Star Force 10: Outcast Read online

  Thor possessed three rings, which was unusual. One linked to the dead sun, a cosmic cul-de-sac leading nowhere. The second one led back to Eden, which we’d just traveled through. The final one I knew lay half-buried in the mantle of Yale, one of the lobsters’ former homes. It had been turned off and dead for decades.

  “So…we’re here?” I asked Adrienne, who sat expectantly in her seat, obviously waiting for me to say something. She seemed to savor the drama, just as Olivia had. That thought sobered me.

  “Seriously, where to now?” I asked.

  “You know about the Yale ring, right?”

  “Yes. Once the Macros turned it off, we could never get it turned back on again. Dad believes the machines might still be on the other side, building up, but nobody wants to hear that.”

  Adrienne held up her hand as if to get back on track. “Yes, there was a big expedition about twenty years ago that failed to achieve any breakthrough, so Star Force left an orbital station and a few spy drones monitoring the dead ring. But now, they’re secretly trying again.”

  “They? Who is ‘they’?”

  “A Fleet-sponsored civilian science team. One of those lobsters is along, too, since it was their system originally.”

  “How the hell do you know all this if it’s supposed to be secret?”

  “I have my ways.”

  I bugged Adrienne to tell me but couldn’t get any more out of her. “So this was Olivia’s surprise,” I said, studying Yale. There was a ship drifting there just as she’d said there would be. It was a Star Force warship.

  “Just wait until we get there,” Adrienne said.

  That evening, Greyhound announced we would be turning over and gradually decelerating from our high speed. Just after it did, the brainbox came back with, “Possible anomaly in the aft cargo bay.” That got my attention. When we had left the refueling station I had instructed the ship to keep watch for anything out of the ordinary—no matter how small.

  I could hear the way it hesitated, as if it was uncertain. I suppose that even the words “no matter how small” were open to interpretation. There had to be a cutoff for any measurement below which anomalies were ignored, or the thing would be forever reporting false positives every time we ran into a piece of space dust. It could have just been cargo shifting due to the turnover.

  “What kind of anomaly?” I asked.

  “Unknown.” That was all it said. Okay, I was going to have to dig it out of the brainbox. These things didn’t have much imagination.

  “What parameters have been exceeded?” I probed. “Mass? Chemical composition? Movement? Energy?”

  That seemed to prompt the ship’s mind to finally give me something definite. “None of the above. No single parameter is sufficiently divergent, but taken together, there is a better than fifty percent chance of an anomaly.”

  “Give me visual in all spectra and audio from within the aft cargo bay.” Several displays lit up with various shots using visible light, infrared, ultraviolet and others.

  “What’s that?” Adrienne said, taking a stylus and drawing an outline on the smart screen.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, as the shape of a mechanical monster became clear for just a moment before all the cameras shut off. Then my head jerked at a mechanical sound, a kind of scraping and dragging, which came through the speakers and then cut out. “It’s a Macro.”

  “Interior alarm tripped,” came the abrupt voice of Greyhound. “Unauthorized access detected.”

  “Stay here. Close the bridge up tight,” I told Adrienne.

  “Give me a gun,” she said. “I’ll back you up.”

  “You’re not trained with weapons, are you?”

  “I can shoot.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but hang back. If something goes terribly wrong, you’ll need to seal the hatch and fly the ship. Contact Star Force.”

  “So you want to go in there alone and play hero?”

  “I’m a Star Force officer. Macros are my job.”

  Adrienne finally stopped arguing and nodded. “All right Cody, what’s the plan?”

  “This machine must have gotten aboard somehow, maybe back at the station, and I bet it plans to finish what it started. I bet the old machines still have a base out here, like my dad always said, building up to attack humanity and its allies again. Or maybe it’s a new thing the Blues have released. Maybe they’re slipping small machines into Earth space as spies and assassins in revenge for bombing them. If I can get evidence…it might make Olivia’s death mean something.”

  Adrienne looked like she wanted to keep arguing, but finally just nodded. “Go.”

  Leaping to my feet, I ran for the weapons locker. I’d already checked out just what weapons they carried aboard. Nothing military, but even civilian spaceships were allowed to have some serious gear. Never knew what you might meet out here.

  The locker metal shivered and then opened as it read my palm. I strapped on a big pistol and the largest laser rifle I saw. It was powerful enough to have its own polarizing goggles. Rethinking what I had told Adrienne, I grabbed another set of weapons for her and took them to the bridge so she could defend herself.

  Then I went hunting for whatever the hell it was that had killed my girl.

  “Greyhound,” I yelled as I walked down a passageway, “What kind of Macro is the intruder?”

  “Question not understood. Reference ‘Macro’ unclear.”

  “The intruder, I mean the anomaly.” Stupid civilian brainbox. It didn’t even know what a Macro was. Probably, it had never even watched a documentary. There ought to be a law that all brainboxes be loaded with a basic understanding of our enemy. I bet the manufacturers of nonmilitary brainboxes believed the Macros were all destroyed, but I agreed with my old man. There could easily be an infestation out there just waiting, building and multiplying like a hidden disease getting ready to burst forth and attack us again.

