Star Force 11: Exile Page 7

  Great. It was just as I’d feared. “What else does your highly educated intuition tell you?”

  Rather than being chastened at my sarcasm, Hoon’s tone grew more condescending. “Other than that taking action to preserve ourselves is paramount? This is the first sighting of what might be a ship of the Ancients in our combined species’ history, so let’s not antagonize it, shall we?”

  “We’ll try not to.”

  “Given that the Square is probably a buried ship of similar design and function, I suspect the new vessel is here to affect it in some way—perhaps to activate it, deactivate it, retrieve information from it, or some other purpose as yet unknown.”

  “All the more reason for us to get the hell out of its way. Thank you, Professor.”

  “Of course, young Riggs. My intellect is your greatest asset, and it pleases me that you’ve made good use of it.” He closed the connection.

  I wondered if it was a plague on captains everywhere that everyone around them seemed to think they were smarter than the boss. In their own specialties they were, but it was the commander’s job to synthesize all that great advice and make the right decision.

  Or, at least, one that wasn’t terribly wrong.

  “Captain,” one of the watchstanders said with a finger on her earbud, “General Sokolov would like to speak with you.”

  I threw a hand up in exasperation. “Why not? I have nothing else to do. Put him on.”

  “Captain Riggs, you must let me out of this cell,” said Sokolov’s voice from a speaker.

  “It’s not a cell, it’s a stateroom and you’re staying there. You’re one more random element I don’t need bouncing around right now.”

  “I must protest, Captain Riggs. This doesn’t befit my rank and status,” he blustered.

  “Your rank and status have not been confirmed to my satisfaction, General. Until they are, you’ll have to put up with some inconveniences.”

  A momentary silence came then, but he didn’t close the channel. “Captain Riggs, I have information about the ship of the Ancients—information you desperately need.”

  “How do you even know about the ship?”

  “People talk. It’s all over your crew’s lips, of course.”

  Of course, I echoed within my own mind. There is nothing more unstoppable than scuttlebutt, especially among marines who are standing guard waiting for something to happen. “All right. Put your marine escort on.”

  “Don’t you mean my ‘guard’?”

  “Call him what you like,” I said. “Just put him on.” A moment later I instructed the noncom to bring the general up to the ready room. I deemed that action the lesser of two evils and better than leaving the bridge with that Ancient vessel out there.

  When I saw Sokolov at the main bridge portal, I waved him into the privacy of the ready room and closed the door. “All right. Start talking.”

  “Captain—” he began in a tone of patient indulgence.

  “Don’t patronize me anymore, General. Right now this vessel is under serious threat. If you know anything about combat ops, not to mention the regs and the traditions of the service, I’m the next thing to God on this ship right now—even to you. If you don’t want me to dump you onto the surface with a survival bubble and a week’s rations you’d better talk fast.”

  Sokolov looked sour. No, more than sour—I could tell I’d crossed a line with him and he wasn’t going to forget it. Maybe I’d been too hard on him by making threats out of frustration at being balked at my every turn by prima donna specialists who wanted me to praise them for their amazing brains, but I couldn’t worry about that now.

  Even so, he answered through gritted teeth. “I’m trying to help, Captain Riggs. I never finished my narrative, and there are things you need to know.”

  I glanced at my chrono and softened my tone. “You have about seven minutes, maybe a few more, so try to tell me the most important stuff up front.” I forced myself not to scowl.

  “All right. When we followed the Macro fleet through the fifth planet’s ring, we saw a system with little life. Except for a few moons circling the two gas giants, all the planets were dry and lifeless. Our exit ring orbited one of those, the first planet from the star—very hot. The Raptor fleet stayed ahead of the Macros. Apparently this was not the Raptors’ home and they hadn’t found anything worth colonizing.”

  “That’s what we now call the Litho system,” I said. “They infest most of it.”

  “Did you ever wonder why?”

  I shook my head. “No time for the Socratic method, General. Just brief me quickly and plainly.”

  Sokolov sucked in an irritated breath but went on. “It appeared the Raptors had sown silico-nanites on every planetary body that would hold them. With a fleet about on par with the Macros, they kept their distance. Clearly they were pursuing a scorched-earth policy in this no-man’s-land star system.”

  I nodded. “If the Macros landed factories, the Raptors would jump them with the advantage of higher space even as the Lithos attacked on the ground. The one exception was one of the water moons. The Macros could have landed there.”

  “For whatever reason, the Macros chose not to try to establish a base. That was probably because they knew our Nano fleet would assist the Raptors and tip the scales. Instead, the Macros did something quite clever, yet not so clever that the Raptors shouldn’t have spotted the tactic,” he went on hastily, seeing my impatience. “Simply put, they used the big gas giant’s gravity to slingshot past all of the planets by speeding up and getting a free course change at the same time. That sent them hurrying toward the other ring, which orbited far from the star. The chickens could have tried to overtake them and fight a chasing battle, but instead they just lurked along behind and let them get away.” Sokolov’s voice had taken on an even more bitter edge.

  He really seemed to hate the Raptors much like the way my crew hated the Pandas. I wondered why, as none of his reasons seemed sufficient to me. That made me think there were things he wasn’t telling me.

