When Fighting Monsters, page 18
part #5 of The Maauro Chronicles Series
“You realize,” Raglan said, “that such readings are at best guesstimates, and in several cases have been proven wrong. There is no certain way to tell about a jump short of diving into it.”
“We have instrumentation of our own,” she replied, “and it confirms your own work. We can take a realistic chance on it. Beyond that is the fact that your vessel is exhausting its energy and life support, as well as its fuel. We are too small a vessel to refuel a cruiser. While there is some fuel aboard the sled at the edge of the system, there will be no time to get it this side of jump. Though, if it is not destroyed, it can jump with you for later fueling.
“You have fuel for only one more high-speed run if you are to have any hope of returning to Confed Space.”
“We are in the land of poor choices,” I add. “But you have a crew still on a ship nearing the end of her operational time. We have to get you out of here while you can still run and fight.”
“But what of you?” Raglan demanded.
“We will run before this enemy until we devise a way of destroying it,” Maauro replied.
The Denlenn sighed in a human gesture he must have learned. “Were it just for me, I would not ask this of you. For my crew and my ship, I must accept. It grieves me beyond words that I leave you to this fate.”
“Sooner is best,” Maauro said. “How soon can you get underway?”
“We are ready now,” he said.
Maauro looked at me and I nodded.
“Then we leave as soon as we return to Stardust,” she said. “Let us brief the command staff. I have summoned Olivia as well.”
We cleared orbit of the gas giant named for Menoan within the hour with Stardust trailing Taiko. While both ships possessed the same top speed; we could out accelerate the massive cruiser. Maauro’s plan called for the ships to travel so closely that they would appear as a single blip on a normal sensor screen. We could only hope our enemy saw no better than we did at a distance. To prevent the enemy from overhearing any conversations, we took the highly unusual stop of running a thousand meters of wire between the vessels. Our circuit was closed and eavesdropping hopefully impossible.
“We have three days voyage before we must part and take our separate courses to the jump points,” Maauro told everyone during the briefing. “If we do not know where our enemy is, there is some danger of his intercepting both of us. Therefore we hope to encounter it before we separate. If we do not pick it up on passive sensing, then on the third day we will deploy our best sensors and generate enough EM activity to either lure it out, or detect it.”
“Wouldn’t it be better just to try and sneak out?” Abalaf grumbled on hearing the plan.
“What if it is at the Confed bound jump point?” Maauro answered, “The significance of which it has learned by your several attempts to get past it. Then we can only flee out the other jump point with it on our heels. No, we must know where it is before we commit to our strategy.
Stardust and Taiko maintained their best speed heading for the two jumppoints far out in the system but mercifully not far from each other. Maauro spent much of the time on the outside hull of Stardust, her hair spun out to its maximum use as a sensor array, integrating data from both ships with her own systems. I didn’t like her being out on the hull for so long, even though the radiation attenuated as we drew away from the immense super-giant. The ship’s EMG screens rerouted radiation from the interior hull, but she was outside. Maauro denied any suffering, or damage from the radiation, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I spent a lot of time watching her through the porthole.
“You know,” Olivia said, “a girl could feel jealous of how much you care for her.” She’d come up behind me as I watched Maauro
I smiled wanly without taking my eyes off Maauro. “What? Isn’t Delt paying enough attention to you?”
“Oh, your handsome childhood friend is diverting and fun, but that is all he and I are going to be. You two are something that happens only rarely. And I’m not referring to her being an android.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Thanks, I think. I do love her. I just wish there wasn’t so much arrayed against us, everything from the Guild, to governments, to the nature of our own bodies.”
“I doubt there’s much the pair of you can’t overcome.”
I gave her a sidelong glance. “And here I was, never sure if you liked her or not.”
“I like her well enough. We may be too alike in some ways for real closeness and maybe too unalike in others. But there is something more. The Confederacy has always been my highest value, my Holy Grail. Maauro doesn’t care about it all. She’s a citizen, but that means nothing to her. She only cares about you. If you were to die, God know what she would become.”
I was surprised at the intensity of Olivia’s response. My comment had been meant as a joke. “Maybe you are right, but how then do you account for her willingness to risk Stardust with me aboard?
“Even that is about you. She knows that you won’t hide behind her, and that you need some form of work that you find fulfilling. Unfortunately for her, you’re not a schoolteacher. She has the same problem. At her highest expression of herself, she’s a combat AI. She needs to exercise those capabilities.”
“She’s more than that.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t, but it’s the core of her being. The only other personality factor that even rivals that is her relationship with you. So she’s interested in you, your friends and family, but not a lot more. When you’re not around, Wrik, she’s a lot more machinelike. She just doesn’t invest the effort and energy the way she does when you are present. It’s like she’s going through the motions. Ever see her plug in to repower anymore? She does it when we are around, but not when you are. Ninety percent of the cute, adorable Maauro occurs when you’re in sight.
“Even when we were girl-talking about you and Delt—”
“You were talking about us?”
