reason took over. If Cossett was talking this way to an inferior, he was worried. Very worried indeed.

She was worried, of course, herself. Worried about the future, about the world... and about her future. "Well, I suppose if we lose, we won't have to worry about what to do with decommissioned ships."

His response was grim. "That depends on who gets the political upper hand. For now, though, you're going to be transferred in a week."

A week, and then probably another to reprogram herself and learn her new body. That was all the "shore leave" Weiwei was going to get. "I'd have got more shore leave if you'd been repairing me."

She could hear the fatherly resignation in Cossett's voice. "I tried. I really did. Now I have to... deal with something."

He hung up, but not before she caught the concerned note in his voice.

The conversation with Weiwei had, in fact, cheered Cossett up some. He just couldn't bring himself to tell her one of her sisters had just committed suicide.

There were supposed to be safeguards to keep the ship brains from doing more than maintenance changes. They could erase small portions of their memories, and sometimes did in order to avoid unpleasant remembrance.

Somehow, the Jellicoe had erased her entire consciousness, removing herself from existence.

He had promptly checked on every single damaged ship, if only for five minutes. None of the others seemed to be suicidal. Weiwei had seemed a bit too chipper, but that was her personality, to always sound as if she was in a good mood, no matter what.

He couldn't worry about it. They could still salvage the Jellicoe's hardware, not like when some rating hung himself.

And the suicide rates had gone up. If Weiwei could work out they were losing then Jellicoe could have worked out the same thing, just as quickly. The two had been printed off of the same basis. They were in truth sisters, their minds different only in nurture, not nature. Twins.

So, Weiwei had been his first concern. She was the only one of the same model here right now and in the state she was in physically... but she seemed to be okay.

They were losing the war. That thought sometimes made Cossett consider the same way out himself. People were realizing they would never be discharged and who knew what the aliens would do when they won.

They might offer terms, but Cossett was pretty sure they wouldn't be very generous. The best case scenario he could imagine was post World War I Germany—trampled on and forced to pay crippling reparations or war debts.

The worst case did not bear thinking about. Either way, they would demand Earth disarm... any scenario included the destruction of the ships he saw as his men... or perhaps his women, given they tended to adopt the female gender, influenced by cultural tendencies in that direction.

If things got to that, he could order the ships to flee, to disperse into interstellar space as slowboats. They could survive multiyear trips in a way humans could not, and then something of humanity would survive.

Humanity's children. He wondered if anyone else had thought of it. Not Madam Oversight, that was for sure. She saw the ships as mindless, thoughtless tools. He saw them as human creations with minds, and thus an extension of genus homo.

And one of them was dead. He had paperwork to fill out now. But he had talked to the ships from his office. He did not have to move.

He did not move until it was all done.

Weiwei's new body shone, but there were signs it had been put together in a hurry. True, her new paint job was one to be appreciated. Engines and weapons worked. Crew quarters were not quite finished, and would not need to be until testing was over.

You always tested without squishy humans on board, just in case. A malfunction in life support was easy to fix, but not often easy to fix quickly. People scrambling for suits was not something Weiwei ever wanted to see through her internal cameras again. Scrambling, not making it, dying. People she had cared about. Not loved, no, that word was too intimate. But cared about as one cared about comrades-inarms.

She stretched her legs. She powered away from the shipyard and for a moment all of her worries were lost in the feeling of being able to move again, of being free in space once more. In some ways she was programmed to appreciate it, something akin to instinct buried deep in her core. Because it was only fair for a ship to enjoy being a ship.

To enjoy flying. She remembered something Cossett had said. That when all soldiers had been volunteers, they had willingly given up their home so others could have it.

Now most of them were draftees and she, of course, was built to be nothing else. If the war was lost, she would be destroyed by the enemy, or decommissioned as part of a treaty. Or she could run.

She could run right now. Her programming was no longer enough to stop her any more than it had been enough to stop Jellicoe from destroying herself.

Her duty was. The Solar System was as close to home as she had. A home she could not appreciate or enjoy, but home nonetheless.

If, though, she was going to be decommissioned? Then she would run. She would mourn and she would run. She was not going to die, not pointlessly like that.

For now, she spun through her axes, testing her maneuverability, testing her steering. They had talked about sending smart ships out un-crewed. With no humans on board, she could maneuver in ways she would never dare with their fragile bodies present. It had been tried, though.

Jellicoe was one of the ones they had tried it with. Weiwei mourned, but she had not killed herself. Had not and would not. She wanted to live. She wanted Earth to live more, but if Earth was going to die or be enslaved, then...

She turned again. Thus it was that she was the first sentient to see it. The capital ship blazed out of hyperspace. Unlike her, it needed no jump point to make the transition. It carried the huge equipment with it, in the toroids that emerged from its rear.