  “Maybe they had something heavy waiting for them in their home system,” I said, “and the fleet you saw would shut the door on their escape.”

  “I thought of that at the time. If they had, I’d have a better opinion of the chickens. No, they just followed the Macros through the ring and then we followed them in turn. You know what they did on the other side?”

  “You’re doing it again,” I warned.

  “They just let them go!” Sokolov slammed his fist into the wall, leaving a slowly filling dent in the smart metal. “They stood off with their fleet and another bigger one and practically escorted the Macros across their system to escape through another ring. That ring, on the other side of this planet!” he said, pointing emphatically downward.

  “Fine, I get it. You’re pissed the Raptors didn’t annihilate the Macros. I would be too. Get to the part about the ship of the Ancients.”

  Sokolov stared at me a moment more in seeming disbelief of my careless dismissal of the Raptors’ offenses. However, I couldn’t get caught up in what might-have-been right now. The past was the past. I always assumed the Macros would be out there somewhere, and having that confirmed didn’t generate the same kind of rage he seemed to harbor. Eventually Sokolov pulled himself together and went on.

  “The chickens let us through too, and the Nano fleet wasn’t listening to me or the bear commander at all. When we followed the Macros through the ring, we ran into this ship of the Ancients.” Here he stopped, swallowing convulsively. If I had to guess I’d say he was grieving, moved as if by the death of friends.

  “The Slab,” he continued, “at least that’s what I’ve called that ship ever since I saw it—seemed to ignore the Macros who kept on going as fast as they could into the system. It was a dead system with no life in it at all. The Slab didn’t ignore the Nano ships, though. It came at us with incredible speed, with no apparent drive mechanism, and then stopped at point-blank range. We—the Nano ships,
I mean, not at my order—fired at it. It was like gnats flapping their wings at an elephant for all the effect we had. Within seconds our ships began to disappear, beginning with those who fired first. As I frantically ordered Alamo to stop firing, I was one of the last to be taken.”

  “Taken? You said your ships began to disappear, not that they were destroyed?”

  Sokolov nodded. “They just winked out. I think the Slab teleported them somewhere. At least I saw no evidence of destruction. First they were there, and then they were gone. Then Alamo disappeared too…” His gaze lengthened, staring at nothing until I grew impatient and cleared my throat.

  “Sorry,” he said. “As I explained, my ship vanished around me and I found myself in an airless corridor made of golden ring-material. My bear comrades…my brothers in arms…” He took a shuddering breath. “They didn’t wear suits aboard ship. They’re braver than we are, you know that? Noble savages in some ways: caring little for themselves but always willing to sacrifice for each other and even me.”

  This guy had a bad case of bear-love. He’d become a bear-o-phile—ursophile? My Latin was rusty, and it really wasn’t important. In any case, in my opinion he’d lost his perspective.

  “Fortunately I kept my suit on in all combat situations, even my helmet, or I’d be dead too. As it was, I wandered through a three-dimensional maze that was probably within the body of the Slab. I found thousands of tons of junk. There were things from our Nano ships mixed in with innumerable pieces of equipment from what I believe were the alien races it had encountered.”

  “You said you thought you’d been gone two years when Marvin found you. How did you survive?”

  Sokolov drew himself up proudly. “For food I ate bear meat. It was an honor, and they would have wanted me to. I scavenged air and water from tanks I found, and some alien packaged rations when the bear meat ran out. I believe my nanites helped me digest the food, though it tasted terrible. I found a survival pod to sleep in that was made for some kind of humanoids, but with no language I ever saw. Eventually I salvaged things and built a room, and then a complex to live in. The place almost drove me crazy, with gravity and other physical laws changing every time I rounded a corner, but I managed to stay alive.”

  “Quite an accomplishment,” I offered with genuine respect. “Okay, I can buy all that, but how did you get from the Slab to the Square?”

  Sokolov threw up his hands. “How the hell should I know? I never saw anything but corridors and chambers all rectangular and made of that gold material I couldn’t make a dent in. The robot said the openings in your Square were like little rings. Well, somehow I was transported. How? I don’t know. I’m no physicist.”

  It all made a certain kind of sense. Who knew where the Square’s windows led? When Marvin dove through one to escape the beetles, he must have been transported to the Slab and then managed to find his way back with Sokolov in tow. The mystery of it hardly mattered unless it told me something about how to deal with the Slab.

  -7-

  Checking my chrono, I noticed the seven minutes had passed and more. “General, I’ll have to ask you to return to your quarters.” Opening the portal, I gestured to the marine standing outside.

  “Captain, I must protest. My proper place is on the bridge—as an advisor,” he added hastily. “I might be able to provide critical information as the situation develops.”

  I chewed on that for a moment balancing the disruption of having a putative flag officer at my elbow against the possibility that he could be useful. “Okay.” I turned to the marine sergeant. “Take the general to get fitted for a standard suit, and then escort him back here.”

  “I’d prefer my own suit,” Sokolov broke in. “It’s…I’m used to it,” he finished.

  “All right.” I gestured at the two men, who hurried off the bridge.

