Of Fire and Night (14 page)

32

ADMIRAL LEV STROMO

T
hey kept up the fight for two full days, losing ground a centimeter at a time. But still losing.

After the mutinous Soldier compies killed Sergeant Zizu, taking the security chief down in a flurry of broken bones and last spurts of weapons fire, Stromo saw that only he and Commander Ramirez remained alive on the Manta’s bridge. He’d heard enough panicked transmissions across the intercom to know the compies were massacring everyone else aboard. Frightened bridge crewmembers had tried to evacuate, but the corridor was stacked with the bodies of dead soldiers. And the compies kept coming.

Below, Qronha 3 looked maddeningly peaceful, exhibiting no sign of rammers or hydrogue warglobes. His Manta was all alone and vulnerable.

“Admiral!” Ramirez tossed him a charge pack for his twitcher. “This is the last one.”

Stromo’s hands were trembling, but he managed to snap in the replacement pack. He had drained his weapon stalling the oncoming robots, but the stunned Soldier compies reasserted their programming and came forward again.

He jerked his head toward the captain’s prep room adjacent to the bridge. “If we go in there, we could barricade the door.”

“It won’t last long, sir.”

“Doesn’t need to! Remember the emergency ladder?” It had seemed an odd protective measure when the Mantas were designed, an escape hatch in case the commanding officer needed to slip away from the bridge. On the other hand, he’d sat on enough EDF committees to know that planning sessions often mutated in strange directions.

Ramirez’s face remained grim. “That’ll take us down a deck. Then what?”

“One step at a time, Commander.” First, he wanted to get away from here. He would worry about the next stage later.

“Good idea, sir. Go!”

As the Soldier compies battered aside the last-ditch barricades and surged onto the bridge, Stromo bolted toward the small private chamber. At one time, using the military robots had seemed the perfect solution to make up for the shortfall of recruits and the loss of so many fighters in the hydrogue war. Now there was so much fresh blood on the deck that he could barely run without slipping.

Before following him into the dubious bolt-hole, Ramirez paused at the command station and fiddled with the systems. Stromo skidded to a stop at the prep room. “Come on, Ramirez! I can’t hold this open forever.”

“Just a minute, sir.” She worked furiously, sweat dripping from her brow, paying no attention to the oncoming compies. “Another second . . . one second.”

Stromo swallowed hard. Even once sealed, this door wouldn’t hold long. What was she doing? Well, he could no longer be responsible if Ramirez insisted on staying at her station. That was her choice. He had to make a command decision. He turned to the door controls.

She finally finished her routine and hit the activate button. As she sprinted toward him, sparks flew from all the bridge stations like a chain of firecrackers. Ramirez was actually grinning as she burst into the prep room with him. Stromo slid the door shut, sealing it. “What the hell was all that? You’ve cost us time!”

“Disabled the primary systems, sir. Now those compies won’t have access to my ship, no matter what happens.” He should have thought of that himself. It was clear the compies wanted this Manta for something.

Only seconds after the door sealed, compies began to pound on the barricade; dents formed in the metal. This wasn’t an armored chamber. The door was little more than a privacy screen for the ship’s commander to have strategy discussions with his underlings or perhaps deliver a stern lecture to a recalcitrant crewmember.

“Quick!” Stromo gestured toward a tiny closet with an access hatch in the floor. “Go first.” He didn’t know what might be down there.

Ramirez lifted the hatch to expose the ladder and in a smooth movement slung her feet through the hole. Stromo scrambled down more awkwardly. “There’s a cargo lift down at the end of this main corridor,” he said, breathing heavily as he lowered himself rung after rung. “Maybe we can make it to the hangar deck. Grab a Remora or a personnel transport.” His feet dropped to the floor with a thud, and he nearly lost his balance. “Then we’ll fly out of here.”

“Are you sure there’s no one else left alive aboard, Admiral?”

“Even if they are, we can’t save them. Come on, hurry up.”

