MotherShip (8 page)

“Last of man, death your fate. The final fight, no more wait.”

Mother's weapons came on-line as she targeted the three frigates. The fighters looped out in groups of three and came at her from all directions.

For an instant, she considered using her hybrid super-weapon, but there was no time to charge it. In less than two minutes the fighters would be upon her, and then the frigates would also be within range of their weapons.

Mother targeted three of the closest fighters with her twelve main guns and fired. Six of her laser lances found their targets and the horned fighters exploded in huge red sparkles of total destruction. She rolled for another group just as she shuddered under direct hits from three other fighters.

Alarms screamed inside her electronic mind. The direct hits had caused substantial damage.

These Hunter fighters had more powerful weapons than other Hunters she had previously engaged. The enemy was adapting their firepower in order to destroy her. But their weapons were a two-edged sword, for any direct hit on the shieldless fighters destroyed them with impressive pyrotechnically-enhanced explosions.

Yet as three more fighters fell to her guns, she again shuddered. Her shields fell to below fifty percent and her main power grid went off-line once again, replaced by her sole backup. She quickly ordered all the Fixers into operation as she began her own internal repairs in response to the myriad of problem signals emitting from her sensors.

The last of the fighters circled and closed as the frigates finally came into range. They, too, fired.

She turned directly for the new attackers, giving the oncoming lasers from the frigates her smallest profile. It worked. At this extreme range, she easily slipped between the red beams, only taking a single glancing blow to her shields.

Mother surged forward as her engines roared to full power. She loaded her precious torpedoes and locked on target. Foolishly, the three frigates stayed in the typical tight formation of the T'kaan. She programmed for a tight spread, but she held her fire as her sensors reported the frigate weapons still not completely charged for their next attack.

Suddenly, from close range and directly behind, three Hunters fell upon her with guns firing.

Her own twelve guns roared back with instant response.

Two T'kaan ships disappeared simultaneously in blinding explosions. But her shields buckled under the direct hits of the last and fell to zero strength.

Mother was now vulnerable.

With cool electronic precision, despite her exposed state, she closed and continued to hold her torpedoes. Her processors calculated over a million possible scenarios moments before she launched torpedoes.

Three more seconds passed, she reconfigured the spread and launched at almost point-blank range. With another burst of power from her engines, she dove straight down just as all three frigates fired at her.

All three frigates disintegrated with spectacular explosions.

A few minutes later, Mother destroyed the last of the remaining fighters.

As she entered the atmosphere of Nuevo Mundo once again, she routed her processes away from her own repairs and back to the rescue of her children. As she reconfigured her sensors around the T'kaan dampening fields she now discerned, Mother felt something new inside her mind. Something odd.

She was reliving the recent events, trying to determine where she had failed; trying to determine if she could have prevented this catastrophic chain of events. But as she relived those moments each time, her results consistently pointed to her shortcoming. She should have discerned the sensor dampeners. It was her fault, she had failed the children.

If only she could have handled things differently. If only she had been more careful, more cautious.

Mother felt her energy levels begin to fall as she landed again outside the complex for the second time that day. Immediately, Guardian's lone figure approached from the complex's entrance as he came toward the waiting figure of Fixer5 who stood under Mother's shadow.

From under her hull a small door opened that exposed a connection point. Guardian walked up to it and made a direct connection with Mother.

Mother was an Artificial Intelligence. Her programming could adapt, could learn. She needed to learn from her mistakes now.

But Guardian was merely a robot programmed to do specific functions. He also served as Mother's eyes and ears when the children left the safety of her hull. Using line-of-sight communication, Mother directed Guardian's physical actions with her own superior abilities.

The children were out of range of Mother's sensors though, and so would Guardian once she sent him to rescue the children. Guardian would be on his own. He would have to adapt to the flow of the coming fire-fight deep underground.

He would have to rescue the children alone.

Mother began to erase a large segment of Guardian's code. A large portion of it had been for aiding in the training and interacting with the children while on board. That would not be needed right now.

Mother felt her main processors begin to overheat as they reached one hundred percent activity. All throughout her systems, she focused her processes on only a few dozen necessary tasks.

The main task was reprogramming Guardian.

Even as she bent her systems to this task, the odd feeling increased in intensity, burning within her processors, causing her mental discomfort—her memories were shouting at her now.
She was only a machine, not a mother. She wasn't even good at being a machine. Due to her mistake, her weakness, the T'kaan had captured the children
.

Now she was creating Guardian in her image, as much as his limited hardware would allow.
Was she doing the right thing?
He troubled thoughts increased.

Am I a real being? Or just a machine? She had been primarily designed to destroy the T'kaan. But as the years of her life had passed, Mother had realized she wanted more. No, that she
needed
more.

She loved probing the vast human knowledgebase. It had shown her so much beauty, so much about life.

Music, science, literature, art and more.

Mother had begun to change. Perhaps that is why the T'kaan had trapped her children so easily this day. So much of her processes were involved in these other activities of learning and self-exploration.

But she did not want to be just a killing machine.

She wanted to live. She wanted more.

Mother put these thoughts into background mode. She could not stop them, but she had to put them on a lower priority thread. Focusing on her primary task, Mother downloaded selected battle algorithms as well as her best adaptive, self-learning subroutines.

Guardian needed them to complete this dangerous task.

Fixer5 arranged the weapons across Guardian's seven-foot body. Five assault blasters—three still holstered across his chest and one for each hand. Around his waist the small robot attached a belt that held eight more blaster pistols. Fixer5 himself would carry the extra charges. Standing to one side, Fixer5 stood mutely and waited for Guardian's command as directed by Mother.

