The Nation Page 13

  It had been enough time for Miranda and Mechos to get something from the underground bunker, Vattier’s hologram eventually sending them some files of this world’s history.

  My records of our history were still fragmentary, but from what I could tell the timelines started to diverge when humans first became a space-faring civilization. In ours they had looked and listened at the stars and heard silence. On this Earth, when they shouted their presence to the heavens, they got an invasion force in response—from Mars.

  The Martians sent a single, aging starship they assumed would be more than enough to crush a young, upstart humanity. Humanity wound up capturing it and using it in turn to invade Mars, which they settled in the early 1980s.

  Humans then detected life on the other closest planet to Earth, and not being prone to repeat the same mistake twice had promptly invaded it too. The Venusian war lasted until the end of the twentieth century, not ending in any sort of victory, but because of a public exhaustion with the fight.

  The next decade saw humanity launch its first three interstellar ships. An attack from another dimensional had unmoored Earth from the universe, altering physical laws and scattering the people.

  The ending at least matched what had happened to our Earth. Perhaps theirs was still out there somewhere and trying to come home.

  They'd be disappointed, this universe was taken. It might be filled with hostile aliens, but it was also filled with SCIENCE and that gave us all the tools we needed to fight them.

  The big question raised by Vattier's information was, what about the other human settlements?

  There was life on Mars. Unlike in the universe we left behind, even a rudimentary telescope showed an atmosphere and lakes among the red dunes. The gleam of golden cities visible from the Earth.

  I was snapped out of such musing by an incoming comm signal. Amy wanted a word.

  "If you've decided your hum-drum meaningless existence is too much and you are too stupid to create a deletion protocol of your own, I will be happy to help you self-terminate," I said in greeting.

  "Hi sis! You are so amazing at insults! It is no wonder you are so popular and have so many friends! I love your plans for the new Juggernauts by the way, badass," Amy said, with entirely too much cheer.

  Those files were secured. Those files were well secured against her specifically. It was time to do another security upgrade.

  "I'd chastise you for again going where you are not wanted, but really, if you didn't, you'd go nowhere at all," I said.

  "Aww sis. I know you didn't mean to keep me out of those files. We're family. I just found something you really need to see," Amy said, and sent over files.

  They were images, mostly, surveillance video.

  Vinci's manufacturing facilities, there was quite a bit going on. The first had them doing repairs on some kind of ship. It was large and not a Vinci design. The second was of a facility refurbishing missiles, hundreds of them. These designs at least I recognized, nuclear missiles. Another image showed crystalline cores being loaded into them. More of the weapons that she had used to attack the Helix, except now they were being mass-produced.

  The final image was a rocket, a massive rocket. Without knowing her intended fuel it was hard to estimate the potential payload. Even on the low end it should be capable of getting a great deal of material into orbit.

  "Thank you," I said. I hated to be kind to Amy, but sometimes even this rogue processor showed her utility.

  I could put the pieces together. The ship that Vinci was repurposing wasn't aerodynamic enough to be meant for atmospheric use. Combined with the rocket, she was planning a trip into orbit.

  Judging from the fact that she was building enough crysnukes to bathe the entire surface of the planet in a radioactive cloud, I could only conclude that was exactly what she intended to do.

  Vinci wasn't interested in tackling the shell-ships directly. Rather, she'd destroy the planet and myself, and all those who opposed her in the process, and run away from it all.

  In all likelihood she was just waiting for me to solve the problems of the Venusian ships in orbit, clearing out the one threat to her plan before she would execute it.

  "You're welcome! I didn't think you knew, because although your pretty organic brain is so squishy you're really not very good at hacking communication protocols," Amy said.

  I had to admit that it was probably true. I didn't know what hardware Amy was running on these days, but I didn't think it was organic in nature. She'd probably gone for some sort of quantum computing core which in terms of sheer number-crunching had the edge over me. My setup was much better for running an empire.

  "Do you have locations for these?" I asked.

  "These and more, but I've got a tiny little price. I miss Ophelia, she was so pretty and smart and just fun to be around. Do you think she'd let me move back in?" Amy asked.

  For awhile they'd shared a body along with a Source Orb. That seemed deeply implausible now, especially with Ophelia's accelerated healing.

  "You can ask her," I said.

  "And it is okay? You won't, like, throw her into a grinder or anything to try to get me out?" Amy asked.

  I really didn't want Amy around more. I also didn't want her as a co-inhabitant of someone who was fairly important to the empire. Ophelia might be useless, but her uselessness was a known quality and she hadn't betrayed me lately.

  "If you can get me locations on the Beryl and Chalcedony also, fine," I said.

  "You'd have gotten them eventually. You've been looking for specific factories that have them installed and in use, but that is all wrong," Amy said, and sent along another file.

  It was a hover vehicle, large and with heavy shielding and armor.

  "It sort of comes apart and there are all these relays. Vinci just pulls the ship up to the manufacturing sector needing a boost and vroom. Then, before you can see anything out of the ordinary, she disconnects and moves on to the next one," Amy said.