He sprinted down the corridor, and Ramirez easily paced him. She made no comment, but she was smart enough to know their chances. Everyone had to be responsible for his or her own welfare.

“Watch out, sir!” Two Soldier compies lunged out of a side corridor. Ramirez fired a long blast with her twitcher and knocked them aside.

Ahead, the corridor seemed to go on forever, with any number of chambers and branching hallways where compies might be lurking. He hesitated, his face red, his heart pounding, but he knew they had to keep moving.

When more compies emerged, Stromo blasted repeatedly with his twitcher, but the military robots seemed inexhaustible. He nearly tripped on a fallen compy; in an automated spasm, the metal arm reached out to grab him, but he jumped away.

Ramirez fired her own twitcher, blast after blast. “At this rate we’ll drain our charges before we even get to the lift!”

Stromo sprinted ahead, concentrating on the wall controls and the closed lift door. Barely able to hold himself upright as he panted and wheezed, he slapped the summoning sensor. The indicator lights raced as the fast cargo elevator shot up to Deck 2. Only a few seconds more!

“Hurry, Ramirez! The lift is coming.” He could feel the wall vibrate, hear the machinery humming.

She fought to catch up. Three cabin doors slid open. The rooms should have been crew barracks where off-duty personnel rested and relaxed. Four compies emerged, covered with blood.

Ramirez fired shorter bursts with her twitcher, just enough to divert the machines, but now compies crowded the passageway. They came toward Stromo, and he fired at them, extravagant with his weapon’s energy; in such a dire situation, no half-assed effort would succeed.

Ramirez couldn’t shoot the compies fast enough. Her charge pack ran out.

Stromo meant to go help Ramirez, but he saw that his twitcher had only enough energy to fire two more significant bursts—not nearly enough to save her, not nearly enough to let him get away.

“Admiral!” The compies grabbed Ramirez, and she battered at their optical sensors with the butt of her weapon. She shouted his name as they surrounded her, something that might have sounded like “Go!” Stromo almost moved,
almost
went forward to assist her, to go down fighting.

But the lift opened at last. He saw it was empty and waiting. A miracle!

Before he could see Ramirez fall under the attacking compies, Stromo scrambled into the lift and punched the selector controls for the hangar bay. He tried to remember how to fly EDF ships. He had the training, of course. He’d received instruction long ago, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually sat in a cockpit. Did he even know how to open the launching-bay doors?

Stromo set his jaw. With a Remora’s jazers, he could blast right through the damned hull if necessary. He stood ready, knowing what to do now, as the elevator opened.

Hundreds of compies filled the hangar bay, all of them waiting for him. They pressed toward the lift’s open door.

Stromo’s two remaining shots did not last long. He backed against the inner wall, and the compies pushed in on him.

33

ENGINEERING SPECIALIST SWENDSEN

O
nly a constant barrage from the silver berets kept the robots contained within the barricaded factory. Sergeant Paxton dismantled his temporary command post and took up residence in a large armored vehicle, where he prepared for the second phase of the assault. This time, no one would underestimate the rampaging Soldier compies.

Swendsen huddled inside the claustrophobic vehicle, racking his brains for a workable solution. What had caused the compies to go wild?

“We could call down an airstrike to annihilate the whole facility,” Paxton growled. “Melt ’em all into puddles. Solve the problem.”

“That would stop the compies here, but it wouldn’t affect the larger emergency,” Swendsen pointed out. “We can’t just blow up every EDF ship where the compies are running wild, now can we? All of my compy schematics and management protocols are in that factory. That seemed the logical place to keep everything. If this is a pervasive programming error, we have to find a way to shut them all down. I can’t do that until I understand what went wrong, and it would be difficult to get any data from a lump of melted metal.” He stared at his datapad, scrolling from one assessment to another. Without knowing what had gone wrong with the governing modules in the first place, it was damnably hard to fix things. “We don’t even know for sure if this is intentional sabotage, or just an accidental glitch.”

“An accident?” Paxton looked at him in complete disbelief. “Occurring across the whole EDF? Some coincidence!”

