World Hammer Read online

  No answer. It could be, Tarkos realized, that this was the real Tiklik’al’Takas. Maybe the robot had always been an enemy agent, one of the infiltrators that they feared the Ulltrians would plant among them. Tarkos thrust the weapon at the robot, its blue sparks arcing toward the AI’s nearest leg, but the robot scurried into the far corner of the airlock, unreeling fiber cables from the access hatch as it retreated.

  Eydis climbed up Tarkos’s back, pulling hand over hand along his armor. Tarkos pulled himself into the airlock before she could climb over and past him. He held the weapon out before him, aiming it at Tiklik.

  The airlock alarm sounded. The decompression cycle had been initiated, but the inner door was still open because Tarkos’s legs stuck through it, out into the hall. “Get out of here!” he shouted to Eydis. But Eydis put a hand on his shoulder and pulled herself over him and into the tiny space. Tarkos stayed in the doorway, hoping the safety protocols would remain intact and would stop the decompression if he held the interior door open.

  Eydis reached forward but Tiklik put two legs out against the close walls and used its other two legs to grapple with the woman.

  “Pala, get out of the way!” Tarkos shouted. He needed only to place the weapon against the AI and the coherent plasma charge would seep across its metal surface, seeking entry to its machinery. But with Eydis wrestling the robot, helmet off, he couldn’t risk that the plasma might find its way into her suit and cook her alive.

  On the other hand, if he didn’t act quickly, the robot might manage to open the outer door, decompress the starsleeve, and then while Pala asphyxiated the robot would very clearly, very definitively, warn the Ulltrian fleet that they were here.

  “Help me,” Eydis grunted. She struggled to reach for the robot. Tarkos didn’t understand why she wanted to touch its body, but with his free hand he grabbed one of the robot’s legs that slapped at Eydis. He saw only then that Eydis did not wear her gloves. She reached forward, taking advantage of the opening Tarkos created, and pressed a naked palm against Tiklik’s body.

  The robot thrashed. One of its legs slashed across Eydis’s cheek. Blood swelled immediately, drifting into the air as tiny red globules. But Tiklik’s shuddering slowed. In a moment, the AI was still. Its legs went slack.

  Tarkos stared a long while, expecting a sudden violent motion from the robot. But it remained catatonic.

  “What did you do?” Tarkos whispered.

  “Put that away,” Eydis gasped, pointing at the plasma weapon that still sputtered in his grip. Tarkos pressed it into its case, fighting with it a moment as the energy resisted being caged. He sealed the case, and instantly the airlock seemed quiet. Tiklik drifted, legs slowly curling up.

  “What did you do?” Tarkos repeated.

  “I interrupted some programs implanted in his mind.”

  “This is an AI,” Tarkos said. He lifted his visor. “This is an AI. An old world, maze-minded, endlessly deep, quantum-computing, Kirt AI. You don’t just ‘reach into’ that. No one can hack that. It’s like saying you swam the Atlantic.”

  Eydis smiled at him without mirth. “You really underestimate us apes, Amir. You don’t think the old primate clade has a few surprises for the Galactics, a few unexpected skills?”

  Tarkos’s mouth fell open as he stared at her, searching for words. But Bria interrupted the silence. “Report.”

  “Tiklik is… appears to be incapacitated. Is it transmitting still?”

  “No,” Bria said.

  Tarkos sighed. They were still a few light seconds out from the World Hammer. They’d know very soon if Tiklik’s transmissions had draw attention to them. But the first thing he had to do was ensure Tiklik did not revive and cause trouble again.

  “Come on,” he said to Eydis. He grabbed one of Tiklik’s legs, at the thicker part near the body. “Let’s lock it in its quarters.”

  _____

  Tarkos pulled Tiklik into the room it had shared with the Kirt astronomer Ki’Ki’Tilish, until the astronomer had been killed by Gowgoroup. Eydis followed him, attentive but quiet, as he let the robot free to drift in the room. She watched as Tarkos stood silent a moment, interfacing with the ship.

  “I’ve locked all the systems, and set a Farraday field around the room,” he explained. “I don’t know if that’s enough to make this a jail cell for a Kirt AI, but it’s all I got. If he’s a traitor, working for the Ulltrians, then I doubt it’s enough.” Tarkos frowned. “We might have to do something more drastic.”

