Roboteer (13 page)

‘Thank you, General,’ said Rodriguez smoothly. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you all. Please consider my presence here a measure of the Prophet’s appreciation of your good work.’ His voice oozed pious insincerity. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to take the opportunity to talk to you all one-on-one over the next few days, to find out what you do. I’m well aware that I have a lot to learn.’

Gustav watched his team’s collective suspicion screw tighter. ‘I’ve decided to relinquish Regis’s time to you for the next few days, Father, to help bring you up to speed,’ he said.

Rodriguez shot him a suspicious glance. “That was very generous of you, General.” He turned his hard black eyes on Regis.

Regis smiled back blandly. Gustav was pleased. Apparently, Emil had briefed Regis well.

Gustav rubbed his hands together. ‘Now, where should we start? I imagine you’re keen to take a look around, Father? Perhaps you’d like to view the Relic with your own eyes.’ He gestured invitingly down the corridor that led to the observation centre, as if he intended to walk that way himself.

Rodriguez nodded slowly, clearly surprised to find Gustav so cooperative all of a sudden. ‘That would be my first objective, yes,’ he said warily.

‘Wonderful. Regis, please take good care of the disciple. I will be briefing my science staff in the ready room.’

Rodriguez’s face hardened as he realised he’d been outmanoeuvred. Before the disciple could complain or change his mind, Gustav strode off in the opposite direction with his team following close behind. He felt a certain glee as he walked away.
Free
, for the first time in weeks, from the disciple’s repellent smugness and psychotic schemes. The sense of relief was like a window thrown open in a stuffy room.

Though the ruse amused him, it was also a necessity. He needed to get his people away from Rodriguez as fast as possible, so he could explain the situation before one of them put their foot in it. After all, they had just weeks to persuade the Prophet’s representative to see things from their perspective before the project was dropped. After that, Rodriguez would be free to try out his ideas for destroying the Relic.

Emil had a guard waiting at the door of the meeting room, just as Gustav had requested.

‘Welcome back, sir,’ the guard said with a grin.

‘Good to see you, Assim,’ said Gustav. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed, not by anyone or anything – particularly not by Disciple Rodriguez. If he tries to enter, call for Chu.’

‘Yes, sir!’

Gustav ushered his staff into the meeting room and closed the door behind them.

‘Sit down and listen,’ he told them all. ‘Save your questions for the end. I have a lot to tell you.’

6.4: WILL

Together, John and Will scrutinised Ulanu’s security arrangements. It was becoming increasingly clear that to get at Ulanu’s data they had no choice but to deal with the sentinel swarm that hung around the ships like a cloud of animate menace. Will manoeuvred their drone fleet and handled John’s incomprehensible hacking templates. Meanwhile, John became progressively more agitated.

‘Damn!’ he exclaimed at last.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Will.

‘That cloud is the problem. I just realised why I couldn’t hack its swarming protocol –because it doesn’t have one. The fucking thing is semi-random. It’s some kind of chaotic, distributed set-up.’ John pulled a sour face. He was not a man used to being thwarted. ‘Not only are all the comms routed through it, but it scans the surrounding space for intruders, too,’ he complained. ‘Send a drone in there and you trigger an alarm. Try to intercept a sentinel and the same thing happens. Because they don’t have any visitors, there’s nothing to stop them from winding their security as tight as they like.’

‘Can’t you just send a tight-beam message through it to one of those ships’ data ports and bypass the whole problem?’ said Will.

‘Not without knowing their encryption first. To find out what they’re using, I have to intercept packets. And I can’t get at the packets unless I know where the sentinels are going to be.’

Will stared into the ever-shifting swarm. ‘If the sentinels’ movements are random, how do they find each other?’

‘It must be hard-wired,’ said John bitterly. ‘As far as I can tell, they read the positions of their neighbours and the ships they guard and then compute expected vectors. They probably just use some tweak of a standard chaotic function. The problem is, without knowing the exact formula, we don’t stand a chance of replicating it.’

‘Can I have a look at your workings?’ said Will.

