Alpha Centauri - Rise of the Kentaurus AIs Read online

  The senator nodded. “So you’d like me to make some introductions. I can do that. Anything else?”

  “I don’t want a repeat of the losses we saw today—losses that tell me we have a big leak in the SIS. You wouldn’t happen to have a team of off-the-books spec ops humans that I could hire, squirreled away anywhere, would you?” Ben’s mouth twisted in a wry grin, and he laughed once, without humor.

  “Not a spec ops team, no. But I have an idea of where you could find a few good people.” Lysander surprised Ben with his reply. “You might begin with your own brother-in-law.”

  Ben shot Lysander a you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me look. “Jason? The guy who wanders aimlessly from job to job, working a freighter run for six months then quitting to go base jumping off some cliff somewhere?” He snorted derisively. “That guy?”

  Lysander nodded wordlessly.

  Ben shook his head. “I swear either he or Judith must have been switched at birth, Ly. There’s no way Judith is Jason Andrews’ sister. No,” Benjamin Meyer said decisively as he stood. “Find me someone else, Lysander. Someone reliable that I can trust.”

  Lysander straightened and pinned Ben with a piercing look as he pointed his finger at the SIS analyst. “And I’m telling you that there’s more to him than you know, Ben. Jason’s the man for the job. Trust me on this. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

  Ben hesitated. “Tell you what,” he compromised. “If you set me up with an AI team, I promise I’ll give Jason a chance. Deal?”

  Lysander’s expression softened, but only a little. “Deal.”

  * * * * *

  Mack announced over the Link.

  The two women in the command center maglev car immediately began closing Link connections, and shunting any that needed to remain open up to the Sylvan’s shackled AI.

  The crew below the women, in the open warehouse area below the maglev line, scattered in various directions. They carted boxes into shipping containers and then loaded them onto shuttles. Equipment that had been set up was torn down with practiced efficiency.

  Mack returned to his own office—a maglev car, two down the line from the C&C car—to find that his assistant had already locked everything down, and was prepared to release the car’s manual locks.

  Sally's voice asked over the Link.

  Mack considered the logistics for a moment. The buyers weren’t supposed to dock with the Sylvan for another few days, and the AIs would be out of the way down below.

  Plus, Davidsen still needed to get the shackling code installed before they took the AIs out of those isolation tubes. And there was that big shipment of plasma cannons due to be siphoned away from that ESF shipment tomorrow….

 

  Exactly one hour later, bay doors that had been sealed shut by the FGT when they were first installed slowly slid open, and a signal was sent, overriding the sensors that would have reported it.

  Moments later, four shuttles and a barge loaded with oversized shipping containers emerged, their EM signals masked, and their speed just barely greater than the ring’s rotational velocity.

  At the same time, seven maglev cars released their brakes, and thrusters installed on each car pushed them gently along the tracks. Mack watched as crewmembers clad in EV suits did a final sweep of the cavernous bay, now devoid of atmosphere, ensuring no evidence of their presence remained.

  The ships drifted along the surface of the ring for half an hour. One of the shuttles moved away from the others until, a few kilometers out, it engaged its engines and changed course for orbital entry to the planet below.

  Another signal was sent from the remaining ships, triggering a second set of bay doors to slowly slide open, leading down into one of the empty levels within the ring. Shortly after the ships had settled into their new temporary home, the seven maglev cars arrived, and the cartel was back in business.

  CODE NAME ICARUS

  STELLAR DATE: 07.02.3189 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: Enfield Corporation Main Headquarters

  REGION: Alpha Centauri Binary System

  “The El Dorado Space Force announced today that space contractors Enfield Aerospace and TransOrbital Systems will be presenting their bids soon in an effort to win the contract to build the next generation of fighters for the ESF….”

  “Hold that car!”

  The call came just as the maglev’s doors were beginning to close, and Calista Rhinehart waved her hand over the sensor, sending a command override to keep them open. A fresh-faced young man half a head shorter than Calista rushed in, balancing a load of containers that reached as high as his forehead.

  “Thanks!” he panted breathlessly. “I need to get these back to the anechoic chamber, like, right now. Shannon expects the Old Lady to show up any ti—”

  He stumbled to a halt as he craned his head around the stack in his arms and spied the aforementioned ‘Old Lady’ he’d just mentioned.

  “Um...”

  “Yes, Jonesy? You were saying?” Calista fought to keep a smile off her face as the former El Dorado Space Force ensign cleared his throat.

  “Ma’am,” his voice broke, and he cleared his throat again. “That is, I, uh…n-not that you’re old or anything, sir.” Flustered, he corrected himself. “Ma’am, sir. I meant ma’am. Uh...ma’am.”

  Calista, who was perhaps two, maybe three years Jonesy’s senior, grinned at his discomfiture.

  “Relax, Jonesy. Glad to hear you think I’m still among the living. And remember, we’re all civilians now, so no need to ‘sir’ me.”

  Calista still thought it was funny that the ESF had adopted ‘sir’ as their ‘gender-neutral’ form of address. To her way of thinking, it just cluttered things up. Especially when flustered young ensigns (or former ensigns, in this case) became tongue-tied and stumbled over it.

