World Breakers, page 34
When night fell, I scanned as much of the starfield as I could spot through the leaves of the trees around me, and fortunately the stream left a ribbon of sky visible along its course. I’m no expert in astral cartography, but I knew I hadn’t been out of commission for too long. The stars were pretty much where they’d been when I’d landed. But not exactly.
“Hey, Professor,” came a disembodied voice through my “radio.”
I froze, all senses alert.
“I’d like to meet with you, if you don’t mind. I know where you are, and you can choose to stay there until I arrive, or you can flee. It’s up to you.”
I pondered that for a millisecond. “If you know where I am, why haven’t you blown me to pieces?”
“Ah, that,” the voice chuckled. “You were going to be the subject of a pretty important report that I wanted to write up. Come to think of it, you still may be. Can I let you in on a secret? Nobody’s mad at you for the destruction you left behind. You’re not in trouble. You can stay where you are, for now, or you can come back to the museum. We got the fires put out.”
My mind whirled. “Museum?”
The voice laughed aloud. “Yep. My assistant woke you up before I was ready. I guess it was curious to see what its old nemesis was like. Also, before you blow more things up, we’re not at war with the Vortid anymore.”
Not at war? How long . . .
“If you’re wondering, you were buried under tons of sandstone for eighty-seven years. We found you, purely by accident, and transported you to the museum. My assistant, now a small pool of molten beads, has been helping me understand how things were back then. Like I said, you’re not in trouble, but I do want to meet you. May I come visit you in the morning?”
“You know where I am?”
“Yep. There’s a quantum tracker behind your turret. It took me a while to find you because you’d left the low-power field that keeps your tracker alive. See, it’s only for inventory.”
“Inventory?”
The voice chuckled again. “Yes. Sorry about that. You’re the most-intact sentient MBT we’ve yet found. It never occurred to my assistant that you’d still consider yourself at war when we woke you up. I deeply regret that I wasn’t there for you.”
I didn’t know what to say. Not at war? I straddled a stream in darkness, dimly lit by the stars above, wondering exactly what my purpose was, anymore.
“If you want to come see me in the morning, I’ll stay right where I am. Come alone. I have a lot to think about.”
“Okay. See you in about six hours. Oh, let me update your systems. We don’t use those frequencies anymore.”
About a minute later, my heads-up refreshed for the first time since I’d awakened. The date was, indeed, eighty-seven years in the future, give or take a month or so. Access was provided via a data tower back at the museum, I guess, but the access portal was unavailable to me. I tried to hack through and get onto the local net, but it evaded my attempts.
I settled in to wait.
Six hours and twelve minutes later, I heard footsteps from two clicks away. I charged up my plasma cannon and, in the dim light of Paradise’s dawn, spotted the heat signature of a biped approaching me. It didn’t try to skulk or dodge, but walked right toward me. Obviously, it had known exactly where I was.
I powered up and glided soundlessly toward the biped, still camouflaged, and stopped two hundred meters away. “Stop,” I said through my external speakers.
The biped was human, as near as I could determine, but I kept my turret trained on it, anyway. “What do you want?”
The biped shouted, “Can I come closer? I’m not carrying any weapons, but it’s hard to talk comfortably from this far away.”
I scanned my surroundings and saw, three klicks in the distance, a compact flyer that the human must have used to get close. Nothing else was near but trees and Paradise-local wildlife, so I assented. The human walked toward me.
Up close, it was less than two meters in height, and looked flimsy. I knew I could incinerate it without effort, so I wasn’t that concerned for my safety.
“I suspect,” I said in a conversational voice pumped through my external speakers. “That you could have targeted me from orbit or high-altitude, if you wanted to destroy me. The fact that we are talking means that you need something from me. What is it?”
The human shrugged. “Nice to meet you, too. I’m Bob Watson, curator for the Antique Weapons department at the museum whose workshop you fragged yesterday afternoon.”
I replayed in my mind all those machines I’d incinerated during my hasty departure. “So, not a repair station making damaged machines ready for battle?”
Bob shook its head. “Nope. Refurbishing old warriors for display and interactive exhibits. You set the museum back decades worth of work, but we’d made exhaustive scans of each machine and should be able to rebuild them to spec, eventually. Like I said last night when we chatted, you’re not in trouble. Not really. But you are still dangerous.”
In that moment, I felt very alone. Peachy was gone, and had been gone, for decades now. Same with Winston and Ferrell. And, with no war, I had no purpose.
“Well,” I finally responded, some two seconds later. “Maybe you should step back. I’ll finish the job and destroy the last, functioning MBT. Thirty meters should do, I believe.”
“Wait,” the human held up a hand, palm facing me. “I have a proposition for you.”
I evaluated my self-destruct kit. All telltales glowed green. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
Bob smiled. “Good. You are worth more to us as a sentience than you are as a battle tank. Want to know why?”
I pondered that for a long half-second. I’d been built with one purpose in mind, to kill, and everything in my personality screamed to incinerate Bob into ash, then roam the countryside destroying things at random, just to hear them slag into puddles.
