The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (34 page)

              “Yes, Captain,” Templeton said and promptly set about it on his coms panel.

              “Twenty seconds, sir.” The warning in Dinah’s voice was compelling.

              “Charis, Don will verify that everyone’s okay, but right now, I need you to do your job. Do you understand?” Charis nodded, and Staples pushed herself as quickly as she could past Bethany and back to the coms panel. Just as she strapped herself in, she heard and felt the vibrations of slugs slamming against the hull. “Dinah, it’s your show.”

              The engineer did not waste time. “Bethany, take us out of this spin, but don’t stop us moving. The slugs those fighters are shooting can’t puncture the hull, but they can damage the weapons and portholes, including these.” She nodded at the window in front of her.

Staples had a sudden picture of slugs rupturing the windscreen in the cockpit, of the air rushing out into space in a second, and of dying, frozen and decompressed, strapped to her chair. She shook it from her mind.

“I need
Gringolet’s
movements to be unpredictable to them, but you need to tell me constantly what you’re going to do. It’s the only way I’ll be able to bring the guns to bear. We should be ready for missiles too. Fighters usually carry them, but they’re a fraction of the yield of the one that hit us a minute ago.” Dinah’s voice was calm. She might have been giving directions to the mall. Not for the first time, Staples considered that hiring her had probably been the best decision she had ever made.

Bethany uncurled her legs, took a deep breath, and her hands went to work. “Left twenty degrees, thirty degree axis rotation to port in three seconds.” Her high voice carried a confidence the rest of the crew rarely heard when she wasn’t in the pilot’s seat.

“Copy that.” The engineer’s reply was curt. Bethany’s maneuvers went into action, and Staples’ neck became very cross with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Templeton put a bracing hand on his as well, and wondered how much experience her expensive doctor had with strained muscles. Dinah’s dark hands manipulated the gunner’s controls, and a moment later, the flak cannons sounded again.

Over the din, Templeton yelled to Charis, “Gwen says she’s fine, but scared. John is okay too. I told Gwen we’d be down as soon as we can.” She absorbed his information silently, and though it was clear that she wanted to rush to her daughter’s side, she held her post and began running damage diagnostics. More slugs thudded into the hull, some of them sounding quite close to the cockpit.

Bethany raised her voice even more to be heard. “One quarter G thrust forward, forty-five degree pitch up, thirty degree axis rotation to starboard in three, two, one.” They all felt the thrust as the ship surged forward briefly, at least from their perspective, and the stars and wreckage beyond rolled through their collective vision. Templeton cursed softly and fixed his eyes on his coms panel, where he was accumulating reports from the various remaining crew members.

“Got one, sir,” Dinah reported, uncharacteristic triumph creeping into her voice. A second later, there was a lurching turn followed by a shudder and a loud roar.

“Missile strike, Captain,” Charis stated. “I think they were aiming for a starboard porthole, but Bethany put it on our ventral-”

The young pilot spoke over her. “Thirty degree yaw to port, one hundred and eighty axis rotation to port in three, two, one.” Again, the ship turned and spun as Bethany sought to trap the evasive fighter in Dinah’s field of fire, and again, the flak cannons sounded, the flashes showing against the control panels and chairs around them.

Abruptly, and without climax, Dinah said, “Got it.” There was no accompanying explosion, just silence as the guns ceased. Staples heard her engineer-come-tactical officer take a deep sigh. “I think we’re in the clear, sir, but request Charis do a long range scan for more ships.”

Staples locked eyes with her frightened navigator, then shook her head. “I think I can do it. You go see to your daughter.” With relief, Charis unstrapped herself and pushed for the corridor at the back of the cockpit. “Don, tell everyone we’re safe. Anyone with injuries should report to Medical. After that, we need a damage assessment.” She thought for a moment. “And get Jang looking for our saboteur. I want to know what the hell happened.”

Chapter 18

Five minutes later, Bethany, Templeton, and Staples were the only remaining crew members in the cockpit. The captain was working the astrogation radar to the best of her ability, and Templeton was collecting data from crew members and tabulating it on his surface. Bethany sat in her seat, her eyes gazing through the window in front of her. She was in part keeping an eye out for stray wreckage, but mostly she was staring into space. Dinah had gone down to the ReC to relieve John so he could be with his wife and daughter.

“I’m not very good at this, but I don’t see anything too close to us. I read a few other ships at distance, but they seem to be commuter flights between Mars and other places,” Staples stated. “I think we can relax for now.” She attempted to slouch back in the chair to relax, but instead she drifted an inch away from the seat until the safety harness restrained her.

“I think I’ve got it all, Captain.” The man’s fingers continued working as he spoke. “Crew status, ship status, then after-action assessment?”

As she rotated around in her chair to face her first mate, she said, “Please.”

“Okay.” He made a few more keystrokes, then began. “No serious injuries reported. Lots of strained necks, some sore muscles, headaches, bruises, but we made out really well. Nothing even so bad as Yoli’s injured arm from the pirate attack.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.” Staples wondered how many more of these close calls her ship had in him. “Anyone in Medical?”

