The Life Engineered (15 page)

I knew I couldn’t eradicate this annoying Adelaïde protocol from Coatlicue’s personality, but Aurvandil and Ardra had already figured out how to circumvent that problem. I carefully disconnected our host’s cognitive core from the rest of the assembly and, using components filtered for me from other secondary systems, built a bridge from her mnemonic core to whatever else I could get my hands on.

Once I had finished my share of the work, I looked up at the crowd standing at the door to the chamber. Some, like Ukupanipo, stood still, while others danced nervously, betraying their unease at the procedure. I then glanced at the little Von Neumann, who had been hovering, all six of him, while waiting for the next part. Again, I gave him another subtle nod, and to work he went once more.

One shard floated to the middle of the chamber close to me, while all five others converged on it. Then in a frenzy of what resembled cannibalism, the sixth shard was furiously disassembled, leaving a diminutive cognitive fragment accessible for me to meddle with. The procedure took less than a minute, and as soon as it was complete all six shards took up a holding position, floating calmly within the chamber.

Then as carefully as I could, I hooked up my small, damaged friend’s networked mind to the awesome body and memory of a Gaia thousands of years old.

COMET 3598-G76, Interplanetary Space.

Clever, clever humans, I thought to myself.

I think it’s one of our biggest mistakes as Capeks that we constantly underestimate the race that reared our kind. We see them as the simple, angry, insecure, and primitive creatures used as the marble from which our personalities are hewn. Only once the impurities are removed do we earn the privilege of becoming more than human.

Those are the humans from the Nursery. Inspired from history, past civilizations, or perhaps even completely fictional, they probably have little in common with the humans who had a hand in constructing three generations of artificial intelligence. Those humans, they were very clever.

Skinfaxi collapsed our space-time bubble as far in front of the comet as was necessary, immediately firing up his massive ion thrusters to match the traveling dust-and-ice bowl’s speed. It took several hours for us to achieve the appropriate velocity, doing so exactly as the immense chunk of space debris was close, just as he’d calculated. From that moment on we were stationary relative to our target. The comet was a monstrous nineteen kilometers long by fifteen wide. It had an extremely slow rotation, tipping end over end at a rate of one full rotation per seventy-six days. Opochtli had mirrored our maneuver and was also following the comet. Both Sputniks moved in and landed gently on the surface of the enormous glacier.

Stepping out of my friend and ship, I looked around me to get an appreciation of the landscape. There was no nearby sun, just the tapestry of lights that was the sky this deep in interstellar space. Off on the slowly shifting horizon of the comet, I could see a familiar nebula, the same one I had observed after our escape from Hina, though from a different angle. A curious coincidence.

There was no discernible gravity to speak of as my thrusters provided the necessary push to keep me close to the surface, where I needed to be.

“Anything?” Ukupanipo asked from within the cabin of my whalelike friend. Opochtli’s spacious cabin offered the large war Capek a more comfortable ride, not that these things mattered to our kind.

I adjusted my vision to the infrared end of the spectrum. Carefully, I scanned the surface of this false dirty snowball for traces of warmth. From afar, any heat signature could be mistaken for reflected light or background radiation messing with sensors, but at this close range there was no hiding what we expected to find.

“Yeah, I got it. Clear as day.” Somewhere under the sheet of ice I could distinctly see a minuscule but intense localized source of heat. Small strands of barely noticeable warmth branched out from it, fine veins of yellowish-green blood spreading from an organ. The fusion cell for a stasis chamber.

Clever humans.

“How do I get in?” I asked.

“We’re going in?” I hadn’t expected Skinfaxi to be the one who’d be nervous about invading the human sanctuary.

“Not ‘we.’ If this is built for humans, I doubt it will allow large Sputniks or Ukupanipo’s frame inside.”

I concentrated, listening for any open channels that might serve as a way to communicate with whatever onboard computer would be monitoring the sleeping humans. Nothing.

“Do you think they have a set date for when they should awaken, or are the Gaias programmed to send out some kind of quancom signal when we’re done rebuilding their worlds?” I asked, walking around silently on the icy surface.

“You tell me.” Faxi was clearly not in a speculative mood.

