Burnt Ice (51 page)

‘Who from,
Rick
?’

‘What
from, would probably be the
better term. The controlling artificial entity of the Octopoid Library,
actually. Seems that it has been studying us as much as we have it. I really am
intrigued by this. Our collective studies showed it to be a highly
sophisticated accounting and storage system. Is Fritz reliable enough to act as
my number two for this short mission?’

‘What are you proposing?’

‘We don’t have much time, but I
need his unique intelligence to determine if this is an artificial — and
whether we can safely take it with us, as it has requested. Only problem is
that we may not make it out in time. I am slamming together a recovery unit —
basically a lifter with a big fuel tank, AG augmentation, antimatter thrusters
and a jump unit. It’ll be ready in two hours. In three hours we need to be
gone. That unit will have to fly down, grab the artificial, decide if it’s
safe, then leg it out of there at a tremendous rate. The artificial says that
it still holds the last thousand yottabytes of what it terms “esoteric
information” — and that this information has not been transmitted to the cache
that we have just excised. It is a mighty prize for one such as me.’

‘OK, Rick. Ask the artificial how
much music and maths is held in that last thousand yottabytes.’

‘It says approximately four per
cent is music and six per cent mathematics.’

‘There’s your bait for Fritz.
Tell him that hundreds of years of continuous listening exists, waiting for
him. Then lay out precisely what you need from him.’

~ * ~

‘Are
you sure about this, Fritz? There is a good chance that we will not see you for
twenty or more years if you jump to a shifting LP.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, Jan. It’s a
no-brainer. Is the lifter ready to go yet?’

‘Ten minutes, Fritz. One of the
Rick proxies will be with you shortly. Take care, mate. See you when we do.
Make sure that you upload your Soul Saver in the next few minutes, OK?’

‘Thanks, boss. Yes, I’ll do that
right away. Patrick, Soul Saver data on the way. Music: more music than I can
ever listen to. That’s bullshit! I could never listen to more, than I can
handle anyway! See all you whenever.’

~ * ~

Fritz
was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of Rick’s hastily created lifter craft.
Checking it out, he concluded it was a different model from the other two. He
had noted that every part of it was massively overbuilt. Even the command pod,
in which he sat, was almost brutal in its shape. He was mentally uncomfortable
— he hated controlling the flight of anything, even a small hoverbike.

‘Very glad you decided to come
with me. My thanks to you, Fritz; you will not go unrewarded, I assure you.’

Fritz looked at the Rick proxy,
deciding that even he was built to take serious punishment, with slightly more
defined facial features than the other ones he had seen — and considerably more
muscle mass under the deep green flight suit. He swallowed hard, wondering what
he had let himself in for.

‘Yeah, right, Rick. So if we miss
hitting the LPs we’ll be OK, right?’

‘Yes, of course. I have a very
special cryo unit set up just for us, if necessary. But hey, that’s why you’re
here, so we can make a quick, correct decision. Did you bring any foodstuffs
that you particularly like? And are they secure? This is going to be a fast
ride.’

‘Just a kilo of Marko’s cookies.
Your galley drone took them from me.’

Fritz looked out the side of the
cockpit to see that they were already dropping away from the bulk of
Rick.
His friends were also climbing towards the local LP, under hard acceleration.
On his screens he could see the two other segments of
Rick
towing the
300-metre-long, 200-metre-wide cone of moon rock and library cache between
them, also accelerating hard towards the LP.

‘Good. Now establish contact with
the library artificial and talk to it please. I need to know your thoughts and
impressions. We have forty-three minutes’ flight time before we’re alongside it.
Don’t be alarmed by the actions of this craft. We have no time for nice, gentle
flight sequences. Your pod will, if necessary, encapsulate you and lock you in
gel. May I suggest that you load anti-motion sickness into your bioware and
seal your visor, Fritz?’

‘You sound just like Jan! Someone
is always fussing over me! Here is a comms unit for you. Put it in your ear and
just think what you want to say to me. It is line of sight, but I do have some
relay units in my kit, should we need them.’

‘New tech! Such is one of the
small joys in my life, Fritz. My thanks.’

Fritz opened the conversation
with the artificial, discussing music and his other favourite subject, maths.
He considered after ten minutes that the artificial was an intriguing entity
who knew little of music and did not seem to care greatly for it. Fritz, for
all his impatience with people and other intelligences in general, had long
thought that if a person had a love of music there would always be common
ground on which to build some type of relationship. He had also learnt that he
would never be able to deal with those who did not like music, or who were
ambivalent about it.

Just as they were about to enter
the outer atmosphere there was a large thump from the rear of the lifter. Fritz
looked questioningly at Rick.

‘Our main fuel tanks, the
thruster units and the jump units will await our return from atmosphere, Fritz.
Little point in taking them down with us and it would take a huge amount of
fuel to get them back up.’

Switching to maths, Fritz felt a
little more in common with the artificial but again had misgivings, which he
relayed to Rick by rapidly sending him messages via his crew comms unit. He was
perfectly at ease holding two conversations at once. Looking up from his
screens he saw that they were only eighty kilometres from the library.

‘This entity is just flat-cold
emotionless. I have little in common with it. Can we be sure that it even has
the additional information it says it has?’

‘No, Fritz, we cannot, but my
entire reason for existence is to gather and analyse information. It is the one
thing I am very good at.’

‘So, you are prepared to risk our
lives to gather information?’

