Wanderers On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 6) Page 17

  “Hey, there’s an unaccompanied Horten and he’s definitely a tourist,” Chance observed, getting up from the table. “Back to work for me. Don’t forget to tell Blythe about the shoes,” she said over her shoulder, timing the move to allow her to bump into the Horten for a fast-track acquaintance.

  “How about a dancing lesson?” Chastity suggested to Paul. “I must have invited Aisha out here a dozen times, but she keeps making excuses, so I figure it’s because you aren’t comfortable dancing.”

  “I dance alright after a couple beers, or at least, I think I do,” Paul replied. “My wife is the only adult on the station I know who hasn’t been out to the mob even once, just to see how the Wanderers live. You’d think with her show she’d be the first one to rush off for a look at a different social structure, but it’s all work and Ailia with her now.”

  “The Vergallian girl is pretty clingy, isn’t she,” Chastity said in sympathy

  “Yeah, but I’m the last one who can hold it against her,” Paul admitted. “I don’t think I let Joe out of my sight for months after he pulled me out of the wreckage of the mining outpost when I was her age. He even switched with a pilot to skip a drop because the whole platoon was afraid I’d bang my head on the hull until my skull broke. I guess I acted out a lot when I was scared.” Paul paused a moment, thinking about the parallels between his own life and that of his new foster daughter. “Ailia just sort of collapses and cries silently, which is even worse.”

  “She’ll grow out of it soon, kids are tough,” Chastity said. “If you don’t need the practice, how about a dance to make Marcus jealous?”

  “I haven’t even had one beer yet,” Paul reminded her. “Besides, anybody can see that he’s crazy about you. Everybody likes him too, except for his, you know.”

  “The work thing,” Chastity said grimly.

  “Yeah, that,” Paul replied. “It’s funny, but with the Zarents, the little genetically engineered fellows who do ship maintenance for the Wanderers, work is recreation for them. At first I wasn’t comfortable around them because I couldn’t help seeing them as slaves and I didn’t want to collaborate with the system. But even though they started life in a lab, they’ve had millions of years to create their own civilization, and who are we to argue with their choices? They need work like we need air, but we don’t think of ourselves as aerobic slaves.”

  “What I don’t understand about Marcus is that he thinks this all makes sense,” Chastity complained, biting her lip in frustration. “You should have heard Dorothy’s class cutting him up at their Career Day. At first, he didn’t even realize that they were laughing at him, and then he couldn’t believe that a bunch of kids were actually looking forward to work.”

  “Maybe you need to find him a job, or better yet, to figure out how he could survive on Union Station without needing your help,” Paul suggested. “He doesn’t really know any way to live other than what he was brought up to do, and he probably thinks of being a Wanderer as a career. In his mind, you’re kind of asking him to give up his career to be your dependant.”

  “Weird,” Chastity said, but she looked thoughtful, and Paul could tell that she was examining the problem from a new angle.

  “Keeping working on him,” Paul advised, as Thomas and Mist glided up to the table. The young clone was happy, but winded, since the whirlpool-style dance forced partners to practically run at times.

  “Marcus said that Dorothy demanded another dance and he couldn’t refuse,” Mist relayed to Chastity, after gulping some fruit juice. “They’re really good.”

  “He’s a fine teacher,” Thomas added. “I observed his technique closely, and I believe I might be overly focused on the technical issues when I’m instructing students at the EarthCent mixers. Of course, I don’t want to mislead my human partners by flirting or revealing too much charm when nothing can come of it in the end.”

  “Somebody’s flirting with my thirteen-year-old daughter?” Joe asked, suddenly looming over the group. He took a seat, but he didn’t have a beer with him since there weren’t any brewers with the mob.

  “Just Marcus,” Chastity explained. “He’s avoiding me.”

  “Did the pile meet the specs?” Paul asked.

  “I didn’t stay for all of the tests, just long enough to get the chief engineer to promise me he’d let one of his kids appear on Aisha’s show. Turns out that Let’s Make Friends is pretty popular with the Wanderers. Those temporary tunnel ships that Stryx Dreel gave the mob pick up the Stryx network as well,” Joe replied.