I wandered the comet’s surface for several minutes, pondering what my next step might be. So we’d found a Dormitory World, which turned out to instead be a ship camouflaged in ice and dirt zipping across the galaxy at high speed. It was a strange place to hibernate, and I had to wonder—what were the humans so afraid of that they went to such lengths to disappear so thoroughly from the Milky Way for so long?

“There,” Opochtli’s measured tone broke in. “Look to these coordinates. There’s an NFC device emitting a weak magnetic field twenty meters under the surface of the ice.”

Unsheathing my plasma cutter, I dug a hole into the surface. I struggled to avoid being blasted into space by the ice erupting from the geysers of vaporizing gas. Once I’d gotten close enough to the hull of the hidden ship, I began breaking the ice by hand.

It took no small amount of work, and I’ll admit to being greatly tempted to ask for Ukupanipo’s help, but eventually I cleared out a square hole, five meters on each side. At the bottom was a hatch, also square, but smaller than the cavity I’d excavated. No handles, no apparent controls or even a porthole. I couldn’t identify the material from which the hull of the ship was constructed. It had most of the hallmarks of pseudo-plastics, but spectrographic analysis indicated it was significantly denser and made up of nonalloyed carbon.

“Did you manage to analyze the magnetic field?” Finding an interface was one thing, but it was a long road to actually communicate with it.

“It’s input-output, but it doesn’t match any known design for a key lock.”

“Great.” I wasn’t sure where to begin. We should have brought Koalemos after all. His skills at understanding how things are made and unmade would have been useful. However, he had chosen to stay behind. Being a Gaia ever so briefly and being allowed to pore over the accumulated memories of Coatlicue had done something to him. Perhaps it had shown him a portrait of how broken he had become. Or maybe a way to become whole again. Regardless, he wasn’t here, and we had to figure out this puzzle on our own.

“Plasma cutter?” I suggested.

“Noooo . . .” Skinfaxi said. “Unless I’m mistaken, the hull of this ship is composed of ethimothropic carbon.”

“Plasma won’t cut it then?”

“I doubt. The hull is composed of a single custom-sequenced carbon molecule. So if you succeed in cutting through it, you’ll be severing molecular bonds, and frankly, I have no idea what effect that might have.”

I sheathed my plasma cutter quickly. The last thing I needed was to deal with an unpredictable reaction from a decomposing exotic metamaterial.

“So what do I do?” I asked, worry building up in my mind. As it turned out, our human predecessors were significantly more advanced than I had given them credit for. More advanced than we were anyway. I didn’t even think ethimothropic materials were possible. If they didn’t want us in their ship, I wasn’t optimistic about our chances for breaking in.

“We talk to the ship.” Belenos had kept quiet for now. He’d been pleased when we had rebuilt Coatlicue, eliminating any remaining doubt about the purity of our intentions.

The large dog-shaped Leduc-class crawled out of Skinfaxi’s belly. He walked down the side of the hole I’d dug, sticking to the walls like a gecko. Nearly shoving me aside, Belenos made his way to the NFC interface, dropping one heavy paw over it before becoming completely immobile.

“Faxi?” I asked on a private channel. “What happens if we don’t find what we’re looking for in there?”

Our plan had been boldly optimistic. Assuming the Adelaïde protocol was in place to protect the Dormitory Worlds from Capeks with less-than-kind intentions, it stood to figure that once the humans were awake, they might want the protocol canceled. Dorm Worlds are, aside from our civilization, the very last vestige of humanity in the Milky Way. Hence, if there was any kind of deactivation sequence, it would be stored here.

“Oh, I have a plan,” he said, laughing with unsuppressed mischief. The large Sputnik didn’t bother sharing what he had in mind, but I knew that if he had something planned, it was probably pretty good, and that made me feel somewhat better.

“Got it,” Belenos growled.

The hatch sprung to life, pulling itself a few inches down into the hull before sliding abruptly to the side and into the frame. The outer shell of the hull was no thicker than three millimeters, with only about ten centimeters separating it from the inner wall. Seen like this, the structure of the ship seemed so incredibly fragile. It was difficult to imagine that the cabin would not explode if pressurized, but that is the miracle of ethimothropic materials, I suppose.

The hatch now open, Belenos and I could see into what looked like a simple, even threadbare airlock. The walls were lit through an internal luminescent system that made it glow eerily turquoise.

“Shall we?” I offered my canine companion.