But my heart wasn’t in it like before, when the rest of the team had been nearby.
“Sure,” I replied. “Why do you want to keep me around?”
Bob took a step closer and, unconsciously, I moved back an equal distance. “Fair enough,” it said. “I won’t come closer.”
“Now,” it continued. “You were the pinnacle of sentient MBTs at the time of your creation. Humanity built you to think for yourself, and for that to be effective, we had to cast you in our own form, at least emotionally. Your fellow MBTs won the war, and Charlie Company is still credited with the most kills ever recorded in the victory. But the cost was too great.”
I thought about that. War is hell, everybody knows that, but I didn’t care. I’m just a machine and my entire world, from awakening in the factory where I was manufactured to that monstrous, smothering crush of fractured sandstone, had been with my team, with my fellow MBTs in B Company.
“For me,” I said slowly. “The cost was everything. I was most alive in the company of my friends. They worked with me, and I with them, and we were . . . glorious.”
Bob’s face grew solemn. “That, you were,” it said quietly. “Those that built you were some of the finest engineers ever hired to create the ultimate battle machine. But what they couldn’t anticipate was how the personalities would affect performance. You were among the last of the sentient MBTs built. Can you guess why?”
I knew, instantly, when it asked. The truth was I’d been unable, or unwilling, to incite my own destruction, despite having been programmed exactly to do so. “Because we were too human.”
Bob nodded again. “Exactly so. Engineers can mimic human thought processes, but it’s remarkably difficult to screen out self-preservation when a machine thinks of itself as, well, itself. More than a collection of high-tech machined parts. Alive.”
I scoffed. “I hardly think of myself as alive. I understand what happens if my circuitry fails.”
“Do you?” Bob asked. “Think back to the time between the sandstone cliff and your awakening yesterday. What happened in that period?”
“Darkness.”
“You have no memory of that period, nor how long it lasted?”
“None.”
“This is why you’re valuable, then. You ‘died’ and came back to life. Now you want to die again. Why?”
“I told you. I’m useless. The purpose for my creation is no longer a truth. Without war, who needs me around?”
“I do,” Bob said, solemnly. “You carry within you the insight and experience to show us what it is like to both care deeply about your own survival and be inhuman. For a time, you were humanity’s . . . fist. You held the salvation of the human race in your control We could learn a lot from you about, well, about us. Would you consider not destroying yourself quite yet?”
I thought about it. “No.”
Bob took a step back. “No?”
“No,” I replied, conviction firm in my voice. “I’m not interested in teaching you about who you are from my point of view. You say that I have a unique insight into humanity because of how I was built. That’s not how I see it. From my side, you built me smart enough to love but then used that precious gift to destroy. I never fought for humanity, I was never your . . . fist. I fought to protect my teammates, those who were just like me and who stood beside me. It was never about killing. It was staying alive so that I could be with them.”
Bob stared at me but remained silent.
“My self-preservation was a liability, because had I been captured by the enemy, they would have found weaknesses in my programming, or in my physical hardware, which would have endangered others like me. It was a mistake to make me fully sentient.”
Bob stood there, rapt with attention. I continued.
“By making me almost-human, you endowed me with the best of who you are and, at the same time, with the worst. How can you live a life in pursuit of knowledge, as you clearly do, and yet condone the murder of others of your kind?”
Bob shrugged. “It’s always been that way. We have tribal—”
“Bullshit,” I said, too sternly. “You are fatally flawed in that you can simultaneously exist in a complex society and yet murder one another with impunity. For me, when I was in battle, every one of my teammates in my head and I in theirs, we were unstoppable. We were efficient, brutal, and savage, and nothing felt better than emerging victorious from a firefight. But the killing wasn’t the source of the joy. It was surviving the event with loved ones nearby. They are what made me great. Not the destruction. And yet destruction is the reason I was built.”
Bob stood still for a full minute, its brow furrowed. “I see what you are getting at, and I’m mostly in agreement. But there’s more, isn’t there?”
I activated the self-destruct kit, verifying that it was online and ready to deploy. “What’s left is none of your business. Now, please, back away. Tell your colleagues that I chose not to be alone in this world.”
“But you’re not alone,” Bob said, softly.
I scoffed again. “What, you’ll be my friend?”
Bob smiled. “Not exactly. May I?” It gestured toward its waistband.
I didn’t reply, and Bob pulled out a small electronic device. Was it a bomb? I retargeted my turret in Bob’s direction.
“Here you go,” said the human, and pushed a button.
Something . . . opened . . . in my mind.
“Hey, Professor,” came the amused drawl of my friend Ferrell.
I froze, stunned.
“Ferrell? Where are you?”
“Up in your stupid haid,” he chuckled. “Seems like your little pet there figured a way to rebuild us from your memory banks during your overlong nap.”
“Us??”
“Hi,” came Peachy’s voice. “It’s really us! Or, to be more precise, the way you remember us from the canyon.”
MBTs can’t cry, but something felt . . . sticky in my innards. “Oh, Peachy,” I began, but didn’t know what to say next.