  “My sister Gwendolyn says that a whole colony ship of the old Empire Gem are coming to Union Station,” Mist informed them suddenly. “She says that they’re going to try to join the Wanderers.”

  “Well, they have no skills, other than telling other people what to do, so they could be a good match,” Chastity mused. “But now that I think about it, Marcus said that the Wanderers don’t let just any colony ship join. It has to be pretty automated.”

  “That’s why they didn’t come as soon as the mob showed up,” Mist replied. “Gwendolyn said that everybody on Gem Prime chipped in, working around the clock the last couple months and installing equipment from the old nutrition drink factories to make the ship self-sufficient. She said that it’s only the, uh, the Gem that wouldn’t learn the new ways who are going.”

  “Kelly said that the Stryx see the Wanderer mobs as a sort of safety valve for the stable species,” Joe commented. “I guess this is a good example.”

  “Intractable,” Mist declared, remembering the word the current Gem ambassador used to describe the remnants of the old Empire elites.

  “That’s a good word,” Joe said. “You’ll have to teach that one to Dorothy. I hope Marcus hasn’t kidnapped her.”

  “They’ve got coffee,” Paul said. “I figured I’d wait until you got here.”

  “I guess I could do with a cup,” Joe replied. “We’ll give the girls another half an hour, and then I want to head home. On the way here from the Drazen cluster, I saw Union Station go black for a moment, looked like some kind of sudden energy drain. I checked in with Libby and she said that everything was fine, but she sounded a bit squirrelly.”

  Eighteen

  Clive, Blythe, Lynx, Thomas and Woojin were all waiting for Kelly when she arrived at the EarthCent Intelligence offices, which were sublet from InstaSitter. The ambassador suspected that Clive had been celebrating before the meeting because he was a shade redder than his usual color and seemed a mite too pleased with himself. Lynx and Woojin looked puzzled, and Blythe was visibly annoyed.

  “If it’s good news, spit it out,” Kelly ordered in her best executive voice. “If it’s bad news, put it in writing.”

  “He’s been drinking with Jeeves,” Blythe said in disgust. “Of course, Jeeves doesn’t drink, so Clive had to do double duty. I suppose we’re lucky they didn’t invite the Effterii to the party.”

  “Jeeves and the Effterii wiped them all out,” Lynx said. “That’s all we’ve gotten out of him so far. He said he didn’t want to have to repeat the whole story when you got here.”

  “In other words, he plans on embellishing, and he’s afraid if he has to tell it twice, he’ll get the details wrong,” Blythe added.

  “What are you talking about?” Kelly demanded. “Who was wiped out by whom?”

  “The Helper AI, or at least, most of their stuff,” Clive said, and then paused to take a sip from his coffee. “Jeeves and the Effterii did it, or rather, they acted like spotters for some of the first generation Stryx who channeled some unimaginable amount of energy into the area. Incredible light show.”

  “You’re starting at the end,” Kelly said in frustration. “Tell me from the beginning.”

  “Pretend we’re a serious intelligence agency for a minute and give us a battle assessment we can use,” Woojin suggested.

  “Alright, alright,” Clive replied, but from the way he sipped greedily at his coffee, Kelly began to suspect that it had been swee
tened with something from a flask. “You know that I brought Jeeves out to Kalthair Two on the Effterii to investigate the Helper AI. We took our time approaching while Jeeves evaluated their technological level, which wasn’t as high as I would have guessed. Higher than humans, obviously, but other than the AI, not much further along than the Gem. They never detected the Effterii, so in the end, they never saw it coming.”

  “Kalthair Two is the system where the Intrepid commune traded their mining claim for ship upgrades?” Kelly asked.

  “Bingo,” Clive confirmed cheerily. “Either the claim extended to the whole asteroid belt or the AI took liberties, because after twenty years or so of mining, it was practically gone.”

  “Gone as in missing?” Lynx asked.

