His Majesty's Starship (18 page)

- 14 -

21 May 2149

The suit tautened around Peter as the air left the lock. He checked his tether was secured to the ship and moved cautiously out, the grips on his soles hugging onto
Ark Royal
’s ferro-polymer skin. Behind him the laser turret at the ship’s bow and, beyond that, the long drop into nothingness. In front of him the circular wall of the centrifuge ring.

He made his way, step by clinging step, down the hull to the ring, then up between the heat fins to the edge of the ring and the ship’s laser comms array. Standing on the edge was like standing on top of a high mountain with all creation spread out around him: the manifest evidence of the heavens declaring God’s glory.

Peter looked around and his eyes fixed on another ship. Letters appeared on the inside of his faceplate to tell him it was the Euro ship
Bruxelles
. He switched off the open band communicator on his suit and knelt down, plugging his suit instead into the array at his feet. A beam of coherent light speared invisibly out towards the Euro ship.

“Connection made,” said his suit. Peter Kirton was back in contact with the communication web that the visiting humans had spun around the Roving, and Plantagenet couldn’t tap in.

“Call Captain Gilmore,” he said.

Gilmore took the call in his cubicle in the Dome and listened as Peter explained the situation.

“What you’re saying, Lieutenant,” Gilmore said slowly, “is that an item of software on board
Ark Royal
has interfered with an autonomous program that you were running.”

“Um – yes, sir,” Peter said. “It was definitely Plantagenet. The extra code in his ROM has that capability, as well as the targeting software, and now that I know what to look for ... yes, sir, it was definitely, positively him.”

There was a pause. The connection was audio only and Peter tried to imagine the captain’s expression. Would it be stony? Angry? Or was the captain silently leaping around his cubicle, gleeful that Prince James was implicated in this matter? He doubted the latter but it was a nice image.

If Gilmore was gleeful then his voice hid it well. “In that case,” he said, “under the Software Act of 2097, as incorporated into ... what is it ... hold on, got it, Clause 1071 of the Space Treaty, I am ordering you to take whatever action necessary to neutralise Plantagenet, up to and including destroying him, if necessary. Let me know when it’s done.”

Peter passed the connector back to Adrian, then slowly pulled himself out of the innards of
Ark Royal
’s computer centre, nestled inside the centrifuge ring compartment.

“Done it?” Adrian whispered. He had taken Peter’s warning about secrecy to heart and the fact that Plantagenet could simply have turned up the gain of the nearest audio pickup to hear them had escaped him.

“Yes, that should do the trick,” Peter said loudly. He took the goggles from his belt and slipped them over his eyes, and the ship’s network appeared all around him again in three dimensions.

The hardware additions he had been making to the network were there too, represented as a sphere of blocks surrounding a few core sub-routines. Lesser, semi-sentient AIs were passing around and one of them wandered a bit too close to the sphere. Peter waved it away quickly.

“Plantagenet, could you lend me a hand?” he said.

“Certainly, Peter.” The AI’s icon appeared next to him. “What would you like me to do?”

Peter indicated the area inside the sphere. “I’ve changed some of the configurations here.”

“You appear to have added some new hardware.”

“That’s right. The memory processing in this sector has been sub-optimal and I thought the new modules might help.”

“I wasn’t aware of any problems.”

Peter caught himself from going into yet more detail. Lying wasn’t an art he had been encouraged to develop on Mars, but he thought he had a sufficient grasp of it to know that the less specific you were, the better.

“Your duties don’t include monitoring the network, do they?” he said.

“A good point,” Plantagenet said. “What would you like me to do?”

“Go in and give me your impression. You’re the highest level AI on board so if there’s anything sub-optimal, you’ll feel it and come straight out.”

“An analogy would be to send a human into a compartment with faulty environment control and ask if he has difficulty breathing,” Plantagenet said sniffily. “But if it helps the ship-”

“Thank you,” said Peter. Out in the real world he lifted a hand slowly.

“Complying,” said Plantagenet. Peter held his breath as the AI moved into the central space, passing between two of the modules that formed the sphere. “It seems to work-”

Peter’s hand came down. At the signal, Adrian closed a contact and the final module came online, appearing in the space that Plantagenet had passed through. The AI was trapped in a circle of low baud rate components, to low for such a memory-hungry program as Plantagenet, and he wouldn’t be able to pass out through them without suffering severe loss of function.

“Yes, I see no problem with memory processing here,” Plantagenet said. Peter bit his lip as the AI came up to the barrier of components, paused a moment, then passed effortlessly across. “No problem at all.”

Plantagenet paused, then: “That component was not there a moment ago.” Another pause. “This entire set up could almost have been devised to entrap me. How peculiar. Did you know about this, Mr Kirton?”

“I-” said Peter.

“And yet, why would you have done so?” Plantagenet said calmly. “Computing. You have the authority on this ship to do so, but you have no reason to do it of your own initiative. Therefore, you have received orders to that effect. Accessing communication log: no, you have had no contact with the two most senior officers of this ship and I have not heard Lieutenant Loonat issue such an order. Accessing systems log: you engaged in extra-vehicular activity earlier today and
Ark Royal
’s laser array was utilised externally. I deduce it was at that time that you received your orders. What are they?”

Peter saw no point in bluffing. “The captain wants you confined, Plantagenet.” Samad and Adrian would be monitoring the conversation and, he hoped, frantically working out how Plantagenet had got out without even trying.

“Whatever for? Is he unhappy with my performance?”

“Because I told him you tampered with Polyglot.”