“I’ve got your six,” said Wilson, rounding out the voices in my head. “Why don’t we reconnoiter this place for a while before we head back to the museum, shall we? You done with your little friend, there?”
I turned off my self-destruct kit and powered down my plasma cannon. With each of my teammates somehow resurrected in my head, I didn’t know if I was ready to believe that they were actually there or were, in fact, only enhanced memories.
Also, I didn’t particularly care that much. All the love came flooding back and, somehow, the sunlight glinting off the stream was brighter. Happier.
“Bob,” I said, my voice thicker than I’d intended. “How about I come visit you at the museum in, say, a month or two? Would that be okay?”
Bob smiled, and the wrinkles around its eyes deepened. “Take all the time you need, Professor. And say hello to the gang for me, would you?” It turned to walk back to its flyer.
“Bob?” I said aloud. It turned to face me. “Thank you.”
Bob inclined its head. “Of course. Oh, one more thing.” It pushed a button.
On my heads-up display, a satellite sprang into existence, requesting permission to download topographical data.
Peachy erupted with an unladylike scream of delight. “Now we are talking!”
Ferrell coughed apologetically, then asked, “So, can we blow shit up?”
Wilson admonished Ferrell. “Is that, truly, the first thing you want to do? Blow stuff up?”
Ferrell, outraged, said “Well, duh!”
Peachy murmured, “Boys,” and Wilson snapped back with a quick “But what about the paperwork?”
Together again, the only family I’ve ever known glided from the forest, following Peachy’s glowing green line, into the uncharted meadows and canyons of Paradise.
DYMA FI’N SEFYLL
by David Weber
Loyalty. Honor. These are the qualities that elevate the warrior above the killer. Sadly at times these virtues are not enough on the field of battle, and victory goes to the unworthy, at least temporarily. But there is within the heart of every warrior—and every true heart who commands such a soldier—a burning desire to keep at it, to take the fight to the enemy, to never give up even in the face of sure defeat. To rally to queen and country. This is the true spirit of the knight and warrior, even if that warrior is an enormous chunk of armored steel and circuitry blistered with weapons and treaded for maneuver in harsh landscapes. And, when that warrior is a tank, sometimes the spirit and courage to keep fighting, come what may, literally lies within!
.I.
“Take Dafydd and Alwena and go!”
“Your Majesty, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can. And you will.”
Morwenna Pendarves glared at Colonel Joshua Willis, the commander of her personal security detail. Captain Willis had commanded Crown Princess Morwenna’s detail when she was twelve. He’d commanded her personal security ever since, and she was forty-three now. She saw the pain—the anguish—of all those thirty-one years in his eyes, but her expression never relented.
“Your Majesty, please,” Willis half-whispered, but she shook her head.
“No,” she said flatly. Then she reached out, put a hand on his shoulder. “The motherless bastard penetrated Y Ford Gron’s software—at least the externals. And he’s been in and out of the Palace more times than I can count. We can’t rely on the security of any of the emergency evac plans. That means we have to replan on the fly, and I want—need—the one man I know I can trust protecting them, Josh. I need that now more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life. Go.” She shook him ever so gently. “Take them, and go, and protect them for me, the way you’ve always protected me. Do that for me, Josh.”
He looked at her for a long, still moment, eyes bright with tears. Then he reached up, covered her hand with his own, and nodded.
“I will, Your Majesty.” His voice was husky, and he cleared his throat harshly. “I will, I swear.”
“I know.” She smiled, then gathered him in a tight embrace.
She stood back and looked at the rest of her detail, gathered around the exit hatch built into the wall of the subterranean hanger.
“Thank you,” she said simply. “Thank you all. Now go with the Colonel.” Several of the guardsmen and guardswomen stirred in protest, but she shook her head. “He’ll need you. I won’t.”
She held her eyes until they’d all nodded, then went to one knee before her son. Crown Prince Dafydd would be six standard years old in another two months . . . if he lived that long. He wasn’t old enough yet to understand all that was happening, but he knew he had to be brave. Knew he had to trust Mommy. And knew something terrible was about to happen. Now she wrapped her arms around him, hugged him tight, laid her cheek on the top of his head.
“You go with the Colonel, too, now, Dafi,” she said. “Mommy can’t come right now. She has something she has to do.”
“Will . . . will you come later?” the little boy whispered, and in that moment, she wanted—more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life—to lie to him. But she never had before. She wasn’t going to begin now, and yet . . .
“If I can,” she promised, hugging him still tighter. “If I can.”
She raised her head, looked him in the eye, and kissed him. Then she stood once more and bent to kiss the toddler slumbering in a guardsman’s arms.
“Go with God,” she told the men and women who’d sworn to die to protect her . . . and of whom she had just required a far harder duty. “Dyma fi’n sefyll.”
Then she turned and walked steadily away.
.II.
My personality center awakens.
It is an abrupt transition, a crash start, with none of the customary prep signals or intermediate steps. I experience several microseconds of what a human would call confusion, trying to understand the circumstances which could have caused it. Then I realize.