  “I don’t think he’s a traitor,” Eydis said.

  “We can’t afford to assume he isn’t.”

  “But this…” she hesitated, and Tarkos twisted his hips, making himself rotate so that he turned his back on Tiklik and faced her.

  “I might have caused this,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Tarkos asked. “How—”

  A message from Bria, direct to his implants, interrupted him.

  “Ships,” she transmitted.

  “Commander?” he replied, talking aloud as he also used his implants. “What? Ships? Coming this way?”

  “Coming every way,” Bria growled.

  “How many?”

  “Two hundred nine found. More.”

  “I’m coming, Commander.” He looked back at Eydis. He reached out and grabbed her, so they could keep a steady orientation. “Why are you going to the World Hammer?”

  “To try to help Earth.”

  “If you stay here, you’ll be safer. But if you go down there, then—”

  She pulled free and shook her head. Tarkos sighed. “Go strap in,” he told her. “I’ll be right there.”

  She pulled herself through the door.

  Tarkos pushed off the floor and flipped over. “Tiklik. Can you hear me?” He put his hand on the plasma weapon at his hip, ready to draw.

  “I am...” the robot stuttered.

  “Tiklik, what happened? Did the signal we picked up infect you?”

  “A pro-pro-pro-pro-pro-pro-pro…,” it stuttered, in a voice like a broken, cackling speaker. Then its voice cleared and became almost normal. “A program. One billion eight hundred million six hundred and seventeen thousand four hundred and eighteen bits of it are identified now. I will, I will, I will isolate the—”

  “We’re leaving, Tiklik. I’m leaving you here with Gowgoroup, on the starsleeve. You have as much a chance as we do.”

  “This room lacks access controls,” the robot sputtered.

  “I can’t trust you anymore, Tiklik. I’m setting one of our weapons outside. It will destroy you if you try to leave this room, or try to take control of the ship. Do you understand?”

  “I can help,” the robot said.

  Tarkos hesitated. He disliked AIs, but he accepted that sentient AIs were persons. “This is a matter of trust, one person to another,” he said.

  Bria sent him a single reminder: “Crew cruiser.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tarkos said. “But I have no choice. Too much is at stake.” He realized that he had made this apology too frequently for his own comfort, these last few weeks. He pushed backwards and floated out into the hall.

  Tiklik floated in the dim room, a lonely black form bound on each side by the hard walls that kept it from the emptiness of space, where it really wanted to be. Then the door closed, shutting out the songs of stars.

  _____

  As Tarkos slipped into his seat on the bridge, Bria constructed a large tactical display of the system using data from the probes that they had launched, and which now hurried out into the system. The tactical view looked like a slow-motion explosion: many golden lines, each representing the trajectory of a ship, spread out from the planet they approached. The energy signatures of the ships varied, but most were of two kinds: a minimal energy leakage, which could mean a smaller ship, or a ship partially stealthed; and huge energy leakages, which must mean something of the size and power of a Neelee crystal ship—kilometers long, and likely capable of destroying wh
ole star systems.

  Bria opened a hyperradio beam, tightly aimed back at Neelee-ornor, command center for the Galactic Alliance. She told the ship to downloaded all their mission data and transmit it. Sending such a transmission might make it easier for Ulltrians to target them, but Tarkos understood Bria’s reasoning: their time was up. They were likely about to die. They could no longer wait to report.

  “Assuming they know we’re here,” Tarkos said, “then they must think we are the tip of an invading force. They’re running in every direction. Seven ships are coming straight at us.”

  “Prepare cruiser,” Bria said.

  Tarkos looked into Bria’s virtual space, and found the commander was doing a dozen things at once: starting the cruiser separation protocols, creating a looping report program for the starsleeve to transmit its data to Neelee-ornor, activating the starsleeve’s meager stealthing capabilities.

  Tarkos turned to Eydis. “Follow me down inside the cruiser. We’re going to separate. We can fight in the cruiser, and at least then we’ll be two targets.”

  He did not wait for an answer, but sent the commands to open the doors behind them. He pulled himself over his seat, and shot through the airlock in the bridge floor and down into the narrow hall of their cruiser, which nestled in the starsleeve like a gun in a holster.

