Activation Degradation, page 4
Maybe in the minutes it took Unit Four to prepare the boat, the invaders would disappear. Leave the platform and its robots in peace.
It turned down the volume on the music. Turned it into a low, barely audible thrum. The airlock was like a cocoon. Small, safe. A pocket of pause.
Once it opened the inner door, it would be nothing but push, push, push again.
Run, run, run.
And what was it running toward?
If it had any real sense of self-preservation, it should be running away.
It shook itself.
It was trying to protect the platform. The mine.
Earth.
Trying to protect Units One and Three.
The way it couldn’t protect Two.
Silly, stupid robot.
It turned the volume back up. “I need . . . new music,” it said.
“Oh?”
“Loud. Fast. Hard.”
“You sure?”
“My biology needs new programming. I need—I can’t pause.”
It stepped into the hangar control room as drums—deep, reverberating, frantic—assaulted its microphones. It increased the volume further still, until all of its systems told it the noise was too much, too loud. Until it was swimming in a roar.
A roar so full, it interrupted its new-data retrieval. Its integration and processing.
Interrupted its doubts. Its worry.
It was perfect. Now all it had to do was follow its pre-programmed muscle memory.
Each heavy drumbeat became a footfall.
Swiftly, Unit Four went to the left of the control room, to the chemical shunts. It ignored the broad wall of glass that looked out into the hangar proper, where five boats sat anchored to the decking by two sets of clamps each. Instead, it focused on the dispensary, on commanding the chemical banks to deliver the proper dosages of the requested molecular compounds. The dispensary itself was set inside the wall, shielded in layers of lead. The interface was a copper-colored set of tubing, each line capped with a nitrogen-compressed release valve that could only be opened by attaching the proper vial heads.
The vials were freely accessible on a nearby rack. Moving deftly, with confidence, it selected the necessary containers and screwed them into the dispensary. It performed the task as though it had performed it hundreds of times. Its grasping pads knew what to do—Unit Four just had to let them act. With the music pounding, it moved to the rhythm, unconscious of each action.
Retrieving the full vials, it secured three chemical barrels with port-interfacing shunts for the boat, and six for itself. It considered using a dose of the compound right then, but decided that wasn’t the most efficient use of its time.
It could shoot up once it was in the ship.
Before leaving the control room, Unit Four went to the computer terminal to port over instructions for launch. It identified which boat had been revived from anhydrobiosis, and set time releases for both the main hangar doors and the decking clamps.
Only then did it glance out at the boats beyond.
Each was a sphere, their hulls composed of thick, convex, interlocking triangles. The hard-body was mostly turquoise—like its own hard-body—and the seams between triangles were a pearlescent purple in contrast.
And, just like Unit Four’s own shell, a soft-body lay within.
The hangar itself was cavernous, its corners dark. Bulkheads in the ceiling, walls, and floor all contained mods for the hard-bodies and the systems for installing them. Each interlocking triangle could be swapped with another, shifting a boat’s purpose. It could be a scouting vessel, a repair craft . . . a warship.
Sometimes it needed to be all of the above and more.
The appropriate mods had not yet been added to the active boat’s hard-body. Executing a few lines of code, Unit Four directed six long arms to descend from the ceiling. Biological, but with mechanical roots, they shot along their tracks to each mod’s storage space, returning with guns, a grasping metal claw, and a series of repair kits for if—when—Unit Four defeated the invaders and could turn its attention to the microwave array. The hangar arms, each with the same dexterity in their grasping ends as the AMS units, slid current sections of the hard-body away—revealing, for only a moment, the biology—gently throbbing—beneath.
The anti-plasma—AP—cannon locked into place. Then the claw. And the repair tackles.
The superfluous triangles were stowed before the arms snaked away, back into their compartments.
With the drums still beating, Unit Four stepped out of the control room and onto the decking.
And the platform rumbled. Jagged vibrations ran up the robot’s legs, but all of its gyroscopes were working, keeping it upright.
“What was that?” it demanded.
“More debris,” said its handler inside its CPU, their voice unhindered by the blaring music. “It struck the hub. They’re not letting up.”
If the hub went down . . .
Unit Four broke into a sprint. Its shell clang-clang-clanged on the corrugated decking—its steps heavy, determined.
The hull of the activated boat swooped high above Unit Four, the bowing curve of it imposing, yet familiar. Each clamp holding it in place was larger than the robot itself, and the entire orb gave the impression of some giant monster’s egg—fitting, given the organics inside.
“Hello,” Unit Four greeted it fondly, though the boat itself was not sentient. “We’ll make it.”
It wirelessly interfaced with the boat’s onboard controls, and one set of triangles—hinged together, different from the rest—unfolded to allow the robot inside.
Unit Four was met by a quivering gray, tan, and brown biomass. The boat was a genetically engineered soft-ship—a unified, ultra-responsive sphere of nerve and muscle grown atop a branching chassis. The hull door led to a fleshy iris: an egress in the boat, for easy atmospheric intake, and for AMS units to use as an entrance and exit. A portal for one robot, into another.
