The Ouroboros Wave (7 page)

“But, Chief, how are we going to get there? It’s forty klicks.”

The voice belonged to Kurokawa in East Habitat. Along with the destruction of the docking ports, they had lost the cargo lifts and elevators running from the habitats to the logistics module. Theoretically they could make their way to the logistics module using the carbon-fiber handholds running along the station struts. But EVAing forty crew members and bringing them to the logistics module was not realistic. There was bound to be an accident—most
of the crew had not logged much EVA time.

“Well, the main lifts were carried away when the shuttles exploded, but there are emergency lifts that can be deployed manually from the logistics module. All we have to do is enter the code to release the lifts and centrifugal force will bring them down to the habitats. They carry four at a time, so it will only take five roundtrips
to evacuate everyone.”

“That means someone will have to EVA and go there to enter
the codes.”

“That’s right, Kurokawa. And we can only summon the shuttles from the habitats, not from the core, so we’ll need to leave some people here. All we need is for one person to go—say two, for
backup in case there’s an accident.”

“But that means whoever goes has to be qualified to prepare the
port for docking.”

“Then we know who’s going, don’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and I are the only ones on this station with those qualifications.”

7

THE TRUCK WAS SPEEDING
counterclockwise around the ring, far faster than its rated limit, though this was of no concern to Catherine now. Shiva had attacked Amphisbaena. There was no telling what he might do in the next few minutes.

SysInt’s voice came over her web. “Catherine, Shiva’s logic core is running flat out.”

“That’s not good. Where’s the station now? Is it approaching another platform?”

“No. It passed South Platform a few minutes ago. Shiva ignored it.”

The truck abruptly decelerated. Catherine had inadvertently created the same conditions that preceded Graham Chapman’s death. But Shiva had learned something from the accident. Rather than stop the truck instantly and risk damage to Ouroboros, the AI was reducing its speed slowly.

“I think I know what he’s doing,” said Catherine. “This may have something to do with the resonance-damping system. Whenever the station approaches Ouroboros, gravitational attraction distorts the ring. If the truck moves too fast in this direction, it too will generate oscillations that have to be damped out.”

“So all this is consistent with Shiva trying to protect Ouroboros from oscillation?”

“It could be. It’s just that the anti-resonance system isn’t new. Why has Shiva started behaving like this now, I wonder.”

“What are you going to do? You’re not going to make it there. Should I send the train?”

“We don’t have time. Stay calm, there are other options. Just get Sati activated as soon as you can.” Catherine lowered her visor and pressurized the suit. The truck’s life-support systems had just gone off-line. The air would soon be unbreathable. She extracted a tool from her utility pack and went to work removing the cover on the console and resetting the control jumpers. This put the truck
under manual control.

“There goes five minutes,” Catherine said to herself. She put the truck in motion again. There was no way Shiva could access it now. She quickly passed the speed limit again; this time the truck’s
systems remained nominal.

“Catherine! What’s going on?”

“Nothing, I just outsmarted our AI. Something wrong?”

“He’s reasoning like mad. He must be thinking of a way to stop
you.”

“That’s not possible. I’ve taken the truck off-line. I’m invisible.” The truck was within hailing distance of South Platform when Catherine heard a wail of panic.

“Stop!”

“Why? What is it?”

“He’s activating the laser cannons!”

“Good god!” But the truck was moving far too fast to be stopped quickly. Increasing speed, on the other hand, would make Shiva’s aim that much less accurate. It was her best bet for survival, but Catherine prepared for the worst. She assumed a fetal position on
the floor of the cab.

Then it hit her—Shiva didn’t have to know where the truck was. The lasers were equipped with onboard radar aiming. He could hand over control to the radar at the last moment and let the cannons
think they were firing at a meteor.

Where am I?
Catherine began feverishly trying to guess when the truck would pass South Platform. Shiva didn’t know her precise location, which made it impossible for West Platform to confirm it either. She couldn’t see anything from the floor of the cab. All she could do was try to guess her location from the time display on her visor.

He’ll hit me as soon as I poke my head up over the horizon.

The distance to the horizon along the ring’s outer surface was only about two kilometers. Catherine would be in cannon range for less than a second, but for that instant her fate would hang in the balance.

Suddenly the cab was filled with light, and Catherine was convinced her luck had run out. There was a high-pitched whine as air vented rapidly to space. Soon the sound stopped.

Is that it?
She lifted her head to peer out. There was a single hole, several inches across, in the front of the cab. It would have been fatal if the beam had struck her, but the location of the hole suggested Shiva hadn’t been targeting the passenger.

“Catherine, I hope you’re alive.” It was SysInt.

“Alive and kicking. There’s a nice big hole in the truck though. What happened? It looks like Shiva only fired once.”

“So he did hit you. We tried to take control of the lasers, but he completely shut us out. We saw him fire.”

Catherine noticed she was slowing down. The outrushing air had pulled the truck’s operating manual out of the rack behind the passenger seat and tossed it onto the speed control lever. She lifted the lever and the truck accelerated.

“I think we’ve been on the wrong track all along. You said Shiva bypassed the subsystem and was controlling the lasers directly?”

“That’s how it looks.”

“Shiva isn’t capable of selecting targets.”

“I don’t understand. You said there was a hole in the truck,” said SysInt.

“It’s not that he grasps the reality of Amphisbaena or the truck as physical objects. For Shiva those are just symbols. He’s using symbols to attack symbols. That explains why he hasn’t been following through on his attacks. I think the same thing happened with Amphisbaena. The data relay on each habitat—that’s all Amphisbaena is to Shiva.”