“Shut up and listen. This is important. Even that is about you.”
“You realize that she could be listening to this whole conversation.”
“Be damned to her if she is,” Olivia said, eye sparkling. “She’s always telling us that she keeps her security parameters below the level of her conscious awareness. Whatever the hell that means. Supposedly, she grants us privacy. But Wrik, we both know that she has something in common with humans in this regard. She lies when it suits her purposes.”
“And what do you want me to do?” I snapped.
“Start by being aware of it. You two exist in your own happy little bubble-world. You clearly love her, and if I can tell anything at all about her, she loves you. That makes you partly responsible for the most dangerous individual in known space.
“So right now she loves you, cares about your friends and family and this ship. I don’t know that it will always be that way. You could die, you could fall out of love—don’t interrupt, it happens. You could end up cheating on her. I know you two are sexual, but is it as good as it was with Jaelle? With me? She’s a machine pretending to have an orgasm, I imagine. Will that always satisfy you?
“How much has she changed in the time you’ve known her? She went from a programmed war machine that almost killed you, and yes she finally did tell me the story, to your girlfriend. What will she be like in ten years? We live a long time nowadays but a hundred years from now, you’ll be old and she won’t. One hundred fifty years from now, she’ll be here and you won’t. What will be going on in that armored skull then and will it have anything to do with the good of humanity, or even of the Confederacy? She damn near drowned a Confed world because a rebel element on it threatened you. Collateral damage is not a big issue for her.
“What holds her to the rest of us if you’re gone, or you change? Or do you care?” Olivia looked almost exhausted by the torrent of words.
I turned back to the porthole looking at the stars beyond. The conversation unsettled me in a way I had never imagined. Finally, I turned back to her. “I don’t rule her life. I just love her as best I can and have to hope that she genuinely cares about the things that I care about. Maybe we will just all have to deserve Maauro’s love and allegiance.”
“You’d certainly better,” Olivia said. “That may mean turning down a lot of temptations that will come the way of a wealthy and powerful male.”
“Are you going to test me, Olivia?” I shot back, trying to unnerve her as she had me.
“God’s no, because I think I could succeed and I’m not going to do anything that would alienate Maauro. In fact, if you were starting an affair, I’d have the other person killed.”
“What really scares me now is that you sound half-serious.”
“Listen to me, I am entirely serious. You and she are a class of threat not much below what we’re chasing. I would do it in a heartbeat, except for the fact that Maauro will spot you straying long before anyone else will.”
“Oh hell, Olivia,” I shot back. “On Seddon, it was Maauro that kept pushing me toward you. I don’t think she’s that territorial.”
“That was before she decided that place belonged to her, nothing in common with now.”
We stared at each other, breathing hard. I was angry, and I knew some of what she said was true. I loved Maauro, but that hadn’t turned off my awareness of other women, not Jaelle, not Olivia, but how was that different than for any other man?
Olivia broke our gaze first. “Listen, I’m sorry if you feel that was out of line, but I’ve been worried about it since the Voit-Veru colony. I do like Maauro, and I want things to work out for you two, but Wrik, for Christ’s sake, don’t you think I was in love with my first husband? He was everything to me, until he cut and ran when I was court-martialed. I’ve never gotten over it. And compared to you two, we came out of the same mold. So many long-term relationships end badly, but yours could take a few billion people with it if things get out of hand.”
“I do occasionally lie,” Maauro’s gentle voice sounded. Olivia and I turned, startled. “I try not to, but I find it unavoidable.”
Maauro must have reentered the ship while Olivia and I argued. She walked over to us, passing Olivia, who looked ready to bolt or fight as needed.
“So,” Maauro continued, “I do not spy on you in the shower, or listen to your conversation normally. I have literally programmed a sub AI in myself to do that, but not to tell me things that do not pertain to my security.” She sighed. “However, this conversation penetrated those levels. Maybe it should not have. You should feel free to doubt me, Olivia, and my intentions. I have my own interests. They do not always align with yours, or the Confederacy’s. I certainly feel free to doubt yours.”
I moved to stand next to Maauro and took her hand, but said nothing.
“There is much that you said,” Maauro continued, “that I suspect you intended for my ears. You are devious and clever, though I also believe you are mostly sincere.”
“Mostly sincere,” Olivia said, “that will look great on my tombstone.”
“If you mean to express by that a concern that I will be the reason for that tombstone, than I have done an even poorer job of being a friend than my limited skills in this area justify.”
“I’m not mad at you Maauro—”
“No. But you are quite sensibly afraid of me.”
“Who wouldn’t be, with your powers?” Olivia blazed.
“Well, Wrik for one,” she said. “He wasn’t really afraid, even when I was merely a programmed machine. Somehow, he never believed I could harm him.”
“Does that immunity extend to others?”
Maauro smiled sadly. “And if I told you it embraced you as well, Olivia, would you believe me? We both know I can lie.”
“Maybe,” Olivia said, after a few seconds.
