“We have work to do,” she told her partner. “Let’s get on with it.”
Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. “Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my program.” He float-sauntered away to his own console and began deploying some remote exploration drones.
Tor concentrated on directing the lesser minds within Warren’s control board—those littler, semi-sapient specialist processors dedicated to rockets and radar and raw numbers—who still spoke coolly and dispassionately . . . as machines should.
A Sealed Room
Towering spires hulked all around, silhouetted against starlight—a ghost-city of ruin, long, long dead.
Frozen flows of glassy foam showed where ancient rock once briefly bubbled under sunlike heat. Beneath collapsed skyscrapers of toppled scaffolding lay the pitted, blasted corpses of unfinished star probes.
Tor followed Gavin through the curled, twisted wreckage of a gigantic replication yard. It was an eerie place. Huge and intimidating.
No human power could have wrought this havoc. That realization lent a chilling helplessness to the uneasy feeling that she was being watched.
It was a silly reflex reaction, of course. Tor told herself again that the destroyers had to be long gone from this place. Anyway, she had servant guardians patrolling nearby, vigilant against any unexplained movement.
Still, her eyes darted, seeking form out of the shadows, blinking at the scale of this catastrophe.
“It’s down here,” Gavin said, leading into a cavelike gloom below the twisted towers. Flying behind a small swarm of little semi-sentient drones, he looked almost completely human in his slick spacesuit. There was nothing except a slight overtone in his voice to indicate that Gavin’s ancestry was silicon, and not carbolife. Tor found the irony delicious. Any onlooker who viewed the two of them would guess that she was the creature made of whirring machinery, not Gavin.
Not that it mattered. Today “mankind” included many types . . . all of them considered citizens, so long as they showed fealty to human law, and could appreciate the most basic human ways. Take your pick: music, sunsets, compassion, a good joke. In a future filled with unimaginable diversity, Man would be defined not by his shape but by heritage and a common set of grounded values.
Some foresaw this as the natural life history of a race, emerging from the planetary cradle to live in peace beneath the open stars. But Tor—speeding behind Gavin under the canopy of twisted metal—had already concluded that humanity’s solution was not the only one. Clearly, other makers had chosen different paths.
One day, long ago, terrible forces had rained down upon this place, breaking a great seam into one side of the planetoid. Within, the cavity gave way to multiple, branching passages. Gavin braked before one of these, in a faint puff of gas, and pointed.
“We were doing our initial survey, measuring the first sets of tunnels, when one of my deepest-penetrating drones reported finding the habitats.”
Tor shook her head, still unable to believe it. She repeated the word.
“Habitats. Do you really mean as in closed rooms? Gas-tight? For biological life support?”
Gavin’s face plate hardly hid his exasperated expression. He shrugged. “Come on, Mother. I’ll show you.”
Tor numbly turned her jets and followed her partner down into one of the dark passages, their headlamps illuminating the path ahead.
Habitats? Tor pondered. In all the years humans had been picking through the ruins of wave after wave of foreign probes, this was the first time anyone had found anything having to do with biological beings. No wonder Gavin was testy. To an immature robot-person, it might seem like a bad joke.
Biological starfarers! It defied all logic. But soon Tor could see the signs around her . . . massive airlocks lying in the dust, torn from their hinges . . . then reddish stains that could only have come from oxidization of the primitive rock, exposed to air.
The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!
Although all humans were equal before the law, the traditional biological kind still dominated culture in the solar system. Many of the younger Class-AAAs looked to the future, when their descendants would be the majority, the leaders, perhaps even star-treaders. To them, the discovery of the alien probes in the asteroid belt had been a sign. Of course, something terrible happened to the great robot envoys of the past. Nevertheless, all these wrecked mechanical probes testified to what was physically possible. The galaxy still might—somehow—belong to human beings. Though humans made of metal and silicon.
Difficult and dangerous it might be, still, the AI folk appeared to be humanity’s future.
Only here, deep in the planetoid, might be an exception!
Tor moved carefully through the wreckage, under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock. Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat so that, even in vacuum, little was preserved from so long ago. Still, she could tell that the machines in this area were different from any alien artifacts discovered before.
She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. “Chemical-processing facilities . . . and not for fuel or cryogens, but complex organics!”
Tor hop-skipped from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of semiscent robots accompanied, like dogs sniffing a trail. In each new chamber they snapped, clicked, and scanned. Tor accessed the data on her helmet display and inner-percept, as it became available.
“Look there! In that chamber, the drones report traces of organic compounds that have no business being here. There’s been heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!”
She hurried to an area where drones were already setting up lights. “See these tracks? They were cut by flowing water!” She knelt and pointed. “They had a stream, feeding recycled water into a little pond!”
Dust sparkled as it slid through her touch-sensitive prosthetic fingers. “I’ll wager this was topsoil! And look, stems! From plants, and grass, and trees.”
“Put here for aesthetic purposes,” Gavin proposed. “We class AAAs are pre-designed to enjoy nature as much as you biologicals . . . ”
“Oh, posh!” Tor laughed. “That’s only a stopgap measure, till we’re sure you’ll keep thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict a love of New England autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire simply by focusing a telescope on the Earth!”