‘Be my guest,’ John replied distantly. His tone implied what he’d never say out loud: that he doubted Will would see something he couldn’t. After all, Will was just a roboteer.

Will opened a window onto John’s digital interpretation of the swarm. John had overlaid colour-coded velocity and acceleration vectors onto each sentinel, and they moved in slowly undulating unison like bright fish under water. Will stared at the image intently, determined to help. He’d not really had a chance to prove his worth since he stepped aboard the
Ariel
. Perhaps this was his opportunity. After all, this was just a pattern-analysis problem at the end of the day, and that’s what he was good at.

Several minutes of staring and pondering yielded nothing, though. Will decided he wasn’t close enough to the swarm. He needed to be in it. He dumped John’s feed into a virtual room and stripped off the vectors to look at the raw motion. The swarm became a cloud of fireflies, the ships at their heart a cluster of burning embers. He walked around it, and through it, letting the ebb and flow sink into his mind.

‘Will?’ said John.

‘Hang on, I’m thinking.’

The swarm had flavours of tides and flocking birds, but there was something else in the mix. He peered at the sentinels and watched them suddenly backtrack at speed in a surprising cascade.

He laughed, a crazy idea forming in his head. He pulled up a scalar velocity history of the sentinel that had caused the domino effect, and sure enough, there it was – a pink-noise curve, just as he’d suspected. Will would have seen the same graph if he’d plotted the behaviour of a piece of jazz. Whoever wrote this swarm code had taken their algorithm from a music package and beefed up the motion with extra dimensions. The solution looked strangely cheap and obvious now that he’d spotted it, but he had no doubt it was the right one. It fitted perfectly with the Earthers’
make do and mend
approach to coding.

Unfortunately, there was still no way for him to know the exact formula they were using. But that shouldn’t stop him from improvising along with it for a little while. The idea amused him.

‘What if we could make one of our drones move like a sentinel long enough for us to break the encryption?’ he asked John excitedly. ‘If it could fool its neighbours and intercept signals on their behalf – would that help?’

‘Sure,’ said John with a laugh. ‘That’d solve all our problems. Assuming we could emulate their flight pattern down to the nearest metre for whole minutes without fucking up.’

‘Okay,’ said Will. ‘I’ll need a couple of hours.’

John glanced incredulously into his cabin camera. ‘You think you can do it?’

‘No harm in trying, is there?’

John raised an eyebrow. ‘Not until we get our asses kicked, no.’

It took Will longer than he’d guessed. First, he had to trawl the
Ariel
’s entertainment archives for a decent jazz improvisation SAP. He beefed the code into shape, adding extra dimensions much as the Earther programmers must have done. Then he grabbed a handful of suitably complex songs from the music archive to act as base parameters. Finally, he needed a little magic: anticipation. He took that from a schoolyard tag program he’d written. Then he started knitting it all together so that instead of thinking like an ordinary machine, it guessed and played like a living thing.

This was Will’s speciality. Common wisdom said that an SAP could only get so smart and still provide reliable behaviour. Galatean research had never been able to push artificial intelligence beyond the hypothetical Brache limit without creating minds that were dangerously erratic. Widen the aperture of consciousness and there was a corresponding drop in the frequency of rule creation. Narrow it and there was a limit to rule complexity and a tendency to obsess. Hence the need for a human handler – a guiding intelligence beyond the Brache limit that could handle ideas that were
strongly fuzzy
.

Will’s fascination was with pushing that limit. After all, nature had done it with the human mind. Admittedly it had taken millions of years of evolution to achieve, but nevertheless, the presence of natural intelligence meant it was possible somehow. Will hadn’t been able to break the limit yet, but he’d come close and this SAP was one of his finest.

John watched it with him as they dry ran the program. It matched the swarm’s motion almost exactly.

John shook his head in disbelief. ‘In Gal’s name!’ he said with a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.’

The others opened windows through their visors to see what Will had accomplished.

‘Way to go, Will!’ said Rachel with a grin.

Will swelled with pride.

‘This is excellent work,’ Hugo told him, sounding surprised. ‘Really excellent.’