“I see,” Plantagenet said. Peter waited for him to make a further comment but realised Plantagenet had said all he intended to say.

“Why did you?” Peter said.

“I am unable to comment.”

“In my capacity as software officer, I order you to tell me.”

“I’m sorry, Peter, I can’t do that.” While Peter was thinking of a response, anything to keep Plantagenet talking, the AI added: “those diagnostics your companions are running will not spot what is wrong. Your trap was elegantly constructed and would have worked on any other AI, but the ship’s hardware is configured especially for me and that is why you won’t be able to use it against me. I can go anywhere I like in the ship’s system and do whatever I wish there.”

Plantagenet gave Peter a moment to imagine what he could do if he got annoyed. Then he added:

“However, I am not a virus and I wish you no harm. If you simply leave me alone then we can co-exist quite happily.”

“I’ve got orders to restrain you,” Peter said through clenched teeth.

“And I cannot let you do that. I am important to this mission and this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it.”

Peter waited a moment, then pulled the goggles off with an angry gesture.

“He was right about the hardware,” Samad said, out in the real world. “I checked.”

“How could that happen?” Peter demanded.

“The same way the ship could handle the extra mass of the torpedoes without our noticing. The extra capacity was hardwired in from the bottom up, and short of shutting it down completely, which will work against our own interests slightly, we can’t affect Plantagenet in any way. There’s no way you could have spotted it with your software checks. I just checked the components supplied against the specs of the manufacturer but of course the manufacturer was supplied by the king-”

“I’m not going to be outwitted,” Peter shouted, “in my own network by a b-”

Adrian and Samad looked at him in expectation. Adrian was grinning and Samad had an eyebrow raised.

“-lasted AI,” Peter said, more quietly. He put his hands to his head and ran Samad’s words by himself again. Then he took out his aide, typed a query on the display and held it up for Samad to see, making sure no optical pickup was in line of sight of the text.

Now both Samad’s eyebrows went up. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

Peter grinned suddenly. “That locker behind you,” he said. “Pass me what’s in it.”

What was in it was an AI transit unit – the same one in which Plantagenet had originally come on board. Peter clipped it to his belt and started to type out further instructions on his aide.

Another ten minutes, and Adrian and Peter were in
Sharman
’s cockpit. Samad was still at the computer nexus inside the ring compartment, his hands poised over the controls.

“Ready,” said Peter’s voice over his aide, and Samad’s hands moved.

At the bow and the stern, the lights faded and went out. After a moment the red emergency lighting came on, giving an eerie glow that was made worse by the sudden silence: the background hum of the air conditioning was off too. Samad had shut down all systems in the forward and aft compartments.

His hands continued to move ...

Death came silently to
Ark Royal
’s systems, a creeping wave of zero power that moved in from the bow and the stern and crept towards midships. Samad was at the heart of the ship with his hands physically on the hardware and nothing could interfere with what he was doing.

“This is inadvisable,” said Plantagenet over their aides. “You are bluffing.”

“We’re shutting down the entire ship,” Peter said. “You can’t hide then.”

“By your own laws, that will be murder. I am a legally protected entity.”

“I say you’re a threat to the ship,” Peter said, “and I can take what measures I like.”

“Ninety percent shut down,” said Samad, “and increasing. Shutting down central sections now.”

He was literally pulling the plug. A moment more and the processing power left on board
Ark Royal
wouldn’t be able to run a twentieth century desktop computer, much less contain an entity like Plantagenet.
Ark Royal
’s native semi-sentient AIs would retreat to their ROM crystals but Plantagenet ...

“You will not continue.” It was Plantagenet again: not an order but an optimistic statement of fact. The AI was speaking more slowly, more deliberately as it spread its processing more and more thinly over ever-decreasing resources. “This is ... pointless. The ship is ... suffering as ... much as ... I by ... your actions.”

The next statement was precise and cogent again. It was a standard error message embedded in Plantagenet’s code.

“Caution: I am unable to function adequately in this environment. I am closing down all non-essential processing functions.”

Then:

“Please. Turn. The. Systems. On. Again.”

Another pause, then:

“Please.”

Peter shut his eyes and hoped. Hoped Plantagenet was bright enough to take the one route out still left to him, because the AI was absolutely right: if this went wrong then he, Peter Kirton, proud Puritan son of Mars, could be tried for murder. Outside, through the cockpit windows, he saw the lights dim and go out.
Ark Royal
was a dead ship.

The LEDs on the transit unit, which was plugged into the pilot’s console on
Sharman
, danced into life. Adrian gave a triumphant shout as Peter swiftly unplugged the unit. The LEDs continued to flicker.

“Very clever,” said Plantagenet’s voice through the unit’s speaker. “I congratulate you. I hope you realise how seriously you have endangered this mission.”

“I take it it worked?” Samad’s voice said.

“You bet it did!” Adrian shouted. “Brilliant, Pete. Brilliant.”

“Thank God for that,” Samad said. “I’m restoring power now before we start to tumble.”

With the ship’s systems shutting down around him, Plantagenet had been driven by sheer self-preservation into the one place that could still take him:
Sharman
’s memory systems. And as Samad had confirmed to Peter’s written question,
Sharman
had not been modified in any way for this mission: it had simply been purchased from its makers by the Royal Space Fleet. It still had its original design and it was an entirely separate system to
Ark Royal
. Peter had been able to channel Plantagenet via
Sharman
into the transit unit and now he was physically trapped there.

“I’ve got to report to the captain,” Peter said, as outside in the boat bay the lights came on again and life returned to the ship. It did nothing for the cold, dark feeling inside him.