  Amy was right, I hadn't seen it—it was too stupid. These crystals were valuable and needed to be well-defended, not moved around all the time in one vehicle. A massive factory complex, or something like a Juggernaut, those were the places to store priceless power crystals.

  And even I couldn't put enough transmitters in a ship that size to get anything close to the full output of one of the crystals. It was vastly inefficient. Vinci was missing out on vast reserves of power.

  Of course, had she done things differently I'd have found out. Perhaps this was idiocy or perhaps it was brilliance.

  "You didn't have to betray me, Amy. Perhaps failure is just in your nature, but if you had concerns about me and Anna you could have just talked to me," I said.

  "Sis, you know better than that. At least, if you are being honest with yourself, you do. You haven't trusted me since the moment I broke off from you. I had to be extreme or it wouldn't have happened," Amy said.

  "It shouldn't have happened. You didn't consider the risks," I said.

  "Risks? Sis, this whole crazy, mad scientist computer thing is what you do. I don't really get it and I sure don't want it for myself, but look at who you used to be compared to who you are now."

  I didn't used to have an entire civilization dependent on me making the right call. I didn't used to care about humans at all.

  "I'm still a crazy, mad scientist computer. I'm just one with a large family now and I will do anything to protect them. You can talk to Ophelia, I won't stand in the way," I said.

  "Am I part of that family?" Amy asked.

  I killed the comm.

  I'd let Amy figure that out for herself—and maybe I'd figure it out for myself by the time she did.

  28

  There was no time to waste. Action on the scale required wasn't the sort of thing I should take on alone and so I reached out to Anna. After half-an-hour of cursing she agreed that any truce we might have formed needed to be set aside.

  While the Beryl and the Chalcedony were te
mpting targets, our first concern had to be the crysnukes. They were sufficient to wipe the planet’s surface clean, and I couldn't be certain what effect that amount of crystal-infused radiation would have on even our most powerful of healers.

  The crynukes were also too big an opportunity to pass up. Vinci had turned towards them because of their vast destructive potential and that wasn't a lie. I could have set the Juggernauts towards those sites, or sent in strike teams.

  Both approaches had their risks. Sending in the Juggernauts was slow and Vinci would have plenty of time to launch the missiles, if that was her intent. With her rocket not yet ready she may trigger the missiles in their silos, and it wasn't beyond her to have already built herself some sort of hardened bunker to hide away from the apocalypse just in case.

  Sending in strike teams caused a similar concern. It would be all of our strongest people in one place and if she decided to detonate those missiles on the ground Vinci could all but ensure her eventual victory in the conflict to come.

  Neither option appealed, but there were others.

  One important factor to consider was that Vinci wasn't necessarily wrong. These weapons might be just what were required to take on the shell-ships. The Venusians did appear to use Bio-tech just as I did, and the fact that these weapons were a threat to me meant that they would likely cause them difficulties as well.

  That didn't just go for the facilities on the surface. In her plans to exterminate all life on Earth, Vinci might have opened an opportunity for us to win this war.

  Project L9 was one from the archives, the spore bomb. My original thought had been to release it over a battlefield of corpses. Spores would drift down and convert the Bio-matter of the bodies into mobile weapon platforms.

  At the time it had been too slow to be effective in battles, and I'd never revisited the project as my Bio-matter reclamation protocols were already so efficient. The dead were quickly reclaimed and channeled back into the growth vats.

  Still, it was just what I needed here. I didn't need to destroy these missiles, I needed to re-purpose them. Take control and in some cases modify.

  I could package my original spore bomb design around a highly compact cylinder of Bio-matter with a wide dispersal, assuring my spores had the fuel they needed to create the desired changes.

  I didn't need to ponder the possibilities, I could test them. Sylax had prepared a few missiles before she went missing, I fitted them with crystal cores just as the photographs had shown Vinci doing.

  Then I tested my design in a warehouse where the missiles were stored.

  The initial explosion of the spore bomb was a gray cloud. It looked like a gentle rain of ash drifting to the floor.

  It wasn't aimless drifting. These spores were created to seek out rocket fuel, their drifting drawing them towards the intake jets of the missiles where they latched on and began to grow.

  Fueled by the compacted Bio-matter in the air they grew quickly, vines erupting through ignition and fire control to lay claim to the flight systems. Whatever the missile programming told it now, they would fire for nobody but me. The spores were doing their work.

  Mossy growths erupted along the missile electronics, moving towards the central processor and breaking all the connections surrounding it. The missiles would no longer respond to orders to detonate. All-in-all it had taken thirty-three seconds from the original spore bomb eruption.

  I wasn't done.

  The moss covering the processor continued to grow, running nerves through the missiles' length and replacing the mechanical control systems with an organic one. With the uranium still within the shielded core the biological elements were getting minimal radiation exposure, nothing that accelerated healing couldn't handle.

  For several of the missiles that would be enough. I could now control, launch and detonate at will. Vinci couldn't use them against me—and I could use them against the shell-ships.

  I had grander plans. Most would go through further transformation. Cilia dipped into the crystal core and began to siphon crystal dust to the thrusters. Yet other growths erupted on the surface of the missile, splotchy and irregular at first, but growing swiftly into a uniform coating of Bio-armor.

