Nemesis (9 page)

The
Griffin
slid to a gentle halt and a soft bonging sound filled the cabin as the locks engaged. Ann fought down another wave of excited unease as she unclipped from her bunk and drifted into the cabin’s central well.

‘I’m proud of all of you,’ she told her crew. ‘We did a great job.’

They’d already guessed she had some kind of important meeting to attend. She could see the curiosity written in their eyes.

‘I’ll be gone for a while,’ she said. ‘Hours, maybe, so please shut down without me. And in case you finish before I get back, enjoy your break. You all deserve it.’

She tried for a winning smile and fought down a stab of jealousy towards her own team.

River shot her a concerned look as she made for the airlock. ‘Hope it goes well,’ he said.

‘Me, too,’ said Ann as she sealed herself in.

The
Griffin
’s docking pod slid up through the ship’s mesohull and mated with the standard-issue transit pod waiting at the end of the tethering arm. As the doors swung open, Ann glided across from one bland, biocarpeted interior to the other.

‘Welcome back, Captain Ludik,’ said the transit in a friendly, feminine voice as it accelerated away from the ship. The main screen showed her a map of her location on the station and various useful facilities she might want to visit.

‘Where would you like to go?’ it asked eagerly. ‘I can deliver you to your office in four-point-eight minutes or the officers’ lounge in five.’

‘There’s a project I need to check on first,’ said Ann. ‘The details are here.’

She pressed the chip in the back of her hand against the reader in the transit’s wall.

An ungainly pause ensued. The pod momentarily slowed and then accelerated again as its usual identity went to sleep and another one woke up.

‘Secure reboot complete,’ said the SAP in a new voice – one with a deeper, more directive tone. ‘Lie back, please, Captain. Transit will be swift.’

Ann clipped herself into the furry lining of the pod using pull-out straps from the wall and held on tight as the transit routed her out of the human pod channels and into the ones designed for freight. Freight-pods didn’t operate under the same acceleration limits, which meant the ride could be rough.

‘Do I have a meeting point?’ she asked as she was jounced and jerked through a complex web of girders between boxes of machine parts and canisters of coolant. The shadows of tubes and walkways flashed past on the monitors.

‘Yes. Your end point is confirmed. Your contact is waiting for you. Surveillance cover for this meeting has also been arranged. Details will be deposited in your chip on your return trip.’

When Ann or one of the other members of the Rumfoord League needed to take time out, they were simply listed as
not available
, which usually meant working on one of IPSO’s secure projects. And there were enough such projects in the Fleet that the conspiracy was easy to hide, particularly with the high-level support the League commanded. But that didn’t stop Ann hating every minute of the subterfuge.

The pod lurched to a halt, tilted ninety degrees and slid her under the carapace of a large crab-shaped maintenance robot. The screens’ view swapped to the crab’s primary cameras. Ann felt a surge of acceleration as the robot sped away from the Fleet station and out into empty space.

Though she felt badly in need of conversation, she knew better than to try to talk with the pod. The stealth SAP now in charge of it had deliberately filtered access to information and was designed to flag a warning if she asked too many unexpected questions.

‘Can I get a status update?’ she said instead.

‘One has been prepared for you,’ said the SAP. ‘Passive-vid will play it on screen two.’

The screen flared into life as the SAP began its presentation. The League’s stylised Taj Mahal logo showed briefly, followed by dense tables of statistics.

‘Our Nemesis machine deployment at Tiwanaku achieved objectives but with unanticipated losses,’ it said.

Ann groaned. The Nems made her nervous, but she wasn’t alone in that.

‘Human error caused a delay in initiating the swarm surge. Consequently, warp exodus was delayed by approximately one standard day. Rather than encountering a system in post-swarm fugue, the
Reynard
and
Horton
arrived prior to engagement. Both ships were lost. Fortunately, swift action on the part of the
Reynard
’s captain meant that knowledge of the event still passed to Fleet control.’