Swendsen shrugged his bony shoulders, still denying what he knew to be true. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Not in my career.”

“All right . . . not in mine either.” He didn’t want to let the sergeant know that
he
—the Hansa’s primary engineering specialist—had no idea what to do.

Reinforcements had arrived. One hundred twenty-eight armored assault vehicles surrounded the factory, blasting any compy that broke loose. Elite commandos were stationed at the primary entrances and shipping bays, but the facility was enormous. If the compies made a concerted effort to break free . . .

Touching the numeric pad, Swendsen estimated how many new robots had been ready for deployment, then calculated the additional number that could have been produced in the meantime. Even with new arrivals, the commandos were already greatly overextended. They could never hold back all the compies.

Someone pounded on the closed hatch of the armored carrier, identified himself to the observation eye, then keyed in his code. A silver beret escorted a thin Asian man wearing a serious expression. “Sergeant Paxton, this man claims to be a compy specialist, a cyberneticist with a great deal of experience in Soldier models and their programming.”

Swendsen jumped to his feet. “Dr. Yamane!”

“Dr. Swendsen.” Yamane stepped forward for a brief but enthusiastic handshake. “I understand you’re having some trouble.”

“A bit.” Swendsen’s excitement surged as Yamane explained his experience with the battle group at Osquivel, observing the Soldier compies in action.

“Here’s the interesting part, Dr. Swendsen. When they rescued us, the Roamers also salvaged a hundred Soldier compies, erased their programming, and put them to work. We had a situation similar to what’s going on here, compies going berserk—and I caused it. Intentionally.”

Paxton rested his elbows on the consultation table inside the armored vehicle. “How—and why—did you manage to do that?”

“We needed a diversion so Commander Fitzpatrick could attempt to escape. Because of my work with the Soldier compies, I knew how to cancel their behavioral restrictions. An insidious little repeater virus that, for lack of a better term, turned them into loose cannons.” A wan smile crossed Yamane’s face.

Swendsen’s eyebrows shot up. “And did it work?”

“They certainly created a diversion, but once the compies clicked into chaos mode, we had no way to stop them. They ended up destroying much of the Roamer shipyards.”

Swendsen considered. “So, someone transmitted a similar virus to trigger our current revolt?”

Yamane shook his head. “Transmitted? No, the breakdown is not localized. Soldier compies are simultaneously subverting command protocols all across the Spiral Arm, which means it must be embedded. Some timed instruction must have been included during their initial activation. That implies a long-term plan, which is much more sinister than a programming gremlin.”

Swendsen offered the cyberneticist a folding seat inside the crowded vehicle. Yamane looked into his colleague’s bright blue eyes. “However, it occurs to me that we could use something similar to achieve the opposite effect. A repeater virus that would serve as a big wrench thrown into their modules.”

“That’s an idea! I understand.” He shot a look over to Sergeant Paxton. “
We
understand.”

“Then I suggest you two get to work as soon as possible,” Paxton said.

34

MAGE-IMPERATOR JORA’H

W
ith Osira’h gone, the Mage-Imperator summoned Adar Zan’nh, senior members of the scientist and engineering kiths, military strategists, even Rememberer Vao’sh. Each was the best his kith had to offer. With the help of these men, Jora’h had to find a way to stand against the hydrogues and save the Empire.

He waited in front of the immense gates of the Prism Palace. At the top of the ellipsoidal hill on which the Palace had been built, the rushing water of seven converging streams thundered like the roar of a storm. In straight lines, the streams came together at this point, flowing uphill. From his high vantage, he could see their courses extending to the perimeters of Mijistra, where the landscape sculptors had finally allowed the rivers to bend back into their natural patterns. He had called the meeting here for a specific purpose.

“Observe the seven streams,” the Mage-Imperator said in his most commanding voice, “and consider exactly what Ildirans accomplished here.”

