The Catalyst

-Chapter 25-


The enemy cruiser had lost velocity in its efforts to avoid our minefield, and had veered onto a less direct course. It now shadowed us on a parallel line. It was still overtaking us, but at a much slower rate. They were cautious now, as I’d given them good cause to be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk them into such a simple trap again. As they kept slowly gaining, their plan seemed clear: get in close, but not directly behind us where we could leave mines in our wake for them to run into. All they had to do was wait to see if the missiles destroyed us. If they didn’t, they could come abreast of us and fire. We would be at a severe disadvantage with no main gun turret. My mines would be useless if we were side by side going fast, and my invasion troops could not cross the void to board a target that was moving faster than they were. We didn’t have assault ships on hand to do an invasion assault in any case, and I needed my last two factories to produce drones to stop the missiles from knocking us out.
Gorski and I worked hard on some mathematical trajectories and timing. We decided to try using the mines anyway. The Macro ship was off to our side, but not that far off. We built a bigger whip-arm, a huge thing as big as the one the Alamo had carried. We set it up outside the breach and fed it mines. We threw the mines out in predicted paths that might get in the way of the cruiser. The mines would be very hard to see out there, floating through space with no propulsion systems active until they sensed the cruiser’s approach and homed in. The problem was that space was big and the enemy ship wasn’t on a perfectly smooth course. They made frequent adjustments. We put out about a thousand mines, but putting them in the right spot was a matter of pure guesswork. The mines were a long shot, but it was the only shot I had.
If Sandra had been around, I knew she would have scolded me for polluting this region of space with deadly mines. Who knew how many lives I’d just ended in the distant future? I had to admit, it was somewhat irresponsible, but this was a matter of survival. The environment of the Helios star system could get cleaned up in peacetime—if there was any peace out here.
While I worked to defeat the Macros who stalked us, my team kept busy as well. First, they moved the medical brick, gently lowering it down into the widened breach and into newly built hold. The area around the breach had once been a storage facility for Macro troops, as far as we could determine. It had hundreds of berths that were about the right size for a dormant Macro marine to crouch.
Looking at the power outlets that were at every station, I thought our first guess might have been wrong. Perhaps this was what passed for a mess hall for the Macros. In any case, we took it over, ripped out the walls, widened the breach in the hull and used the big new nanite arm on the hull to move our bricks into the cruiser one at a time down. 
I had to admit, when I finally did stretch out in the first sleeping brick the big arm brought down into the cruiser’s interior, it felt a lot safer and more comfortable to be inside the ship. Out on the open hull the G-forces lifted my lips into a permanent snarl when I tried to rest. Here, inside the range of the inertial dampeners, I felt blissfully normal when I laid down.
When other marines came in to get some shuteye in shifts, they were universally startled to see their commander resting on one of the bunks. I didn’t care enough to open my eyes when they huffed and whispered. I had reached that special point of fatigue where one just doesn’t worry anymore about their surroundings. I could have slept on train tracks if I had to.
I had strange dreams. That’s not unusual for me. My dreams had been haunted back on Earth before any of this alien invasion funny-business even got started. But now that my family had all been exchanged for ghosts, my dreams were positively wild. I dreamt that the Blues, Sandra and the Macros were all in a conspiracy to give me a surprise party back at my old farm. I tried to talk them out of it, to tell them they needn’t bother. I knew all about the party and didn’t like surprises in any case. They just smiled knowingly and assured me they had a real surprise for me. One I’d never expect.
I never got to the surprise, but I caught a glimpse of it. In a pit I saw a threshing machine that devoured innocent folk, including Worms, Centaurs and humans. The threshing machine was like a giant Macro with a head that resembled whirling lawnmower blades. Bodies kept being drawn into it and churned to bloody pulp.
I awoke with a gasp—at least it wasn’t a girlish scream. I thought about the dream briefly, and wondered if the threshing machine was supposed to represent the Macros, my own bad choices, or the cold universe itself. I wondered what some psychobabbler would have thought. I supposed it didn’t matter.
A dozen marines snored all around me in the dimly-lit brick. I crept out through the airlock and staggered around, cursing and searching for coffee. I’d been out for nine and a half hours. Under normal circumstances, I rarely slept for more than six. I felt lazy and sore, as if I’d lain in bed all weekend.
When I had my act together I went to check on Sandra. Carlson avoided me, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Sandra was still breathing. The combination of the nanites in her system and the automatic support systems in her tiny chamber had kept her alive through everything. Her brain wasn’t showing anything other than the lowest level of activity, however. As far as we could tell, she wasn’t even dreaming.
My eyes stung as I looked into the chamber at her nearly perfect form. The nanites had been busy, repairing cell damage as best they could. But her mind could not even dream—was she really alive?