Ann shook her head at the awful waste. That was some terrible timing. The
Horton
had been full of families. She reminded herself that a lot more innocent people would die before the project was over. Their loss would make this tragedy a footnote by comparison.

‘Nemesis machine activity ran entirely as predicted by the mean standard model with the exception of a single behaviour – the incorporation of a broadcast message into the attack pattern.’

The presentation played the message loop. Ann watched the terrified boy backing away from whatever piece of alien machinery had come to get him and nausea rose as she imagined what must have happened next. She put a hand over her mouth.

The fact that the message appeared to represent a certain level of autonomous intelligence – not to mention malice – disturbed her, but she knew that wasn’t a fully rational response. There’d always been evidence that the Nems were smart. They appeared to be almost on a par with human SAP technology. What they weren’t, though, was flexible, creative or self-aware. The League would never have dared use them if they had been.

The last war had brought hard lessons about the misuse of alien technology. The League overcompensated by modelling and testing everything to the
nth
degree. Some of the conspirators called it overkill. Ann called it wise.

The Nems always incorporated a small amount of foreign material into their matrix after each attack, and this showed up as subsequent modifications to their behaviour. To Ann’s mind this meant you could never be too careful. Thankfully, the Nems’ overall sophistication never wavered.

‘The message has been subject to significant subsequent analysis,’ said the SAP, as if picking up on her alarm. ‘Concerns were raised that it constituted an entirely new behaviour. However, closer examination of the records of previous Nemesis machine operations reveals that a broadcast message has always been associated with attacks. Prior analysis had erroneously assumed this message was some kind of targeting signal. In fact, what occurred during this attack was a translation from the Nemesis machine language to an approximation of our own, using material culled from the protocols of co-opted machines.’

That came as something of a relief, though it did little to quell Ann’s overall sense of unease.

‘The one remaining concern regarding the attack was that the presence of the two extra ships increased the size of the target, and therefore the mutation risk incurred through ingestion. The League notes, however, that recent scans of the Tiwanaku System suggest that the machines are operating entirely within tolerances. The presence of extra biological samples does not appear to have distorted machine behaviour patterns. This may be because the samples in question were destroyed during acquisition.’

In other words, everyone died before the machines could get to them. Ann hoped so, for their sake. Not for the first time, she shuddered at what she’d become involved with. Had she not considered it absolutely necessary, she never would have joined the Rumfoord League. But the discovery of the Snakepit System and its attendant technologies had left the conspirators in an impossible position.

It had started with the realisation that Earth’s sects had been keeping discoveries in Fecund space secret from IPSO, a move clearly aimed at strengthening their hand if war broke out. After that, it was only a matter of time before certain Fleet captains had started doing a little off-the-books exploring for themselves to even the odds. They’d only been looking for an extra Fecund secret or two, but the world they found changed everything. After that, keeping their discoveries secret became a necessity. Had they made it public, the debate over control of Snakepit would have sparked a conflict all by itself. The planet was, as Sam had put it once, ‘the dirty great toyshop the Transcended always meant us to find’.

Snakepit’s own Nemesis machines had proven by far the most effective way of keeping the frontier safe and open. Whatever Ann thought about the Nems, they were clean, discreet and incredibly reliable. While nobody really understood how they worked, they followed simple cues with reassuring consistency. And they had staved off outright war for over two years without the true cost appearing on anyone’s balance sheet.

The Rumfoord League’s existence hinged on that fact. The sects’ secret colonies simply disappeared without them knowing why. Had the Nems not been doing the heavy lifting, such an ambitious operation would have become obvious long ago. Now, though, the sects’ increased aggression had made the ugly endgame inevitable. For all the horror it entailed, Ann looked forward to the resolution and transparency it would bring.

The rest of the report made grim, dry reading. Ann was supremely grateful when, after twenty minutes of silent, anonymous flight, her pod slid back out of the robot and into the exohull of an orbital habitat. She enjoyed a brief, thrilling ride down from the orbital’s hub, looking out at the curving ring of immaculate suburb below. The pod finally deposited her at a small domestic station in the centre of a well-maintained municipal park.