Klie’f, an old and distinguished member of the scientist kith, and Shir’of, a younger but talented representative of the engineering kith, studied the convergence point with its foaming water, as if Jora’h had just posed a new technical challenge. Vao’sh nodded, recalling the historical tale.

In a complex engineering feat, the Prism Palace builders had channeled these streams to flow toward the seat of the Mage-Imperator. Using gravity-assist steps and locks, scientists had wrestled the currents, manipulated the water itself, so that the streams flowed against nature, climbing in a white torrent until they reached the apex. Here before the main gate, the seven streams joined to pour down a wide well in a circular waterfall, at the bottom of which the gushing water was redistributed from outlets below and behind the Palace hill.

Jora’h waited, but no one ventured a response. In angry impatience, he shouted above the roar of the water, “
We did the impossible!
And we must do it again. Long ago, Ildirans used their ingenuity to defy the laws of the universe. They achieved the unachievable because the Mage-Imperator demanded it of them. I now demand the same from all of you.”

The representatives seemed intimidated; Adar Zan’nh’s expression remained stoic, but he nodded. Rememberer Vao’sh looked intrigued.

“Answer this question and you will save our Empire.” Jora’h paused. “How can we stand against the hydrogues?”

Klie’f and Shir’of looked at each other, then at the military strategists; they all turned to the commander of the Solar Navy. Zan’nh said, “None of our weapons have proven effective. Adar Kori’nh destroyed many warglobes, but at a cost far too great for us ever to achieve victory.”

Jora’h stepped to the lip of the furious waterfall as it vanished down the deep well. “That is why I called you. The hydrogues have given me an ultimatum that I find unacceptable. I bought time by pretending to agree. Now I need you to give me another solution to another impossible challenge. You are my best. Take these questions to your fellow kithmen, work together with them. Push yourselves beyond your usual boundaries. If you succeed, I guarantee you a place in the
Saga of Seven Suns,
memorialized for all time. What Ildiran could ask for more than that?”

“You are asking us to stand up against the undefeatable, Liege,” Klie’f said.

“Yes, I am. Give me new strategies, new defenses, new weapons!”

Zan’nh bowed toward his father. “You are the Mage-Imperator, Liege. You are our leader, and
we
comprise your Empire. If we cannot solve this problem, then we have failed you indeed.”

“If you do not find a way,” Jora’h said in an oddly flat voice, “then two races may die.”

Rememberer Vao’sh, though fascinated by the conversation, looked at his leader. “Liege, I am a mere storyteller. What can I do?”

Knowing more of the historical truth than he had ever wanted to learn, Jora’h had often cursed his predecessors for hiding so much information about past encounters. He had to break that long-standing censorship. “We have fought the hydrogues before, but many of the records of that conflict are locked away in the apocrypha. Unseal them and study them. Learn what has been forgotten, and bring me any clues you may discover about our enemies.”

“An immense task, Liege. I will inspect all our records here, but there are important archives on distant planets, particularly Hyrillka.”

Jora’h recalled that the first Klikiss robots had been excavated from their long hibernation on a moon of Hyrillka. Centuries ago. Was something more buried in that system? Some lost document explaining the ancient compact that had changed the alliances in the first great war? Perhaps a record of how Ildirans had once shared a bond with the faeros, as the hydrogue emissary had accused? So many tangled connections!

“I am sending the new Designate with a recovery team to Hyrillka to help rebuild the areas destroyed by the revolt. Accompany them, Rememberer Vao’sh. Learn anything you can.”

Jora’h watched resolve harden on each of the faces before him. The scientist and engineer would develop weapons that might succeed against the deep-core aliens. Adar Zan’nh would guide the military applications and consider new tactics. The rememberer would dig through hidden history. For just a moment Jora’h felt confident. He briskly clapped his hands. “All of you, find me answers. Do whatever you deem necessary. I place my faith in you.”

Jora’h once again resented the poor choices of his predecessors. Instead of gambling everything on a breeding program to create a telepathic negotiator, the Ildiran Empire could have spent ten thousand years creating better weapons. Now they had to do it all within a few days.