The Life Engineered (19 page)

had changed significantly since last I saw it, but I was still rather

shocked by how much. The front was more pointed, and the

engine section was so large it took over three-quarters of the vessel’s volume and probably an even greater portion of its mass. It

was to be expected. The Tjurunga is equipped with variations of

every type of faster-than-light device known to Capek-kind, as

well as a few prototypes. Karora likes to brag that his ship was the

fastest in the galaxy, which might mean something if space folding didn’t make the very concept of speed irrelevant.

I floated into the craft through the airlock. Two of Karora’s

shards were already there to assist me in.

“I broke a sensor array, Kar, I’m not an invalid,” I protested. Karora’s shards are difficult to take seriously. Each is roughly

two feet high and is composed of chubby segments that form

humanoid limbs. They look like teddy bears. However, they are

incredibly efficient. Each segment can rotate around the one

it’s connected to at almost three hundred degrees, making the

shards remarkably flexible. The extremities, being so fat, allow

the housing of a shocking amount of tools and devices, including

thruster arrays in each foot. Unleashed upon a project, Karora

can swarm rapidly to various portions, giving himself assistance

where needed to accomplish challenging feats of construction

and assembly at speeds that simply boggle the mind. Then again

that’s what he was engineered to do.

“Just let me have a look at it,” he insisted. Without waiting for

permission, he began to disassemble the mounting on my back,

liberating the mechanism that held my wings in place. I sat down in the cockpit of the Tjurunga. All of Karora’s shards

were somewhere in the cramped room, each busy with a different task. A third shard joined the two already furiously working

on my back. My friend did not need to interact with his ship to

pilot it. That was accomplished through wireless communication, but the Tjurunga had a fully functional pilot’s chair, and a Capek of the appropriate dimensions and configuration, like me, could

take the helm.

“So you say you figured out who the Capek with the arsenal

is,” I said, trying to distract myself from the impromptu surgery. “I did! You want to know now, or should I keep it a surprise?” “Ugh. Just tell me.”

“Too late! We’re here.”

I guess I was meant to be impressed. We had traveled over

half an astronomical unit in a matter of minutes, clearly through

the use of a space-time bubble. An Alcubierre drive. Yet I hadn’t

felt the telltale vibrations that usually herald the buildup of the

necessary power, nor had I noticed when the bubble had popped

in and out of existence around us. However, I didn’t have the time

to voice my admiration.

“Is that . . . ?”

“A n hu r.”

“No!”

It was hard to believe, but there he was. One of the biggest

villains of Aurvandil’s rebellion. The giant Lucretius had disappeared after the events that had almost plunged Capek civilization into civil war. It was the uneasy assumption of almost every

Capek that he had limped off to a nearby wormhole or managed

to fold space one last time before completely falling apart. From

the looks of him, the theory held some truth to it.

So far from the nearest star, it was the Tjurunga’s lights that

illuminated the monster. The top portion of his shell was pockmarked with impact craters, some large and deep enough to

expose the inner workings of the beast. A third of the long, thick

spines that served as his engine and maneuvering thrusters were

damaged or otherwise severed. It was Anhur’s prow, however,

that held the strongest evidence of his defeat. It was marred by a

long gash of burnt and twisted pseudo-plastic so deep and wide that, to a technically minded Capek, it was obviously a surgical strike meant to incapacitate the Lucretius. Massive exposed conduits that could only serve to power engines had been severed and rendered useless. One of the redundant fusion reactors was

ruptured, reduced to a cold and empty husk.

Yet the giant lived.

Karora brought his ship close to the largest opening in Anhur’s outer shell. Circles of bright illumination danced over the remains as if each had a mind of its own and was looking for something. The Tjurunga got within a few feet of the wreck, and Karora opened the hatch.

“They still don’t work,” I complained. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t get any telemetry out of any of the sensors.

“I know. I just repaired the folding mechanism. I mean, if you want to stay here for a couple of hours I can probably take care of it, but you’ll miss out.”

I couldn’t deny that curiosity was gnawing at me voraciously, and, after all, what good were atmospheric sensors in the vacuum of space? He was right: the sensors could wait. As long as I no longer had limp, skeletal tendrils flopping around me, I was better off tagging along. How often does one get to explore the wreck of a legendary killer Capek?

We disembarked from the hatch, me and seven of Karora’s shards. The little robots immediately fanned out to investigate as much of the husk as they could. Six of them became little dots of ion thrust darting about in the dark, while the seventh shard accompanied me toward where Anhur’s cognitive array should be housed.

“Did you try to talk to him?” It wasn’t the smartest question. Without quancom, the only message Karora could have sent would have been by radio, and we would have beaten the signal to its destination by several hours. This left the short window since we’d arrived.

“Pointless. I didn’t see his entertainment core listed with the damaged systems, so I’m assuming he’s isolated his consciousness in there.”

“Would he have listed that as a critical system?”

Precious few Capeks were equipped with an entertainment core, but all Lucretiuses had them. The device created a customizable, fully immersive artificial reality. A Lucretius by his very nature was likely to spend thousands of years in deep space, completely isolated. The entertainment core offered a safe retreat where the Capek could stay busy during the long transit between galaxies.

“Wouldn’t you?”