‘Of course! Why would you
question such a motive?’

‘Because I like the way I am, and
don’t want to wake up twenty millimetres long, in a tank with little knowledge
of how I got there! Rick, this artificial does not seem to know a great deal
about the life forms on this planet. I have been asking it a great deal of
questions about the library contents, which it knows all about. But when I
asked it about the biological lens that Sirius recorded, it did not recognise
my description. So, what do we have here?’

‘Something that I have
encountered only a few times before. It is a scout from another alien group, I
suspect. Perhaps a survivor from a crashed ship. So, some excitement at last!
Good! Now this is going to get interesting. It also explains why the library
broke orbit and landed. It must have been only partially taken over, then
realised that it had to store the knowledge off-planet, or the survivor’s own
starship — that which was excised from the moon by us — took all that
information. Yes, that would explain a few things: for example, all my sensors
did not recognise the layout of the artefact buried in the moon’s surface as
anything but a large shuttle packed with data storage units. There must be an
interstellar of unknown origin parked somewhere close as well. A pity we have
so little time. I would be interested in seeing and examining that ship too.
Messages sent. My greater self will find out in due course.’

Fritz looked across and down as
the distance to the library was eaten up.

Rick addressed the being on the
Octopoid Library. ‘Artificial, this is
Rick.
Time to come clean with us.
If you want to live in your current form another day, you will tell me what you
really are. I will come within four light microseconds of the library and do
one circuit at that distance. Fail to demonstrate exactly what you are within
that time space and I shall climb back out of the atmosphere.’

‘Why am I here, really, Rick?’

‘Bait. You are bait, Fritz. You
have been with your group long enough to realise that this is how things are
done sometimes. I, as part of the greater self, have long suspected that there
was something else down here. All creatures of sentience love information and
in you there is a great deal of exactly that. Now we will find out what this is
down here.’

‘In what form would you wish to
see me, Rick of the Collective?’ said the being in the library.

‘Surprise me.’

On the screens a most exotically
beautiful woman with extraordinary hazel eyes appeared.

‘Yes, this is my actual current
form, as my type walk among you unrecognised. And as you are, Rick, so am I —
an artificial. A tool of another. So I need passage from this planet, as you
have stolen my shuttle from under the surface of the moon, and what are we to
trade, I wonder? Oh, and you are Fritz Andreas van Vinken, technical sergeant,
and also a construct, but one of a most intriguing order. Yes, you would make a
prize, indeed. You obviously have no concept of what you will become in time.’

‘I don’t know what you are
talking about,’ Fritz said. ‘And what’s your name anyway?’

‘Name? Why do biologicals always
insist on names? I don’t have one, van Vinken. Just as you, in fact, don’t have
one either — apart from the one that someone else gave you, and that is not
really a name anyway. The only names that matter are those that we create for
ourselves. Oh, for your interest, I do actually enjoy music, but I had to get
you down here so I played the part of a technical artificial, as against a true
sentient one. So I have information, a good quantity of it, which I know will
be of interest to you, Rick. Here is a sample. One thousand primary LPs which
link towards an area that I know you are interested in, but my creators have no
use for. Take it as a gift. I have tens of thousands more — for which I shall
trade passage.’

Rick was silent for a few
moments. Fritz brought up a part-screen, watching the computer usage spike as
the information was checked. He could also see that the information was relayed
to Rick’s greater self. Without fully thinking through his actions, Fritz
lasered a music file containing two thousand of his favourite pieces back to
the artificial. On the screen she smiled one of the most glorious smiles he had
ever seen, blew him a kiss full of promise, and an instant later a huge file
was wide-band lasered across to him and hard-stored in the computer inside his
pod. As he dipped into it, he found that it was all music, but music he had
never heard the likes of before. His mind swam in a state of utter bliss.

An instant later, the sides of
his pod slid closed and hard-sealed, his whole body gripped by the seat, and
laid into the optimum acceleration pose. He noted through the haze of music
that his bioware had been activated for maximum tissue protection, as gel
flooded the pod. He, with great concentration, looked across at the gently
smiling Rick.

‘What is happening, Rick?’

‘Time for you to go, my friend.
This version of me will probably not see you again, but we can never be totally
certain of anything, can we? Goodbye, Fritz.’

The gel was forcing itself into
his nose and mouth. His breathing ceased. He could only nod at Rick, as his
comms unit also shut down, and was ejected from his ear while more gel flowed
into him.

Through the haze of thunderous,
vibrant, all-consuming music, Fritz was barely aware of the pod being pulled up
and back into the lifter. It came to a harsh stop as an armoured casing slammed
closed around it, then attached itself to the spine of the carapace, which
promptly peeled off, then rocketed skywards on an AG unit designed to perform a
single massive one-shot flight.

Fritz tried to shut the music down,
but understood that it was now part of him, so he relaxed, letting it wash
through his mind and soul. As the emergency craft accelerated up through the
atmosphere, ramjets folded out further, increasing speed until it ripped out
through the afternoon sky, with the empty fuel tanks and the AG unit dropping
away from it. Fritz was vaguely aware of a few seconds of free fall, and the
utter relief of no acceleration, before the main antimatter rocket units and
wormhole generator, which had been left in orbit, came up behind the pod and
docked hard with a clanging shudder. The locks engaged as the pod was pulled
back under further shielding. The engines ignited and the harsh acceleration
continued towards the distant LP and
Rick’s
greater self.