He walked into the airlock, sticking to its walls like a giant, four-legged insect. I fired my maneuvering thrusters to move in after him but found myself struggling. The more power I would give the small engines, the more I would move away from the hatch, drifting slowly toward space. After fighting for a moment to get back to the comet-like structure, I was pulled abruptly into the void. From the corner of my eye, I saw that both Skinfaxi and Opochtli were similarly pulled up from their moored landing areas.

I slowly twisted my head around to look behind me, knowing full well what to expect and dreading the truth. I watched as the stars in the distant sky were joined by others, their firmament pulled into view by the effects of an incoming space fold.

I
raced along the smooth, beige surface of the attacking Capek. The previous few minutes replayed in my mind as I moved to avoid the incoming attacks of Kamohoali’i’s automated defense systems.

The immense Sputnik was designed with as much care and efficiency as Ukupanipo had been, but whereas I had wandered through the great war god’s hull unmolested on account of the damage he had already sustained, this new shark was intact and fully operational.

The moment I had crashed into his fuselage, barely escaping the initial volley of self-guided torpedoes he’d unleashed at my other companions, a veritable army of automated surface defense automatons had rushed out of hiding. These robots, specifically designed to root out and destroy close-proximity attackers, like a large-scale immune system, were lodged at regular intervals along the surface of Kamohoali’i’s outer shell, barely visible until deployed. They crawled over their host on ion thrusters and magnetic coils that allowed them great speed while attaching them to the immense shark. Meter-wide domes equipped with short-range fusion weapons aggressively eradicating invaders such as me.

Fortunately, I was not entirely without my own advantages. “Uku?” I asked, knowing he had other fish to fry. “I’m busy but listening.”

The great god of war who stayed hidden within Opochtli was obviously preoccupied with his and Skinfaxi’s survival at the moment. Fortunately, both could use the synthetic comet as a shield against incoming attacks by Kamohoali’i, as it was a safe assumption that the Sputnik hunter would avoid destroying the Dormitory at all costs.

“I was hoping you knew a way I might be able to maybe not get killed.”

“I’m working on it.”

I looked around me and saw a dozen and a half defense drones converging on my position, fusion guns flaring brightly on infrared.

“You’re close to a torpedo tube,” Ukupanipo informed me. “Find it and get ready.”

I recognized the plan and was not on board with it, but I had very little choice in the matter. Looking back at the Dormitory, I saw Skinfaxi fly out from behind the comet, spiraling through the vacuum and away from the sanctuary that had so far stayed the hunter’s hand.

“He’s going to fire more than one of these things,” I warned as the ground rumbled under my feet.

A hatch less than half a meter away blew open as a sleek, glossy black missile shot out from the bowels of Kamohoali’i. With a speed that surprised me, I grabbed onto the projectile as it rocketed toward my friends, its onboard AI completely focused on obliteration. I struggled briefly to get a better handhold and looked around, appraising the situation. Kamohoali’i was being conservative, probably wary of any trick we might have up our sleeve to turn his weapons against him or the Dormitory. Only six torpedoes had been launched, but each was moving in on a different specific vector—one to intercept Faxi directly, the others to cut off his points of evasion.

“Okay, now what?” I held on to the projectile as it made sudden changes in heading. Space isn’t a place where speed is easy to measure and comprehend. The scale is too large. The reference points too few. I could observe the plasma trail of each torpedo as it sped through the vacuum, and I could find and track all the ships involved in the skirmish, but holding on to this projectile, everything was far and small and slow. Only I was fast. I knew how fast I was going. My navigation systems made sure of that, and in an unlikely alchemy of science and psychology, numbers transformed into emotions. In this case the kilometers per hour translated to exhilaration under a thin coat of fear.

“When I tell you, disable the torpedo’s thruster array.” I looked around, hoping to guess my target before Ukupanipo gave his signal. “Now.”

I plunged my plasma cutter into what I hoped was the right spot and was relieved that I had guessed correctly.

Skinfaxi was moving toward my position, guiding another projectile closer to me as it gained on him at worrying speed.

“You’re not serious?”

“Oh-oh, we very much are,” Faxi replied, instead of the war god.

As soon as the second torpedo was close enough, using every ounce of information from my navigation systems I pushed myself from my current ride and onto the other.