She stood up and spread her arms. “This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real, living aliens!”
Gavin frowned, but said nothing.
“Here,” Tor pointed as they entered another chamber. “Here is where the organic entities were made! Don’t these machines resemble those artificial wombs they’ve started using on Luna Base?”
Gavin shrugged grudgingly.
“Maybe they were specialized units,” he suggested, “intended to work with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it.”
Tor laughed. “It’s an idea. That’d be a twist, hm? Machines making biological units to do what they could not? And of course there’s no reason it couldn’t happen that way. Still, I doubt it.”
“Why?”
She turned to face her partner. “Because almost anything available on Earth you can synthesize more easily in space. Anyway—”
Gavin interrupted. “Explorers! The probes were sent out to explore and acquire knowledge. All right then. If they wanted to learn more about the Earth, they would want to send units formatted to live on its surface!”
Tor nodded. “Better,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t wash.”
She knelt in the faint gravity and sketched an outline in the dust. “Here is the habitat, nearly at the center of the asteroid. Now why would the parent probe have placed it here, other than one fact, that it offers the best possible protection?
“Meanwhile, the daughte
r probes the Parent was constructing lay out there in the open, vulnerable to cosmic rays and whatever other dangers were prowling, during the time when their delicate parts were most exposed.”
Tor motioned upward with her prosthetic right claw, which looked far more robotic than Gavin’s comparatively soft, glove-covered hand.
“If the biologicals were just built in order to poke briefly into a corner of this solar system, our Earth, would the parent probe have given them better protection than it offered its own children?”
Gavin’s head lifted to follow her gesture upward, toward where the twisted wreckage of the unborn machines lay open to the stars.
“No,” Tor concluded. “These ‘biologicals’ weren’t intended to be exploration sub-units, serving the parent probe. They were colonists!”
Gavin stood impassively for a long time, staring silently down at one of the shattered airlock hatches.
Finally, he turned away. Radio waves carried to her augmented ears a vibration that her partner did not have to make, since he lacked lungs or any need for air. Yet, the sound amply expressed how he felt.
Gavin sighed.
Return of the Wolf
Two days later, Tor glimpsed her partner up at the crater’s rim, directing robots that trimmed and foam-packed the most valuable salvaged parts for a long voyage, pulled Earthward by a light-sail freighter. Gavin had asked to work as far as possible from the “creepy stuff”—the musty habitat zone down below in the asteroid’s heart, that once held breathable air and liquid water.
“I know we’ve got to explore all that, eventually,” he told her. “Just give me some time to get used to the idea.”
How could Tor refuse a reasonable request, made without sarcasm? And so, she quashed her own urgent wish—to drop everything and rush back to those crumbling tunnels, digging around blasted airlocks and collapsed chambers, excavating a secret that lay buried for at least fifty million years. And hoping to find the colonists, themselves.
We may become the most famous grave robbers since Heinrich Schliemann or Howard Carter. For that, Tor supposed she could wait a bit.
Some of the cutting drones were having a rough time removing a collapsed construction derrick that had toppled across the construction yard. So Tor hop-floated closer, counting on ape-instincts to swing her prosthetic arms from one twisted girder to another, till at last she reached a good vantage point. The asteroid’s frail gravity tugged her mechanical legs down and around. Tor took hold of the derrick with one of the grippers that served her better than mere feet.
“Drone K, go twelve meters left, then shine your beam down-forty, north-sixty. Drone R, go fifty meters in that direction—” she pointed carefully “—and shine down-forty-five, east-thirty.”
It took some minutes—using radar, lidar, and stereoscopic imagery—to map out the problem the drones were having, a tangle of wreckage with treasure on the other side. Not only baby probes but apparently a controller unit, responsible for building them! That could be the real prize, buried under a knotted snarl of cables and debris.
Here an organic human brain—evolved in primal thickets—seemed especially handy. Using tricks of parallel image processing that went back to the Eocene, Tor picked out a passage of least resistance, faster than the Warren Kimbel’s mainframe could.
“Take this route . . . ” She click-mapped for the drones. “Start cutting here . . . and here . . . and—”
A sharp glare filled the cavity, spilling hard-edge shadows away from every metal strut. Pain flared and Tor cringed as her faceplate belatedly darkened. Organic eyes might have been blinded. Even her cyborg implants had trouble compensating.
The corner of her percept flared a diagnosis that sent chills racing down her spine. Coherent-monochromatic reflections. A high-powered laser.
A laser? Who the hell is firing . . . ?
Suppressing fear, her first thought was a cutter-drone malfunctioning. She started to utter the general shut-down command . . .
. . . when a war alarm blared. A sharp vocal cry followed.
“Tor! I’m under attack . . . Tor!”
As quickly as it struck, the brilliant light vanished, leaving her surroundings in almost-pitch blackness, with just the distant sun illuminating an exposed crater rim. Crouching where there had been stark shadow just moments ago, she prayed that the nearby girder still lay between her body and the laser source. Tor shouted.