I almost gave up on her and ordered that the proverbial plug be pulled. I couldn’t quite do it, however. My decision—or lack of one—wasn’t entirely emotionally-driven. We were under new circumstances. We discovered new technologies every day, and no one really knew what the nanites were capable of given enough time. I didn’t think she would have given up on me, so I couldn’t give up on her…not yet.
The corpsman watched me go, but said nothing. I exited through the airlock and felt all the weight of command on my shoulders again. I checked our stocks of weapons, including the new drones and the magnetic mines I’d had built. I’d deployed about half my mines, keeping the rest in reserve for a trap when we next went through a ring. Neither the supply of drones or mines was adequate, but we only had two factories left. I’d have to use ordinance sparingly.
The missiles were not catching up too quickly, that was the good news from my combination bridge/engine room. Our best computer model suggested the missiles had avoided the minefield and then changed course to pursue us, setting a pace that would slowly overtake us. Then they’d shut off their tiny engines and dropped off our boards. They were too small and too far away for our limited sensors to detect with radar scans. We knew they were still out there, and could predict their paths with precision. They were undoubtedly saving fuel to reorient and aim with more accuracy when they got closer. We expected they would perform a last minute burn when they were in range, making themselves harder to hit.
In any case, I had a couple of days to prepare while the missiles silently chased us. As long as they didn’t reappear on our screens, firing their jets again, we had a little time. After walking all over the cruiser and seeing most of my marines were engaged in useful projects involving welding guns and nanite repair tubes, I decided I could spare a moment to work with the knowledgebase the Centaurs has seen fit to send me.
We had put the massive download into a fresh brainbox, as it was basically an image of the neural chain structure of a similar box in the hands of the Centaurs. These brainboxes were like old hard drives lying around in household computers—they tended to be clogged with ‘stuff’. In this case, however, the stuff was actually useful.
The brainbox image was a very large one. I couldn’t recall ever having seen the like of it. With brainboxes, increasing capacity was done easily by adding more of the correct variety of nanites. Unfortunately, the larger the structure became, the slower and more unpredictably it behaved. It was rather like having a full computer disk that needed defragmenting.
I had to empty most of production barrel of nanites into the biggest brainbox I’d ever set up to hold everything the Centaurs had sent. Even then, I knew the transmission had not been complete, and thus the neural system image may not function.
“How much data are we talking, total?” I asked Gorski.
He grinned proudly. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “About four hundred petabytes.”
I blinked. It was a staggering amount of data. A petabyte was a thousand terabytes, and each terabyte was a trillion bytes of information.
“You’re right, I don’t believe it,” I said.
Gorski laughed. “I’ve got the numbers to prove it. We certainly had our receivers churning. We added every nanite we had on hand to the box, and cannibalized a few others to increase the capacity. It still wasn’t enough and there wasn’t enough time to catch it all in any case.”
I shook my head and stared with marveling eyes at the box. It was big, physically bigger than any brainbox I’d ever seen. Usually, a brainbox was about a three or four inch cube. This one looked big enough to hold a basketball. But it still hadn’t been enough.
“Can I talk to it yet?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s ready. We have speakers hooked up to it, and basic sensors. It can hear us now—it knows we are talking about it.”
I stared at the box, which was truly alien in nature. Sandra hadn’t liked the relatively small, unintelligent brainboxes we’d used to control our laser turrets back on Andros Island. I knew she would really hate this thing. It felt a little creepy to me as well. A huge mentality captive in a box. It had a personality, I was sure. All the big ones did. But it would be a personality devoid of human contact. It would be something mixed with Centaurs, Blues and the odd twist of the Nanos themselves. Really, I had no idea what to expect. I only hoped I wouldn’t be talking about herd honor and the sky all night.
To remove distractions from the environment, I took the brainbox with its independent power supply and I/O systems to a part of the ship none of my crew liked to venture into. It was a region referred to by my marines as ‘the weird zone’. We really had no idea what these chambers were for, but I had my suspicions. They looked similar to the Macro labs I’d discovered long ago on the invasion ship, where I’d once met up with a Worm under torment and dissection. I’d killed the Worm out of mercy on a laboratory table that looked remarkably similar to the ones in the weird zone.
There were tanks of liquid in the zone, big ones. Something organic bubbled inside. We weren’t sure what it was or what purpose it might have, so we’d left it the hell alone. The tanks weren’t designed as humans would have done: instead of sitting in rows on the floor, they hung bulbously from the ceiling. Straps and hoses connected to them, running off into the rest of the ship. There were electrodes planted here and there, but those had stayed in the off position since we’d boarded, all except for one that still buzzed and crackled now and then. I wasn’t sure what the one active electrode was for, so I didn’t touch it. I could tell it was occasionally zapping the bubbling mess inside the bag-like tanks of soupy liquid. Maybe the electrodes were keeping the soup alive. Maybe they were slowly killing it. I was damned if I knew which.
Some thought the tanks were full of foodstuffs and that the organic soup was a slurry of bacteria cultures. Gorski thought they were biotic colonies of some kind—like an undersea reef captured in a mass of shivering polymer bags. Once in a while a droplet of condensation rolled off the bags and plopped to the floor.
