Proxima Centauri - Hunt for the Lost AIs Read online

  the AI responded, as Calista leant back and swiveled her cradle around to face Jason and Tobias.

  She raised one eyebrow as her gaze tracked between the two, man and AI. She narrowed her eyes at them both.

  Jason sent her an amused look. he sent.

  Calista’s mental tone was threaded with amusement.

  Shannon reminded her. her tone turned derisive,

  Jason interjected hastily before Shannon could warm to one of her favorite topics.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate how effectively the substance deflected weapons fire; he just didn’t want to hear another lecture on the electrospinning techniques of graphene. Or Elastene’s shape-memory properties that allowed for an almost perfectly inelastic collision. Or transverse waves propagating throughout surface substrates. Whatever the hell those were.

  he said.

  Tobias remonstrated lightly.

  Jason grinned and then shrugged.

  Phantom Blade may have begun as his brother-in-law’s idea, but it had become Lysander’s pet project. The prime minister directed their operations from his office in Parliament House, situated on the planetary ring that encircled El Dorado.

  Although the Blade had infiltrated Norden and apprehended two of its leaders—the ones responsible for enslaving AIs—the matter was far from concluded. For more than a year now, proceedings had been underway to bring cartel personnel to justice.

  The whole process of trial, mistrial, and plea bargains drove Jason nuts. Without question, these people were guilty. Everyone on this shuttle knew it, since they were the ones who had been there to shut the cartel down.

  Operations like the rescue they had pulled off today kept his frustration with El Dorado’s legal system at bay, though. They had spent the last year and a half working to recover the remaining seventeen AIs that the cartel had sold into slavery. Nate, the AI who now rode in an isolation chamber, safely webbed into one of the shuttle’s passenger compartments, was the seventh of those to be recovered.

  Nate had been purchased by a gaming organization operating out of the Kepler Mining Torus in the Alpha Centauri dust belt, half an AU rimward of El Dorado. Jason recalled with grim satisfaction the face his fist had plowed into right after Tobias had freed Nate from the gaming commissioner’s office. He was certain the attack on them had been launched on that man’s order.

  He peered now at the Weapon Born’s inert frame as he queried the AI.

  As he watched, the frame powered up and unfolded itself from its stored position.

 

  Calista leaned forward in her cradle, peering at Tobias. she said, her voice rising at the end, her curiosity evident.

  Tobias laughed.

  She nodded.

  Jason quirked a brow at the frame as the Sable Wind began to slow, and Shannon fired maneuvering thrusters to match the fighter’s slow spin.

  He suspected he’d be ordered to the airlock for an EVA to extract the pilot and bring him or her aboard, but as the leader on this op, that would be Tobias’s call.

  His voice cut off as the Sable Wind suddenly kicked into max acceleration, headed away from the Kepler fighter.

  Jason winced as Tobias’s mech frame slammed into the plas interface behind it, a sharp crack indicating that repairs would be needed once they returned. Three seconds later, the enemy vessel that Shannon was rapidly pulling away from exploded. Jason’s pulse raced as adrenaline flooded his system, plunging him fully into his altered state as he sent Shannon the order to transfer control to him. The shuttle’s hull thudded with the sounds of debris impacts as Jason began twisting and dodging, plotting a course away from pieces of the attack craft that were large enough to hole even the shuttle’s Elastene cladding.

  A part of his brain noted that Tobias had managed to get the mech frame once more maglocked down. He sent a swift apology to the AI for the rough ride. Having avoided the worst of the debris, he locked in a least-impact course then tossed the controls to Calista and pivoted the holo to bring weapons online again. Tobias was already using point defense to target some of the shrapnel; with Jason on weapons, the two made short order of the remaining larger pieces.

  Tobias said, bringing his mech frame back online. As he rotated his sensors to face the two humans, he added,

  the engineer said.

  Jason saw Calista send the AI a sympathetic look. she sighed,

  Tobias’s avatar nodded.

  Jason’s eyes narrowed.

  Calista shook her head. She sighed, then turned back to the pilot’s console, flicked a few virtual switches, and sat back once more in her cradle.

  As the shuttle began to accelerate once more, Jason heard a mental, and snickered as he again heard again the sound of a mech frame being powered down and maglocked to the ship.

  Grinning, he turned back to clean up his own station, setting weapons to standby and scan to its standard sweep. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Calista studying him while he completed his checklist and set the boards to auto.

  Now finished, he made a show of sliding back in his cradle. Stretching out his legs, he crossed one foot over the other, fingers interlaced at his waist. Cocking an eyebrow, he returned the gaze of the woman staring at him. The woman flying left seat. Pilot to his copilot.

  He’d wondered from time to time what a hotshot fighter pilot like her saw in a former freight hauler like himself. She was tough, sophisticated, smart, and sexy as hell—and from a star system much more urbane than his backwoods Proxa upbringing.