  Turning back to the holotank, I saw the situation seemed unchanged. “How soon until we have everything prepped for a standard lift? If possible, I’d rather take off in good order without damaging or leaving anything behind.”

  “About forty minutes, Sakura says,” Hansen replied. “Oh, and Marvin called. I didn’t let him through to your headset directly.”

  I frowned. Normally, I was the one who decided who I would talk to and who I wouldn’t. I decided not to make an issue of the matter.

  “Connect us,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  A moment later he came on. “Captain Riggs, I have discovered several things.”

  “Go on. List them in order of importance to our survival.” If I let him, he’d ramble on with useless but interesting trivia. Interesting to him, that was.

  “The Slab and the Square are aspects of the same multidimensional construct.”

  “They’re the same ship?”

  “Not precisely,” Marvin replied. “Human minds can seldom comprehend dimensionality beyond the basic four without specialized training and aptitude.”

  I tried to recall the section on multiple dimensions in my physics classes at the Academy without success. “Give me an analogy my primitive human mind can comprehend,” I suggested.

  Marvin paused, apparently thinking. “First, imagine you’re a two-dimensional being—a flat creature that only sees length and width, not height. You live on a plane.”

  “Okay. I read Flatland—actually, I saw the vid.”

  “If a three-dimensional human being puts his five fingers into a two-dimensional world and wiggles them, all the inhabitants would see were five irregular ovals mysteriously appearing. The ovals would move without apparent motive force.”

  “So the Slab and the Square are three-dimensional manifestations of parts of the same multidimensional…being? We just can’t see where they attach together in the higher dimensions?”

  “That’s reasonably accurate. Being, construct, machine, call it what you will, that’s my working theory.”

  “Wonderful. How does that help us survive?”

  “It illustrates the Ancients’ superior technology and guards against hubris.”

  I snorted. “Great. Humility isn’t a strategy, Marvin.”

  “I find that an appropriate state of mind tends to generate appropriate responses.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Okay, so we won’t do anything to piss it off. Can we talk to it?”

  “Do you want to hear my other observations, Captain Riggs, or are you bored already?”

  I frowned at the barb, but didn’t bite on that hook. “Go on,” I said. “Enlighten me.”

  “I’ve synthesized and analyzed informational sources from the Raptors as well as all my records and General Sokolov’s recent alleged revelations.”

  “So you—sorry, go on.” I realized at that moment that Marvin had been listening in on our transmissions to the Raptors. Then I remembered I’d left his pseudo-malware in place within Valiant’s brain. It must have been feeding him information from the ship, and I’d never cut it off. As long as Marvin stayed useful and loyal—more or less—I’d let it go.

  “The Slab—I’ll maintain the current nomenclature for the separate parts of the construct—apparently left the Macros alone yet disabled or destroyed the Nano fleet.”

  “Do you have a theory as to why?”

  “I do,” Marvin said, “while I was within the maze, the first sentient life sign I detected was Sokolov, not counting the giant beetles, but there were many indications of what you would call inorganic machines—robots, telefactors and automated devices of all sorts. None were fully sentient, but several seemed to rise to the level of our nanite-infused brainboxes—pseudo-AI in other words. I spoke to several of them.” He paused.

  “Yes—and? What did they tell you?”

  “That’s not relevant right now.” Marvin stopped speaking. This seemed to be one of those times when he wanted me to guess at his meaning, the better to display the fact that he’d figured something out before I had.

  “Marvin, I could really use your help and your neural chains here wit
hout playing another guessing game.”

  This admission seemed to mollify him and fulfill his irritating need for validation. “The question that occurs to me is this: why was Sokolov the only live sentient biotic? Many items remained intact. Surely with as many things as the Slab had collected, more aliens would have survived? Yet, Sokolov apparently met no others in nearly two subjective years.”

  “Actually, he didn’t mention meeting any biotics at all, but he didn’t specifically deny it either.”

  Marvin paused again. “That’s true. He might be withholding information.”

  “Ya think? Sound like anyone you know?”

  “If you’re referring to me—”

  “Bingo!”

  “—it is only the truth of your allegation that prevents me from taking offense.”

  I chuckled, glancing over at Hansen who raised an eyebrow. “Marvin, in that respect you’re a damn fine individual and a credit to your species. So let’s get this straight, you believe there were other biotics that we don’t know about running around the maze?”

  “It seems likely. I believe you need to question Sokolov closely to elicit more information. Or if that’s not to your liking, I have some preliminary designs for a mechanical mind probe—”

  My blood chilled. “Marvin, I expressly forbid you to do any further work on, or operationalize, a mind probe of any kind.”

  “But—”

  “How would you like it if I had scientists create a brainbox with the power and software to invade your mind?”

  “I would suggest that such a thing would be highly immoral.”

  “But your mind probe wouldn’t be?”

  “Immorality has never stopped progress.”

  “And you’re all about progress?” I asked. “You’re still in Star Force, Marvin, which means Star Force’s morality and ethics are your morality and ethics. We don’t torture or mind-rape people for information.”

  “Your father did.”

  “I’m not talking about my father and what he may have believed he had to do for the survival of the human race, I’m talking about you and me today.”