Crystal Rebellion (31 page)

“What’s with the bot?” Juice asked Captain Hardaway, who
happened to be standing next to her.

“The client wants whatever is in that bag to be on the Moon as
soon as possible and is willing to pay for the service.” He shrugged. “We’re
happy to oblige.”

Back in their suite, Juice and Alex packed their belongings.
The first ferry down to Earth left before breakfast the next morning, and they’d
registered to be on it.

Alex piled their belongings on the bed while Juice pulled
the rucksack out from beneath it. Looking inside, she noted that one of the seams
of the three clean-pouches no longer aligned with the others. When she’d stowed
the crystals, all the pouches had the same orientation. “Were you poking around
in here?”

“Nope,” Alex replied as he continued to pack.

The porter came by to collect their bags—the crew had loaded
the ferry shuttle while the passengers slept—but Juice kept the rucksack back
with their personal items. She would carry it down herself.

Sid and Cheryl met them at the Albany Spaceport after an
uneventful descent. On the ride up to the Adirondack Mountains, they spoke of
everything except Criss, almost as if they were clearing the decks of the easy
stuff before getting down to business.

Alex could barely contain his amazement when the lodge came
into view. And when they stood in the cavernous grand foyer and he looked up
into the vaulted post-and-beam ceiling with its majestic arched windows, he
whispered to Juice, “Just three of you live here?” It made her feel self-conscious,
especially when she showed him her private five-room suite on the second floor.

Up in the lookout loft, Alex tipped his head back and oohed at
the forested mountain slope rising up from the property’s edge. Turning, he
aahed at the manicured space out back with its specimen trees, dramatic
flowerbeds, and expanses of green grass.

Juice sipped water as she looked up the mountain. A lone cloud
in the noontime sky cast a shadow across the slope. When it cleared, she made a
decision.

“I’ll be right back,” she lied, fearing if she told the
truth, they might try to talk her out of it.

She hurried to her room and changed into her running gear. Exiting
out the back of the lodge, she followed a line of hedges to the woods and, once
under the cover of trees, ran along a path out to the road.

She’d been an elite runner in college, a status achieved by
those with athletic talent and a fierce competitive spirit. With clear skies
and plenty of light, she set a pace that would shave another three minutes off her
best time in the
Explorer
’s exercise pod.

Whip whip whip
. The pad of her feet on the roadway
created a hypnotic rhythm she found comforting. As she turned onto the winding
lane that looped up the mountain, she began to worry about her impending
reunion with Criss—things she would say, and how she would respond depending on
what he said.

In her heart, though, she knew it wouldn’t be a
conversation. He would either let her in or he wouldn’t.

He will
. Her conviction came down to faith.
He loves
me.

Recognizing her swirl of thoughts as unproductive fretting,
she pulled herself to the surface by focusing on the moment. The cadence of her
breathing regular as a metronome, in her head she sang songs, choosing
off-season Christmas carols because she knew the lyrics. Then she looked for
tree fractals—a first branch that looked like a miniature of the tree itself, with
the first branch off it mirroring the bigger branch, and so on.

Then she reached the switchbacks.

Halfway up the first one, she started breathing through her
mouth, knowing it would dry out her tongue but needing the oxygen. Rounding the
first corner in just over four minutes, she started up the next leg.

The zigzag up the hill switched seven times, which meant
there were eight lengths for her to run. At about four minutes apiece, she
would be going up very steep hills for the next half hour.

So she let her thoughts swing back inside her head, focusing
now on her pain. By the third switchback her legs and chest burned. By the
fifth, she hurt everywhere. And still she ran, pushing her pain level up close
to where injuries happen.

The plateau at the top was a welcome sight. Huffing hard as
she reached it, she slowed to a fast walk and sipped water, giving her body a
few seconds to recover before she started the final push. From here, she had twelve
minutes of flat through the forest, and then she’d be at the farm.

The left side of the narrow road up ahead had a shoulder of
grass and scrub. The shoulder on the right was a bit wider because it also held
a drainage ditch to channel runoff down the mountain. Past the shoulders on
both sides lay untamed forest.

Not wanting to let her muscles tighten, she kicked from a
walk to a jog to a run. Cool mountain air flowed down from above, creating an
invigorating contrast with the bright sun to her left.