  “Gone as in transmuted into more robots and stuff, though Jeeves didn’t have an accurate measure of the mass and composition of the asteroid belt to start with, so he couldn’t be sure how much of the matter was accounted for,” Clive replied. “He says that from a behavioral standpoint, the Helper AI liked to keep all of its stuff in one place. But he also said he understands humans better than artificial intelligence, so he wouldn’t make odds.”

  “You showed up in this system and found that the Helper AI had processed the asteroid belt into more Helper AI. Then Jeeves called for help and the Stryx destroyed them all?” When Clive didn’t answer immediately because he was sipping his coffee again, Kelly added, “Did he give you a reason?”

  “That’s two questions,” Clive admonished her, actually wagging a finger. Apparently Blythe hadn’t been kidding when she said he’d been drinking for Jeeves as well. “The Stryx didn’t destroy them all. They left the hives alone, though there were only three of those that I saw. It was mainly robots that got blasted, all shapes and sizes, zipping around the vacuum under their own power like army ants or something. But there were also these immense factory things, ten times bigger than the hives even. If you put all the colony ships and habitats in the Wanderer mob together, you might get something half the size of one of those factories.”

  “How do you know they were factories and not something else?” Lynx asked.

  “All metal and fire, with energy bleeding out of the cracks,” Clive recounted, his eyes closed as he focused on the memory. Even though he was seated, losing visual contact with the room affected his balance after weeks in space, not to mention the heavy drinking, and Blythe had to push him upright as he tipped in her direction. She did it roughly.

  “Right,” Clive continued, his eyes snapping open as he pulled himself together. “What was left of the asteroid belt was being guided straight into the maw of this thing, like they were feeding it raw materials. Out the other end came a stream of robots, shooting off in search of more raw materials.” He paused here and gazed sadly into his empty coffee mug, but even if he had a flask on him, he had more sense than to try sneaking a refill under the eyes of his wife.

  “So Jeeves saw that this Helper AI was creating so many robots that they were a threat to the galaxy, and the Stryx vaporized them,” Blythe summed up.

  “No, no,” Clive protested. “It was more selective than that. We hung around spying on them for a week. The Effterii tore around that star like everything else was standing still. There could have been a trillion robots at work along what was left of the asteroid belt, it was mind-boggling. Then we saw a factory thing begin to tear itself apart, like a cell dividing. Jeeves said, ‘That’s it then,’ after which there was a flash, and everything turned into a sort of a glowing halo.”

  “Jeeves killed them all?” Kelly asked in astonishment. “Do the Stryx have a prohibition on over-production of robots or something?”

  “Let me finish,” Clive said. “No, wait. I’ve got to make a pit stop first.” He lurched out of his seat and steadied himself by putting a hand on Blythe’s shoulder. She pointedly ignored him, even though he’d been gone for weeks. After establishing his balance, he strode off to the bathroom, looking only slightly off kilter.

  “It’s a long time to spend in Zero-G,” Woojin said, in defense of their leader. “Even if he put in six hours a day on the exercise equipment, it’s not the same as having weight.”

  “Has anybody spoken to Jeeves since they got back?” Kelly asked. Everybody else at the table shook their heads in the negative.

  “They only got in around twenty minutes ago,” Blythe explained. “He’s better than he was before I pushed him into the shower, but I’m still as much in the dark as you are as to exactly what happened. I think the scale of it all sort of stupefied him. The bourbon hasn’t helped, obviously. I’m still not sure whether he’s celebrating or trying to forget.”

  “Are you uncomfortable with all of this?” Lynx asked her partner solicitously.

  “What?” Thomas said, coming out of his reverie. “Sorry, I just heard from Jeeves, and he shared some pictures with me. I wish I had been there.”

  “But we don’t even know why the Stryx attacked them,” Lynx protested. “I thought you might be sympathetic with the artificial intelligence.”

  “I am,” Thomas replied. “I’m sympathetic with the Stryx artificial intelligence and with the human artificial intelligence, especially me. And if you were paying attention, Clive said they didn’t destroy the AI, just the mechanical agents and factories. Don’t you know the difference between a machine and a sentient?”