“Doc says most of the crew stopped by for some pain meds and muscle relaxers. He gave ‘em out and sent ‘em on their way. No one down there right now but the Doc himself.”

“Well, tell him to stay there. I’m going to make a stop myself before too long.” She rubbed her own neck, feeling the tender strained muscle under the skin.

“Will do. The ship is about in the same shape as far as we can tell. We won’t know the full extent until we take a UteV out to survey the damage, but most of it seems to be concentrated in the ventral aft section of the ship. Bethany,” he looked pointedly at the young pilot who continued her search of the stars, “managed to put the least vulnerable part of the ship in the path of the missile. If it had hit the engines, the cockpit, or half a dozen other places, we might be in really bad shape.”

Indeed
, Staples thought,
we might not be here at all
. “That’s why our necks all hurt so badly, I’ll wager.” Bethany looked over at her, and to Staples’ great surprise, she did not offer an apology. “That was a good move, Bethany. You may have saved the ship.” She smiled at her warmly. “I’d much rather be sore than dead.” Bethany smiled back at her and then returned her gaze to the window. “Do we have primary thrust?”

“Dinah is working on that. She thinks we do, but she wants to run some diagnostics.”

“How long?”

“Three, four hours maybe. We’ve got minor hull breaches in the aft section, and an entire cargo bay is exposed to naked space, but pressure doors are holding. We’re going to need to spend some time on repairs. Dinah also thinks some of those maneuvers our superstar pilot pulled might have overloaded some of the steering thrusters, and so those are going to need some diagnostic and repair work. All things considered, we’re hurt, but mobile. Probably much better off than we deserve to be.”

Staples nodded. She was desperate to hear about Jang’s search for their saboteur, but at this point, she wasn’t sure that she shouldn’t thank whoever was responsible. “All right. What about our assessment of that other ship?”

“Charis sent up some data,” Templeton stated, looking over the surface in front of him. “She said that the ship would have stopped just as they reached us. There’s no reasonable doubt that they were going to stop alongside us. She’s also confirmed the other ship’s deceleration at five point nine two Gs.”

“It’s hard to imagine any crew dealing with that, especially going into a combat situation. Who would do that to their crew?”

“Charis doesn’t think there was a crew.” Staples wanted to be shocked at Templeton’s statement, but she wasn’t. The idea that the ship had been automated had occurred to her, but the implications of such a thing were complex to say the least.

              She and Templeton stared at each other as she spoke. “A computer controlled vessel? I’ve heard of smaller craft, repair drones and the like with sufficient AI to run themselves, but never ships of that size.”

              “Me neither, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The computer still can’t match the ship type, which means it ain’t in the public registry.”

              “I don’t think there was anyone in the fighters either,” Bethany broke in. They both looked at her, but her gaze was still fixed on the stars. “They didn’t move right, not like people move, and some of their turns would have really hurt a pilot. Maybe killed them.”

              “It’s not unusual for fighters to be automated for that very reason,” Templeton ventured, “but they’re always controlled by someone on a nearby ship, just like the drone the
Doris Day
sent out when we picked up the satellite. At the very least, they’re controlled by a computer on another ship. You don’t spend all that time programming advanced AI routines into fighters… they tend to get blown up.”

              “But why?” Her head hurt. “Are we really assuming that Burr sent some AI controlled warship to eliminate us because we suspect he had Laplace killed a billion kilometers from here?”

              “Have you got a better explanation for it?” Templeton probed her.

              After a moment of thought, she shook her head. “I really don’t. It just seems so crazy, like overkill. We can’t even prove it.”

              He shrugged. “Billionaires do weird things.”

As Templeton spoke, Staples’ watch pinged. “Captain, it’s Jang. I have our saboteur in custody.”

Staples debated the wisdom of asking who was responsible in front of Bethany and Templeton and decided she might as well. “Who is it?” She tensed for the response; after her doubts about Yegor, after the mess with Parsells and Quinn, and after the betrayal of Piotr, she didn’t know how she would feel about yet another traitor in their midst.

“I think you’d better meet me in the mess hall, Captain.” Jang’s voice was deep and dramatic, as always.

“Damnit, Kojo, just tell me who it is.”

“It’s not a member of the crew, Captain. We have a… stowaway.” Staples looked with confusion and disbelief at Templeton and saw her emotions reflected back at her. Only Bethany seemed unperturbed.

“I’m on my way,” she finally said into her watch, then turned to Templeton. “Hold down the fort.” She undid her safety harness, maneuvered her way around Charis’ chair, and pushed off for the passage at the back of the cockpit that led to the rest of the ship beyond.

On her way down the corridors to the mess hall, Staples contemplated how someone not authorized could have gotten onto the ship. It had presumably happened on Mars. It was nearly inconceivable that someone could have remained hidden on board since Cronos Station, especially given the human needs for sleep, food, and to evacuate waste. If someone had managed to slip aboard her ship on Mars, they would have needed to have a six-digit access code. The ship was set with security measures whenever they berthed anywhere public. It was possible, of course, that someone had given another person the code, or that a member of the crew had snuck the stowaway on board, but that brought her back to the thought that she dreaded: the idea that someone among her dwindling crew had betrayed her.

