Conquest (Star Force Series) Page 4

  “I gave up on that hope long ago.”

  “All right then,” she said leaning close. “You have a class A personality. Did you know that?”

  “Alpha dog, that’s me,” I admitted. I felt like kissing her when she came close, but I figured this wasn’t the time.

  “That’s not all of it. You are also a risk-taker. A daredevil. I’ve read all about it. Women are attracted to your type, because they feel protected—but then when they become involved, they don’t like it anymore. They are upset by the very traits that drew them in the first place. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “Sounds unfair to me,” I said. I was beginning to frown. I didn’t like where this conversation might be headed. Was she trying to pull back?

  She sensed my mood and reached out a hand, touching my wrist. “Don’t worry. I’m not changing my mind about anything. I just wanted to read up on us, about our relationship.”

  I sighed and tried to calm down. As always, I didn’t want to lose Sandra. Especially not to some bullshit she’d read in an article somewhere.

  “What I’m trying to get to,” she said, “is that I don’t want you to take unnecessary personal risks. Not this time. You’ve given your entire life to this world. It has given you little back.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, waving to the swathe of empty plates between us. “The food is pretty good.”

  “Stop joking around,” she snapped, “I don’t want you to go out there again and die on me. You can die. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Promise me then. Promise me you won’t try to kill yourself, or—”

  “Look,” I said, then paused. How could I delicately tell her I was going to do whatever I damned well thought needed doing? “This isn’t just about my ego or personality. I’m leading Earth through a war. Risks have to be taken. Look at my record. I’ve done some amazing things and here I am, still in one piece. I need you to trust me.”

  Sandra stared at me. I could tell by the way she had tightened her dark, lovely eyes she didn’t trust me as far as she could throw me—which was quite a distance.

  It was her turn to sigh and lean back. “I had to try,” she said. “Let’s get out of here. I want to make love before these aliens come and kill us all.”

  “Okay.”

  We headed for our on base quarters, an unimpressive but private bungalow, and we did make love. I was glad no one shared a wall with us, they would have complained. This time, we broke the couch and the coffee table. We both had a few scratches when we were done, but we hardly noticed as the nanites knitted our skins back together.

  Sandra broke out a bottle of whiskey, but I waved it away. “Nothing so strong,” I said. “I have to stay reasonably sharp—in case the call comes.”

  She didn’t ask what call I was talking about. We both knew. She put away the whiskey for a happier future night and brought out a giant bottle of beer. It was malted stuff, the kind they only seem to have at all-night convenience stores. We shared it and laughed, talking about happier times. It was a good evening.

  I was lying on the broken couch at an odd angle when the call finally did come in. Sandra was draped over me. Despite all her strength and agility, she didn’t seem to weigh much more than a housecat.

  I picked up my headset and held it to my ear. I didn’t even open my eyes.

  “There’s something down there, sir,” Major Barrera buzzed in my ear.

  Didn’t the man ever sleep? It had to be four a. m.

  “Down where?” I asked.

  “Hugging the surface of Venus.”

  I lifted myself off the couch. Sandra’s body was tossed up and out of the way. I knew she was too tough to be hurt. She sank back down on the couch, moaned in protest and buried her face in the cushions.

  “A ship?” I said, hunting for my shoes with fumbling hands. “A Macro ship?”

  “No, sir. I think it’s one of ours.”

  -5-

  I reached my new headquarters building less than three minutes later. In the hallways and stairwells, a few janitorial people scattered at my thundering approach. It was a good thing too, as I might have plowed right through them in my haste. Without nanites in their bodies to harden their flesh, they would have gone down hard.

  I hit the doors of my office at a run. They opened with a cracking sound that sounded expensive. I didn’t care. If the mahogany broke, I’d replace it with steel—or better yet a nanite wall.

  Major Barrera stood over the table alone. He didn’t look up as I charged in.

  “The contact is right there,” he said. “Very close to the ring.”

  I saw a yellow-gold collection of pixels on the screen. There was no identifying stream of letters behind it. Our two ships were in close now, they had come down into the upper clouds of sulfuric acid. I’d been in those clouds and it was no picnic, but they were determined to gather all the information they could. I was proud of the pilots. They knew the score, so they’d taken the risk.

  “Any radio contact?”

  “They haven’t tried yet. They spotted it on their sensors and contacted us first.”

  I nodded. “Get me in touch with that unknown vessel,” I ordered. “Patch me through relaying the signal through our ships. We should be able to open a channel down to the surface from here.”

  Barrera worked the table. It took him longer than Major Sarin to do the task.

  “Where’s Major Sarin?” I asked.

  “Getting out of bed. I contacted her second.”

  “How far is Venus right now? What kind of propagation delay are we going to have?”

  “About a hundred million kilometers range from Earth,” he said. “Any message will take five minutes to get there and five minutes back. Ten minutes round trip to hear the response.”

  “I’ll send the message blind, then. Send this: Unknown contact on Venus, please respond and indicate your intent. You are not authorized to be in this region. If you are damaging Star Force equipment, you will be held accountable.”

  Major Barrera glanced up at me. “Do we want to start off with a threatening position, sir?”

