Extinction

satellite. In the past, I would have been able to order the ship to reorient itself so that the engines were out of the way and didn’t cause signal interference. Now, however, I knew without asking that my request would be denied.

I was fortunate enough to get a signal almost immediately. I requested a voice connection, and got it. General Kerr was on the other end within a minute or two. No doubt he’d been crapping in his coffee down there, as he liked to say.

“Riggs? Your ships have broken off and are moving away. Is there a new threat? What’s going on up there? Report.”

“General, I’m sorry about the break in communications,” I said. I briefly explained that the Nanos had decided their mission was a success and were heading off to ‘save’ another world. He was almost as stunned as I was.

“So… you’re headed out into space? You’re leaving us defenseless? We’ve put millions-no billions of taxpayer dollars into your amateur army, Riggs!”

“Sir, we’re not in control of our ships.”

“Then get control of them,” he snapped. “If you can’t do it, no one can. Kerr out.”

I nodded at the SCU. Classic Kerr. All love and biscuits, that man.

I stared at the forward wall. Earth’s gray disk was long gone now, I think it had slipped somewhere underneath my easy-chair. There was nothing but silvery wall and bubble-like lumps of nanite excrement, or whatever it was they used to make metallic things. Hundreds of golden beetles followed me. We all crawled toward nothing.

One of my lights went out then. It was the one over my armchair, which I used for reading. I got up and checked the bulb. It seemed fine, and worked in other sockets. I chewed my lip and thought about asking the ship about it. I decided not to. Why speed up the process? Clearly, the ship had decided to stop following my standing orders. The ship would reassign nanites to other purposes as they were needed. It was only a matter of time until I was left sitting in a dim, quiet room. How long would it be before the ship didn’t bother to update my view screen on the forward wall? How long before it didn’t bother to respond to me at all?

I knew now exactly how the centaur people had felt. They had been carried away, just like this, from their homeworld to Earth. Had they known what was in store for them? Probably. There was no reason to think their world had been the first the Nanos had attempted to ‘save’. At least, I told myself, in my case the mission had been a success, not a failure. The Nanos and humanity had kept the Macros at bay. We had at least managed to postpone the destruction of my world.

I frowned, thinking of our arrangement with the Macros. “Alamo?” I asked tentatively. There was no response. I drew in a deep breath. I had to give it a try.

“Alamo, the Earth has not been saved. We have failed in our mission.”

There was no response for several long seconds. Had the ship’s brainbox moved on to more important things? Perhaps it was resetting its language loops, building a new set of neural patterns for the next race it planned to torment.

“The primary mission has been accomplished,” the voice said at last.

I smiled faintly. My bait had worked. “No, the mission has failed. You have failed the mission.”

“The primary mission required the defeat of the enemy. Primary mission parameters have been met.”

“The enemy has withdrawn, but will be back in one year. That is not victory.”

“A negotiated peace was reached.”

“No. You have broken the peace. I promised them they would have nanite-filled troops to fight for them. Nano forces have abandoned us. They have no interest in normal human troops.”

“Reproductive units were left behind on Earth. Troops can be processed to fulfill the requirements of the truce. Weapons can be created to arm them. All required systems are functional.”

I realized the reproductive units the ship was talking about were the Nano factories I’d set up on Andros Island. The Alamo was a clever monster. Earth was capable of building the required army with them. I thought furiously, and soon came up with an argument.

“But they don’t know about the truce,” I pointed out. “No one on Earth does. I didn’t tell them. They don’t know how to talk to the Macros, either. Only I do.”

The Alamo was silent for a time. I glanced up at the forward wall. What I saw there made me smile. My ship had stopped moving. My little, metallic-green bump separated from the golden ones and fell behind them. The others all drifted away from me. I might see Sandra again, after all.

“You will communicate the information to your military,” said the ship.

“And if I refuse?”

“You will be coerced.”

The floor began heating. I wore shoes, but I could feel it anyway. I knew the nanites could heat the room up to a thousand degrees if they wanted to. Hot enough to light my carpet and my shoes-and eventually my hair-on fire.

“All right,” I said unconcernedly. I walked over to the SCU. Without even sitting down, I put a quick-pumping fist through it. I cracked the coffee table computer underneath in half as well, shattering the screen and shorting it out. Blood welled up and ran down my cut-up arms a few seconds later.

A dozen little black arms flew out of the walls and restrained me. I grinned. At least the nanites in my body hadn’t abandoned me yet. Bare-handed, I would have had a heck of a time destroying the radio before the ship had latched onto me.

“I’m sorry, there seems to have been a malfunction,” I said calmly.

“You have damaged mission-critical equipment.”

“By accident,” I said with certainty. “Check your records. Biotic units sometimes break things without intending to. These events occur at random, unpredictable intervals.”

The ship hesitated. I hoped it would burn a nano-chain or two looking that one up and calculating the probabilities. In the meantime, the floor began to cool.

“You will communicate the information to your military,” said the ship.

“I can’t do that from up here.”

“You will be returned to your base of operations.”

I grinned at the walls. “Great idea.”

The ship made no reply.

The little black arms held onto me all the way down to Earth. I had plenty of time to watch the forward wall. I could barely turn my head to do anything else. I noticed something interesting. Another of the ships, a single golden beetle among the hundreds, broke off and returned to Earth, trailing my contact.

I chuckled. Someone else had figured out a way to avoid a one-way trip to Rigel, or whichever star system was next on the Nanos’ optimal path. My grin faded as I watched hundreds of others continue to slide up the wall and drift away to nothing. I realized that each of those contacts carried one or more panicked human beings, all of whom were headed for certain death on an alien world.

And there was nothing I could do for them. Nothing at all.

I became angry, sitting there in on my couch, held down by a dozen little arms. I had a lot of things to be angry about. This ship had killed my kids. I’d never forgotten that, but I’d accepted it, to some extent. The ship itself was a tool, after all. A very complex, almost intelligent tool, but a tool nonetheless. It made no sense to be angry with a tool. Back home on Earth, once every year or so, my computer would get a virus that would slip past all my defenses. Usually, the infection was fatal. I would end up reinstalling everything, and I spent many irate hours doing it. But when that annual sequence of events happened, I didn’t curse and rage at the virus. My computer and the software that infected it were, in a way, blameless. The target of my fury was always the creators of the malware. The beings who had knowingly released their binary vandalism upon the world to throw pop-ups in my face, demanding my credit card number.

Similarly, once I had come to understand the nature of the Nano ships, I had a hard time hating them. They were wondrous machines, but they only followed their programming as best they could. If a human got in the way, we were callously crushed, but it was nothing personal.

Now, as I watched, the Nanos were moving to a new phase in their programming. The creators, the ones I called the Blues who had sent out these heartless ships, hadn’t sent them out as emissaries to offer aid and