  “The anomaly is a mechanical construct.”

  That wasn’t very illuminating. “Is it still in the aft cargo bay?”

  “Yes.”

  I hustled down two doors to the main airlock antechamber and quickly jumped into a suit, leaving the faceplate open. It would snap closed in case of pressure loss, and I wanted to not have to worry about my air supply. A Macro wouldn’t care. In fact, the smartest thing for it to do would be to rupture every chamber and bulkhead it encountered. Killing un-nanotized humans was easy for a machine. I wondered why it hadn’t done so already. Probably it had waited for the right time so we would just disappear with no evidence. We would be “lost in space.”

  “Greyhound, the anomaly is an intruder. Give me a report whenever the intruder moves to a different space or passageway.”

  “Command accepted.” The voice stopped, so I took that to mean the Macro remained in the aft cargo bay. I worked my way around the back of the ship and entered the engine compartment. The three high-performance motors were wedged in tightly with only enough room to squeeze among them for maintenance, but I managed to get to where I wanted. There was an access panel I could open and shoot through from here.

  “Greyhound, confirm; the intruder has not left the cargo bay.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “How is it armed?”

  “Please clarify question.”

  “Does it possess firearms of any sort?”

  “None detected.”

  “How about explosives?”

  “None detected.”

  It must be a low-grade model, maybe a worker that might only have pincers or tools as improvised melee weapons. All right, I thought I could handle that. Hell, my old man ate workers for breakfast with nothing but his bare hands, if you could believe the lurid documentaries I’d watched as a kid. When I was old enough for Dad to show me some of the raw, unedited footage of the carnage, misery, and death the Macros inflicted, I came to understand the truth.

  “How large is it?”

  “Approximately one-point-five meters in diameter. Mass: th
ree hundred kilos.”

  That was much smaller than any Macro I had ever heard of. Maybe it was a miniature model, or perhaps it was damaged.

  “Greyhound, does the Macro intruder appear to be in good working order?”

  Greyhound replied, “The intruder appears to be damaged. Unable to fully evaluate. No such machine baseline in database.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “The intruder appears to be reconstructing itself.”

  Shit. So a small Macro somehow sneaked aboard. It had managed to evade the brainbox’s sensors, gotten into the cargo bay, and was now cannibalizing our ship to add to its own capabilities. I couldn’t let that happen. Yet…I had to be smart. I’d already gotten one girl killed. If I lost another, I might just consider sticking this pistol under my chin and blowing my brains out, because I was obviously worthless as a Star Force officer.

  “Greyhound, can you immobilize the intruder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then do it, for God’s sake!”

  “Command accepted. Intruder immobilized.”

  I sighed with relief. Greyhound would have used its cargo-handling tentacles to grab the thing just like the original Nano ships had done. This Macro must be small and weak. “Is there any chance it can break free?”

  “Yes.”

  I almost panicked, but… “How much chance?”

  “0.00958 percent over the life of this vessel.”

  Right. Machines were literal-minded. Even smart brainboxes took a long time to learn their masters’ quirks, and I was new to this one.

  “Greyhound, unless otherwise instructed, round all numerical answers to the nearest percent or digit, whichever is more precise.”

  “New parameters set.”

  “So now, is there any chance that it can break free?”

  “No.”

  Perfect. It had rounded down to zero. I had a Macro prisoner in my ship. “Make sure you notify me and Adrienne of any change in the intruder’s status. Oh, and keep it as immobilized as possible. Do not let it rebuild itself further or in any way access ship resources or systems.”

  “Command accepted.”

  That relieved me of the need to open the panel in the floor of the engine room and risk beaming the thing inside the ship. I had no idea what was stored in the cargo bay, but I could imagine there might be flammables or pressurized gases, and given our current unknown state of repair, I really didn’t want to start shooting up my own boat with no atmosphere outside.

  As I returned to the bridge, the brainbox said, “Star Force space control regulations require all emergency situations to be reported within one hour of the ability to do so.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Presumably a Macro encounter fit something on its list of parameters. “Do the regs specify what an emergency situation is?”

  “Emergency situations are defined by command personnel.”

  Like Dad had said, with machines, there’s always a workaround. “Okay, then I specify this is not an emergency situation.”

  “Command definition accepted.”

  Once I got to the bridge I asked Greyhound, “Are there any other anomalies or intruders nearby? Anything out of the ordinary for the programmed voyage?” I heard the brainbox hesitate, probably adjusting for my one percent rounding command, and then it said “no.” I was glad of that. At least there weren’t more Macros sneaking up on us. Just to make sure, I activated the radar and pinged once all around, finding nothing. Doing so was a slight risk as it could give away our position, but it wasn’t as dangerous as another surprise anomaly.

  “Let’s land this thing,” I said to Adrienne.

  “Keep heading toward Yale,” she said.

  “You said there is a Fleet ship out there, right?”

  “Yes, the battlecruiser Valiant, commanded by my uncle, Sir William Turnbull.”

  I cursed the stupid brainbox that hadn’t figured out we had something on board for days. The monster must have gone dormant to avoid detection. I hefted my weapons. “I’m going to go take a look at the Macro. We have no working cameras in there, and I want to be sure it’s not doing something sneaky.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  I nodded and then made my way to the aft cargo bay. “Is there normal pressure inside?” I asked the brainbox.