  _____

  When the cruiser slipped free of the starsleeve, with Bria now at its controls, the ship took off at an orthogonal course at two Sussurat gees. Tarkos and Eydis were paralyzed by the sudden change from no weight to nearly triple their weight, but after a few minutes of acceleration Bria shut down the engines and turned on full quantum cooling. The skin of the ship froze immediately to a temperature nearly indistinguishable from the background. She gave a few more bursts of thrust, changing course three times before she let them drift. Tarkos looked back at Eydis, meeting her eyes through their helmet visors, but she seemed less sick than he felt after the quick shifts in acceleration and direction.

  Tarkos saw another benefit of Bria’s probe deployment: the probes simply broadcasted data widely, instead of tightbeaming either the cruiser or the starsleeve. For that reason, the cruiser could pick up full tactical information passively, without betraying their location. It took time to assemble the data, as some of the probes were nearing a half-second delay now, but Bria created a crude model of the surrounding space.

  “Three ships will come within a few thousand kilomeasures,” Tarkos said. “Assuming they don’t change trajectory. They’re big. But they’re not slowing down—they keep accelerating. If they launch an attack on us or on the starsleeve, it will have to be soon, and it will have to be a flyby. Or do you think they’ll waste all that velocity and turn around?”

  Bria did not answer, but only stared at the data. The cruiser had x-ray lasers, anti-matter missiles, a heavy particle beam cannon, and a lot of tricks. The missiles would be the only appropriate weapon in a situation like this. But when ships passed at high velocity, the window of attack shrank down to minutes. The ships would cross paths at a percent of c, and part ways very quickly.

  “What’s happening?” Eydis asked. Tarkos made their tactical images accessible to her. She watched as faint but clear trails of more than a thousand ships—heat and gravitational distortion and gamma radiation—moved off in every direction.

  “They’re fleeing,” she said.

  Bria armed three missiles, preparing them for launch. The cruiser’s computer assembled a grainy extrapolation of the approaching ships, using data broadcast by several probes. It revealed a black triumvirate of vast ships covered with irregular spines, like city-sized medieval maces.

  “Wait,” Eydis said. “Wait. They’re fleeing.”

  “Explain,” Bria demanded, without looking back. The dilemma was simple: wait until the ships were near, and you had a better chance of hitting them, because the ships had less of a chance for defensive countermeasures. But once they were near, if they knew the cruiser’s location, they would find it easy to destroy the cruiser. The only safe course would seem to be for Bria to attack before the Ulltrian ships did.

  “Remember how they lost the last war,” Eydis said. “The Ulltrians thought the Alliance could not coordinate a large, strategic response. And so the Ulltrians kept nearly all their ships in a single system. When the Alliance managed to get every single member, every available ship, into the battle, they wiped the Ulltrians out by fighting in the single system.”

  “Or so we thought,” Tarkos said. “It didn’t wipe out all of them.”

  “But most of them. Their whole primary fleet, right? Well, they’ve learned their lesson. I bet they were all here, on the World Hammer, just as we predicted. But they were ready to disperse, as soon as the Alliance showed up here. Which had to be sooner or later, given that they just raided the Well of Furies, revealing themselves.”

  Bria turned to look at her. “Should destroy ships.”

  Eydis nodded, a gesture that Bria, at least, understood. “Right. We should destroy as many of their ships as we can, under normal conditions. But they’ll have to respond. They’ll know where we are then, and they’ll destroy us. Then, we’ll never find out what’s on the World Hammer. We have to measure the benefit of finding out what’s here, against the chance of destroying one or two of those ships.”

  Bria cleared her visor and stared at Eydis. The human woman met the Commander’s double gaze, unblinking. They were both thinking the same thing: if Eydis was wrong, they would die without having taken a single Ulltrian with them.

  “We need to know more,” Tarkos whispered. “She’s right. We need to know what’s on the World Hammer. We don’t really understand what’s happening here. Learning what they’re up to has to be more important than taking down one or even all three of these ships.”

  Bria blinked all her eyes, a Sussurat nod. “Launch missiles if they attack,” she told Tarkos.

