Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (19 page)

We could only wait, in varying degrees of anticipation and fear—Lt. Stein's the greatest of all, one could safely guess. Lt. Stein stared fixedly ahead at the hatchway. We were all flying blind here—the Fury, too, we hoped. Our only readouts now were of temperature. They were up and off the board.

The hatchway before Lt. Stein was visibly giving off heat, melting the fittings on his side of it. It was beginning to glow, the metal shifting into the red. The air before it shimmered in heat refraction.

Time passed.

Nothing happened.

The readout on the heat sensor began to back down.

The bridge still crackled, but all around me was a release of tense musculature, a controlled exhaustion of held breath. And slowly, very slowly, an exchange of hopeful smiles.

On camera, Lt. Stein looked the most relieved of all.

But underneath the hope and relief we knew what we had. Not the end of the game.

Halftime.

After the battle came the accusations and recriminations. Everyone knew where the fight had taken place. It wasn't hard to figure out why. The Fury had gone from its investigative to its death-dealing mode, and the ship's officers or the AI were its target.

The passengers were in an uproar. They had been chased from the ship's passageways to huddle in their staterooms while a pitched battle raged outside.

Ambassador Darvesh and Peter McNally weren't huddling in their staterooms. They were fronting the captain with their accusations and demands. Apparently the captain tolerated it because he needed McNally's help. The engineer had activated the Fury, and only he and his sleeping miners could shut it down.

The Sackers had a price. An off-the-record explanation and apology wasn't going to do it. They wanted a public admission of guilt from the captain. They weren't going to get that.

The whole process struck me as fruitless. Even were McNally and the ambassador satisfied, they couldn't get into the cold sleep quarters. The Fury and its remaining laser-armed remotes had turned that place into a redoubt. The ship had no more makeshift weapons, only sidearms. No one wanted a battle among the cold sleepers. Talley's death at Terran hands was bad enough. A massacre of the cold sleepers was unthinkable.

It looked like a stalemate. We hoped that the Fury thought so too, and was content with its defensive posture. That would produce a victory for the captain and his policy of limited confrontation and procrastination. We'd have made our jump, could evacuate the ship at our next call, then deal with the Fury.

It was a misplaced hope. The Fury reopened communications by tapping into the main comm line. It informed the captain that if it could not access the AI or the captain, it would act against their extension. It would disable the ship. "Destroying the Fury won't work," Miro said. "You tried that when you had more armament. Start thinking in different terms."

This was an ad hoc war council. A peace council, too. We had to neutralize the Fury before we were all dead or marooned. We had to make a truce among ourselves to that end. Afterward we could war against one another anew.

Present were the captain and Commander de Prado, the Coalsack ambassador, and McNally. Myself as a wild card/forlorn hope. I had brought along Miro Banks: a different perspective.

"What terms, Ms. Banks?" the captain asked.

"Set up a new value system. An Apollo to the Fury."

"What's she babbling about?" the first officer muttered.

"I assume that she's read her Aeschylus and Euripedes," McNally said. Apparently there was time for the classics in far-flung mining camps. "Apollo and his concept of tempered mercy supplanted the Furies and their rigid justice. The test case was Orestes."

Miro nodded. Her expression was intense. I had seen this in her sculpting, her lovemaking—and in her expression of anger on hearing who had killed Talley. There was more Fury than Apollo in her, did she but know it.

"Admittedly, the ship's AI isn't an object of moral concern on Orestes' scale," she went on. "It isn't even the proper object of justice for anything but another machine. I want to see justice and punishment meted out to the policy-makers who programmed the AI, but that's not going to happen on this ship. Or at all, unless we get back. And we'll only do that by superseding the Fury with a higher power."

"And who would that be?" the ambassador asked.

"Our diver. He's neutral and therefore looked on by the Fury as a non-party to its programmed task. The Fury won't admit armed ship's personnel into its presence, but it may admit
kyr
Nystrom. Particularly if he takes control of the ship's AI and can stand in its stead."

"It might admit the captain," the ambassador said. "As a surrogate."

