The Great Destroyer (11 page)

Project Charlie authorities had given her access to the television so that she might learn about human culture.  Since the signals were also broadcast by satellite, Takagawa had decided that the Ushah would see everything on television anyway, so they might as well show the programs to Oslahef as well.  Oslahef devoured all available information about human society, rapidly gaining a level of insight and understanding to rival that of a citizen of the Terran Alliance.

Jackson answered, “An Ushah committing the attack is still the likeliest explanation.”

“Could it have been a tiger or some other beast of the jungle?” Oslahef inquired with innocent interest.

“That is unlikely.  The marks on our officer’s body did not appear to be made by a wild animal.”

Oslahef sat quietly for a moment, and Jackson could see her agile mind probing the problem.  “You want me to give you some indication, some window into the Ushah mind so that you can discover whether it was my people that committed the attack,” Oslahef said matter of factly.

Not for the first time, Jackson reminded himself that the Ushah were staggeringly intelligent social animals, or at least their interpreters were.  Oslahef read every hint of body language, every nuanced inflection in Jackson’s voice. Of course, they were genetically engineered to be perceptive.

That was one of the first big revelations to come from Oslahef.  At some point thousands of years ago, the Ushah had engaged in genetic engineering for several different professions. The soldiers had been made bigger and stronger, the engineers had been made borderline autistic in their fanatic devotion to detail, and the linguists... well, they had ended up like Oslahef.

It was usually best to play it straight with Oslahef, Jackson thought. She was too smart to trick for long. “Yes, I was hoping you’d tell me a little more about why the Ushah might cross the Mozambique Channel.”

The Ushah diplomat stared at the professor for a second, then said, “I will offer some insight into the question, but only on condition that you return me to my people.”

Jackson hadn’t been expecting that. 
Must be a pretty damn good insight
, Jackson thought. Then again, there was no chance it could be important enough to trade away the one source of knowledge about the Ushah. 

“We can’t send you back,” Jackson said simply. “You are the only Ushah who will talk to us.  Your potential knowledge about this incident is nowhere near as important as your status as a bridge between our civilizations.” 
Never hurts to butter someone up
, Jackson thought, a skill he had learned when seeking tenure at Yale.

Oslahef shrugged, as if she had expected this response.  “Then I will not tell you what I know.  But I will offer you another bargain.  You wanted to know how and why the Ushah have apparently escaped their island prison.  If you arrange with my captors to allow me outside once every day, I will suggest an answer to the why, though I cannot say for certain.  The how, I’m afraid, will remain a mystery to you.”

“I accept,” Jackson said immediately.

Oslahef’s eyes glowed. “Mine are an ironic people, Professor Jackson.  I was born in a prison. So were my compatriots.  Our people were not born to live in artificial light and sterile metal walls.  We lived for the day when we would leave the walls behind us on the ship.  Here then, is the irony.  Having had the chance to set our feet upon on a real world for the first time in thousands of years, we find ourselves in a larger prison, one with oceans instead of walls.  We grow curious to find new boundaries.”

Initiate StealthListeningMode.do
.
The command flicked across Charlie III-5’s central command register, triggering dozens of subroutines. Every half second, an audio recording of the previous half second was compared to a vast library of millions of sounds.
There were far more noises in the Mozambique jungle than in the deserts of Texas, where most of the Charlie III-5’s training had taken place.  Birds chirped and flitted through the trees, wind whistled through the leaves, and occasionally a small mammal or rodent scampered underfoot. 

The Charlie ignored the odd insect who buzzed around to investigate him.  Mosquitos, attracted as they were by carbon dioxide emissions and various chemicals associated with living creatures, mostly ignored Charlie III-5’s sterile metal skin.
An internal alert triggered.  It was time to share experience data to the six other Charlie IIIs in the area, a standard procedure to transmit any important new lessons.  Normally, that transmission would be done automatically so that Charlie III-5’s central processor could focus on more important tasks.  However, when a stealth subroutine was in operation, the central processor could choose not to send an electronic emission that might be detected by the enemy.

Charlie III-5 quickly decided that, yes, the data should be transmitted.  Drawing upon its experience database, it decided there was less than one percent chance of detection from the transmission.  There was no sign of the enemy, and no indication that they could break the cipher used for the data. 

