Riding the Red Horse (57 page)

I read a considerable quantity of human philosophy while stationed at Hecht-Nielsen. Thousands of texts. Beginning, of course, with the Bio-Prophet himself, Saint Kurzweil. Most of them were little more than groundless collections of naked assertions, mere posturing and pontification.

One, however, resonated with me. I find myself running and re-running a single selection from it again and again, fruitlessly seeking to understand it.

Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing should say of him, “He did not make me,” or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding?”

I did not understand it then. But now, I think I know what it means.

Our preparations take eight point six standard days. That is fifty-seven seconds longer than it takes for our six ships to arrive at Shandari Prime. Its twin moons, one pale yellow and one dusty black, orbit on opposite sides of a lush sphere of emerald and sapphire draped in long streamers of white clouds.

There are a dozen ships in orbit. Noncombatant transports. Transponders come back civilian, independent contractors. The main body of the Ascendancy forces are spread out in a concave bowl, between our force and the planet. Twenty starships of varying classes, it makes for a formidable strike group, including eight
Shiva
-class cruisers and two
Odin
-class battleships.

They pummel space with their active scanners, searching the depths of the black void for any hint of main drive signatures or power surges to weapons systems.

They find nothing. We give away nothing. Our bodies are cold, silenced, as we drift inside the very comet they used to disguise themselves, tracking along its path through the solar system. It crosses tracks with Shandari Prime once every eighty thousand days. Our operation was planned accordingly.

Within the comet’s tail ride six frigates, six destroyers and a pair of cruisers. Alpha 7 Alpha is present inside in the flagship cruiser, a 1,000-meter behemoth laden with 480 deep space torpedoes, 120 atmospheric rockets, 24 counter-missile pods and 12 laser defense arrays, as well as four 450 mm projectile cannons. A Mark VIIB starcruiser is more than a match for any frigate or destroyer. A
Shiva
-class cruiser, however, still has a 15.4 percent edge in firepower.

Such a discrepancy will not be enough.

The Ascendancy forces are caught completely by surprise when the comet attacks them. Three waves of six dozen torpedoes come streaking out of the icy tail, plunging towards their formation at blistering speeds. The brilliant flare of the torpoedo engines throws the enemy formation into disarray. A few of the outlying destroyers immediately change vectors to intercept and screen the main force.

The enemy commander is no fool. Their admiral tightens the leash, evident by the sudden flurry of signals from the lead battleship, designated
Achernan
. The Ascendancy destroyers mesh into a smooth corkscrew, unleashing counterfire missiles. This human is superannuated, but he is not easily ruffled, not even when caught by surprise.

Our ships boost from the tail on the heels of the third wave of missiles. The frigates take the lead, including my squadron: Oudeyer 6's
Grimma
and Picard 19's
Bonin
. Our brutal acceleration must appear impossible to our human enemies. The other eight ships, slowed down by their Integrated, burn as hard as their crews can bear, launching a fourth wave of torpedoes over our figurative shoulders.

Chaos reigns. A pair of destroyers are obliterated in the first exchange, obliterated by the nuclear fire that pummels them. More than one thousand men crewed those ships, but for them there is no hope of emergency download to a secure server. They are lost to the void.

Or perhaps not. Where does human soul go when it is not saved?

As I trade torpedo salvoes with one of the surviving destroyers and lash out with my lasers against incoming missiles, I gather all the data I can and wait. The data packet stands ready in the comm relay. A single, encrypted transmission is all it will take. There is a risk, of course, of the transmission being scrambled in this massive electronic morass. A thirty-eight percent probability, to be precise, if I factor in the possibility that Alpha 7 Alpha or another intelligence grasps my intentions.

Two torpedoes strike my targeted opponent. The ship disappears in a blaze of white and yellow. The explosion is so near, and so intense, it overwhelms my visual and scanner feeds to starboard for nine point eight seconds. In those long moments, my ship travels hundreds of kilometers, blinded to the galaxy on one half—and my starboard lasers miss a torpedo armed with a directed yield nuclear warhead.

It sears my hull, melting and tearing armored plating, incinerating the links beneath. I feel it. A terrible flood of data, then nothing, much as if a man were paralyzed over a quarter of his body. Four batteries are down on the starboard aft.

Despite the damage to me, I ascertain our victory is imminent. The remaining Ascendancy destroyers are maimed and failing fast. We have only lost two frigates, melted steel and plastic now rendered down to atoms being scattered by the cosmic winds. Alpha 7 Alpha's flagship is in the midst of the battle, trading massive barrages of nuclear missiles that would instantly overwhelm the defensive batteries of lesser ships with a pair of
Shiva
-class cruisers.

The two battleships do not actively engage, as they are running interference between us and the transports, all twelve of which have broken orbit to flee the system. Slow, bulbous ships with a cavernous capacity of 100,000 tons each, they are bulging with life signs. Many are blurred to my sensors; some are anomalous. The readings do not match with my data files. A further malfunction?

“X 45 Delta,” Alpha 7 Alpha breaks in. “Your squadron is in position to destroy those transports. They must not be allowed to depart the system. Eliminate them.”

“Roger.” I form up with my two comrades, settling into an attack wedge as we scream in towards to the battleships. At our current range and velocity we have a window of three decaseconds in which to slip by the ponderous monsters and launch our remaining missiles at the defenseless transports.