“Gavin . . . are you all right!”
Her racing heart was original equipment. Human-organic 1.0, pounding like a stampede inside her rib-cage, inside a cerametal tube. Even faster when her partner replied.
“I . . . I’m in a crevice—a slit in the rock. What’s left of me. Tor, they sliced off my arm!”
They? She wanted to scream. Who—or what—is “they”?
Instead of shrill panic squeaks, Tor somehow managed to clamp down and sound like a commander.
“Are your seals intact? Your core—”
“Fine, but it smarts! And the arm flew away. Even if I make it out of here, my spare sucks, and it’ll take weeks to grow a new—”
“Never mind that!” Tor interrupted to stop Gavin from babbling. Get him focused. “Have you got a direction? Can your drones do a pinpoint?”
“Negative. Three of them are chopped to bits. I sent the rest into cover. Maybe Warren—”
Cripes. That reminded Tor. If a foe had taken out the ship . . .
“Warren Kimbel, status!”
There followed a long, agonizing pause—maybe three seconds—while Tor imagined a collapse of all luck or hope.
Then came the voice she needed to hear.
“I am undamaged, Captain Povlov. I was blocked from direct line to the shooter by the asteroid’s bulk. I am now withdrawing all sensitive arrays, radiators and service drones, except the one that’s relaying this signal. It is using a pop-out antenna.”
“Good! Initiate war-danger protocols.”
“Protocols engaged. Tracking and weapons coming online. I am plotting a course to come get both of you.”
Tor would have bitten her lower lip, if she still had one. She made a hard choice.
“Better not move, just yet. That beam was damn powerful. Gavin and I are safe for now—”
“Hey, speak for yourself!” Her young partner interrupted. “You wouldn’t say that if an organo-boy had his arm chopped off!”
“—but we’ll be screwed if any harm comes to the ship.”
That shut Gavin’s mouth. Good. His position was worse than hers. He shouldn’t radiate any more than he had to.
“Warren, did you get drone telemetry to analyze the beam?”
“Enough for preliminary appraisal, Captain. From the kill-wattage, duration and color, I give eighty-five-percent probability that we were attacked by a FACR.”
“Shit!”
Across the broad Asteroid Belt, littered with broken wreckage of long-ago alien machines, only one kind was known to still be active. Faction-Allied Competition Removers—an awkward name, but the acronym stuck, because it was easily mispronounced into a curse.
It’s been years since anyone was bothered by one of these things. Everybody thought that they were gone, or resigned to humans expanding into the Belt. But apparently it’s not over.
Why is one shooting at us now?
“Warren,” she said. “Maybe it’s no coincidence that we were attacked just after you orbited behind the rock.”
There was no immediate response, as the ship’s mind pondered this possibility. Tor couldn’t help feeling the brief, modern satisfaction that came from thinking of something quicker than an AI did.
“If I grasp your point, Captain, you are suggesting that the FACR is afraid of me. More afraid than I should be of him?”
“That could explain why it waited till you were out of sight, before shooting at Gavin and me. If it figures you’re too strong to challenge . . . well, maybe you can come get us, after all.”
“Amen,” murmured Gavin.
Then, before Tor could admonish, he lapsed back into radio silence.
“Unless it was the machine’s intent to lure us into drawing exactly that conclusion,” the ship-brain mused. “And there may be another reason for me to remain where I am, for now.”
A soft click informed Tor that Warren was switching to strong encryption.
“I have just confirmed a two-way channel to an ISF vessel—the cruiser Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta. They are only three light-minutes away.”
Well at last, a stroke of luck! Suddenly Tor felt a bit less alone out here.
Then she quelled her enthusiasm. Even using its fusion-ion engines, the big, well-armed ship would have to maneuver for weeks in order to match orbits and come here physically. Still, that crew might be able to help in other ways. She checked encryption again, then asked the Warren Kimbel—
“Can Ibn Battuta bring sensors to bear?”
“That ship has excellent arrays, Tor. As of last update, they were swinging sensors to focus on the region in question—where the killer beam came from—a stony debris field orbiting this asteroid, roughly five kilometers from here, twenty-north by forty-spinward. They will need some minutes to aim their instruments. And then there is the time-lag. Please attend patiently.”
“Ask them not to use active radar quite yet,” Tor suggested. “I’d rather the FACR didn’t know about them.” Better not to reveal this one possible advantage.
“I have transmitted your request. Perhaps it will reach them in time to forestall such beams. Please attend patiently.”
This time Tor kept silent. Minutes passed and she glanced at the starscape wheeling slowly overhead. Earth and the sun weren’t in view, but she could make out Mars, shining pale ocher in the direction of Ophiuchus, without any twinkle. And Tor realized something unpleasant—that she had better start taking into account the asteroid’s ten-hour rotational “day.”
North by spinward . . . she pondered. Roughly that way . . . she couldn’t make out any glimmers from the “stony debris field,” which probably consisted of carbonaceous stuff, light-drinking and unreflective. A good hiding place. Much better than hers, in fact. A quick percept calculation confirmed her fear.