“But if Shiva is reacting to symbols, how did he target the station? That has to mean some kind of awareness of the physical world.”

“Being dependent on symbol recognition doesn’t mean Shiva can’t target things in the real world. The relays on the station are just above the docking ports. Shiva is constantly tracking them, which means he can extract a targeting solution from real-time coordinates. That’s not recognition of three-dimensional space, though. We had another dummy Amphisbaena ID ready to swap into the system, but we haven’t used it. As far as Shiva is concerned, the attack rendered Amphisbaena nonexistent. The truck’s speed dropped after I was fired on, though that was just an accident. Shiva will think the truck’s been destroyed.” In point of fact, Catherine wasn’t sure about this, but she felt reason for optimism. Accounting for Shiva’s behavior in terms of faulty awareness was easier than assuming the AI had decided to attack its human masters.

There was a pause. “Catherine, it looks like the angle of the laser strikes on Amphisbaena is consistent with an attack on the data relays. The shuttles were just in the way.”

“See? That’s a major indication of why this started in the first place.”

“But in that case, Shiva is a danger to us all,” said SysInt. “He doesn’t understand that humans are physically present on Amphisbaena.”

8

“
CHIEF, SOUTH PLATFORMS’S SHUTTLE
is ready when you are.”

“Understood. Prep for evac. I’m almost there.”

Tatsuya toggled off. After the laser attack he’d decided not to use a new ID to reestablish contact with Ouroboros Net. Clearly Shiva had some serious issues with Amphisbaena. For now the AI seemed to be deliberately ignoring them. As long as they weren’t under attack, it was best to leave things alone.

The current problem was how to get to the logistics module across forty kilometers of Amphisbaena’s struts and bracing. It had been his idea, but he’d never imagined it would be this challenging. The gravity in the habitat was about the same as that on Mars—about a third of Earth’s—and as he worked his way toward Amphisbaena’s midpoint, the force generated by the station’s rotation would diminish. The beginning was supposed to be the hardest part.

Tatsuya’s guess that it would be possible to cover such a distance was based on a vacation he’d spent as a young man climbing Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system. The volcano was twenty-seven kilometers high, but nearly six hundred wide. It was more of a plateau than a mountain, with a constant, gentle slope. Walking to the top in his suit had been exhausting and he’d had some close calls along the way. But he’d made it.

Of course, Amphisbaena was not a mountain. But there was little difference between gravity at the base of Olympus Mons and at its summit. Even so, he’d managed to gain twenty-seven kilometers of altitude. With gravity dropping the closer he was to the center of Amphisbaena, this should be far easier. At least that was the concept.

As it turned out, he wasn’t entirely wrong. He could feel his body getting lighter as he worked his way along. Still, it had taken him twenty kilometers of climbing just to reduce the gravity by half.

“Kurokawa, can you hear me?”

“I hear you, Chief.”

“How far along are you?”

“I think about halfway.”

“About the same as me.”

“Can I ask you a question, Chief?”

“Sure.”

“What gave you the idiotic idea we could climb forty klicks?”

“Is that your only question?”

“That’s it for right now.”

The rest of their climb was punctuated with similar exchanges. Not long after the halfway point it was clear to Tatsuya that he was reaching his limit, because he was having trouble gripping the climbing hooks. The low gravity made it easy to recover if he missed a hook, but after missing one five times, he knew he was out of his depth. This was getting dangerous. He found himself wishing the emergency docking port had been situated a bit more conveniently. He toggled his comm and said to no one in particular,
“Ten-minute break.”

The logistics module’s docking port had been built for cargo shuttles to use while the station was under construction—it wasn’t in routine use. For reasons Tatsuya could not recall, the port was oriented ninety degrees to Amphisbaena’s rotation, forcing spacecraft to roll in order to synchronize with the station beneath them prior to docking. Because this port had only been used during the construction phase, the designers had never thought to equip it with remote access capability. Someone had to prep it from inside. At a time like this, the design wasn’t very user friendly. Tatsuya spent his break cursing this lack of foresight.

“Chief? Ten minutes.”

“I know, I know.” Tatsuya started moving again. Later he realized from Kurokawa’s tone that he hadn’t just been reminding Tatsuya
of the time. He’d been checking if his chief was still alive.

Not far past the halfway point climbing became much easier. Tatsuya discovered that propelling himself tens of meters at a time was more efficient than proceeding hook by hook. It seemed Kurokawa had made the same discovery. The Coriolis effect was weaker here, and there was little drift to correct for. Soon he was able to cover a hundred meters in one go. He had to stay alert; were it not for his experience, he could easily have built up enough momentum to end up crashing into the hull of the module. But he and Kurokawa had EVA’d so many times that compensating for
changing inertia was second nature.

Tatsuya reached the hatch of the logistics module. It opened easily. Gravity was now close to zero. His body was exhausted, but he wasn’t feeling it much in the microgravity. He released the east lift’s latch, leaving the west lift for Kurokawa. They had both climbed here, each with a mission to fulfill.

The emergency lift consisted of a plastic frame at the end of a carbon nanotube wire. Releasing the latch triggered a spring-loaded ejection mechanism. Slowly the lift began its forty-kilometer descent toward East Habitat.

“Lift on its way, gentlemen. It’ll be with you shortly.” Tatsuya went to work prepping the docking port.

9