  They looked back at the tactical displays and waited to see if they were about to die.

  CHAPTER 3

  “The three biggest ships will pass within ten to the four standard units,” Tarkos said. “They might detect us from gravitational pull alone at that range.”

  Bria blinked agreement. Tarkos held his breath. The cruiser was completely silent, adrift—the only active system the chameleon skin running its reverse quantum computation to cool the ship’s outer skin. In the silence, Tarkos could hear the quiet sounds of his armor: the click of the small in-suit robots crawling about, looking for problems to repair, the hiss of the regulator equalizing pressure against his breathing, the light crackle of the helmet collar when he turned his head. These were the sounds of danger: he never heard them unless things were going badly, and he drifted in space under radio blackout.

  The tactical display showed the three ships speeding closer. Tarkos switched to full immersion, the display in his suit giving him a god’s-eye-view of the surrounding space, the ships exaggerated in scale so that he could see them clearly. The Ulltrian ships, like mace-heads covered with black metal spikes, surrounded the cruiser….

  And then they shot past.

  Bria grunted, blowing a blast of breath across her visor that fogged it for a moment.

  Tarkos instructed this helmet to open. “I think we’re safe,” he said in English to Eydis. “They could still fire on us, but it seems unlikely now that their tactical advantage has come and gone. They must not have detected us.”

  She nodded but her eyes betrayed skepticism. “Maybe they just don’t care,” she said.

  Tarkos closed his helmet, throwing his view back into the tactical VR, but now with Bria standing a few meters away in the dark of space. Behind her, the three Ulltrian ships continued their retreat out of the system’s gravity well, preparing for FTL transition. Tarkos checked the suit status readouts that unfolded into his internal work space, and saw that Bria had initiated a closed and encrypted link between them. Though they sat just a meter away from Eydis, she would not be able see their faces
or hear their conversation.

  “Trust Eydis?” Bria asked.

  Tarkos hesitated. “Why do you ask?” Which was, he realized as soon as he said it, a foolish question. Bria should not have to explain herself. So far on this journey, out of a crew of five, two members had betrayed them, and one had been killed. Permanently. It was a rotten track record.

  But Bria did not get angry. Instead, she said, “Smell is on you. Your smell is on her.”

  To Bria then it was obvious they had become lovers. Tarkos felt his face blush hot, and hoped that his virtual image in this space would not show this.

  When Tarkos had saved Eydis, on the Ulltrian’s original homeworld Dâk-Ull, the Well of Furies, he had not imagined he would be so drawn to her. She was a decade older than him, and at first she treated him like a naive boy—and all while they’d been fighting for their lives. But then he’d discovered in the ship that he struggled not to stare at her. Part of it, he knew, was simple stir-crazy deep space loneliness. And there was something special, something unique to this experience also: only a few human beings, and only in the last few years, had been alone among intelligent but alien beings. There was a kind of longing that came from being always with company that was wise, that talked and reasoned with you, but remained—at least emotionally—always mysterious. Each gesture of a Neelee or a Kirt or even of his Sussurat partner required of him intense concentration, if he were to understand it. Suddenly, to be with another human, he felt as if he were telepathic, and could understand the rich meaning of every tick of her face, every motion of her hand, without effort.

  But it was more than this. He suspected that even on Earth, he would have fallen for this woman, strong but kind, direct but subtle, honest but infuriatingly crafty, dismissive of him but also somehow admiring, and with blue eyes that could look straight through him. After they left Dâk-Ull, for a week he had studiously given her as much space as possible, almost avoiding her, which was a difficult task on the small starsleeve. It had a crew of five, but with the OnUnAn Gowgoroup a prisoner confined to quarters, his commander asleep in an autodoc while tiny robots knit her body back together, and Tiklik’al’Takas spending whole days in the near hibernation of slow time, they seemed alone together. So he’d taken to isolating himself on the bridge. Then, one night, his door chimed, and when he opened it—not wanting to check but preferring to imagine it was her, just as he hoped and dreamed— there she stood. She put her hand on his arm, and he pulled her to him, and kissed her as if his life depended upon it. And so they had become lovers, sleeping in his quarters, while the starsleeve sped along on its mad mission. Alone together, till Bria awoke.