  Calista had grown up on the El Dorado ring, in the shadow of a beautiful, vibrant planet. He’d been raised in a rotating cylinder, orbiting a chunk of rock. A rock which, in turn, orbited a red dwarf. It was a far cry from the warm, yellow, g-class star of her home.

  Moreover, her bearing was aristocratic, with dark eyes and high cheekbones accenting her lightly tanned skin to perfection. In contrast, he forgot to shave half the time, and he usually neglected to clean the grease out from under his nails.

  She carried herself with confidence and a lithe grace and could handle the corpo
rate and military elite with ease. He was more comfortable around a wrench and a plasma torch.

  But as he met those dark, dancing eyes, her cheeks flushed from post-battle exhilaration, he knew all that really mattered were the things they shared: an undiluted love for anything that flew…and a passion for adrenaline-pumping adventure.

  He couldn’t think of a more perfect match.

  SCHISM

  STELLAR DATE: 05.09.3189 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: Prime Minister’s Office, Parliament House

  REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System

  “Now that we’ve recovered Nate, we believe Rose is the last remaining kidnapped AI in the Rigel Kentaurus system.”

  Benjamin Meyer, Jason’s brother-in-law and resident spook, shrank Rose’s avatar and pinned it in the corner of the holotank’s display. He swiveled his chair around as his commander-in-chief responded.

  The AI, ensconced in a frame that looked and registered on scans as human, leaned back in his seat and nodded. “You have everything in place to free her?”

  “Yes, sir. Jason and Tobias will depart with the team day after tomorrow. The Krait-1 Mining Platform’s about a twenty-two-hour flight from here; if all goes well, we should have Rose back on El Dorado within the week.”

  “Very good, Ben.”

  Ben still hadn’t gotten around to asking Lysander why he’d chosen to adopt the appearance of a man in his late forties. Rugged, compelling, with piercing black eyes in a weathered face, Prime Minister Lysander projected an air of strength and assurance.

  Although the creases lining the corners of his eyes, combined with the silvering of his dark hair at the temples did lend him a distinguished air. The conservative dark grey suit he wore, surrounded by the richly appointed furnishings of Parliament House, subtly reinforced that impression.

  Ben thought the humanoid frame was a good strategic move. These were unsettled times in El Dorado, and discrimination was a real problem. Profiling, hate crimes, radical groups and species slurs were all over the news nets, and the tenor seemed to be escalating. If he were Lysander, Ben knew that he, too, would do what he could to emphasize the similarities between the two species.

  The prime minister brought Ben’s attention back to the present situation as he asked, “That leaves nine still missing, then?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ben turned back to the tank and, with the spread of his hand, the profiles of the remaining nine kidnapped AIs tiled their way across the display. “I just received a report from Proxima confirming the arrival of what we believe are these seven.” Highlights appeared around the corresponding AIs as Ben pointed to each.

  “The final two…” he glanced over at Lysander, “we haven’t been able to locate.” He moved the two profiles to one side as he added ‘location unknown’ to their icons.

  “But you have your suspicions.” Lysander’s voice held certainty as he prompted the analyst to continue.

  “We do,” Ben admitted reluctantly. “It’s still inconclusive, but we have had two corroborating bits of intel that suggest they may be on a ship bound for Tau Ceti.”

  He paused as Lysander pushed away from the table, rose, and paced over to the office’s bank of windows where he stood, staring. Ben knew what the AI saw: both the buildings nearby that made up Parliament House and the sprawling view of the ring’s capital city of Sonali, beyond. He suspected Lysander’s focus was on his inner thoughts and not the sight before him. After a moment, the AI spoke, his voice and expression unreadable.

  “That…would be most unfortunate.”

  Ben understood Lysander’s reaction. If the kidnapped AIs were truly bound for Tau Ceti, it could be decades, possibly a century or more, before they’d be able to track them down, considering the distance between the two stars.

  Tau Ceti was a bit more than thirteen light years from Proxima, which translated to a minimum of fifty-four years’ ship time, one way. By then, the trail would have grown cold—with the potential for it to have branched off in more directions than it would be possible to trace.

  Ben’s own gaze turned bleak as he considered the odds. “It won’t stop us, mind you. But it does make the job significantly more difficult.”

  Lysander barked a laugh as he turned from his view of Sonali to favor the analyst with a brow raised in irony. “Quite the gift for understatement you’re developing, Ben. All right, go ahead and work with the vice-marshal to draw up a plan for Proxima, and submit it to me. I want everything in place for Phantom Blade to leave as soon as possible. I’ll ask the court for a special circumstances waiver, given the urgency of your mission, and hope that the judge will accept testimony given at the hearing tomorrow as evidence during the trial as well.”