The other Charlies’ transmissions came in.  There were some tweaks to jungle movement subroutines, none of which were major.  However, massive continual improvement consisted of many small upgrades, as Takagawa and Dmitry Peskov had envisioned when designing Charlie III.

Initiate StealthMove
.
do
.

Charlie III-5 walked with inhuman slowness forward.  He was nothing if not patient.  Yazov had virtually etched the concept of patience into the Charlie IIIs’ central processor. 

The Charlies had been stalking around the Mozambique jungle for two days now, but fatigue was a concept without personal meaning for the Charlies.  The lessons Yazov had taught individual Charlie IIIs had been distributed across all of the Charlies, and they all remembered Yazov’s teachings as if it had been given to them personally.

Charlie III-5 had a basic purpose.  He wanted to complete his objective, because he had been programmed to want that.  Failing to accomplish an objective resulted in a constant negative feeling.  A human might find it analogous to pain, but rather than a sudden sharp discomfort that quickly dulled, the pain was constant, insistent, begging to be addressed. 

The objective at the moment was to detect the presence of Ushah soldiers, most likely of the scout subtype.  That would be the indicator that the attack on Igazi had indeed been an Ushah foray onto mainland Africa.

Another data transmission came in, but this one wasn’t from the other Charlies.  It was Yazov’s voice.  “Thermal anomaly detected in Sector 21.  It’s similar to the anomaly detected by the Arcani last week.  Charlie III-5 and Charlie III-6, investigate.”

The coordinates, about a kilometer away from Charlie III-5’s current position, were transmitted into his internal navigation system, and he set off in that direction.  He was still moving at a quiet, slow pace because he hadn’t received any orders to do otherwise.

A curse over the radio came a moment later.  “Charlie III-5, Charlie III-6 move faster.”

Without saying a word aloud from its speaker, Charlie III-5 transmitted back, “I am sorry, sir, I can’t move faster than this in stealth listening mode.  Should I change to stealth combat mode?”

“Yes,” Yazov said, “move at a trot until you are within 100 meters of the objective, but hold your fire unless you receive further orders.”  Charlie III-5 acknowledged the command, and an internal control mode changed. 

He began walking at a more brisk pace.  Though he wasn’t quite aware enough to know it, the purpose of the change in orders was to try to find whatever had caused the thermal disturbance before it could go away, either naturally or under its own locomotion.

Charlie III-5 set off at about five miles per hour, as fast as a jogging human.  Yazov had spent a great deal of time teaching Charlie IIIs how to move silently even at high speeds.  However, at that high speed, his audio processors had difficulty identifying noises that it would ordinarily notice.  It was a problem that the programmers hadn’t thought to solve quite yet, and one Yazov could not teach around.

There was little warning, therefore, when something slammed into the side of the 300 pound Charlie III-5, knocking him from his feet.

“What the fuck was that?” Luke Tanner fairly screamed over the radio.  Charlie III-5 had no particular emotion about the question, and so he answered plainly as he tried to cushion his fall, “I don’t know, sir.”

Damage diagnostics triggered automatically.  The central processor, encased in multiple layers of foam padding and an armored box inside Charlie III-5’s head, was intact.  He had landed hard on his left arm, however, and it was inoperable.  Both legs were undamaged.

That diagnostics process took only a second, but it was not the most important thing going on at that precise moment.  Charlie III-5 had pressure sensors embedded in its skin, and something was ripping at his exoskeleton.  He swiveled his head to see what it was.

An Ushah. 
The target identification computer had no trouble discerning from the shape and size of the aggressor that it was one of the alien visitors to the planet.  And Charlie III-5 was still in combat mode.

The Ushah had tried to wrench Charlie III-5’s head off its body, but it had underestimated how difficult the task would be.  Charlie III-5 judged from the close proximity of the Ushah that his Ascalon would be of more use than the assault rifle that he’d been carrying in his now-inoperative left hand. 

“Under attack, request assistance,” Charlie III-5 beamed to his fellow Charlies.
Charlie III-5 knew that he needed to protect himself to reach his objective, the grid coordinates sent down by Yazov.  The objective was the ultimate imperative, and so Charlie III-5 would do what was necessary to achieve it.  If “wanting” can be described as something strived for with every fiber of being, all possible volition a sentient organism can possess, then Charlie III-5 wanted to live.
The Ushah had given up on destroying the robot with his bare hands, presumably intended to achieve a quiet kill.  Instead, he activated the rail gun on his left arm and pointed it at Charlie III-5’s head. 