  “Just send it. If the ship is one of ours I’m definitely in a threatening mood.”

  The signal went out, and we waited for the response. Major Sarin trotted in as we waited and we briefed her on the situation. She took over communications and Major Barrera went back to whipping people out of bed. We soon had staffers wandering the top floor, looking bleary and worried at the same time. Donuts, coffee and bacon arrived just in time, and I dug in.

  While sipping the coffee and chewing a piece of bacon, I continued to stare at the screen. Two more mines had gone off the board since I’d sent out the message. Out of roughly fifteen hundred mines, we were down to about six hundred now. We could rebuild them, but it would take time to get them out there.

  I happened to glance back out on the ledge outside. There was Sandra, on the other side of that thick glass, watching us. For the first time since we’d returned from deep space, she looked worried.

  Crow was the last man on deck as usual. By then, the response was due back from Venus, if they were going to respond. Finally, it came in.

  “Hello? Colonel Riggs? Is that your voice? I’m authorized to be here. You gave me that authorization.”

  Everyone exchanged glances. We all knew the voice. It was Marvin.

  On our fateful return journey from Helios and Eden, we’d rebelled against our machine masters, the Macros. We’d formed an informal alliance with other biotic races we met along the way, including the Centaurs, a herd people with an odd outlook on life. I’d asked for an exchange of information, and they’d sent me the neural contents of a grand old brainbox. It was so full of petabytes of information, we’d barely been able to build a brainbox big enough to hold the download. Unfortunately, we’d had to retreat from the Eden star system before we could complete the transmission.

  What we’d gotten after that aborted download
became known as Marvin. He was a genius—with gaps. His knowledge and personality weren’t complete. He had set about helping us, however, with translation duties and the like. I’d given him a few robotic pieces to make him self-mobile, and he’d added more of his own design. After we’d returned to Earth, I’d honored my bargain with him, giving him a spacefaring body.

  Apparently, keeping my bargain with him had come back to bite me in the ass. I gripped my headset and pressed it into my cheek. I wanted to apply enough pressure to destroy it, but I resisted the temptation.

  “Marvin,” I began as calmly as I could, “this is Colonel Riggs. We are monitoring your activities. You have disabled a large number of our mines on Venus. You do not have the authority to do so. You will cease and desist, immediately. In addition, you will begin reactivating the mines you turned off.”

  When I’d finished and transmitted the message, Crow let loose with a long, nasty laugh.

  “I enjoy a good joke as much as the next bloke, but this is too much, Kyle!” he cackled. “Hoist by your own petard, eh mate? Such a perfect metaphor, only this time it seems the petards are being turned into duds by your pet robot.”

  I ignored him with difficulty. Major Sarin, sensing my mood, raised her hand slowly. I gestured impatiently for her to speak.

  “I think we can stand down our full alert now, sir,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Well—because there isn’t any threat. It’s just Marvin, turning off the mines so he could go through the ring. Right?”

  I shook my head. “Marvin has the same onboard codes as the rest of us. He doesn’t need to deactivate the mines to go through the ring. He can sail right by the minefield just like any Star Force ship.”

  “What’s he doing, then?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’ve got that right!” Crow hooted at me. He walked over to the breakfast tray I’d had wheeled in and served himself some coffee. He continued muttering and chuckling to himself, stuffing croissants into his mouth. “I almost soiled myself when the call came in from Barrera. You lot really should verify your nonsense before you hit the panic button.”

  I gave him a dark glance, then returned my attention to the big screen. “Have the mines stopped being deactivated? How many do we have left?”

  “Our sensors will take five minutes to update the count of mines, sir,” Sarin said. “I can tell you the orbital field is intact. Eighty-five percent of the mines laid on the surface around the ring, however, have been deactivated.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the horror of the situation sink in. Not for the first time, I wondered if I should have destroyed Marvin upon our return to Earth. I’d felt some form of loyalty toward him, and had treated him like a person. Had that been a mistake? He was a machine, after all. No matter how sophisticated, he was not alive. Perhaps this had always been the error biotics had made in the past when they accidentally created their own replacements. I could imagine working for long decades to craft a human-like intelligence, then feeling attached to it—defending its mistakes exactly as one would a child. But what if this immortal, alien intelligence turned out to be a killer? Or in Marvin’s case, it was just too smart, inquisitive and independent to be trusted in the same universe with the rest of us?

  I looked at the digital clock over Crow’s tall, mahogany doors. It wasn’t even five a. m. yet. Much too early for philosophical introspection.

  “It does appear I’ve made a mistake,” I said. “We’ll investigate this matter, but if it turns out Marvin is switching off mines without good cause, he’ll have to be destroyed.”

  I saw Barrera give a tiny nod of approval. He probably thought I should have disposed of Marvin long ago. Crow shook his head, grinning into a fresh mug of coffee. He was clearly marveling at my stupidity and enjoying the moment. Only Sarin looked upset. She knew Marvin better than the others. She knew how useful he’d been as a translator and technician. He’d taught us how to handle Macro equipment. Without him, we’d never have made it back to Earth.