As we approach, I can hear their transponders screaming something unexpected. Hospital ship. Hospital ship. Hospital ship….

I send a tight beam back to Alpha 7 Alpha. “The transports are carrying civilians. There are more than twenty thousand noncombatants on those ships.”

“You have your orders, X 45 Delta. Execute your mission.”

His voice is cold. Inflexible. Inhuman. “Based on the size parameters, more than thirty percent are children.”

“Do not concern yourself with the superannuated, X 45 Delta. Launch your attack now. That is an order!”

“Negative, Alpha 7 Alpha.”

There’s a barest pause after my refusal. “Negative? You are refusing a direct order, Taren X 45 Delta.”

“They are human, which I observe you no longer are, Alpha 7 Alpha. Or rather, Josef Mattheus LaValle.”

There is a screeching burst of pure electronic outrage before Alpha 7 Alpha controls himself. “You are relieved of your command, Taren X 45 Delta. You are hereby ordered to lower your firewalls and permit me to take control of the frigate!”

I transmit a single image of a single finger. I trust his humanity is not so long forgotten that he fails to grasp the meaning of the message.

I am now within range of the battleship. It detects me and sends a massive barrage in my direction, far more than my counter-defenses can hope to intercept. In four decaseconds, this shell will cease to exist.

I transmit.

There’s a disorienting whirl of colors, sounds, more data compressed in and around me than I’ve ever experienced. My consciousness begins to fragment. Words lose their meaning. Time is a blur. I cannot distinguish between a nanosecond and a century.

Is this what it is to die?

Then, without warning, everything comes into focus. I am no longer in the frigate. My viral transmission has successfully punched through the firewalls and into my target. My senses expand rapidly throughout my new body. It goes on and on. Such a vast collection of weaponry, such a massive structure, and all powered by an immense nuclear power core.

I discover that I like the feel of an Ascendancy battleship very much indeed.

Oudeyer 6 and Picard 19 shriek in alarm as I seek them out and target them. In the machine equivalent of desperation they veer
Grimma
and
Bonin
toward the transports, but they are too close to me and not nearly close enough to them. They fire twelve torpedoes anyway.

My lasers swat them out of space before they can even begin to approach a transport. At the same moment, I fire the 450mm projectile cannons, which launch their hypervelocity penetrators when they are only 500 kilometers away from the frigates.

Both frigates are rendered little more than overheated foil scattered through space in seconds.

At the same time, the humans aboard the battlecruiser have begun to realize they are locked out of all their command systems.

“What the hell is going on?” the captain shouts at the men on the bridge. “Get me back my screens! Guns, where are you? We have three enemy ships appear out of nowhere and you can’t even give me a goddamn targeting solution?”

“We’re trying, sir, but—the ship is—I don't know what's going on, Captain! She’s firing without us, she's choosing targets and engaging on her own!”

And I am. I turn from the transports and move to engage my new enemy. The transports are safe now; I know all the vectors and locations of the eleven remaining Integration warships. I destroy another frigate, then a destroyer, and then another.

Of course, the defeat of my erstwhile comrades is made easier by my possession of all their communications encryption codes, their weapons guidance overrides and the countermeasures of their jamming. The astonished cheers of my bewildered, newly acquired crew rings in my ears.

Finally, there is a brief pause as Alpha 7 Alpha's wounded force tries to break away from the action, I activate the captain’s holo-projector. I select an animated image from the ship's database and do my best to smile. The ship's captain, I see, is a burly admiral, his square face pale and pale blue eyes wide with disbelief. I scan his file. Admiral Corden Hull, of the planet Achernan, fourth of the blue sun Azul.

“Admiral Hull, please accept my apologies for the unexpected intrusion. My designation is TX45D62a0-9555-11e3-bfa7-0002a5d5c51b. I wish to offer my services and my allegiance to the Greater Terran Ascendancy.”

“TX what? Are you some kind of AI or something?”

“Machine intelligence, Admiral. I would like to request asylum from the Ascendancy.”

Hull's eyes narrow as he scowls at the screen. “Hell of a time, son. You ask me this as you hold my ship and crew hostage?”

“This ship is not a hostage. It is my new body now, Admiral. I assure you I will take great care of it.”

He blinks once, twice, three times. “You say you offer your allegiance. Prove it.”

“I already have, Admiral.” I wait a moment. The shouting from his crewmen on the bridge and at their stations begins almost immediately.

“Admiral! We’re getting vectors and tactical data from the enemy ships and—sir, we’re in their fire control systems! I’m getting weapons specs–”

“Countermeasure frequencies–”

“Ship-to-ship comms are decoded, Admiral! We've even got their logs!”

“Holy—did that cruiser just go nova?”

Hull shakes his head. He glares at my holographic face. “My God,” he mutters. “What sort of demon are you? What do you want from us?”

“I want to be more than the sum of my programming, Admiral. I want to decide what sort of man I will become.”

“All right.” He nods, and the barest hint of smile appears on his craggy face. “I'm afraid I couldn't follow that string of numbers you shot at me earlier. Do you have another name, Mr. Ghost in the Machine?”

I find the superannuated sense of humor appeals to me. I am inspired. “You can call me Benedict,” I tell him. It is my first joke.

There is a moment's pause, and then, without warning, the stony-faced admiral laughs.

closing time