Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (33 page)

She breathed deep and calm, focusing all energy, all racing thoughts on that simple thing. Whatever was in here had crawled into the hacksaw reactor to start it up, and was now trapped in there. Given the possibilities, it did not make her feel safe.

A shriek lit up her coms, suit armscomp abruptly melting upon the visor, and taccom warning her with red flashes of the most enormous signal output…
“TAKE COVER!”
something announced on coms, and her visor registered a spike in incoming coms data in excess of ten thousand percent. Which was impossible, with this much interference, and
Phoenix
coms were just not capable of…

And then she realised. “Down!” she yelled, and shoved herself away from her firing position, abandoning a clear shot along the shielding bowl for cover. “Take cover!” As tacnet erupted with incoming, missiles streaking and weaving, then airbursting with small puffs before the warheads detonated like strings of giant, deadly firecrackers, and all her view disappeared as the world was filled with blasting shrapnel that cracked and shuddered her suit.

Targeting came suddenly clear across her visor, multiple missile locks as her backrack activated without being asked… “Missiles!” she yelled. “Hold cover, missile locks to my directive!” As she flicked targeting to ‘command’, and those locks propagated across all four platoons. She fired, and
Phoenix
Company fired with her. Big red blots suddenly appeared on tacnet, racing clear of the core.

“Fire fire fire!” she yelled, jetting upward as all about the inner shielding bowl missiles blew everything to hell, but she emerged up into it, grabbed an edge to stabilise and levelled her Koshaim just as a racing shape darted through the smoke and fire. She fired, as a dozen others fired around her, a storm of red tracer and exploding, spinning debris. The racing thing came apart in progressive disintegration, torn and ripped in all directions.

“A distraction!”
came the same voice that had told her to take cover.
“It escapes, outside the shell, move now!”
As a spot appeared on her tacnet, not red like the others, but blue, and approaching Echo Platoon’s wide flank.

“Lieutenant Zhi, kill that thing!” Trace jetted from her position, others chasing, dodging big chunks of reactor shell that had been blasted clear in the shooting, and realising that a lot of things were sparking and flashing that shouldn’t be, in a fusion reactor core. Ahead, Zhi’s platoon were firing and yelling, and Trace zoomed under the spherical core, past pylons now shredded in the explosions.

And then ahead, she saw it, a big alien shape amidst the smoke and impacting cannon rounds, blazing gunfire in multiple directions even as more missiles hit, and blew it sideways up the curving wall. It recovered, and for the briefest moment Trace could see it clearly — gleaming silver steel, many legs, some now missing, others preparing still-functioning weapons to fire back even now. A beast like a nightmare, five times the size of hacksaw drones they’d previously seen. Then about fifteen marines hit it all at once, Trace included, and smashed it to a floating, silver pulp.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Tacnet showed nothing else moving. “Tactical report! Keep your eyes open, do not trust tacnet!” The distortion was gone, but now the damaged reactor ball was arcing in an alarming fashion. Reports came back, all clear, no more enemy sighted. Trace doubted they were all dead, but for now, with their commander gone, organised resistance was effectively ended.

Trace stared at the dead machine before her, twisted like an insect crushed beneath a boot heel. Many of its parts were loose and spinning about the reactor’s inner shield, but still Trace counted ten main arms — twin chain guns like most drones, but underside cannon as well, big thrusters for zero-G movement, and much heavier armourplate. Three huge dark eyes about a central head, behind rows of small, fiddly manipulator arms for close examinations.

“What the hell is it?”
Staff Sergeant Kono muttered, rifle unwavering from that three-eyed head.

“Not big enough for a queen,” Trace guessed. “Some kind of commander though. Smarter than your average drone. Inspect these others with her, I’d guess they’re regular drones.” As several loud rifle shots indicated someone was doing a lot more than just inspecting them.

“Yeah, but what is it?”
Kono repeated.

“Deepynine,” said Trace. It was the only thing that made sense. “It’s a deepynine commander, and it was leading these sard.”

“Oh fuck,”
Dale muttered from somewhere on the reactor’s far side.
“If there are deepynines still alive and
commanding
sard, we’re all in deep shit. We meaning humanity.”