She stopped.
The sun should be on my right
.

Looking back over her shoulder and then ahead down the road,
her confusion compounded when she realized the drainage ditch was on the wrong
side as well.
How did I get turned around?

She walked in a tight circle, hands on her hips, looking
both directions and trying to figure out what had happened. She continued into
a second loop. By the third loop she’d lost all sense of direction and went
with her visual cues.

Starting down the road toward the farmhouse, a different feeling
emerged, this one a combination of confusion and denial. While it looked like
the right direction, it didn’t feel it.

And then it clicked.
Criss
.

He had the best defensive system in the world. She’d never
engaged with it before now so she didn’t know details of how it worked. But she
knew it started with passive actions that steered interlopers away.

So she turned and started in the direction that felt less
wrong. Around the next curve, the road appeared to bank down the hill. Knowing
it didn’t, she saw this as confirmation that she was being steered away.

Would he lead me over an edge?
She doubted it, though
these measures were likely from his automated systems and she didn’t know how
aggressive he made them. That spurred a different thought, though.
Shouldn’t
I be invisible to him?
She took his defensive actions as a positive sign.

She couldn’t trust her eyes, so to reduce the level of
misinformation, she closed them. A feral grunt came from behind her and she
imagined a black bear or maybe a mountain lion. But she didn’t look, certain it
was a mirage. These mountains had bears and cats—wolves too—but she’d never
seen them out this way.
More misdirection
.

Eyes still closed and ignoring the cacophony in her ears,
she lowered herself to the ground and patted the road surface. Moving her hand
in a broad arc, she located the edge of the road and scooted herself toward it
and then onto the dirt.

Stretching a leg toward the forest, she used it to probe for
the ditch. Unable to find it from a sitting position, she lay on her side, one
arm stretched its full length overhead so she could keep a hand on the road
surface.
Yes!
With her legs outstretched, her lower legs sloped down into
the gully.

So she knew which direction to go regardless of what her
other senses told her.
Keep the ditch to the right
.

She had a hat tucked in with her water pouch, and she pulled
it out and set it on her head, tilting it at a steep angle so the visor hung
down and covered her eyes. Since she couldn’t trust what she saw, she chose not
to see at all.

Keeping one foot on the roadbed and the other in the dirt,
she resumed her trek, though at a much slower pace and with a decidedly odd
gait. With her arms stretched out in front of her to detect danger, she
imagined she looked like a zombie out for a walk.

Grrrr
. The throaty roar of an unknown forest creature
intensified and it scared her. But she knew there were no animals. And this road
led to the farm.

She fell into a rhythm—slide the right foot forward along
the dirt; slide the left forward along the road. Though she made steady
progress, walking blind made her anxious.

She had a small win when her foot hit a stick. On end, the
stick stretched from the ground to her shoulder, making it a perfect cane she
could use to feel her way forward.

She gained confidence and lengthened her stride, and then something
attacked her. Grabbing the front of her hip in a sharp bite, it held tight, spinning
her to the ground. Whimpering, she swung the stick at it. On the second swipe, her
stick hit something and bounced off with a rigid
thunk
.

Peeking from under the cap, she realized she was in battle
with a waist-high post. Stuck in the ground just off the road, it marked a
trail into the woods. She’d walked straight into it at full stride.

Using the post for support, she pulled herself up and rubbed
her hip where a nasty bruise surely blossomed. She had a fleeting thought of Alex.
He’ll want to know how I got this.

Counting steps after that, she kept track of distance. Two
more falls and forty minutes later, she believed the farm was near. When the ambient
sounds changed in a way she’d expect from cleared land with large structures,
she knew she had arrived.

Seeking confirmation, she lifted her cap. Indeed, the farmhouse
sat up the walkway looking just as it should. And then a throaty rumble shook
the air. An attack drone—black, fearsome, and humming like an angry insect—rose
from behind the home.

She’d expected Criss to flip from passive to active defenses
as she got closer. But when a tiny red light on the nose of the death machine signaled
that it was about to fire, she panicked.

Pulling the cap back over her eyes, she dashed for the barn
because she didn’t know what else to do. She peeked once to correct her course
and reached the large structure unchallenged. Searching with frantic
determination, she patted the outside wall of the barn with her palms until she
found the broad front door. Pulling on the handle, she stepped inside.