Ann stepped out and took a deep breath of artificially fresh air. It was balmy and scented with pine. There was birdsong, she noticed, though it was almost certainly piped. Attractive-looking apartment buildings peeked over the treetops. The glass-and-ceramic sky above her had been tinted a carefully calculated blue.

What struck her most, though, was the quiet. But for the birdsong, the place was absolutely and surreally empty. This had to be one of the many structures left over when the orbital building market collapsed – what people these days were calling
ghost-cans
.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said Sam Nagano-Shah as he stepped out mischievously from between the trees.

Sam was a powerfully built man with an apparent age of about fifty, dressed in a blue Fleet uniform. Laughter lines crinkled the edges of his brown eyes and his curly fair hair faded to grey at the temples. Ann had always found him attractive but unsettling. His kindly face didn’t quite match up with the occasionally harsh things that came out of his mouth.

She nodded. ‘Very.’

‘It’s amazing to me that people don’t want to use it,’ said Sam. He gestured at the trees. ‘You’d think the Earthers would be lining up.’

‘Indeed,’ said Ann.

Everyone knew why the Earthers hated orbitals. Even if you set aside the engineered political anger the sects spread about them, the core reasons to fear orbitals were primal. A refugee camp was still a camp, even if it was a pretty one. And a camp where people could accidentally shut off your air was never likely to feel homey, particularly after that nasty string of ‘accidents’ involving the habitats around Drexler. It would be years before the places were fully populated and New Panama had a dozen of them, which made them perfect spots for discreet meetings.

‘We picked the nicest one, of course,’ said Sam with a grin and a wink. ‘The one they gussied up to show visitors.’

‘Of course,’ said Ann with a tepid smile. ‘Why pick an ugly one if you don’t have to?’

Which was, of course, exactly what the League should have done, she thought. Picking an obvious habitat felt like a self-indulgent security risk. But besides being the head of Fleet police operations at New Panama, Sam was also the local League chief and a master at political subterfuge, so she kept her opinions to herself. In all probability, the factors guiding his choice had nothing to do with appearances.

‘You’re sure the location is secure, then?’ she asked, squinting into the open distance. An immense arc of unoccupied suburb curved away from her into a haze overhead.

‘Absolutely,’ said Sam. ‘We keep the Ulanu cultists and other weirdos out of this habitat. You won’t find any drug addicts up here. Or pure-food enthusiasts, for that matter.’ He gestured at the path. ‘Shall we walk?’

‘Certainly.’

‘How’s the family?’ said Sam.

His feet crunched on the gravel as they wound between the trees. A robotic gardener clad in shimmering green tact-fur pruned a branch ahead of them and clambered politely out of the way as they approached.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘All fine.’

In truth, she didn’t have much contact with them. She found them dull and slightly upsetting. She didn’t like the way they chivvied her to ‘be less cold’, and to ‘open up’. Her mother was a particular culprit. What was Ann supposed to do – sit there and tell them all about the burned bodies they’d had to suction out of the last Flag ark they’d found? Or perhaps they’d have liked her to explain why the habitat-building plans they sounded so excited about were dangerously ill-conceived? Her parents didn’t appear to have ever got over the fact that they’d had her modded for intelligence and critical decision-making and got exactly what they’d paid for.

‘Mostly boring, really,’ she added. ‘You know how it is with Galateans – they don’t call it the Switzerland of space for nothing.’

This was a running joke between them. Sam was also from Galatea. Most of the Rumfoord League’s top people were. The planet was still wrestling with an ongoing environmental catastrophe that had started long before the war, brought on by a failed attempt at terraforming. Barely a week went by without some kind of emergency.

Out of desperation, they’d long ago tinkered with genetic engineering in an attempt to create minds smart enough to fix their problems. It had left them with more than their fair share of eccentrics. Consequently, their society had a high tolerance for quirks. Ann found Sam’s love of chat somewhat taxing, but that was just Sam. Sam had been bred for leadership, not logic. It took all sorts.