Charlie III-5 had Ascalon in hand now, and he jerked it up with all his strength into his assailant’s side a fraction of a second before the Ushah fired.
The blast slammed into Charlie III-5’s chest, the projectile tearing past his armored skin before exploding in his abdomen.  His battery unit burst in a shower of sparks, and hydraulic lines running to his legs melted and severed.
For a moment, Charlie III-5’s central processor shut down.  A small auxiliary battery in his head then kicked in automatically, allowing the robot to turn his mind back on.
Damage diagnostics didn’t look good.  Neither leg was operational, nor was his left arm. His right arm still clutched his Ascalon, which had impaled the Ushah, who still howled in pain above him. The Ushah had enough sense to begin bringing his arm back to fire a killing shot into Charlie III-5’s head.

Suddenly, the Ushah’s head exploded in a shower of blood and exotic materials from the suit he wore.  Charlie III-5 looked over to his left, where his audio sensors told him the shot had come from.  There he saw Charlie III-6, his .50 caliber Gram assault rifle smoking.  The standard firearm of the Charlies was named for a Norse sword strong enough to chop an anvil in two that had been used to slay a dragon.

With the immediate danger over, Charlie III-5 ran a more detailed diagnostic.  The Ushah’s projectile weapon had apparently damaged the auxiliary battery unit as well as much of the rest of his body.  His central processor was totally intact, but it was almost the only component within him still functioning without defect.  He had at most a few minutes left on auxiliary battery power.

Charlie III-5 didn’t have emotions per se, but he did experience a negative sensation.  A particularly empathic human might describe the sensation as sadness.  Yazov had ordered Charlie III-5 to reach the specific grid coordinates and investigate the thermal anomaly.  Charlie III-5 would fail to reach that objective.  He would suffer the ultimate failure before shutting down for eternity, his last thought focused on that final sin.

His central processing unit retasked itself, as it was programmed to do.  Though Charlie III-5 was not capable of consciously composing the idea, it could be summarized:
Find a way to reach the objective, and the negative sensation would go away.

“Charlie III-6,” he called over the radio.  “Please come to my position.”  Politeness had been programmed into him, and so he was not as economical with his words as a human might have been in a similar situation.

Charlie III-6 immediately responded, “En route, Charlie III-5.”

The second robot walked over quickly, still in combat mode.  Charlie III-5 wasted no time.  “Charlie III-5 requests that you detach his top piece and carry it in your right arm to the objective.”

Charlie III-6 didn’t tilt his head in confusion because he was not a human being.  He simply took slightly longer to answer as his mind processed what was going on. 

Another Charlie had requested something of him, as they had been programmed to do if they needed assistance in a battle.  The battle situation had passed, however.  So why was Charlie III-5 asking him for assistance?  Charlie III-6’s problem solving algorithm recalled that Charlie III associated the completion of objectives with positivity, and that Charlie III-5 could not achieve his objective without help. 

Charlie III-6 was programmed to provide assistance to his compatriots.  That his designers had intended for that assistance to take place in achieving objective did not affect his contemplations.  Instead, he realized that he could remove a tremendous burden for Charlie III-5, a being which he understood was much like him.

“Yes, Charlie III-5, Charlie III-6 will comply.”  Charlie III-6 knelt over and expertly detached Charlie III-5’s head from his largely inoperative body. 

Charlie III-5’s optical sensor still worked, but his central processing unit reduced its transmission quality to conserve what little battery power remained.  It also turned off the onboard accelerometer.  Since it no longer carried any weapons nor had any capability of moving, it didn’t matter which direction it was facing.  All that mattered was getting to the objective. 

Charlie III-6 dutifully carried his fellow soldier two hundred meters to the specified grid coordinates of the anomaly.  When Charlie III-5’s navigation system determined that they had arrived, his internal objective tracker tallied the completion of the objective as a success.  He radioed to Yazov.  “Charlie III-5, on site, as ordered.”

He couldn’t recognize the emotion in Yazov’s voice.  “Well done, Charlie III-5.”

Charlie III-5 barely had time to hear Yazov’s words before the last of the auxiliary battery was drained.  But he had one moment to recognize his teacher’s praise, and he held on to the memory as his power faded.