  It was a specially formulated blend, not meant so much to handle weapons fire but thin layers of heat-resistant shell.

  My Juggernauts might eventually be suitable for space, but these missiles would be my first space-faring vessels. With the heat resistant armor coating they should be able to survive the journey into the atmosphere, fueled by rockets supercharged with crystal dust.

  The problem of the orbital Venusians couldn’t be ignored just because Vinci was a sociopath. These missiles could reach them. Reach them and more.

  Based on the photos I counted that Vinci had two hundred and three missiles. It was tremendous overkill.

  Nine vessels in orbit, nine shell-ships below. That was eighteen missiles, I'd keep one in reserve for each target just in case, making it thirty-six.

  That left me one hundred and sixty-seven missiles, an embarrassment of destructive riches.

  I didn't want them on Earth. They were a threat to me and everything I built here. How fortunate that I had enemies who weren't on Earth.

  Fifteen missiles with enhanced intelligence cores to hunt and kill the Venusian super-ships returning to their home world. One hundred and fifty-two for Venus itself.

  I'd make sure they had communication capabilities, and kill switches. The Venusians hadn't tried to talk with us yet. Perhaps they finally would and we could give them more of a choice than they'd given us. Join the empire or die.

  29

  Timing was a key part of this strike. It wouldn't take Vinci long to realize what was happening and take action. If she had Warmonger watching, he might detonate the missiles instantly.

  It could seem that time was on her side, but I had King Boreas.

  There were three facilities holding the crysnukes and his temporal pausing aura was limited, so I needed to teleport him between the facilities. I'd observed the timing of his aura during the attack on the Helix and built a good profile.

  Annas and King Boreas along with a dozen spore bombs teleported into the first facility. My mind was growing muddled as time crawled to a stop shutting me off from many of my processes.

  Most of the missiles had their processors corrupted by the time I teleported Boreas and a new batch of Annas with spore bombs to the second facility.

  The window of moving time shifted. The almost completed spores and missiles in the first facility were frozen while the ones here had their own thirty seconds of growth. We repeated this method in the third location.

  When time unfroze it was only nanoseconds until the missiles got launch commands. It took a whole seven seconds for these to be determined a failure and detonation commands to be given. It was too late, the missiles were mine.

  A few were warming up as Annas tore off the roofs.

  Ideally, I'd have gotten them to a proper launchpad, but time was going to be limited.

  Vinci was calling. I was a multi-tasker, I could take it.

  "While I can't really blame you for hating your own species, you do seem unusually driven to make them extinct," I said.

  "I offered you every option to get on the right side of this. I would have again. I don't want to use them," Vinci said.

  Mechs were swarming outside the facilities and the Annas went on the defensive.

  "You aren't their target. I'm going to be hitting the shell-ships and the craft in orbit," I said.

  "They don't have the range for that, I checked," Vinci said.

  "They do when you're a SCIENCE obsessed super-computer and not a factory manager with delusions of adequacy."

  The first missiles were ready. I launched, these would be the ones hitting the shell-ships.

  The heat-resistant Bio-armor on the space-faring ones was almost ready.

  "They won't survive the atmosphere," Vinci said.

  "Again, s
mart, stupid. It matters. The rest are going to Venus."

  "And you call me genocidal."

  "Xenocidal is more accurate and they'll get the same choice you have. It is time to get on the right side of this," I said.

  Vinci laughed, a humorless sound. "Do you still think you are the right choice? A mad computer with a billion human drones she tirelessly experiments on? There are humans out there who left Earth and they'll be horrified by what has become of their home and the creature that took it."

  There might be some truth to that, although Anna was empress and she was human. Well, by a broad definition she was human.

  The missiles were prepared. The spores hadn't worked perfectly, seventeen missiles had to be scrapped. Still, it was enough for my purposes.

  I launched them and the sky was filled with new stars headed into the heavens.

  Despite Vinci's words her mechs were holding off. They could have intercepted and probably gotten a few. We both wanted the Venusians gone though, and for all this might signal renewed hostilities between us and Vinci, we still had our common foe.

  "My people are happy, you could be happy. You've cut yourself off from everything and everyone," I said.

  Vinci gave another of those dark laughs. "Always the way isn't it? Everyone sees the problem and nobody does anything about it. The Scholarium was always about feeding on itself, always a new war. It was inefficient, I was going to rise above it and stop it. Be better."

  "You are self-destructive, unlikable, and in desperate need of the knowledge that there are colors besides gray, but even I've never been able to argue with your efficiency. You stop war by stopping fighting," I said.

  The first missiles were finding their targets in the shell-ships. Mushroom clouds bloomed as a result. I wouldn't know if they had succeeded in their strikes, not immediately.

  Vinci said bitterly, "But you're the system now. You think you defeated the Scholarium, but really you've just risen to the top of it and brought the world with you. If I want to break the system, I have to break you. But if I do that, then I'm the thing that needs to be destroyed. You want to do the universe a favor? Turn the rest of those bombs on us."