I spent the minutes drifting from one high-speed target to the next, availing myself of the situation. My companions had cleverly manipulated the pattern of attack to nudge closer to the comet, preventing Kamohoali’i from launching additional projectiles. I could sense the war god’s hand in the cunning but difficult maneuver.

“Again!” he called out.

A second time I sabotaged the maneuvering capabilities of my ride, and a second time Skinfaxi moved a missile into position close enough for me to jump to it. This time, however, just as I was about to leap from one torpedo to the other, the new target moved away.

“Damn!” I cursed. “He’s onto us!”

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Faxi reassured me. “Apply maximum thrusters to the end of your torpedo and rotate it roughly twenty-three degrees to your left, increasing pitch by forty-one degrees.”

Easier said than done but not impossible, even given the ridiculous circumstances of riding around on a torpedo in the depths of interstellar space. My onboard navigation kept track of the changes in heading, making the mathematical portion of my task easy enough, but crawling all over the projectile to give it the proper thrust was another issue. Pushing one way, then pulling to stop the rotation, it took some trial and error, but eventually I got the missile moving where Skinfaxi wanted it. Directly toward the Dormitory.

“Is this intentional?”

“Jettison,” Ukupanipo ordered.

“It’s heading straight for the—”

“Jettison!”

I pushed myself full thrusters away from the torpedo with plenty of time before impact with the comet . . . but only a second before two other projectiles destroyed my ride in a devastating plasma vortex. The concussive blast threw me into the depths of space, clear away from the Dormitory, Kamohoali’i, and my companions. I quickly fired my thrusters to stop myself from flipping end over end, and twisted to see what was going on. One last torpedo was circling around the comet, like a hawk waiting for its prey. Skinfaxi had gone back to flying close to the Dormitory, leaving me to float away in the dark. Any moment, Kamohoali’i could fire another volley in my direction, and there would be precious little I could do about it.

My navigation system flashed in my field of vision, informing me of an increasing change in direction of my rapid drift. It took me a moment to realize what was happening.

“Another space fold. This vacuum’s getting crowded!” I didn’t know what to think of Skinfaxi’s humor as the situation escalated rapidly.

I turned to see where the new gravity well was pulling me. A dozen identical ships, each almost fifty meters of sleek, polished white pseudo-plastic, materialized from the fold. They bore stylized symbols of the zodiac as visual identifiers, linking them to the Gaia who had manufactured them.

The assembled Renegade fleet, along with four Sputnik-class Capeks of various sizes and configurations, was finally making its arrival.

A single tiny rocket shot out from the side of one of the Renegade warships, quickly adjusting its trajectory toward my slowly drifting position. I waited patiently as the projectile sped in my direction. As it zoomed by less than a couple dozen meters away, my navigation systems went haywire, disrupted by whatever jamming technology was on board the projectile. Within moments it impacted with the remaining torpedo, clearing the void of offending weapons.

The respite wouldn’t last.

I continued floating gently toward the incoming fleet. We’d known about their impending arrival. Because of Koalemos and his time on Olympus, we now knew more than enough about the fleet they built, the weapons they had, and their future plans, but everything we did from this point on was a gamble.

The war fleet passed me. Marvelous machines built in the past few days by the powerful fabrication facilities on Olympus. Each ship was controlled through a custom-designed cognitive interface conceived by Ardra, the silver centipede whom I’d assisted in assembling Demeter. This way the Renegades could go to war without the worry of losing lives in the process. In this at least Aurvandil was true to his words.

Each was also equipped with its own space-fold engine, allowing the entire fleet to make multiple jumps without having to wait for the drives to fully cool down.

Demeter was likely creating more of these engines of war as we spoke, ready to subjugate the second-generation Gaias. An odd interpretation of freedom for all Capeks.

The fleet passed me and spread out to create a perimeter around Kamohoali’i. Only the Sputniks held back, leaving the more powerful telepresence-controlled warships to tackle the colossus. I watched as both sides, Renegades and war Capeks, unleashed swarms of self-directing missiles, torpedoes, and countless countermeasures at each other. The complex dance of weapon fire and defensive maneuvers was beautiful, or would have been if there wasn’t a sentient Capek’s life on the line. The breathtaking display of a thousand glowing ion thrusters streaking though the black vacuum in a ballet of motion couldn’t distract me from knowing that in the middle of all this, Kamohoali’i was likely going to die.