“Burn it,”
said the voice in Trace’s earpieces before she could reply. A strange, androgynous voice, not of any recognisable
Phoenix
crew, yet well recalled all the same.
“It is not yet fully dead. Restoration is too dangerous. Burn it, and be sure.”

“And who the hell is that voice?”
asked Lieutenant Zhi.

“Not who,” Trace said grimly. “What.”

W
ith cylinder rotation active
, Trace had to go through the core transit to move from midships to Engineering. She took the H Bulkhead main ladder, which had sensors to warn unarmored crew to vacate least she accidentally squashed someone coming down.

Then she stomped along an adjoining corridor and followed the commotion, edging past alarmed, wide-eyed spacers and finally Delta Platoon marines in full armour. Lieutenant Crozier herself stood guard just inside Romki’s doorway, with several others closer still, rifles levelled at the nano-tank containing the drysine queen’s head. People made way for the Major, and at the far door she saw Erik, standing with Second Lieutenant Rooke and Petty Officer Kadi, talking in low voices. Erik saw Trace and beckoned, as others got out of her way. As she walked into the room, she could have sworn the queen’s red-eye followed her, despite the immobility of the head.

“Firstly,” said Trace as they exited the door to talk in the corridor, “please make sure there’s nothing vital on the far side of that wall, because if you fire Koshaims in here, you’ll blow holes several rooms down.”

“I know,” said Erik. “I hear no casualties, is that right?” Glancing at some of the shrapnel damage on her armour.

Trace nodded. “Seven light injuries, nothing major. I wouldn’t read too much into it — the sard were in a hopeless situation and were just trying to delay. You pick fights in ones and twos against our full company, you’ll get slaughtered.” She jerked her head back toward the room just vacated. “What happened? Where’s Romki?”

“Answering questions,” Erik said grimly. “Again. Petty Officer Kadi says he must have activated the nano-tank. The nanos in the fluid completed bypass circuits in the queen’s damaged head, and the construct program started querying her for more information as the fight developed. That activated a lot more of her subsystems than anyone had anticipated. Well, maybe anyone except Romki.”

“Just as well too,” said Trace. Erik frowned. “Is she actually awake?”

“It’s debatable,” said Rooke. He looked both excited and scared. “She’s far below optimal neural capability, no more than twenty percent. She’s… it’s…” he took a breath to steady himself, and gather his thoughts. “Look, none of us have any idea how she’s doing it, it’s like she’s got some kind of dual-process intelligence going right now, half of it is the simulator construct running on our own hardware, and the other half is happening in her actual head thanks to the reprogrammed micros in the tank.”

“So is it actually her?” Trace pressed. “Or a simulation of her? Backed up by whatever small original parts of her actual brain are still working?”

Rooke made an exasperated gesture. “Oh look… I could give you some futile answer in an attempt to try and sound smart, but I’d be lying. We’re not even sure what consciousness means to a hacksaw AI — how they perceive time, reality, self-awareness. All I’m sure of is that there’s something far more complicated happening than just a series of automated reflexes and subroutines.”

“Well she definitely helped us,” Trace admitted. “The deepynine command drone had three friends, all heavy combat models, multiple missile racks, coordinated guidance like nothing we’ve ever seen. We got warned just in time to remove ourselves from direct line of sight and limit primary exchanges to missiles. Without that, we could have lost a dozen or more, and that commander might have got away, for a time at least.”

“You’re sure it’s deepynine?” Erik asked.

“No,” Trace admitted. “That’s why I’d like to talk to her. But the design philosophy is completely different from the drones in Argitori, or from the queen herself. And it makes sense. She’s drysine, she could have spent a lifetime fighting deepynines, or may at least have the memories of others who did, if she’s not that old herself. This is our chance to finally learn something from the only source that matters. I think Romki’s done us a favour.”

She intended it as a challenge. Erik liked to ease people into difficult concepts slowly. Trace hated to waste time, and wished he’d follow suit. Erik looked very unhappy, that well-chewed thumbnail hovering near his lip. “I don’t like having that thing on my ship, Major. I didn’t like it when she was dead, and I sure as hell don’t like it now. She
can
take over systems by remote, we’ve just seen it. She was using
Phoenix
’s command feed through Operations to make contact with you.”