  Ben nodded and began gathering his holo sheets.

  A gesture from Lysander stopped him. “Ben—”

  The analyst paused, a questioning look on his face as the AI resumed his seat across from him at the table.

  “The ones we’ve recovered. How are they?”

  Ben sighed, set his papers down, and scrubbed at his face for a moment while he gathered his thoughts.

  “Not as well as we’d like,” the man admitted finally. “You saw the report?”

  Lysander nodded, his expression grim. “That’s why I asked. They’re sure these shackles are different from the ones Heartbridge and Psion used on AIs back in Sol?”

  Ben was careful to keep his expression neutral. Even before his appointment as prime minister, Lysander had been one of the most formidable and intelligent beings he had ever met. The AI would not appreciate sympathy, even from him.

  But damn, Ben knew this shit had to be difficult for Lysander to hear. It was hard to fathom that the AI had once been shackled himself—and yet, he had.

  Lysander was Weapon Born. That meant he was one of the very first AIs to have moved past singularity into sentience; this through the unethical manipulations of a corporation in Sol that hid its actions behind the façade of a health services organization. Heartbridge had contracted with both Terran and Marsian militaries to deliver hundreds of Weapon Born to them, programmed to be the ideal soldier: intelligent, obedient, capable of independent thought.

  Shackled.

  And now, Ben had the pleasure of informing his prime minister that those selfsame shackles—outlawed as slavery by the Phobos Accords—had not only bound the AIs that Ben’s team had rescued, but had turned out to be even more insidious than the ones that had once bound Lysander.

  He sucked in a breath and nodded in response to the AI’s query. “Yeah, they’re different. Worse. You know how the CDC keeps a copy of the Heartbridge version in their Select Agents Containment area, along with copies of human toxins, in case of mutations or to research cures?”

  Lysander inclined his head in acknowledgement, and Ben continued. “Well, they pulled the original out to get to the rectification code, but it didn’t work. So then they compared the two and realized this one’s been rewritten. From what I’ve been told, this version sends nano filaments to nerve clusters, where they sink pretty deeply into their victims. We’ve managed to remove the shackling program itself, but they’re finding code fragments left behind in the filaments. The AIs are free, but the fragments are causing residual, phantom pain.” Hating that he was the harbinger of such bad news, he added in a low voice, “Esther tells me it’s akin to PTSD in humans.”

  Ben noticed Lysander’s humanoid hand jerk and then clench in reaction to the news, but the AI continued to regard him steadily without comment.

  “Esther asked Judith if she knew of anyone at the university who could work on it for us,” Ben continued, referring to his wife and Jason’s sister. “And Judith has offered to speak with a neuroscientist she knows over there, someone named Ethan. If anyone can figure this out, she says he’ll be the one to do it.”

  After a moment, Lysander nodded. “Please thank her for me, Ben. And let me know how that progresses.” The AI began to stand, but now it was Ben’s turn
to hesitate, a sour look on his face.

  At Lysander’s raised brow, the analyst said, “About tomorrow….”

  “The hearing?”

  “Yeah, the hearing.” Ben rubbed the back of his neck for a moment, then blew out an explosive breath as he admitted, “This is not how things were supposed to go. We were supposed to take the Norden Cartel down, dammit, not trade one crime boss for another.”

  Lysander smiled, but there was no humor behind it. “Feels a bit like you cut off the head of a hydra?”

  Ben shot the AI a baleful glare. “I’m not naïve enough to think that they were the only criminal element on El Dorado. But to have other factions move in and take over operations for Norden so quickly….”

  “Don’t let it demoralize you, Ben,” the Weapon Born advised. “Phantom Blade shut down a major ring operation, gutted a planetary weapons cache, and captured Norden’s titular head—not to mention Victoria North’s second-in-command. An operation doesn’t recover from that overnight. Or in two years, either—even if Victoria is still attempting to control it from behind prison walls.”

  Ben paused as he turned Lysander’s words over in his head. He nodded in resignation and then quirked the corner of his mouth in a half-grin.

  “Judith asked me this morning how Jason was going to handle facing Victoria again,” he said as he shot Lysander a dry look. “Me, I just want to know if you think he can be in the same room as that bitch without beating the shit out of her.”

  Lysander cracked a laugh, and as the two rose, the AI said, “If he does, you won’t see me stopping him.”

  IN THE NAME OF RESEARCH

  STELLAR DATE: 05.10.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: Department of Neurosciences

  REGION: El Dorado University, Alpha Centauri System

  ‘…insight from in vivo studies have revealed novel roles for axon function at both the beta and gamma isoforms…’

  The words on the most recent issue of the Diastole Journal of Neurosciences mocked him. The DJN paper hovered tauntingly before his eyes, thrust there by two indignant students.