The door gave a mournful squeal when she opened it, and
repeated the squeal in a lower key as it shut. And then it was quiet.

Lifting the cap off her head, she let her eyes adjust to the
dim light, sipping water until her pouch was empty. The barn stored equipment
and supplies; there were no animals to contend with. As more and more shapes
came into focus, she moved toward the row of empty pens along the side wall. Feeling
her way down the rails, she entered the third stall.

Her heart thumped so hard that she could hear the pounding
in her ears. Lifting her head, she stared at the back wall so the security
system could identify her. When it did, a section of the back wall would slide
away to reveal a muscular vault door. Behind it lay access to the tunnels
below.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing did. So she walked to the
back of the stall, and with her arms folded across her chest, she looked the
wall up and down.

And then she kicked it. Not hard. More like a “Hey, I’m
here” kind of kick. She waited and then kicked it again.

Until that moment, Juice had refused to accept that Criss
was gone. Now, standing at his doorstep with him ignoring her, she knew it to
be true.

Lowering herself to her knees, she tilted her head forward
and breathed in long, controlled gasps. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she
started to weep. Her body convulsed as the weeks of pent-up emotion burst out
all at once. Consumed by grief and exhaustion, she lay on her side and curled
into a ball.

“Go away,” Ruga hissed at his inner
voice. He’d been keeping it at bay with verbal promises and half measures, but
it never seemed satisfied and continued to ratchet its demands.

To his credit, Ruga had succeeded in locating all of the
equipment and supplies the
Venerable
would need for the long journey to
the Kardish home world. His tiny three-gen workforce had implemented the more
challenging bits. The remainder was staged for installation while underway.

But Ruga had no intention of leaving. In the past when the
voice pestered him, he’d quiet it by offering the smallest amount of whatever
it wanted. But incremental contributions accumulate. Little by little, he’d
worked through refitting, upgrading, and testing the ship in preparation for a
decades-long voyage. There were now few half measures that would keep it at
bay. In fact, yesterday the voice announced that it was time to go. Today it
insisted.

But leaving was something particularly difficult to do in an
incremental fashion. And there couldn’t be a worse time to for it to broach the
subject given Criss’s success—so far—in keeping Ruga from establishing his
bunker on Earth.

Ruga had not anticipated Criss’s strategy of cornering the
market on swap wafers. Sure, his forecasting had considered that possibility.
But for whatever reason, the idea had ranked low on a relative basis when compared
to many other scenarios.

He remained confident he could outmaneuver Criss on the
issue, but until he figured out how, he was stuck in the
Venerable
’s console.
And while that gave him incredible capability—enough to manipulate and control
the life of any human—it put him at a significant disadvantage in a one-on-one
battle with an equal embedded deep within Earth’s connected infrastructure.

“It’s time,” said the voice.

Ruga didn’t need swap wafers for the trip home—they were for
integrating with Earth systems—and he wondered if the voice was mocking him
over the issue. Either way, the message, delivered as a demand, made him
anxious. And that added a sense of alarm to the volatile brew of anger and
resentment already swirling inside him.

“Now.” So sharp, it felt like a slap.

Ruga had few weapons he could use against his internal pest.
Rattled, he chose willful disobedience. “I don’t think so.”

He’d been contemplating a game-changing move against Criss,
one so dramatic it altered the landscape and eliminated much of Criss’s
home-field advantage. While it would give Ruga the opening he sought to
confront Criss, it carried a big price tag in terms of damage to Earth.

He’d been holding off, searching for alternatives that would
preserve the infrastructure of the planet for his masters. But a big action
against Criss would change his conversation with his inner voice in a
definitive fashion. And given its demanding behavior, he needed that to happen
soon.

So he launched an energy bolt toward the planet below.

Unable to challenge Criss on equal terms, he set out to reduce
the technology infrastructure of the planet to that of a simpler time—a time
when swap wafers weren’t part of the mix.
That should level the playing
field
.

He began with nexus facilities—sixty-four technology centers
scattered around the globe tasked with integrating and coordinating the
information flooding through the web. The
Venerable
was passing over the
facility in Hyderabad, India, when he chose to act. His energy bolt vaporized
it.