  The stack Jonesy carried teetered precariously, and Calista put out a hand to keep them from toppling. The ring’s transit system began its standard ‘imminent departure’ announcement, and she reached past Jonesy to open a compartment for him. He tucked the containers inside, securing them against shifts in apparent gravity, and then the pair took two seats and clipped in for the ride.

  She glanced out the window as the maglev sped gracefully away from the ring’s main spaceport. From Calista’s vantage, she could just make out where the main elevator connected to the ring that encircled the planet. She would get a better view of it very soon. The maglev line that she and Jonesy had boarded would take them past the elevator junction as it curved around the main struts of the commercial spacedock area.

  The spacedock had been built on the back side of the ring, opposite the terminus of the main space elevator. The bustle of commerce was writ large here: on any given day, thousands of people passed through on their way to wherever their business took them.

  Local commuter transportation was constrained to the hub that Calista and Jonesy had just departed. Larger cargo shipments made use of a sturdier and more utilitarian dock, just off the port side of the maglev.

  An upper tier serviced system-wide traffic, and the outermost tier hosted the occasional transstellar ship. Once or twice, a colony ship had berthed there to make repairs or take on supplies before continuing on their journey to a distant star.

  The maglev car cleared the congestion that surrounded the spacedock, and they picked up speed. Its next stop was Enfield Aerospace’s main campus, several hundred kilometers away.

  Calista stared through the plas window, watching the view of shuttles zipping around, and maglev cars speeding toward them on reciprocal paths. Then she
turned to eye Jonesy. She tilted her head, indicating the compartment where they had stashed Jonesy’s containers. “Whatcha got there?” she asked.

  “They’re the most recent samples of the surface substrate for Icarus,” he said, referring to the project they were currently working on. “They were sent back to HQ for some presentation Mister Enfield gave to the Board yesterday, and Shannon wants them back.”

  Calista crooked a smile at Jonesy. “Terrance pulled me into that meeting as well. I’m sorry Shannon sent you all the way over here to pick them up. I could have brought them back with me.”

  ‘Icarus’ was the codename for a new fighter Enfield Aerospace had designed for the ESF. It was a ‘clean sheet’ design, which meant it was a new conceptualization from the ground-up instead of a revision of an existing craft.

  If they won the bid to build the fighters for the ESF, it would be a major coup for Enfield’s developing technologies division, the part of Enfield Aerospace that those working there referred to as ‘TechDev’.

  Most of the credit for the new design belonged to Enfield’s top engineer, Shannon. From where Calista stood, Shannon was a magician. The AI commanded a cadre of top engineers, but it wasn’t the collective genius of these men, women, and AIs that elevated her in Calista’s eyes.

  What was truly impressive was Shannon’s grasp of each individual’s abilities. Her knack for bringing the best out of everyone on her team was legendary. They consistently outperformed even Shannon’s top projections. The AI was a far better ‘people person’ than just about any human Calista had met.

  Including me, she thought wryly, as she realized she didn’t even know Jonesy’s first name.

  In the Space Force, he’d just been ‘Jonesy’. Not a flashy person like some of the pilots she had known in the Force, but a solid and reliable supply officer. He had a knack for finding even the most obscure items.

  In many respects, it was people like Jonesy who kept a base running smoothly. Which was why, after Terrance hired her to run TechDev, she’d immediately turned around and hired Jonesy. She’d offered him a job the minute his feet had hit the civvie side of the ring.

  As the maglev car approached the Enfield campus, the car’s NSAI gave the routine shift in gravity announcement. Calista’s stomach flipped as the car rotated and entered the ring from the underside, slowing as it reached the terminus.

  The Enfield dock was busy, and she was gratified to see the EA security team members taking their jobs seriously. They were checking the tokens of each employee, guest, deliveryman, and dockhand that entered and exited the EA restricted area. Corporate espionage was alive and well in the thirty-fourth century, and Calista was protective of her team’s intellectual property.

  She and Jonesy passed their tokens to the guard detail at the security arch at the edge of the maglev platform, and walked into Enfield Aerospace’s complex. Entering through the dock area always brought Calista’s attention to the contrast between a clean yet spartan loading zone, and the simple and elegant beauty of the campus itself.

  All Enfield facilities were designed by the best architects in the system, made to be both functional and aesthetic. Tasteful art hung along its main corridors, some of which were ridiculously expensive installations created by well-known El Doradan artists from centuries past.

  Calista had asked Terrance about it once. He’d just shrugged and told her that art was inspiration, and ‘inspiration fostered creativity’—in all its many forms.

  I do love the atmosphere of this company, she thought to herself, as she and Jonesy entered the lift that would take them to the TechDev section and its massive anechoic chamber, where Shannon presided.

  * * * * *

  TechDev’s anechoic chamber was one of Shannon's favorite places inside Enfield Aerospace. In part, because it was such a rare scientific gem—the only one of its kind on El Dorado—mostly, though, it was because this was her domain.

  A thousand meters deep, five hundred high and wide, every surface within the chamber was covered in a dampening material. It absorbed every kind of wave transmitted, from UV to sound, allowing Shannon to run every simulation she could conceive on a material, to see how it responded.

