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
