Swarm (18 page)

I didn’t share in the joke. Sometimes, Crow’s sense of humor bordered on the macabre. “So, who else has done it?” I asked.

“No one, to my knowledge. We are survivalists, not heroic, experimental types. You are, as far as I know, the only living person full of nanites.”

We talked further, but Crow was busy. He told me to contact the Senator again, and demand an explanation. We decided we would only allow known officials aboard our ships from now on, people we’d seen in the news. That should cut down on assassination attempts.

“Are we going to even try anymore?” asked Sandra. “They’ve shown themselves to be vicious and untrustworthy.”

“Right you are,” said Crow, “but we still have to work with them. What nation has ever arisen in history without having to defend itself? It’s only natural for them to consider us rebels, terrorists, vigilantes. To become worthy of diplomacy, any group must prove it is strong enough to be independent. I think we’ve just taken a step down that road. We can act huffy about it, of course. We can demand apologies and the like, but after a while we will have to deal with them. Neither side has any real choice unless they can conquer the other.”

At length, Crow put me in charge of diplomatic affairs. I was the least likely to be assassinated, and I was the only person in the fleet who could get out of my ship if I wanted to. Previously, I had been in charge of tactical combat, but right now the Macros were keeping quiet and hadn’t made any further space attacks on Earth.

After we broke off the communication, Sandra kissed me several times.

“I want to apologize, she said. “I’m sorry I recoiled from you when you first came—home.”

“It’s okay. My looks freaked out the assassin, too.”

“One thing is bothering me,” said Sandra, finishing with her ministrations. My face was taped up and slathered with antibiotics. “What about the aliens you fought when you first boarded these ships? The centaur people? Why weren’t they full of nanites and invincible to us?”

I thought about it and couldn’t come up with an answer. But I thought I knew who might have one.

“Alamo, did the… ah… the
biotics
that were aboard this ship when I was first picked up undertake the injections at some point?”

“Yes.”

“Then how could I beat them? They didn’t seem especially fast or strong or full of a metal coating under the skin.”

“They were not as you describe.”

“So, the nanites left them? You reversed the process of the injections?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because they failed in their mission.”

I felt a chill. Sandra and I looked at each other. Perhaps they would see fit to turn off my nanite population someday, cutting me off as well.

“How did they fail, Alamo?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“Their species failed. Their planet was overrun by the Macros. They are extinct now.”

“Aren’t there a few of them left alive on the ships that still roam around looking for command personnel?”

“Yes.”

Sandra tapped at me. “We’ve got to stop them. We can’t kill the last members of a race of people like us! They are fighting us to prevent their own extinction.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t think of a way to do it. What could I do?

“Maybe we could capture them,” said Sandra, thinking aloud.

“I could try to board one ships and beat them unconscious or something,” I said thoughtfully. “If we could at least get a few breeding pairs off the ships, they might not all die.”

Sandra frowned, suddenly not liking the whole idea. “I don’t want
you
to do it. You’ve got about a dozen other missions. We have to defend Earth first.”

I looked at her. “A minute ago, you wanted me to save the centaurs.”

Her face took on a hard look. “If we can—I do. But I don’t want to see you do it
personally
. You’ve done enough. I—I guess I’m getting attached to you.”

I stared at her. There was an almond-shape to her eyes. She had the kind of eyes that didn’t even need makeup. She was lovely. I thought about the legendary professor and his formula for predicting the longevity of such relationships. I didn’t even bother to try arguing myself out of it. I figured whatever we had would fail in the end, but that didn’t matter. When an unattached man in his thirties meets a hot girl in her twenties and she shows strong interest.... Well, there’s no hope for the guy.

I sighed internally. At least it would be a very nice two years.

-20-

When I learned the method by which Pierre had been conducting diplomacy, I almost laughed aloud. He had been doing it via the internet, using a voice system that allowed two-way communication. I knew the software well, my students had used it to communicate with other people worldwide—mostly for online gaming purposes.

It did have advantages, I had to admit. By using a cellular internet hook-up and software for voice transmission, you didn’t have to call people and know their phone numbers. It was a little harder to trace, as well. But mostly I thought it was amusing because I was sure it was the same type of system that Pierre had previously used to con people out of money. E-mails to get them hooked, then a faceless, untraceable, cost-free voice coming over the internet to talk them into the scam. He’d naturally taken the same approach when dealing with foreign governments. I had to wonder if he’d done something else he shouldn’t—something that had pissed off the wrong people and gotten him killed.

I sat and thought for a while with Pierre’s tiny computer in my hands. Before I tried to talk to the government people—the same people, I reminded myself, that had killed our last ambassador—I felt I needed an edge of some kind. I need a bargaining chip. It would be one thing to get online and make them squirm, calling them assassins and fascists and the like. But I was a big boy. I knew the score. They might be embarrassed, but when the survival of the world was at stake, they were playing for keeps. Fortunately, so was I.

I waited until Sandra left me. She had gone exploring the ship. She did that a lot, as it was one of the few things the
Alamo
would let her do. I had done a bit of it, but not as much as she had over the past week. Inside, the ship had several levels and dozens of rooms of various sizes on each deck. There was a lot of strange equipment on the upper decks, the purposes of which were still a mystery to us.