“Belenos?” I was supposed to be with him inside the Dormitory. As fate would have it, Kamohoali’i’s arrival had spoiled those plans.

He grumbled something unintelligible. The big dog was almost the exact opposite of Skinfaxi. Where my first companion had always been openly warm and welcoming, Belenos was a forbidding, brooding Capek. I wasn’t exactly comfortable relating to his sort, but there was no denying his competence and initiative.

“What’s it like in there?” I had resigned myself to one of two fates. Either I would float here until the battle that was unraveling in spectacular displays of plasma explosions and ion trails was resolved, left at the mercy of whoever came out on top, or I would be destroyed in the crossfire. At that point it hardly mattered. It was on the success of my friends that the fate of our galaxy rested.

Somewhere between me and the comet, one of the warships began to fall apart. The absence of air prevented the wreck from exploding or burning up in glorious flames, but the plasma discharge from the volley of torpedoes that had hit its hull ate at the pseudo-plastics with voracious appetite. Lines of coruscating star-fire pulsed on the edges as they were vaporized.

“I might have something, but it’s gonna require a little more t ime.”

I wasn’t fond of that answer. Skinfaxi and Opochtli had been forced away from the protection the Dormitory provided against Kamohoali’i. The giant war god had been careful not to damage the comet, but the Renegade fleet had no such restraint. So far Ukupanipo’s skills as a warrior allowed him to coordinate both Sputniks away from the worst of the fighting, but how long could that last?

“Anything I can do to help?”

“I’m going to cut you off now,” he growled again.

“What?”

“Good luck.” And he shut me off from his quancom channel.

The four Renegade Sputniks had held back. I suspected they housed the Capeks that were in control of the warships. The only one I recognized was the large squid-shaped Capek, who had been floating outside the City with Aurvandil’s cohort when I first met the elegant Renegade leader.

The squid was moving very slowly toward my position, directly under my feet. It gave the illusion of falling to the surface of a tiny, tentacled planet. Minutes passed as I watched the war continue. Kamohoali’i had adopted a new strategy, positioning himself as best he could between the attackers and the comet. You’re wasting your time, I thought. Save yourself.

Eventually, I landed. Very softly my feet touched the cold pseudo-plastic shell on the incoming Sputnik’s hull. I settled gently on the surface. He must have known I was there and moved here on purpose. To save me? To kill me? Capeks—normal ones at least—were not commonly armed. Maybe he meant to push me into the cataclysmic fray ahead.

I turned my attention back to the battle. Another warship had fallen, cut in twain by punishing missile barrages. A third had gotten too close, and I could see swarms of Kamohoali’i’s automated defense drones crawling over its surface.

“Would you like to come in?” Aurvandil said. Why was I glad to hear his voice echo through my head as he broadcast his invitation to me?

I didn’t bother giving an answer, nor did he bother waiting for one. A hatch on the top of the squid’s head hissed open, allowing me access to the interior of the Renegade Sputnik. What did I have to lose? Wasn’t this my plan all along? I went in.

“Welcome. I am Eremiel.” Its voice was kind but distant, as if it was distracted. I wondered if it only spoke to remind me that I was not just entering a ship but a person. I thought I’d gotten used to this concept, but clearly I hadn’t.

“Thank you. Huh . . . I’m Dagir.”

“Keep moving down this corridor. Aurvandil is waiting.”

None of the Sputniks I’d boarded before had ever felt as decorated as Eremiel. Skinfaxi’s interior was devoid of sharp angles, clean and minimalistic. Almost cold. Opochtli felt like a passenger plane. Clean, comfortable, but in no way homey. Eremiel was different. His interior would have been comfortable even to a human. It was lit in warm yellow. The narrow corridor was decorated with landscapes from various planet surfaces, presumably places he’d been and was fond of. Wood inlays and shining metal latticework ran along the walls. The interior, though small, had a rotating mechanism that simulated gravity at just under eighttenths of a g, and did I detect atmospheric pressure? It was all very human.

As I walked into the main cabin, I half expected Aurvandil to wait for me there with a glass of brandy in one hand, twirling a prosthetic moustache. While the room was as lavish as I’d anticipated, decorated with much the same style as the rest of the ship and even furnished with a handful of comfortable armchairs, the Renegade leader was not sitting comfortably in any of them.