We entered a large chamber. It had taken some time to dig this deep into the monster’s body. Close to an hour in fact, winding through tubes and corridors that were never meant to be traveled. Unlike some Sputniks, a Lucretius-class Capek wasn’t meant to carry passengers. The conduits were analogous to arteries, not corridors, so they hadn’t been designed with efficient travel in mind.

Either some automated system detected our presence, or Karora’s other shards had reactivated Anhur’s power grid, but just as we floated into his “brain,” soft-green lights came to life, bathing us in a calm glow that made me think of the tall forests being grown on some Reclamation Worlds across the Milky Way.

“What are we even looking at?” I asked. I’d never seen the inside of another Capek, apart from the purpose-built cockpits and cargo holds of larger Sputniks.

“Damned if I know. I assume the central hub over there.” He pointed to an area where many of the lights inlaid into the walls of the chamber converged. “That should be the central cognitive and memory cores.”

There was no reason to doubt him. Karora might not be specialized in Capek neurophysiology, but there was no arguing that he knew ship architecture and robotics enough to be trusted on the subject. He’d built the Tjurunga himself and had refitted, automated, destroyed, and rebuilt it so many times I could hardly imagine a more competent Capek to have at my side in this situation.

“So, what’s the plan? We reactivate him?”

“Ha-ha-ha! No,” my friend answered derisively as he removed the paneling that covered Anhur’s brains.

“Why not? Weren’t you on the same side during Aurvandil’s rebellion?”

It was a cheap shot and a sore point for him. A handful of Capeks had joined with Aurvandil in an effort to hunt down and contain the human cold-storage locations. Their argument being that the galaxy now belonged to us and there was no reason the humans should ever be allowed to wake up and disrupt our civilization. Needless to say, this was not a philosophy embraced by all. Aurvandil’s methods bordered on insanity. It was in fact eventually shown that the rebel leader had a defect that made him a walking time bomb. Karora had sided with him. The blow to his ego after their defeat and discovering he’d been following a false prophet still resonates with my friend to this day. Fortunately, he and the other rebels were granted amnesty—another divisive issue, but it was the only way to keep our society from breaking out into open civil war. A war that would have burned the galaxy to ashes.

“Well, first of all ‘we’ aren’t going to be doing anything. This is a massively complex Capek, not some clouds and rain. If anything gets done, you can watch.”

“Ouch.”

“Also, even on our so-called side, Anhur was a bit of an aberration. As was Pele for that matter.”

Pele had been another Lucretius-class Capek, one that had been destroyed by the great Hera before she was in turn eradicated by orbital bombardment.

“I’m not exactly sure if even Aurvandil knew what these two were up to. They just showed up one day and started ‘helping.’”

“Helping?” I asked for further clarification while taking a section of paneling he was handing me.

“Well, they’re not like us—Lucretiuses I mean. They’re . . . psychopaths? Aurvandil wanted a peaceful solution. Even the humans weren’t supposed to come to any harm, but Pele and Anhur . . . All the violence can be traced back to them.”

It’s true that it takes a rather unique personality to be a Lucretius, to volunteer for the complete isolation that comes with deep-space exploration and venture into the gulf that separates the Milky Way from its neighbors. I’ve heard them described as sociopaths, insane, or in some cases the most Capek of us all, but not necessarily violent or malevolent.

“So, no reactivation?”

“No reactivation.” To punctuate his answer, he proceeded to disconnect a series of conduits from around the cognitive core.

“Mmmph . . . Judging from the level of activity in this thing”— Karora tapped his fingers on one of the devices he had uncovered by removing the panel—“that’s the entertainment core.”

I looked on as my friend continued to remove pieces to hand me. I’d set them aside to float in the weightless vacuum. He disconnected more and more conduits. I could recognize where he would create loops and feed information back on itself, isolating the cores from each other or from key external systems, essentially separating Anhur from his own body and locking him within the artificial environment of his entertainment core.

It was a slow, hesitant process. Karora, for all his knowledge, was still playing with things that were out of his comfort zone. He’d often stop to judge whether he was making the right decision or not. After a while another of his shards joined us to help with the procedure. Changes in vibrations and other details told me that some of Anhur’s functionality was being brought back online, one system at a time.

“Nervous?” I asked, noticing my friend taking increasingly long pauses.

“No. No, no. Yes. I’m not worried about lobotomizing him, if that’s what you mean, but a big Capek like this has a few secondary cognitive arrays sprinkled around his body. Some might have instructions to protect the central core, here, from exactly the kind of stuff we’re doing right now.”

“Oh, it’s ‘we’ again now,” I said in an attempt to lighten the mood, but there was no answer coming from my partner. In fact, both his shards had completely stopped moving. At first, I assumed he was focusing his full attention on a distant problem his other shards were faced with. Most Von Neumanns never have a problem keeping many threads of activity going, each shard behaving less like a limb and more like its own person. When they do slip, as Karora seemed to be doing, they usually hide it in shame for some reason. As if it were a failing on their part.

This was different, however. Both shards were focused on the same part of the cognitive array he was working on, frozen midmovement. I started to wonder if perhaps he might be communicating with another Capek through quancom, consulting on how best to proceed. A prudent move if that was actually the case. However, just as I began to entertain the notion, my friend shook off his torpor and slowly pointed with the right hand of both of his shards. “What the hell is that?”

T
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