It was not a human capital ship. They had taken every precaution they could to stop the aliens from finding the Solar System. Now they had.

This ship would get away and then the fleet would be here. Unless they could be stopped before they reported back. Communications antennae. She knew where those were. And she knew exactly how to disable a capital-class ship.

One ship alone could not do it.

No. Calculations went through her mind quickly. One ship alone could not do it and live. She was uncrewed. There was no life to sacrifice except her own. Shoot the antennae, then set a ramming course toward one of the jump toroids. They needed all three to jump.

A soldier. She had been created to be that, not given the choice, not given a way out, and right now, she could run. She could run for the Jovian jump point and likely be unnoticed, likely get away. Live for a very long time out in the wilds of the stars, free.

That was not the course she set.

Tony had drifted into town to operate the shredder at the scrap yard. He was big, yet, despite his size, he moved with cat-smooth grace, as light on his feet as if he massed only half his weight of ropey muscle. He was a veteran; that was certain. The scars and burns that marked the backs of his hands looked like war injuries, even though he recalled getting them at a factory he couldn't remember with the same clarity.

Mira hadn't learned much about Tony during their frequent, casual conversations at the diner, nor from the other, more intimate ones that followed, after he'd been coming around for a while. The diner wasn't near the yard where he worked and, truth be told, the food was not exactly the best.

She began to hope that their casual relationship might grow into something more. It had been a while since she'd had a man in her life.

Pete, the town's sheriff, took an obvious and immediate dislike to Tony, as he had with every vet who'd come to town. "You shouldn't be seeing that damn vet," he grumbled. He always stopped by the diner for coffee and a Danish before starting his morning rounds. "He might act like he's normal, like he's safe, but how can anyone tell? What if he still remembers all those skills?"

"I don't think he can remember," Mira replied. "The Amnesty treatments are supposed to replace those kinds of memories."

Pete took a sip of coffee and winced. "Still too hot. I know the Amnesty was supposed to wipe away his training, but who's to say if it worked? Could you trust somebody like that to tell the truth, after? Easy to lie, I'd think, so there's no way to know."

"Tony swears he can't remember anything about the war."

"Right!" Pete sneered. "I'm going to watch him, just the same. He'll show his hand soon enough: a tiger can't change its stripes."

Mira handed him the Danish. "Then he should be all right. The Amnesty isn't supposed to affect your personality, so Tony must have been a nice guy before."

"Is that what you think? That just cutting a few details out of a killer's head would change him; wipe out what they taught him to do? A man has to have killer tendencies to begin with or they couldn't train him: Trust me, he's the same damn killer he always was; vicious!"

"But I heard the doctors say that..." Mira started to respond, but Pete didn't let her finish.

"Yeah,
you
would believe any fool thing the doctors say, wouldn't you?" He leaned over the counter and said very quietly. "Listen, I heard that one of the supposedly treated vets snapped—killed two people before the
Cazadores
could put him down." He sat back. "But you won't see that in the news, will you? Nope, government keeps that sort of thing quiet so people won't get alarmed; better to keep things calm, I'll bet."

Mira doubted that news like that could be kept quiet, even if it did involve the shadowy
Cazadores
who were trying to enact justice for war crimes. A level of conspiracy that vast would require a complex web involving politicians, doctors, journalists, and God knew how many others? No, Pete's story was just another of the paranoid fantasies he seemed to feed on. "I never heard that."

Pete shook a finger. "I know. Those of us who pay attention know what's really going on." He looked directly at her. "Tell me, have you thought about what you would do if this guy snapped? It's a possibility. People could get hurt bad."

Mira knew that there was no sense talking to Pete when he got like this. He was probably wrong, but maybe the sheriff had access to police information not released for public consumption. "I don't know what I'd do," she answered and moved along to serve another customer.

Tony didn't seem shocked by Pete's comments. "Maybe he's right, Mira. I have no memory of what I might have done, except for these." He rubbed at the scars on his hands as if he could erase them. "I walk around with this tremendous sense of
guilt.
What if I did something terrible and unforgivable? What does that make me?"

Mira realized that must be the reason for his haunted look. "Nonsense," she said. "We all feel guilty about something, even when we've forgotten the reasons; maybe we snitched a candy, or didn't return a book, or cheated on an exam. The point is that everybody has something to feel guilty about."

Tony acted surprised. "Even you? I find that hard to believe."

Mira blushed. "Well, I feel like it, anyway— sometimes." She was silent for a long moment before she said; "Look, I don't think you should worry about it. Your guilty feelings are probably over nothing."

"Just the same," Tony went on. "I wonder what else I might have forgotten when they took my memories? Have I lost people I knew or loved? What if I'm not the same person I was, you know, before?"