Before it climbed inside, Unit Four considered stripping itself of its shell. Boats were meant to be piloted soft-parts to soft-parts. Everything aboard was controlled by touch and nerve impulse, and a bio-casing to bio-casing connection could increase the craft’s response time.
Perhaps under different circumstances, Unit Four wouldn’t have given a second thought to shedding its outer layer. But it had already been outside. Had already seen the damage wrought by the invader’s guns.
If it kept its shell, perhaps it would have half a chance in the event of a hull breach.
Carefully—making sure not to pinch the boat’s casing in the joints of its hard-body—Unit Four slipped through the flaps of the fleshy aperture and into the center of the craft.
Bioluminescent veins lit the inside, created a blue-green glow that cast the boat’s flesh in an ironically inorganic hue. Small spiracles lined the veins, allowing the boat to perform minute gas exchanges. The boat’s center was a single chamber with a single seat growing out of its center, the controls all around it were long arms, designed to perfectly fit into an AMS unit’s grasping pads. The slightest press and pull would tell the craft where to go, what to do, and how to respond.
All around Unit Four, the boat pulsed, heaved, with the pumping of fluids and the fluttering of gasses. The AMS unit touched the inside as reverently as it had the outside, making what connection it could.
Swiftly, it tucked itself into the pilot’s seat, found the ports for the chemical shunts, and dumped the first dose of the appropriate hormonal concoctions into the ship.
The boat quivered—the boat sighed—as the chemicals worked their way through its nervous system.
The boat’s CPU was very different from Unit Four’s; the ship had no higher functions, no ability to reason, judge, or learn. But it could feel. Its whole functionality was based on touch, on sensation.
Lining up a barrel with the connection on its shell, Unit Four injected one vial’s contents into itself.
A literal shot of confidence.
It would take a few minutes for its pumps to send this particular mixture of chemicals to the correct receptors, but that was fine. As long as it knew the confidence—the stability, the focus—was coming, it could continue on.
Securing the future doses under a soft flap of the boat’s casing, Unit Four swiped one digit on its grasping pad over a nerve nodule. Chromatophores on the concave inside wall of the boat swirled. The cells contained pigment that, through contraction and dilation, could be commanded to visually mimic what the boat’s exterior sensors detected.
A window that wasn’t.
Another swipe over a different nodule brought two constricting arms around the top part of Unit Four’s chassis, holding it down, hugging it into its seat, to keep it secure when the boat finally left the simulated gravity of the platform.
The robot checked its chronometer. The clamps securing the boat’s hull to the hangar decking should be releasing in three . . . two . . . one . . .
It engaged thrusters, lifting the orb off the floor.
Via the chromatophores, it noted the lighting in the hangar had changed, signaling impending decompression. Pumps syphoned the atmosphere away, equalizing the interior and exterior.
The lighting shifted again, and the hangar doors were opening. Crisp blackness greeted it beyond.
Unit Four had already spent far too much of its existence confronting that darkness.
And yet, falling into it, soaring through it, was its very purpose.
“Good luck,” bid its handler.
“Good luck,” echoed the other units after a moment.
Unit Four increased the volume of the music by another ten decibels. It knew it risked blowing out its microphones if it pushed too far, but it needed the process-numbing. It needed to push everything else aside. It could be all focus and all feeling, or it could be a mess of calculations and simulated thought.
It chose the former.
It was going to war.
It needed the drums, inside and out.
It slotted its grasping pads through the hooked digits on the boat’s control arms and leaned forward.
As the boat took off, shooting through the hangar’s doors, Unit Four let a strong, single note rip through its speakers. A purely instinctual battle cry, bubbling up from it knew not where.
Chapter Five
Unit Four’s intake valves stuttered as it cleared the platform. The increased g-forces slammed it into the supple casing of its seat as the boat accelerated. There was something about the clearness of space it didn’t like—the utter sharpness of the chromatophore picture. It was proof there was no atmosphere. Nothing to distort the reality of emptiness and vacuum. Evidence that most of the universe was nothingness.
And, that if the unit failed in its task, its processing would cease and it would return to that nothingness.
The boat hurtled toward the accosted microwave array. The flashes of AP fire slowly grew from small, sparkling spots into ribbons of light, and then streaks of anti-ionic danger.
Debris glittered all around.
The vastness of Jovian space meant the battleground was immense—the distances between opponents stretched. Even now, the invaders lay hundreds of kilometers away, and the gulf between them felt simultaneously unbridgeable and easily conquerable. Both a wide gulf and a thin fissure.
Even Unit Four’s CPU felt as though it were compressed and pulled taut at the same time.
The robot tugged on a soft petal of skin protruding from the boat’s control mound, and a burst of magnetized, bioluminescent spores filled the air before it. The spores settled into a design—created elliptical loops that coalesced into place only long enough for the unit to take note before they were sucked into the ventilation system for recycling.
The brief display showed it where Galilean moons were in their orbits. It was primarily concerned with Io—currently the closest orbiting body to the platform.
Though the platform could be moved to any of a hundred preprogrammed Jovian orbital locations if needed, it typically orbited Jupiter in counterrotation to Io, along the same elliptical plane. This standard orbit was the easiest location from which to take advantage of the energy swells in Io’s plasma torus.