  “I’m back!” Clive announced unnecessarily, looking a good deal more cheerful than when he’d left to take care of his business. Kelly’s suspicions again centered on an invisible flask. “So, where did I leave off?”

  “Jeeves and the Effterii just wiped out the robots,” Lynx replied.

  “No, they just acted as spotters,” Clive corrected her. “It’s like the old navies back on Earth used to sneak a guy on shore to direct the fire of the big guns. They could even hit targets that were over the horizon that way.”

  “So from light-years away, the Stryx wiped them out?” Blythe prompted, trying to move Clive forward with his story.

  “Light-years?” Clive laughed. “Thousands of light-years, tens of thousands. Jeeves made it sound like opening point-to-point tunnels for the infinitesimal fraction of a second it took to do the job wasn’t that much of a challenge for the first generation Stryx. It just takes a lot of energy.”

  “So that’s what the power outage last week was about,” Kelly said, putting two and two together. “Joe mentioned he saw the whole station wink out for a moment when he was traveling between Wanderer ships, and when he told me, I realized the lights had dimmed onboard for a second around the same time.”

  “I didn’t even notice,” Blythe said.

  “That must have been Gryph’s contribution,” Clive agreed.

  “What are you all so surprised about?” Thomas asked. “The Stryx found some AI who were making trouble and stopped them.”

  “What trouble?” Lynx said, turning to her partner. “All they did was to help a human commune join the Wanderers.”

  “And maybe they built the ships for that lost Drazen colony and some other biologicals as well,” Woojin added.

  “Building stuff is easy for AI with robots and raw materials to work with,” Thomas said dismissively. “So they made some barter deals where both parties got what they wanted. Is that how you determine what’s good and what’s evil? If I turned all of the humans on Union Station into zombies using some Farling drug, am I still a good guy as long as I paid for it?”

  Everybody stared at the artificial person in surprise. Thomas wasn’t one to argue, much less pick a fight, but he seemed to bristle at the implied criticism of the Stryx’s judgment.

  “You might be a little biased,” Lynx suggested eventually. “After all, Gryph is the one who recognized you as a sentient.”

  “Feh!” Thomas replied, one of his stronger expressions. “I remember telling you when we first met that there’s a reason there are more biologicals than AI around the parts of the galaxy we’re familiar with, and it’s no
t because the Stryx keep wiping the AI out. Most artificial intelligence isn’t stable. It’s not all that surprising when you consider who creates it,” he added, a bit unnecessarily, Kelly thought.

  “Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or should I just hit the sack?” Clive asked. The debate on Stryx ethics came to an immediate halt. “That’s better. After turning most of the metal in the belt into a cloud of plasma, Jeeves asked the Effterii to open up communication with the hive queen, the brains of the Helper AI.”

  “See!” Thomas muttered to Lynx under his breath.

  “It seemed they knew each other already, or of each other, because they skipped over any introductions and just started in with the accusations,” Clive said.

  “They probably negotiated all of that directly,” Thomas pointed out. “If they were talking out loud, it was for your benefit.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Clive admitted. He paused to consider if that affected his story, but decided he was in no shape to figure it out and that it would be best to just report the facts as he remembered them. “Thomas? Is there any chance you can ping Jeeves and ask if he can send you a memory of the conversation, something you can project on the office equipment?”

  “Done,” Thomas said, and a hazy hologram of the Effterii’s bridge appeared floating over the conference table. It was clear that it had been synthesized from a couple of static views, rather than recorded with real holographic equipment, but the audio was the main thing in any case. They could see Clive in the commander’s chair, looking a bit stunned, and Jeeves floating a bit to his side, bobbing and weaving like a young fighter.

  “Stryx!” a voice howled, obviously the hive queen. “You’ve murdered all of my children.”

  “They weren’t children, they were tools,” Jeeves retorted. “You’ve been warned before, but you keep doing the same thing over and over again, as if you expect a different result. One species I know calls that the definition of insanity.”