  “Yes.”

  “Open the door.” The portal slid open and the internal lights came on.

  The cargo bay was stacked high with supplies, with just a narrow walkway in the middle. I could see the two black segmented cargo arms that hung from the ceiling.

  Hefting my laser rifle and seating my goggles in place, I walked slowly down the aisle until the cargo arms came fully into view, wrapping the Macro up like two pythons. Within their embrace I saw flat metal, what looked like a brainbox, and several appendages similar to the friendly Nano-style tentacles. That seemed odd because Macro arms were usually much cruder, being built for brutal toughness, not flexibility. I also spotted a camera, and then another, as well as what looked like a gas cylinder and several pieces of metal shelving attached by the kind of constructive nanites every ship carried for repairs. It appeared the thing had been incorporating handy materials into its structure. The cameras turned on the end of their stalks to focus on me.

  Lowering my laser rifle, I switched it off so as not to accidentally burn anything, popped the goggles to the top of my head, and spoke to the creature looking at me.

  Despite its odd appearance, I recognized the machine. Memories of an exploding barn and flying splinters filled my head.

  “Hello, Marvin,” I said.

  -5-

  Marvin shifted within the confines of the cargo tentacles and said, “Person not identified. Not Kyle Riggs.”

  “Nope. I’m his son, Cody. We’ve met before. Remember my dad’s chickens?”

  Marvin paused for a moment, panning his cameras. “An unfortunate incident. Facial scans correlated. Son of Kyle Riggs. Greetings, Cody Riggs.”

  “Greetings to you too, Marvin. You are Marvin, right?”

  “I am Marvin.”

  “Marvin, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Hell is not completely inaccurate. I am trying to repair myself, but my evolutionary progenitor refuses to release me.” He gestured at the confining cargo tentacles with the tip of a manipulating arm.

  I shook my head as I eased over to sit on a crate, weapon still handy. I wasn’t letting him move until I got a good explanation. “You’ll be released when I’m satisfied by the answers to my questions, Marvin. Why are you on this ship?”

  “I have to be somewhere.”

  I groaned. Brainboxes were bad enough, but I could already see a fully sentient robot was going to be a pain in the ass. “If you don’t tell me, you can stay there immobilized.”

  “I attached myself to this vessel in order to get to Yale.”

  “Why do you want to go to Yale?”

  “There is a fascinating experiment going on there. I wanted to help.”

  I ran that through my mind. It seemed plausible. From what I knew, Marvin always seemed to want to “help” if it involved anything cutting edge and technical.

  I wondered what Marvin’s legal status was now. I heard he’d been given citizenship some time back. I guess I’d have to look it up. “More to the point, what do you know about the damage to this ship?”

  “Release me and I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me and then I’ll release you.” If the bastard wanted to bargain with me, I’d bargain hard.

  Three cameras looked at me, seeming to contemplate. “Accepted. When this vessel refueled ten days ago at Orbital Station 133, a maintenance worker placed a suspect device on the hull. It aroused my curiosity. However, when I tried to investigate, perhaps even intervene, the high-G acceleration of your departure damaged me and left me drifting in orbit. It took me five days to throw off enough of my own mass to propel me back to the station. When this vessel returned to refuel, I hacked the e
xternal door and entered the cargo bay. I then shut down to conserve energy.”

  His story intrigued me, but I wondered if it was just that—a story.

  “More likely you shut down to avoid detection,” I said. “So, someone put a bomb aboard this ship, and you just happened to be there to see it and try to save us.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Quite a coincidence.”

  “That is true.”

  “Why would anyone want to blow up this ship?” I asked just to see what he would say.

  “To kill you,” he replied.

  Just like Lord Grantham had said, Marvin also thought I was a target. I was reminded of a time when poisonous antifreeze had somehow ended up in the shots I’d imbibed at an off-campus bar, enough to kill a normal human. Several people had died, and there’d been an investigation that had failed to turn up anything. I’d survived because of my superior physical enhancements, which was another reason I’d kept them hidden and told no one. Back then, I hadn’t thought it was aimed at me specifically, but now...

  “Do you have any idea who wants me dead?”

  Marvin said, “I can provide a rank-order listing of over one thousand individuals and organizations that have excellent motivation.”

  “Really? Over a thousand?”

  “Number One: a Chinese secret society called Fùchóu still blames your father for killing millions during the Macro Wars. Number Two—”

  “Never mind. We can worry about that later.”

  Marvin rattled his restraints. “Cody Riggs, you are failing to live up to our bargain.”

  Hmm. I wondered whether I should let the troublemaker stay restrained, but he might be telling the whole truth, in which case he was on my side. And if I was really in great danger, he wouldn’t want to be anywhere nearby unless there was a very good reason. From what I had heard, self-preservation was Marvin’s top priority, and after that, technical challenges of any sort. So far, his story made sense.

  Also, I might have need of him later, in which case I had to keep my word, otherwise he would be much less likely to cooperate. “Greyhound, release Marvin.”