“And maybe not,” Maauro said. “You can no more know what is truly going on inside of me, than I can tell with you. Less even, as I can dissemble with no physical reaction, such as a human has when lying.
“But think of this, if you fear for the failure of my primary relationship, how much more do you think I fear it? If Wrik loves me with perfect purity and unchanging devotion, all a lot to ask out of the first human male to love an AI, what do I have? A century, maybe? At most, the better part of two centuries? If I’m not destroyed, I must face existing without what I have now. If I can.”
“So you may be right in more ways than one. I think of friendships as networks; it is part of my basic being to see it that way. And it is likely that the wider my network is, the stronger it will be for me. So, I will make more of an effort, even when Wrik is not there, to be less the machine and more the person. I will try and be a friend. I will try to care about the wider world as, and if, I can.
“Remember, that most of my existence, a period that took your kind from caves to the stars, I spent alone, a neglected war machine with tens of thousands of deaths to my credit. In the few years since I reawakened, I have had to learn to be an independent person. To my own utter shock, I had to learn to be a lover. It will certainly take a lot longer for me to get any good at any of it.”
Olivia stared at Maauro for a second longer, then took three long strides to her, and put her arms around her. I let go of Maauro’s hand and stepped back, leaving the two of them in the embrace.
Finally, Olivia let go of Maauro. “Sorry,” she whispered and spun on her heel to walk off.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We approach the jump point. Now, I must dare direct contact with the Beast. We must know where it is before we commit the damaged Taiko to her final run. I have fortified myself by every means conceivable: compartmentalization, automatic reboots and corrective software. I’ve updated and expanded my backups as far as is possible. In the event of complete failure, I’ve made a complete copy of all my memories of my life with Wrik and isolated it internally. It will allow me to essentially recreate myself from static storage. I hope.
The Beast will likely pursue the cruiser unless I draw it to me. I ready my attack though I have no assurance the Beast will even notice. I have never aimed a cyber attack directly at a biological before, but the Beast is like nothing we have ever encountered. For all I know it might be more like a machine, but even there I have to share the language of the other machine, else it is like shouting at a deaf person. Still, I am a cyber intruder of the first water; once I can establish a commonality, my intrusion becomes exponential.
Yet, I dread the coming conflict. The Beast struck me so hard in our first encounter. The last time I suffered so badly was as a result of my own stupidity when I stumbled into a trap set by a Guild gunner named Lostra. To have survived all I’d had and to nearly be done in by that cheap tramp of a gunner! The very recollection makes me burn with shame. The Beast is an enemy so far beyond Lostra as to be unimaginable. Can I win against it?
I have so much to live for. Yet, I could be destroyed or worse, the disarrayal of my data is akin to madness in a biological. I could lose myself.
Do I need to? This sudden thought freezes me in utter shock. No one but I will know if I even reach out to the Beast. It is pursuing Taiko; we are the smaller target and can easily out-accelerate the bigger warship. We could double-back and make for the jump point to the Confederacy. We could escape back home. I need not risk my sanity, my very identity and my future happiness with Wrik. I know that Wrik doesn’t want to take this risk. Only the threat to his species and their worlds has made him consider it.
But do I care? What do other humans, beyond the handful I have befriended, mean to me? Why should I risk myself for a warship of a government I do not trust and owe no allegiance to, beyond that which serves me? They would break me down for my technology in a second merely to advance their power. Only the danger I present to that power stops them from doing so. They suspect that I have infiltrated their planetary and military systems with intruder programs and that these will spring to the attack if I am seized. They are right. I have laid such traps all through the Confederacy and beyond.
Still, I am contemplating such a risk for them? I am afraid of the Beast. I am afraid of what I will lose, the life I love and have fought so hard to earn.
No one will know. We can just run away. No one will ever know.
More shock, more realizations tumble in. This was what Wrik felt in the sky over Retief, with an avalanche of enemy warships coming down on his squadron. His plight was the worse; there was only small chance of surviving the engagement. He dove away, thinking that no one would know.
I could lie. I could say I reached out, but either couldn’t contact it, or make it notice me. I could tell Wrik it couldn’t be done.
I am locked in a struggle with myself. I have lied to Wrik before when I believed it was necessary. Is it necessary now? Is this cowardice? What am I doing? This is no calculation that I can make in tiny fractions of microsecond. In this I must reason no differently than Wrik. This is an emotion-laden decision about what I value, what I love. A sensation of panic begins to surge through me.
Five hundred and seventeen lives balanced against mine, balanced against Wrik’s, against my network with Olivia, Delt and Dusko, frail as it is.
Wrik’s suffering hangs like a warning in my mind. It took years and all the help I could give him to recover himself as a person he could live with. It didn’t matter that he was among people who knew him, valued him, even loved him as Wrik Trigardt. He could not outrun Piet Van Zyle’s load of guilt.
Would it be the same for me? If I decide, whether through selfishness or cowardice, to serve only myself, who would I be then? Would I become someone that Wrik could no longer love? Would I become someone I couldn’t love?