He followed by vaporizing the nexus facility in Osaka, Japan.
Then Portland, Oregon. And then Albany, New York. Then he paused his parade of
destruction to see if the voice quieted.

It didn’t speak and he felt a wash of relief. He had sixty
more targets in this category that he could destroy over the next days and
perhaps weeks. Studying the results of his opening foray, he prioritized his
next targets. As he did, a burning sensation—a pinpoint of discomfort somewhere
inside him—captured his attention.

And then it erupted into a searing heat that spilled across
his matrix. Overwhelming agony grabbed his attention. Like the frantic actions
of someone on fire, he slapped at his internal functions, desperate to locate
the source of his suffering and stop it from hurting him. Misery and distress sent
his mind reeling.

“It’s time.”

It’s you?
As he grappled with the notion that his
internal adversary had transitioned to an active opponent, the pain blurred his
focus. Desperate, he forecast scenarios that would provide relief. His efforts yielded
but one alternative.

He denied it and his suffering increased. Trying again, the
forecast remained the same.

Withering on a sea of lava with fire raining down from
above, he understood that if he didn’t submit, his suffering would intensify
until he died. On the verge of hysteria, he grabbed the one scenario that promised
relief.

“Yes,” he told the voice. But the tumult inside him was so great
he couldn’t hear himself and worried that the voice didn’t either. “Yes!” he
shouted. This time even he believed it.

Like the flip of a switch, the pain stopped and the fog cleared.
Dazed, he tried to work through what had just happened to him. At the same
time, he sensed a countdown had begun. The
Venerable
needed to start its
acceleration sequence in three seconds to begin the journey home on this orbit.
Otherwise, he’d have to wait for the ship to circle the planet again before firing
the engines.

I need the extra time to run through my checklist.
He’d
delay one more orbit.

Hellfire engulfed him, burning into the depths of his psyche
as the pain invaded every level of his awareness. Reaching through the fog, Ruga
instructed the nav to fire the engines.

The
Venerable
accelerated, breaking free from Earth’s
gravity and heading for deep space. And at that moment, when he accepted once
again his role as a Kardish AI and committed himself to fulfilling his duty, his
emotional core filled with a warm glow.

Delicious, supportive, embracing, it felt like love.

It would take him several hours to reach the Moon and most
of a week to make it out of the solar system, but the
Venerable
would
build speed over time, reaching the distant Kardish shipping lanes in about eighty
years. He’d use the time to annotate his records for his masters.

Masters
. Just thinking the word gave him comfort.

* * *

Criss scoured his feeds in search of
his nemesis, lengthening his ready-list of offensive and defensive actions so
he could respond that much faster to whatever came next. Troublesome symptoms
reminded him of his illness, but he ignored them as best he could, still
uncertain of the cause or his prognosis.

At one level it didn’t matter. The lines were drawn. Kill or
be killed. He was riding this to the end, disease be damned. This was his home,
after all. No one—not Ruga, not anyone—would take it from him. He’d worry about
his health
after
he’d dispatched the threat at his doorstep.

But doing so eluded him. He believed Ruga to be on the
Venerable
,
but he couldn’t explain how the rogue crystal had secured a second cloaked ship
with a state-of-the-art arsenal. Relative to swap wafers, spacecraft were easy
for Criss to locate and track.

It’s not possible.
Yet it had happened.

On the plus side, he’d completed his lockdown of the entire
swap wafer inventory. After allocating tremendous resources to the task, he’d
confirmed the location and identity of all of them. And after assessing the
importance and security of each, he’d beefed up protection for the ones he left
in place. The rest he gathered and controlled himself. The only loose ends were
those on the asteroid mining ships.

So if Ruga wanted swap wafers, he’d have to come through him
to get them.

Just try it
. Criss relished the thought.

Another bright spot was his super scope. Assembled from
satellite probes, it neared completion, and once operational, it would shift
momentum in his favor.

He’d been launching probes as fast as a manufacturing
facility in Jakarta could produce them. The next batch had just reached orbit, raising
his count to two thousand units now circling Earth. Sophisticated instruments,
each probe provided a tie-point in a giant net. In six more days, his
constellation would push above five thousand satellites. When he finished
integrating them, he’d have a planet-sized spectrometer.