“And again,” Trace said defiantly, “just as well she did. She’s both a danger and an opportunity. I suggest that the best way to minimise the former and maximise the latter is to try and reach some kind of bargain with her.”

“And you’d seriously trust anything she might say?”

“I won’t know until I talk to her. May I?”

The queen had chosen to speak to her, and not Erik, or even Romki. A natural choice, given her command of the only forces capable of killing a hated deepynine. And also, she was the only member of
Phoenix
’s crew the queen had spoken to before. Right before she’d shot her.

Erik considered for a moment. Then he nodded shortly. Trace turned and thumped back into the room. This time she racked her rifle, figuring that two marines already there were enough. Romki’s workbench was built around the nano-tank, partly obscuring the queen’s eye, and the massive hole Trace had blasted through it in Argitori, and out the back of its head. Engineering techs stared, watching on mobile pads and AR glasses with trepidation. Trace locked out her armoured knees, to sit comfortably upon the armour saddle and rest for a moment.

“Hello,” she said to the red eye. That felt very strange. Like speaking to a rock, and expecting it to answer. “Do you remember me?” There came no reply. Trace waited several moments, and looked at the techs about the bay. They shrugged, mystified. The queen had not spoken since telling the marines to burn the deepynine remains. Had that been nothing more than a voice synthesising program? “Don’t play silent with me. I heard you talk just now. You helped my marines to kill those deepynines. I’d like to know why.”

An electronic ripple sounded on coms. A vibration, in apparently random sequence. “Hang on,” said one of the techs, “that’s definitely her. That’s… that’s basic text coding, just let me…”

A cursor appeared on Trace’s visor. Then it ran, making words.
Primary function
, it said.

“What is a primary function?” Trace asked. “Killing deepynines?”

Primary function
, it repeated. And nothing more.

“I don’t think she’s entirely there,” another of the techs suggested, scrolling rapidly through the torrent of data-feedback they were receiving from the construct and the micros in the nano-tank. “The data intensity is way down on what it was just half an hour ago. That effort might have burned her out.”

Trace stared at the big red eye, and got a cold chill up her spine. She recalled the serpentine body, the intricate manipulator arms, writhing and flexing before her in zero-G. The emotive, almost plaintive note in its voice. Not a cold and unfeeling machine. A living, thinking mind, vastly flexible and completely alien. She’d heard that voice again just recently, in her helmet, confronting the deepynine commander. Yet now, all the queen could give her was a blinking cursor and a few words of print?

“She’s foxing,” Trace said with certainty. “I think she can talk fine. She’s choosing not to. Probably playing dumb, keeping her options open.” But Rooke was right too, she thought. No way this was the fully conscious queen she’d met in the Argitori rock. Even able to speak, this was probably a shadow of that fearsome creature. Whether that made her safer or more dangerous, Trace did not know. “Thank you for helping us to kill the deepynines. We have a common enemy. This ship also hunts deepynines. Do you know why?”

A pause, as the cursor blinked.
No.

“We think the deepynines are still alive. Most species think they’re all dead, but we think they have allied with a species called the alo. Do you know the alo? They did not emerge in the Spiral until many thousands of years after the end of the Machine Age.”

Alo,
said the cursor.
I know.

Trace took a deep breath. Here was the only question that really mattered. Probably the biggest question in the galaxy right now. “Do you know what happened to the deepynines after the drysines destroyed most of them? Were there any left? And are they still alive?”

Evidently
, said the cursor. Trace could almost hear irony, in that single word. Exasperation at a silly question, given what had just happened. Around them, Trace had never heard such silence from a small room full of people.

“How many?”

Unknown. Regeneration possible. Organic sentience assisted?

“Yes,” said Trace. “Yes, sentience assisted. Alo assisted, we think alo have helped the deepynine to regenerate.”

Possibility. Terminal danger.

“How great a danger?” Trace pressed.

Ask alo.
Trace blinked at the words. Definitely it was irony. There was no way that alien machines had irony as humans understood it… it must have picked it up from listening to surrounding speech patterns. And she recalled in her first conversation with the queen in Argitori, how its voice had changed in just a few sentences to become more expressive, more human. A fast learner, to put it mildly. And her suspicion increased. Surely this queen was far more awake and aware than she was letting on.