There was a moment of silence. The air exchanger hummed softly.

"As a sacrifice, you mean," Commander de Prado said, his voice showing his contempt for such diplomatic euphemisms. "We're here to talk of neutralizing the Fury, not appeasing it. Nor am I sure that giving Mr. Nystrom command access to the AI is the way."

"Can you give us another way, Commander?" McNally asked.

The first officer tightened his lips but said nothing.

"What do you hope to do,
kyr
Nystrom?" the captain asked.

I much preferred to avoid articulating my capabilities, but I knew I could not. My brotherhood would not be happy with this.

"Link with the Fury," I said. "Then paralyze it."

"Indeed," Commander de Prado murmured. "As perhaps you can with humans? Once you're allowed in to read?"

This from an officer who had considered me a charlatan, or had said that he did. I had hoped to not disabuse him.

"Enough," the captain said. "I see no better solution, nor any other at all. This is not the time to probe a diver on the limits to his powers. Let us take our unwilling Apollo as he is." He looked at me directly. "I'll be your ticket to the Fury, if it comes to that."

Even the first officer could not object further, assuming that he desired. At the worst outcome of this ploy, command succession would fall to him. But more than command of the ship was at stake here. Commander de Prado's ambitions had never been that limited, I was sure. Here was the chance to forestall or cover up a diplomatic disaster of huge proportions, and to move up in those circles that valued such solutions whatever the human cost.

He was also learning more about divers than a man entering those circles ought.

I left the captain and McNally at the hatchway of the cold sleep compartment. They stood in the passageway, in line of sight of the Fury were I not in between. As I approached the Fury and its ominous, floating remotes, my body took up ever more of their field of fire. They could not gun down the captain without burning through me first.

Cold comfort indeed, even were the cryogenic chambers not cold. No rime frost spangled the fixtures, as I had pictured. The individual chambers, row after row of tiered boxes, were undeniably frozen, but the compartment held an ambient temperature like any other.

The atmosphere of this meeting was cold, on a gut-freezing, mind-numbing level. I felt as if my joints had been lubricated with an oil that had lost its viscosity many degrees above room temperature. My mind fought off the metaphorical freeze of incipient death. I walked on.

"I bring access to the ship's AI," I said as I approached. "The captain is here as well, for your judgment."

"The matter of guilt is decided," the Fury said through the nearer of its two re-motes. "Punishment only remains."

"Perhaps not," I said. "Hear me out. Test me for veracity."

I thrust my hand into the remote's receptacle, feeling again that grip of judgment and death. I extended the filaments of my sensors and made the mindvault into that world of lattices and data flow, artifacts of crystal, and electromagnetic pulse. I ignored the more complex structures of processing and memory. I tracked along that artificial dendritic chain from command center to action relays, and froze it.

"It's locked up," I said over my shoulder to McNally and the captain, beckoning them in as I strode to the compartment's comm console. I switched the visual monitor to the bridge. Commander de Prado was there, ensconced in the captain's chair. Surrounding him was a phalanx of armed crewmen not normally seen on the bridge. I recognized a croupier from the casino, and my table's wine steward. They lacked their hostly and obliging manner; clearly they had collateral duties and loyalties of a more ominous nature.

I activated the control closing the hatch to the outer passageway. The captain and McNally came up behind me. Neither said anything.

"Wake the miners, McNally," I said.

"What is the purpose of that,
kyr
Nystrom?" the captain asked quietly. He made no move to override me. "Isn't the Fury disabled?"

"Frozen. Paralyzed. Not destroyed."

"Destroy it," Commander de Prado said, his voice crackling over the compartment's annunciator. "Destroy it, or we will."

"I think not," I said. "This compartment's sealed off, via linkages controlled by me and the ship's AI. And I control the ship's AI, subject to the captain's authority only. Not yours."

"Captain, those miners must not be awakened. And you must order Mr. Nystrom to destroy that machine or let us in to do it." de Prado paused. "Or I'll be forced to relieve you."