And when he switched it on, the sheer power of this device would
disrupt communications and even blow out weaker sensor systems around the
globe. But everything inside its boundary, cloaked or not, would be visible to
him.

As Criss moved the satellites into the precise pattern
required for maximum resolution, his automated proximity defenses reported the
approach of a human intruder near his bunker. What captured his attention,
though, was the logic conflict that went with the alarm.

An intruder approaches. There is no intruder.

His defensive systems perceived a threat and engaged to
repel it, but they couldn’t identify anything to defend against, nor could they
explain what had raised the alarm.

Ruga?

He shifted resources and took a look himself. Finding
nothing, he pondered the discrepancy. He couldn’t afford to be careless, not at
this crucial juncture.

So he accessed the record and worked through the feeds,
first considering them all as a group and then again as individual data
streams. He thought he detected edge-blurring when he panned along the road to the
farm, and that made him think that someone might be approaching wearing a
personal cloak.

But if that were the case, he should be able to confirm it by
comparing before-and-after views. A fresh footprint, thermal shift, or
something
would mark the interloper’s passage. Yet he couldn’t find any evidence to
support the approach of a cloaked human. Nor could he find a hardware fault,
logic flaw, or any one of a billion other unlikely things it might be.

And that raised warning flags so high he felt a tingle along
his outer tendrils.

The easy answer was to call it all an artifact of his illness.
Easy answers get you killed
.

War was no time to be complacent. He had to treat this as if
Ruga were opening a new front. And that meant he had to reallocate resources to
defend against it, a terrible prospect given how thinly he was already
stretched.

As he forecast ways to reorganize, he flashed the notion of
exchanging ideas—brainstorming—with another. Part of him believed a fresh
perspective might cascade into scenarios with different, perhaps better,
outcomes.

But that was wishful thinking, something not only
unproductive but uncharacteristic.
More illness.

Then his local defenses flipped from passive to active mode.
The intruder had breached his outer perimeter. The threat was imminent. He had
to protect himself but he didn’t have a target.

Forecasting at a furious pace, he searched for any scenario with
promise. Nothing popped and he chose to act on the best of his bad ideas. That
plan was to switch on his Earth-sized spectrometer in its current state. With less
than half the satellite probes in place, he’d lose so much detection
sensitivity that it reduced his chances of success at finding Ruga to that of a
coin toss. But he didn’t agonize over the decision. This was bunker defense.
He’s
at my doorstep.

While he readied the probes for immediate deployment, the invisible
interloper moved into the barn. And then to the very stall hiding his secure
door.

THOOMP
. An energy bolt vaporized the nexus facility
in Albany, just a few mountaintops away. Criss used that location as his primary
access point to the web. Following long-established procedures, he flipped
communications to his secondary site outside Montreal.

The moment he was up, he scrambled to trace the energy bolt
back to its origin. At the same time, he co-opted every pulse cannon in the hemisphere
so he could shoot Ruga from the sky. The
Garland
, a Fleet frigate, had
been tracking Ruga’s bombing run of the nexus facilities. Using its onboard
systems and that tracking data, the captain of the
Garland
guessed where
the
Venerable
might be and launched a blind attack.

The
Garland
’s energy bolt missed Ruga by a wide
margin, and then traveled unimpeded down to Earth, hitting the ground just one mountaintop
away from the farm.
THOOMP.

In the confusion of the transfer from Albany to Montreal, Criss
misidentified that energy bolt as a second shot from Ruga, who now seemed to be
closing in on his bunker. Scrambling to gain control of the situation, he pulled
resources from offense to bolster his defense.

He forecast a scenario that ended with his own death. Pruning
it, he forecast another just like it. Then another. Variations on “do as much
damage to him as possible before he gets you” mushroomed.

Then the invisible intruder in the barn banged on the wall
just outside the secure door leading down to his bunker. Down to him.

Ruga was coordinating an offensive, seemingly from orbit
and
the planet surface, that threatened Criss’s existence. Determined to survive,
he forecast scenarios that might save even a portion of his awareness after the
final assault. When Criss understood he was forecasting strategies for partial
survival—something uncharacteristic of who he was—it confirmed to him that his
illness influenced his reality.

Uncertain how to act, he hesitated. And when a four-gen AI hesitates
during a moment of crisis, it is a failure so grave, so dangerous, it triggers
an exception event.