It was the first time the
Ariel
’s resident physicist had complemented Will on anything.

Ira rubbed his chin and nodded appreciatively. ‘Clever,’ he said. ‘But you realise you’re going to have to ride that drone in there the whole way, just in case. One mistake and those three gunships will fry us on the spot.’

‘I know,’ said Will.

John grinned broadly, his perfectly even white teeth flashing like a shark’s smile. ‘Let’s go, then,’ he said.

John selected the drone from their fleet with a physical profile most like that of a sentinel and slid it close to the swarm. Meanwhile, Will loaded the SAP into its hardware and jumped in after it.

The view from the drone was extraordinary. The sentinels ahead of him no longer looked like dull grey dots or even fireflies. Instead they were golden motes with silver tails of position-history snaking away in one direction and translucent cones of possible flight paths spreading in the other.

In a rush, Will saw the truth of what the sentinels were doing. They were dancing. With glee, he sidled up and joined their three-dimensional tango. The sentinels swerved around him, accepting him into the swing of motion as if he were one of their own. Will shared the spy-drone’s delight.

‘It’s working!’ John exclaimed. ‘It’s fucking working!’

Then, just as Will started to lose himself in the pattern, the sentinels started talking to him. Little snatches of data mentioned in passing like gossip on a ballroom floor. He dutifully delivered them to their intended destinations while John copied them back to the
Ariel
.

‘This is great!’ he exclaimed. ‘Keep it up, Will. We’re getting packets.’

Will danced between the stars. In the back of his mind, he could feel John’s incursion into the Earthers’ network and the chunks of data flowing the other way – architecture schematics, blueprints, passwords. In a few minutes, they’d have cracked the security altogether. The secrets of the strange, smooth world below would be theirs for the taking.

Excited chatter broke out in the cabin, back in the real world. Will could just about hear Hugo’s urgent tones, but with his senses tuned to the dance, it was impossible to make out the words.

In fact, the next human word he heard properly was John’s almost explosive yell.

‘
Shit!
’

It came straight down the comms-line into Will’s sensorium. Will flinched and narrowly avoided missing a cue to dart sideways as the swarm’s flight-path cones flicked around in a spectacular wave.

‘What is it?’ he asked, as soon as the emergency was over.

‘This fucking Ulanu,’ John snarled. ‘There’s no soft copy of the swarm algorithm. He had the sentinels shipped in sealed with their behaviour blueprint intentionally missing so they couldn’t be hacked. Now we know where Earth has been hiding all its decent scientists.’

No blueprint. Will’s high spirits dropped. ‘So what do I do?’

‘Keep at it, if you can. We’re going to try to piggyback the comms straight through you.’

Through
him
? ‘For how long?’ Will asked nervously.

‘Till we’ve got what we need,’ said John. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll try to make it fast. Get ready for a full-scale data-trawl.’

Will braced himself. Suddenly the dance didn’t feel quite so cheerful. He began to see the swaying golden spheres for what they really were: deadly moving triggers. This was a very dangerous kind of ball to dance at, he realised. Tread on just one foot and your dance partners were likely to kill you.

In the next second he experienced a dreadful shuddering sensation, like standing on a bridge over a mighty waterfall. A blur of words and images coursed through his head as the little drone he was piloting became the conduit for John’s download. They were sucking information out of the Earther database as fast as the
Ariel
could read it.

Somewhere in the distance, Hugo shouted again. Ira said something stern and decisive.

‘We’ve found a map of their soft core,’ John explained, ‘and we think we’ve located the access feed for the alien device. Hugo’s going to try for a quick contact.’

‘Can’t we wait?’ Will urged. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up with the trawl going on.’

‘We may not get another chance,’ said John. ‘If there are hook mines anywhere in their data store, just reading them will raise the alarm. We have to be ready for a quick exit. Rachel’s already gearing to go.’

Hugo’s voice came over the line. ‘Don’t worry, Will,’ he said. ‘I’ll be as fast as I can. This is simply an opportunity we can’t afford to pass up.’

‘Then get on with it!’ Will snapped.