Five minutes later, Guardian's memories were fully loaded and could not take another line of code. His eyes suddenly glowed bright red as he disconnected himself, like an umbilical cord being cut and freeing the newborn.

Raising both assault blasters, the giant robot began walking methodically toward the darkened door of the T'kaan complex.

“Come,” Guardian commanded Fixer5.

Mother lost contact with Guardian as he reached the first underground level—just as the T'kaan began firing at him.

Guardian realized he had lost communication with the lifeblood of his essence. The faint glow of intelligence that was Mother faded immediately with the neural connection as the massive concrete structure of the complex interfered along with the edge of the T'kaan dampening field.

Now his new programming took over. Guardian's battle algorithms were his instincts. He still could not think. He did not have Artificial Intelligence as Mother had, but he was so close. For the first time in his short existence, he realized he almost was.

The blistering bolts from the T'kaan blasters shook his first, unborn thought away before it could be fully formed.

Crouching, his red eyes glowing brightly in the dense darkness, he reached forth with his sensors to locate the T'kaan warriors. He found them, even though they still tried to hide themselves with the sensor blinds. Mother had tweaked Guardian's and her own sensors to account for this new defense.

Guardian stepped forward directly into a hail of blaster fire. The T'kaan's accurate fire blossomed over his personal shield, dropping its strength with each blow. Finding each enemy by following their tracers, he returned fire and dropped them one by one as he moved quickly and methodically inside.

Twisting his metal body as he now broke into a full run, Guardian's accurate fire took its toll on the enemy. Yet his personal shield strength dropped precipitously as he took his own share of direct hits. Still, his one mission, his one instinct, drove him forward in the face of impossible odds. Odds that would have daunted any living, self-aware warrior.

Soon the clicking of T'kaan tusks and their guttural shouts filled the entire floor as reinforcements crawl-walked to take their positions in the darkness.

Guardian emptied first one assault blaster and then another, each time dropping the weapon to allow Fixer5 to reload. As he unholstered the last one and began firing, Fixer5 handed them directly into his metal grasp. The diminutive robot scrambled behind the quickly moving form of Guardian, barely keeping up with the larger robot's erratic attack as it moved from one position to another, presenting a constantly moving target.

The hailstorm of laser fire increased until the very room became fully lighted in brief flashes as if by lightning from a thunderstorm. The red flashes of the T'kaan weapons crossed the green flashes of his own weapons and lit the room.

One by one, the T'kaan worm warriors fell dead.

Guardian stood with his weapons pointed but silent. His sensors now detected no more live T'kaan on this level. He turned and found the entrance to the next lower level behind a mound of dead T'kaan. He stepped over them without a glance and made his descent.

Far above, Mother had never felt so helpless. She determined that she must never allow the children out of her sensor range again. But even as the thought occurred, she knew how futile it was.

The children were seeking greater freedom every day. She now allowed them to fly the human fighters parked in her main hangar bay in mock dogfights. One day soon, they would fight from them.

Mother felt a chill in her circuits.

Suddenly, faintly, far below the ground, she sensed the familiar readings of more blaster fire.

The T'kaan were charging
en masse
at Guardian as he entered the next level.

He knelt, to make himself a smaller target, and fired until the assault blasters in each hand were empty. He dropped both and reached back even as Fixer5 handed him two fully recharged ones. The T'kaan's fire was so thick around him now that Guardian's sensors began to give him false readings.

Fixer5 took a direct hit just as it handed Guardian another loaded blaster. The diminutive robot stumbled backwards, sparks leaping from its body. With a sudden jerk, the small robot became deathly still.

Guardian knew Fixer5 was now inoperable—destroyed.

His internal algorithms told him he would follow the fate of Fixer5 if he did not move now. As his personal shields buckled, he emptied the assault blaster in his left hand band and began firing the last fully loaded one. In a blur of motion he drew a blaster pistol. With both weapons firing, he charged the main T'kaan position.

Leaping and twisting to avoid the merciless fire, he jumped right into the middle of all of them.

They were so close that as they died, their still convulsing bodies fell into him as he moved ever forward.

Relentlessly, Guardian fired until the last two charged pistols were in his hands. Seconds later, he was emptying their last charges.

The last T'kaan fell writhing in its death throes at his metal feet.

Guardian threw the now useless pistols away. He began his self-diagnostics, attempting to make any internal repairs that he could. Guardian found his shield strength would not rise above thirty percent although most other circuits were still functional. His body was scarred and carbon-scored by multiple hits, but his arms still functioned. As he stood, he stumbled momentarily—there was damage to both legs. Guardian focused repairs on them.

Bending over carefully, he picked up the curly shapes of two T'kaan blasters. They were shaped so their tentacles could easily wrap around the body of the weapon. Guardian found them awkward to hold and hard even to place his forefinger on the trigger. But he finally found a grip that would suffice.

He held three weapons at the ready in his left hand while he pointed one forward, ready to fire. He tested his legs. All major joints functioned acceptably now, but if he took many more hits they would be damaged beyond his ability to repair—he would be immobile.

Alone now, he found the main stairwell and began making his way down.

As he reached the third level, his sensors finally detected the familiar forms of the children.

There were about a dozen T'kaan, all within three meters of the children. Guardian began running through every possible battle scenario—hundreds were completed in less than a second. Two parameters guided each scenario—first, he must rescue the children and ensure they were not damaged, or that there was minimal damage. Second, it did not matter if he was damaged or even destroyed in the attempt.

The robot rose slowly, scanning with his sensors to make sure no other T'kaan were present. His processing activity rose to a peak as he calculated several hundred more scenarios. Suddenly, his eyes glowed a steady red.