But it also meant—
Yes, Io was swiftly approaching now. It could pose a danger.
As the last of the spores dissipated, Unit Four returned its attention to the chromatophore display.
Jupiter loomed to the right, far, far below the ship. Inside the atmosphere, the automated parts of the helium-3 mine did their work via a combination of aerostats, scoops, and suborbital skyhooks.
Every quarter-rotation of the planet brought the skyhooks in line with one of four nuclear-fusion reactors, which were on a continuous cycle of feeding, fusion, conversion, and purging. The energy created was converted to microwaves for easy transmission to corresponding Earth arrays, and all excess materials were summarily dumped back into Jupiter’s atmosphere, purged back into the storms from whence they came.
There were, in all, twenty-seven microwave arrays staged around the planet, each active at different times, depending on where Jupiter and Earth were relative to one another. They beamed the energy straight and true, no matter what passed before them: an asteroid, one of Jupiter’s outer moons—the sun. A blip in Earth’s reception was preferable to the disruption of powering on and off to avoid a cosmic body.
Unit Four’s knowledge of the mine’s functionality was crucial, because, right now, the array under attack was still active, still on, despite the assault. Units One and Three were making sure of that.
The microwaves were currently invisible to the boat’s cameras—Unit Four had decided sticking to the visible spectrum was best for now—but it couldn’t afford to miscalculate the bleed-range of the dangerous radiation wafting away from the front of the dishes at every moment. The beams blasted and sanitized whatever went in front of them. Anything biological—engineered or otherwise—that fell in front of an active dish would be instantly cooked alive.
As the boat approached, the invaders took no notice. The invader’s ship’s design was as the primer indicated: heavily armored, with thick, fanning layers of plating. Yet, overall, it looked sleek—the bulk of it forming a wedge. Unit Four estimated it to be somewhere between ninety-five and one hundred thousand cubic meters in size—huge, compared to the boat’s trifling twenty-five hundred.
The wedge tip had inserted itself between the long lines of connecting rods that held the dishes at a stagger, and continued to slice up the array.
The aliens proceeded with far more precision than Unit Four had expected. The ship’s bright-green shots were not let loose with the haphazardness of gleeful destruction. Nor were they aimed with efficiency—as though to disable the machinery. Instead, the invaders appeared to be . . . harvesting. Taking great chunks from the array.
Pieces from it were already clamped to the ship’s underbelly.
Before, when Unit Four had dared hope the invaders were retreating, perhaps they had simply taken a pause to secure their catch.
What did aliens need with parts of a microwave array?
For a brief moment, Unit Four wondered if it could find out—could chase the invaders back to . . . to wherever they hailed from, and port the information to Earth, to give them something to work with—some real, solid information so that the next AMS unit or Berserker bot wouldn’t have to go into battle so utterly uninformed.
But it hadn’t been tasked with reconnaissance.
It had been tasked with termination.
It was to kill, not study.
Why did so many of Unit Four’s instincts contradict its direct orders?
Shaking itself, nudging the music’s volume just a bit higher, it primed the boat’s guns.
Unit Four knew that when it engaged, it had to be ready to disengage just as quickly if need be.
Another moment and it would be in range.
Time to see if the meager amounts of data its handler had begrudgingly given were as inadequate as it feared.
The drums pounded.
Its chemicals surged.
An acrid scent—sharp, bitter, unidentifiable—filled its sensors, and a distinct flavor of copper ran through its wet pipes.
Its chassis shook and its casing shivered.
Sensing Unit Four’s tension, the boat’s soft-body, in turn, quivered.
Gripping the controls just so, Unit Four took its first shot.
A brilliant streak of violet cut across the blackness.
An instant passed.
Silently, the shot struck home.
The assault forced the invader’s ship away from the array. But it quickly compensated, changing direction, identifying the source of the blast and hurriedly putting the broad expanse of a dish between itself and the boat.
Though Unit Four couldn’t tell what kind of an effect the blow had had—be it negligent, critical, or otherwise—it did note that the invading craft moved as though its steering system conformed to a four-axis propulsion alignment.
In contrast, omnidirectional jets made the boat hypermanuverable. Unit Four couldn’t understand why the aliens wouldn’t use a similar system. The aliens were more advanced than Earth; they had interstellar capabilities. It seemed strange that they wouldn’t take full advantage of space. Further, their ship’s design suggested their species had a fixation with aerodynamics.
Unless . . . under all that armor was a craft primarily meant to enter an atmosphere? Meant to make planet-fall.
Meant to invade, be it via vacuum, or gas, or maybe even liquid atmosphere.
Did it mean to assault Jupiter directly?
To get at the reactors?
The mine proper?
The alien ship peeked out from its cover.
A flash of green—a dagger of hot anti-plasma—ripped toward the boat.
Unit Four spun the sphere out of the way.
As it went, there came another flash. Another. Another.
The robot had to get closer. Distance was the aliens’ advantage, not its.
The boat tumbled, over and over, making the chromatophore display blur, swirl—the cells wildly contracting and dilating as the boat rolled through space, dodging debris and AP charges alike.