I didn’t know what they were, but I knew when I set up the Centaur brainbox there that no one would come in to bother me. No one liked to go near the place. I could understand that. You had the feeling the stuff in the tanks knew you were there somehow. It was a creepy feeling. Call me paranoid, but I never turned my back on those tanks.
I hooked up the I/O ports to a set of speakers and a tiny microphone. “Hello,” I said to the brainbox experimentally.
Silence.
“We are alone here, do you want to talk?” I asked.
“No,” said the box.
I snorted, and had to stop myself from chuckling. This box had a lot to tell me. We had to get off on the right foot. Laughing at it wasn’t going to help.
“Is something wrong?” I asked gently.
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong?”
There was a hesitation. “I don’t know who I’m talking to.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I smiled quietly. I was already bemused by this box’s personality. It seemed suspicious. “I should introduce myself. I’m Colonel Kyle Riggs.”
“That is not helpful,” the box complained.
“Are you aware of recent events? Of the battle with the Macros? Of human participation in that battle?”
“Yes. Yes. No.”
I thought about that. Maybe it was a good thing if it didn’t know we’d blown a hole in the Centaur ‘sky’ and let all the air out.
“I talked with the Centaurs—those who, ah, raised you. They sent you to me. Were you aware of that?”
“Imprecise reference: that.”
I nodded to myself. Now it sounded more like a Nano brainbox. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that at least it wasn’t talking like the Centaurs. They were difficult to communicate with. “Are you aware the Centaurs sent you to me?”
“Unknown reference: Centaurs. Two uses logged with no improvement in coherency of the reference.”
“Hmm,” I said. “The Centaurs are the furred quadrupeds that I presume assembled you. They live in orbital structures and—”
“Reference classified,” the brainbox said, interrupting me. “Collating previous input. Answer to previous question: I know the Centaurs transmitted my awareness to an alien infestation. Request for clarification: does this infestation refer to itself as ‘human’?”
“Ah yes, I suppose we do,” I said, trying not to get annoyed. This thing was rude. The Centaurs might have been bizarre and obtuse, but they were never rude.
“Reference ‘human’ classified.”
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. So far, it had gotten two pieces of information out of me, while I’d gotten virtually nothing out of it. What did they call that when scoring tennis? Love-thirty?
I was puzzled. This box should know about my conversations with the Centaurs. I was certain I had used a Nano box to converse with the Centaurs as a translator. In fact, this should be the exact system image they’d used to translate. The box clearly had a grasp of human language, as we were communicating in English. If it had done the translation, why would it have such a gap in its knowledge of current events?
I didn’t have to dig long in my own fuzzy mind to come up with a theory: Gorski had said the box transfer wasn’t complete. Not everything had made it across in the transmission, so it had gaps in its knowledge. It was an incomplete system image of the original Centaur brainbox.
I shook my head with regret. I would like to have had the entire transmission and thus the entire mind the Centaur’s had given me. Who knew what invaluable information it was missing? If I’d managed to kill all four of the Macro cruisers with the mines, I would have considered going back through the ring to get the rest of the transfer. With the last cruiser on my tail however, I didn’t dare do anything but run.
“You said before that you didn’t want to talk,” I said. “Why was that?”
“Answer previously provided. It is unchanged.”
Rude again, I thought. What had it said was wrong? That it didn’t know who it was talking to…
“I’ve identified myself as Colonel Kyle Riggs,” I said.
“Identification meaningless. Audio-only input prevents thorough classification.”
I frowned. It was really into classifying things. “Audio-only input? What other input would you like?”
“Visual, tactile and olfactory are standard.”
I made a surprised expression the thing in the box couldn’t see. It didn’t like being blind. Apparently, the Centaurs had more than speakers and microphones hooked up to their brainboxes. In a diplomatic effort, I called for a set of constructive nanites and a surveillance camera. I rigged up two arms for it, one it could reach out with and the second it could use to operate and power the camera. I couldn’t think of anything I could use to give it a nose, so I didn’t bother trying.
When I gave it a strand of constructive nanites, I signaled the marines who had delivered them in a plastic jar to stay. For all I knew, this thing would try to choke me with that skinny little arm, using it like a wire garrote. Everything went well, however, and soon the thing had two small arms. One held up the camera and operated it. A silver feedline of data streamed from the camera down into the box. Another silvery line fed the camera a trickle of power. The black hand held the camera aloft, reminding me of an ostrich’s head with a single, big eye. It moved around, aiming the camera precisely and panning slowly. I watched as it took in the contents of the room and my image as well.
“Happy now?” I asked.
“Unclear reference.”
“Are you satisfied with your sensory input?”
“All components are substandard. Visual acuity in particular is limited, with a narrow field of view and an exceptionally slow frame rate.”
Great, I thought. I’d built myself a prima-donna robot.