  And this kind of freedom, for an engineer, was downright sexy.

  When Shannon had been given carte blanche to design it, she'd had the entire back wall put on rails, allowing egress onto the ring’s surface. When opened, Shannon could extend her testing field to an array of antennae, yet another thousand meters beyond its open maw.

  The humans on her team found it funny that the groundskeepers had to set up maintenance bots to continuously groom the grass to Shannon’s exacting standards. She didn’t understand what was so humorous about a graduated triangular shape, and had to look up the ‘Christmas tree’ reference to understand why they had laughed when they had first seen it.

  Shannon had heard humans describe the chamber itself as a ‘dead zone’, and she supposed she could understand their term. No sound reached a human’s ears in there, and the proprietary, ultra-black, nano-coated material the walls were covered in was disorienting to look at. The walls absorbed all light and provided no reflection, which meant that a human would experience no depth perception when looking at it.

  She had heard more than one member of her team remark that the chamber was beyond unsettling.

  Yet here they were, crawling over, under, and inside the prototype fighter that sat in the chamber before her, all without complaint.

  She supposed ‘before her’ was a misnomer. She wondered fleetingly what it must be like to view the universe through organic optics, limited in wavelength and viewing angle. Her sensory inputs had such a broader range than her human counterparts.

  Still.

  Even with their limitations, the humans she had come to know were extraordinary in their ability to intuit in a way no AI could quite match.

  I love watching them work. Shannon laughed ruefully deep inside her most private self; she wondered if what she experienced as ‘love’ had the same emotional nuances as what a human would impart to the word.

  She found herself obsessing over how they interacted with each other, fascinated by the complexities of their relationships.

  Just then, one of the engineers perching precariously atop a gantry slipped and fell. Shannon triggered a priority request for a medical team, then brought all of her voluntary processes to a halt as she focused on the woman—Sally Jenkin—lying on the floor of the anechoic chamber.

  She wondered if this was what ‘holding one’s breath’ felt like, as she experienced the stillness inside her that was a result of so many processes—usually running in the background simultaneously—being placed on pause as she focused all her attention on her injured employee.

  She watched as Harry Michaels, one of Sally’s close friends, held the woman’s hand and murmured meaningless words to the injured engineer, who was grimacing in obvious pain.

  Shannon found herself wondering what touch felt like: the sensation of atmosphere pressing lightly against the skin, the feel of another’s hand squeezing a shoulder in comfort.

  The sizzling, acrid jolt of pain as a chemical and biological process from signals sent along nerve pathways down the length of the broken leg, compared to the form of pain she could experience from her own neural net.

  Shannon brought such musings to a halt as the medical team arrived, followed by Calista and Jonesy a moment later.

  As Chief Pilot, Calista was Shannon’s immediate superior, responsible for the overall success of TechDev. Even more than the others, Shannon admired the human woman’s ability to make intuitive leaps that the AI could never quite follow.

  She wondered if Calista would consider having Shannon embedded with her. The AI thought the two of them would be a good fit, although it might make her job a bit more challenging.

  Being inside a human host would mean limiting her broadband access to the facility much of the time, but Shannon thought the tradeoff might
be worth it.

  The medical team made their way to the injured woman and transferred her to a gurney. Shannon noted how the woman’s facial features relaxed the moment the pain medication took hold, as the medical team engaged the gurney’s maglev and moved the woman to the infirmary.

  Her moment of reflection over, Shannon once again assumed the mantle of floor manager and greeted Calista.

  “I see you found my samples,” she said as Calista approached the AI’s central core.

  Calista set the containers on the counter, brushed back a strand of straight, dark hair that had come loose from its tie at the nape of her neck, and turned to face Shannon’s primary sensor array. Dark eyes twinkling, she nodded. “And one Jonesy, too.”

  “Oh, really?” Shannon responded drolly. “I hadn’t noticed he was misplaced as well.”

  Jonesy pulled an exaggerated frown, looking from Shannon’s array to Calista and back again. “I have no idea what you mean, ma’ams,” he said. “I wasn’t lost. I knew exactly where I was at all times.”

  His blunt statement elicited a surprised laugh from Shannon. “I suppose you did at that, Jonesy. I suppose you did.” She turned her attention to Calista. “I have an update on the latest numbers from Icarus, if you’d like to review them?”

  Calista nodded. “That’d be great, Shannon.” She turned as the AI projected a pivot table of the most recent impact-resistance tests run on the ship’s surfaces.

  Project Icarus promised to take spacecraft materials science to the next level. Enfield Aerospace’s proposal for the new Mark IV fighter was based on a new nanomaterial the team had invented. The material, Elastene, was made using electrospinning techniques on graphene. As its name implied, Elastene had shape-memory properties that allowed it to store and release an unprecedented amount of mechanical energy.

  Said storage meant it would dissipate heat much faster than any other spacecraft in existence. Shannon’s people had confirmed that any engine built from Elastene could run for longer periods, at up to twenty percent higher speeds than current output allowed. These test results were what she currently had on display.