"You will not, Commander," the captain said. "I'm ordering you to butt out till we know more. Shut up and listen." He turned to me. "What's the meaning of these actions,
kyr
Nystrom?"

Behind me McNally was initiating the unfreeze sequences for his miners. If the captain understood the meaning of McNally's actions at the cryogenic controls—and I'm sure he did—he gave no sign. He seemed ready to engage me in a dialog of open-ended length. I was beginning to appreciate the captain's policy of creative procrastination.

"I'm not going to destroy the Fury," I said. "My brotherhood empowers me to advise in these circumstances, to act only as necessary, and then in as limited a scope as possible. We particularly never act so as to destroy or conceal knowledge. That includes the memory banks of a Fury, or so I choose to interpret my brotherhood's strictures."

I had no doubt that Commander de Prado wanted that data erased. It was valid testimony in a court oflaw, if it ever came to that, and potent testimony in the court of public opinion.

"The Fury will be removed as a threat to the ship and the AI once the miners in council move to deactivate it," I went on.

"And we'll have a Vigilance Committee running loose on this ship," de Prado said. "A bunch of frontier types, heedless of the demands of state policy."

"I doubt that Mr. McNally and Ambassador Darvesh share your low opinion of the miners," I said. "And I think that they can control them, if they're not unduly threatened or provoked."

"Nonetheless, Captain, those memory banks must be scrubbed. This is a point on which my authority overrides yours, even with you in command."

The console and its patch into the AI were feeding me information now. A working party of electronic techs was outside the compartment trying to breach the lock mechanisms.

"Take the long view, Commander," I said. "The circumstances of Talley's murder may never be publicly known. The Coalsack government may come to terms with Terra on this, granted enough concessions."

McNally looked up with a malevolent glare. Apparently he preferred Fury-like solutions to cynical diplomatic maneuverings. But he went on with his monitoring of the instrument panels. It was a safe bet that the action commands to waken the miners had been implemented and were working through to completion.

"I'll point out also, Commander," I continued, "that though I've frozen the Fury's action circuits, it is recording this conversation. The Fury is programmed to judge and punish all crimes, not murder alone. And I mean illegal usurpation of command and disobedience to lawful orders. Mr. McNally's miners will have the Fury scrubbed of its directives on the Talley murder, but perhaps not deactivated. Meanwhile, please order Lt. Stein to break off his attempt to force entry to these quarters."

De Prado's lips tightened. He said nothing, but was still easy to read. He was gambling that he could have Stein and his men inside the compartment before the miners were awake and in control of the now frozen Fury.

"Commander de Prado," the captain said evenly. There was a hard edge to his voice that carried, I hoped, to the bridge. "Order Lt. Stein and his men to withdraw."

Commander de Prado leaned back in the captain's chair, a calculated pose of non-action.

"Commander de Prado," I said softly. "The Fury no longer controls its remotes and their lasers. But I do."

The first officer sat up abruptly. I turned to look over my shoulder to the captain. "I can patch you in directly to the general quarters circuit, Captain."

The captain nodded. All ship's annunciators, including those in the passageway outside, would transmit his voice.

"Mister Stein," he said. "This is the captain. Cease break-in efforts at the hatch. We're coming out. Get to the nearest comm circuit and acknowledge."

Thirty seconds went by. Slowly.

"Lt. Stein, aye," came a laconic voice. "We have withdrawn from the hatch."

"Prepare to escort me to the bridge." The captain turned to the bridge monitor.

"Commander de Prado, you are relieved from duties and confined to quarters. Disband your force and leave the bridge."

I ordered the AI to open the hatch. The captain regarded me a moment, a look de void of expression, turned and walked out.

I secured the hatch behind him and turned toward the console. The first officer was out of the captain's chair. He was standing now, pacing slowly, his hands behind him, broodingly confrontational. And still on the bridge with his armed minions, still dangerous.

"Commander de Prado," I said, and he wheeled and faced his monitor. His face was a study in thin-lipped disgust and hate.

"The captain is on his way. He'll be there in a few minutes." I gauged the man and decided to state the obvious.