“We think the deepynines are working with the sard. We think they are helping the sard to build deepynine or drysine technology ships. We want to stop them. Will you help us?”

I see Dobruta.

“Yes. Do you know the Dobruta?”

Yes. Dobruta want to kill all the children.

“Are you afraid?” Trace asked carefully. No reply on her visor. “Yes the Dobruta wish to kill all AIs. AI civilisation was very bad for all organics.” Still no reply. Trace supposed it was too much to ask that it might venture an opinion on past horrors, let alone an apology. “But we need to stop the deepynines. If you help us to do that, you will become valuable to us.”

When the deepynines are dead. Do I die too?
Several onlooking techs exchanged incredulous looks.

“If the deepynines have been regenerated in alo space, then it will take a very long time to kill them all,” Trace said reasonably. “There could be a lot of them. As you become important to us, your function will grow.” Behind her, she could just smell Erik’s displeasure. She was making promises she might not be able to keep. The queen might become dissatisfied when those promises were broken. All sorts of possibilities arose.

Bring me the new deepynine remains. I will analyse.

“You advised us to burn them.”

Things change.

“
L
ieutenant Commander
, this is most ill-advised,”
Captain Pram insisted on the vid feed in Erik’s quarters. Erik sat at his small desk with no other company. He’d had to clear the crew out to make this call, following the usual strongly worded disagreements. Kaspowitz had been unhappy, but given his friendship with Trace, was not prepared to pick a big fight with her. Or perhaps he just knew he’d lose. Shahaim had been on the fence, disliking their lack of information, and seeing this as a possible solution. Rooke had been mostly embarrassed that he’d let Romki pull this particular stunt right under his nose, and tech-head that he was, was more fascinated by developments than was probably wise. And Trace, as always, remained stubborn as a rock.

“I’m aware of the dangers,” Erik began.

“I think you are not,”
said the tavalai captain. The big, wide face loomed on the vidscreen, mouth thin with disapproval.
“I assume it is speaking complete sentences, and I assume it seems agreeable.
” It wasn’t speaking anything, just writing words on screens, but Erik let it slide.
“I would remind you, Lieutenant Commander, that no AI willingly speaks a verbal language. For them it has the utility of a human expert on birds imitating bird calls to attract a mate. Their usual mode of communication is direct data transfer — it is a language of sorts, though it compresses information at a rate tenfold more efficient than our own tongues.”

Captain Pram was assuming ignorance on the humans’ part — Erik had listened at lengths to Romki’s explanations of ‘Ceenyne’, the deepynine audible language from the last few hundred years of the Machine Age. But he wasn’t about to get into an academic debate now, because without Romki present, he’d surely lose. “I am aware of that Captain,” he answered the tavalai.

“But you have not considered what it means.”
Erik was becoming very tired of tavalai lecturing on human shortcomings.
“We use language to express emotion and personality. All that you think you are hearing from this machine is faked for effect. Neither drysine nor deepynine nor any of the other AI offshoots have ever felt anything comparable to human or tavalai emotion or sentiment. It views our sentiment as weakness, and tries to make you trust it. I assure you, you cannot.”

“You wanted her to translate whatever data you’ve found in the base,” Erik replied, attempting patience. “Well now you’ve got her, and she can do it with far greater accuracy than your construct.”

“It is not a she, Lieutenant Commander, it is an it.”

“I’m aware of that too,” said Erik. “Have you found the data in the control centre that you were looking for?”

“Please do not change the subject. I will remind you that you are currently surrounded by tavalai-controlled mines and gun platforms. Should this new crewmember of yours decide to take control of your weapons to open fire upon my ship, I assure you I will not hesitate to use every weapon in the vicinity in our defence.”

Erik leaned forward to the screen. “Buddy, even with all your mines, you couldn’t take this ship.” A silence, as the two ship commanders stared at each other on their screens. “I am in command of this vessel. Your opinion is noted. If you wish further cooperation in finding this sard base that’s making all these advanced ships, you will send crew with the data we came here to get, and see if our unexpected guest can decipher it. Any other path will see our cooperation ended. Am I making myself clear?”