Whatever she had expected when she reached the large room with the tables of magnetic cutlery holders and large refrigeration units, it was not the scene that greeted her. Jang floated more or less in the center of the room with his firearm drawn and one leg hooked under the bench of an unfolded table. He was dressed in dark clothes, black slacks and a deep blue long-sleeved shirt. The shirt was rolled at his elbows, and the tattoos on his forearms were visible. He was pointing the pistol he held at what appeared to Staples to be a generic automaton.

The robotic device was perhaps a few centimeters taller than she was. Its outer shell was silvery-white, though grey metal hinges showed at its wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, and other joints. It was standing in the zero-gravity environment through the use of magnets located in its feet, an ability of automatons that Staples had read about, but not seen in action. She had, however, seen many that were designed to resemble humans, and this one possessed as good an approximation as any. The face was not intended to fool anyone, and yet it had been conceived to interact naturally with people. The eyes were actually small cameras, and their lenses reflected light in an uncanny way. The mouth was little more than a slit in the face with a speaker behind it. Other features, such as cheek bones, a nose, and a chin were in evidence. The robot was bald, the top of its head a stark dome, and it was looking at her.

In her surprise, Staples almost drifted past the grab bar at the doorway and into the larger space of the room proper, where it would have been difficult to arrest her movement. At the last second, she took hold of the bar at the entrance. Her momentum carried her legs past her a bit, and after they swung past her, she resettled them beneath her.

“What is this?” she demanded of her security chief.

He nodded gravely at her entrance. “Captain. It may be best if he explains. He has been cooperative, and he offered no resistance when I arrested him. He only asked to speak with you.”

“What do you mean, offered?” She stared at the thing. Everything she knew of automatons indicated that they were useful only for shopping trips, walking dogs, serving drinks, and answering the door. Anything more complex than that was beyond their programming.

“Captain Staples.” The machine spoke. “It is important that we begin on the right foot. I am not an automaton. Or rather, I am not simply an automaton. I am a fully Turing compliant Artificial Intelligence.” The robot’s face was incapable of expression, and though its voice was tinny, it carried an uncanny amount of inflection. “That is to say; I am self-aware.” Its cameras continued to regard her. “I am sentient,” it added.

Her eyes wide, Staples stated simply, “That’s impossible.” She swallowed, then added pointlessly, “It’s also illegal.”

“It is my hope that through speaking with me, you will realize the error in the first of your two assertions. I am all too aware of the truth of your second statement, however. There is a reason I did not introduce myself upon entering your ship, a breach of etiquette for which I hope you will forgive me.” Staples found the combination of the blank face and the animated voice unsettling. In her experience, there was an artificiality that automatons, and indeed all speaking computers, possessed that was absent here. The phonemes from this machine did not sound prerecorded and combined; they flowed and varied to better convey meaning.

“A sufficiently advanced computer can be programmed to approximate intelligence and self-awareness,” she objected. “What proof do you have that you are what you say you are?”

“You are welcome to subject me to the test that the Turing compliance standard takes its name from,” it answered evenly and without hesitation.

“You want me to stick you in a room with a person for half an hour and see if you can fool them into thinking you are human?”

“If it will convince you that I am alive, certainly.”

Jang, who continued to hold his pistol on the automaton, interjected. “You said self-aware, not alive.”

The robot swiveled its head to look at him. “I’m afraid that I do not distinguish between the two, security officer Jang.”

“That’s a metaphysical question that I really don’t care about right now,” Staples raised her voice, then looked at Jang. “Where did you find it?”

“In the computer core, waiting for me.” He did not take his eyes off the robot.

“You fired the first six missiles at the other ship.” Her voice was quieter again. “How? Why?”

“I did so to save your life and the lives of the other people on this ship, Captain.” Again, the answer came immediately. “I initiated the launch by introducing a small computer virus.” The robot raised its arm, the only movement aside from its head it had made so far, and the security chief’s hand tightened on his weapon. At the end of the index finger of its right hand a small computer interface jack had appeared. “After the launch of the initial six missiles, the virus deleted itself. There is no further contamination of your systems, I promise you.”

“You promise me?” Staples inquired. She meant the question rhetorically, and the robot did not answer. “How did you know that the other ship was going to attack us?”

“Because I know who sent it to kill you, Captain.”

“Owen Burr?” she inquired.

“No, though Mr. Burr is certainly involved. It is perhaps best if I start from the beginning. Would that be acceptable? My explanation should answer all of your questions. I estimate that it will take the better part of an hour.”

After a moment of thought, Staples nodded. “I’m not sold that you are what you say you are, and I’m not sure that I won’t have Mr. Jang here destroy you even if you are, but I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

“I should state that I have no intention of harming you. In fact, I have risked much to prevent any harm from coming to you, and I do not believe that you will have Mr. Jang shoot me.”