  Sarin had set up a timer. We had just over two minutes left before the next response returned from Marvin. I used the time to think about what Marvin was doing out there. I was baffled.

  “What I don’t understand is why he’s doing this,” I said. “He’s a very deliberate entity normally.”

  “Maybe he’s curious about the mines,” Sarin said. “He’s always been that way, poking around with new equipment.”

  I frowned. “I could see that with a single mine. He might deactivate it, take it apart, poke at it—even set if off experimentally. But to methodically switch off hundreds of them? I just don’t understand it.”

  “Times about up,” Barrera said.

  I glanced at the clock that measured the roundtrip of a message to Venus and back again. It went negative nine seconds before the response came in. Marvin was considering his reply carefully.

  “Colonel Riggs,” Marvin’s voice began, “I’m sorry about any confusion I may have caused. I’m almost finished with my assignment. If you will simply allow me to complete the deactivation of the field, I’ll be on my way and you can turn them all back on again, if you like.”

  I bared my teeth at the screen, staring at the yellow glowing oval that was Marvin. Two more mines had vanished since we’d started the conversation. The group around me stepped to the board, huddling around it. Even Crow had lost his sense of humor.

  “What the devil is that robot doing?” Crow said. “Sounds to me he’s gone rogue, Kyle. I’m going to order my ships to descend and engage.”

  I nodded. “Deploy your ships, Admiral,” I said. “But don’t tell them to fire yet. Give me one more round with Marvin first. This could all be a misunderstanding of some kind. Marvin has been a loose cannon since I put him together, but there’s always been a good reason.”

  Crow twisted his lips unhappily. “We should do it now, Kyle. He could slip away through the ring.”

  “In that case you can send your two ships after him, if you think it’s worth it.”

  Crow grunted unhappily. He stepped aside and relayed his orders to the two small ships. Marvin was essentially a self-guided ship, but I hadn’t built him with any armament. He had sensors, a manipulation arm and an engine, but that was all. Clearly, he was using that arm to deactivate my mines one by one.

  I keyed my headset again. “Marvin, this is your last chance. You will stop deactivating mines and begin putting them back. Answer me this: Why are you deactivating them in the first place? You will explain your actions thoroughly with your next transmission, to my satisfaction. If you either refuse to explain or continue deactivating mines, I will have no choice but to destroy you. Please Marvin, for the sake of our friendship, comply.”

  Major Sarin fired off the transmission and reset the timer. It was a very long ten minutes. At last, the response came in.

  “Colonel Riggs, this is an unnecessary misunderstanding! My motivations are entirely innocent! I should have asked permission, I suppose, but I was afraid you would deny it, on the basis of some technicality. I’ve struck a bargain with the entities on the far side of this ring. They assure me if I deactivate the minefield, they will allow me to explore the star system on their side. Think of the possibilities! You don’t have any cause to worry. They’ve assured me they are only interested in bringing an end to this conflict between themselves and Earth. They say the minefield must be removed so they can bring their fleet through the ring safely and end the war.”

  I rocked back on my heels, stunned.

  “Entities?” Crow cried aloud. “He’s talking about the bloody Macros! That little tin traitor!”

  I leaned forward again, trying to think. All my nightmares were returning. Giant, titanium nightmares that stood a hundred feet tall. I understood what had happened now, as incredible as it seemed. Marvin had explored, as inquisitively as ever. He’d gone too far, exploring outside the system. He’d gone past the Venus ring to t
he blue giant star system I’d once visited. That system was full of Macros who were mining the various rocks that floated nearby.

  Understanding Marvin’s psychology, I supposed the blue star system was a mystery that drove him to desperation with curiosity. We’d more or less quarantined the region, not bothering to send even an occasional scout through the ring to check out what was happening on the far side. Normally, when dealing with a human opponent, it was best to keep close tabs on the enemy activity. With the Macros, even scouting might well prove to be a trigger. We didn’t have much of a fleet yet, and we’d figured it was best to lie low, building up as fast as we could for as long as we could. When the Macros finally came back to Earth, hopefully months or years from now, we hoped to have built a force that could withstand their assault.

  The Macros had other ideas, however. They were building up on the far side of the ring even now and they knew about our minefield. When Marvin had talked to them, they had offered him a trade. If he turned off the minefield they’d allow him to explore their territory and they promised to end the conflict with Earth.

  I knew what they’d really meant by that. They had no intentions of granting us peace. Ours would be the peace of the dead. The final peace all extinct species come to know.

  -6-

  Conversing with Marvin under the best of circumstances had always been difficult. He wasn’t human, and his thought processes didn’t follow patterns that seemed completely rational to our minds. Additionally, he was deceptive. Sometimes he seemed childish to me—at other moments he was more like an ancient, evil genius.

  On this occasion, instead of having him within easy reach, I had to deal with the vast distance between Earth’s orbit and that of Venus. With the fate of Earth’s security hanging in the balance, I found the ten minute round trip for each exchange exasperating.

  It was a full minute after digesting Marvin’s last statement indicating he was cooperating with the Macros before I could put together a sane response. I waved the rest of my staff to silence and lowered my chin to my chest. I cleared my throat and keyed open the microphone.