“Alamo, I want to talk to you.”

The ship didn’t respond. There was no need. I could have opted to transmit my thoughts silently, but that still didn’t feel natural to me.

“Alamo, what if this ship is damaged? Can it repair itself?”

“Yes.”

“Can it repair the macro systems aboard the ship?”

“Yes.”

“All of the big components? Even the drive systems and the weaponry?”

“Yes.”

I made a happy sound and leaned back in my chair. This was what I had been hoping for. If the ship could repair a laser weapon, could it not build a brand new one, given the materials? If it could make an engine, why couldn’t it build more engines? Even more importantly, what component aboard the ship had the job of constructing engines or lasers? What if that repair unit could make a copy of
itself?

“Alamo, do you have some kind of repair chamber?”

“There is a repair unit for macro equipment.”

“If it was damaged, could it repair itself?”

“Yes.”

“Could it
duplicate
itself?”

A hesitation. “Possibly.”

“Why not definitely?”

“Some of the raw materials are exceedingly rare.”

I nodded, thinking hard. “Alamo, lead me to this repair unit.”

A door opened in the bridge wall. I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t think that particular spot had ever opened before. I walked through, and had to duck to get inside. The ceiling here was lower. The room was oddly-shaped as well, resembling a pyramid laid on its side.

I walked in, sliding around on the converging metal walls. It was like being on a slanted steel roof. This turned out not to be the repair chamber itself. Instead, the ship led me through a series of strangely-curved rooms. I went up a level, then another. I thought that I was probably up high inside the ship, up close to the top laser turret. Over the preceding week, we’d gotten a better idea of the ship’s design and structure due to the many carefully considered studies the humans were making. Little else was on TV or the internet these days. It was all documentaries and news articles about Nanos and Macros, all day long. We’d learned that there were two primary weapons systems on these ships, which were all identical in design. The lasers were mounted on the top and on the bottom of the ships, and each mount could swivel around with a wide field of fire.

I finally came to a spot with tubes that led down from the prow of the ship. The tubes led to a central spheroid of dull, non-reflective metal. The spheroid was about ten feet in diameter. The
Alamo
indicated this was the machine. It didn’t look like much.

“What’s inside these tubes?”

“Nothing.”

I sighed. “What is inside these tubes when the machine is operating?”

“Raw materials.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So the tubes open on the outside of the ship?”

“When it is in use, yes.”

“And the big arm feeds it the appropriate materials?”

“Yes.”

I fooled with it, tapping on the tubes and crawling around the cramped space, looking for an exit point, but there was none. This was unsurprising. The Nanos made their own openings in things whenever they felt the need.

“Alamo, this is very interesting. I need you to make something for me with this machine.”

“Permission denied.”

“Alamo, I am command personnel.”

“You are command personnel,” the ship agreed.

“I need to save this planet. That is my mission. Change the permissions so I can complete my mission.”

Hesitation. “Permissions not changed.”

“I can’t change the permissions on this unit?” I asked, thinking hard like a hacker.

“You do not have the authority to change the permissions on this unit.”

“Alamo,” I said thoughtfully. “Your mission is to stop the Macros, correct?”

“Yes.”

“My mission is also to stop the Macros. Using this repair unit will allow me to complete my mission and allow you to complete your mission as well. You will change the permissions on your own authority. Change the permissions so we may both complete our missions.”

Hesitation. “Permissions changed.”

I clapped my hands together. Like every complex system, there was usually a work-around.

“I need you to construct something small for me. I need a hand-held version of the lasers that arm this ship.”

“Request insufficiently specific.”

“Okay,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. It had begun to ache from being in this cramped spot.

“Just make a miniature version of the lasers that arm this ship. Make it one tenth—no one twentieth—the scale.”

“Raw materials needed.”

“Proceed to get the raw materials. But don’t kill anyone!” I added hastily.

“Program executing.”

“Estimated time of completion?”

“Unknown.”

“What part of the process is the greatest variable?”

“Locating and securing raw materials of the correct size and shape.”

“Okay... if you had the raw materials right now, how long would it take to produce the weapon?”

“Approximately six minutes. Warning: the preceding was a coerced estimate, and may or not be accurate.”

“There, there, Alamo,” I said, patting one of the walls as if soothing an excited pet. “I know how much you hate giving estimates. You are doing fine.”

I climbed back through the ship to the bridge. I left instructions for the ship to deliver the weapon system to me when it was finished manufacturing it.

When I got back to the bridge, Sandra grilled me. I explained what I had been up to. She told me she’d never seen that machine.

“I don’t think the
Alamo
really wants us to see it. I only figured out its existence by deduction. In centuries past, when ships traveled across the oceans, they had to take everything with them to rebuild the ship from scratch if necessary.”

“Why?”

“Often, the ship would be damaged. It would leave the crew stranded on some island or a beach along the jungle-covered mainland. There was no one to help, no one to come rescue them. Back then, there wasn’t even any good communication technology like a radio to call for help. The crew had to be able to repair anything and everything, or they could die.”

“So you figured this ship must have the same capacity?”

“I thought it was likely to, yes. If they can rebuild our bodies, rebuilding an engine shouldn’t be too hard.”

She nodded slowly. “What can we do with it?”