“Down where?” I asked.
“Hugging the surface of Venus.”
I lifted myself off the couch. Sandra’s body was tossed up and out of the way. I knew she was too tough to be hurt. She sank back down on the couch, moaned in protest and buried her face in the cushions.
“A ship?” I said, hunting for my shoes with fumbling hands. “A Macro ship?”
“No, sir. I think it’s one of ours.”
— 5
I reached my new headquarters building less than three minutes later. In the hallways and stairwells, a few janitorial people scattered at my thundering approach. It was a good thing too, as I might have plowed right through them in my haste. Without nanites in their bodies to harden their flesh, they would have gone down hard.
I hit the doors of my office at a run. They opened with a cracking sound that sounded expensive. I didn’t care. If the mahogany broke, I’d replace it with steel-or better yet a nanite wall.
Major Barrera stood over the table alone. He didn’t look up as I charged in.
“The contact is right there,” he said. “Very close to the ring.”
I saw a yellow-gold collection of pixels on the screen. There was no identifying stream of letters behind it. Our two ships were in close now, they had come down into the upper clouds of sulfuric acid. I’d been in those clouds and it was no picnic, but they were determined to gather all the information they could. I was proud of the pilots. They knew the score, so they’d taken the risk.
“Any radio contact?”
“They haven’t tried yet. They spotted it on their sensors and contacted us first.”
I nodded. “Get me in touch with that unknown vessel,” I ordered. “Patch me through relaying the signal through our ships. We should be able to open a channel down to the surface from here.”
Barrera worked the table. It took him longer than Major Sarin to do the task.
“Where’s Major Sarin?” I asked.
“Getting out of bed. I contacted her second.”
“How far is Venus right now? What kind of propagation delay are we going to have?”
“About a hundred million kilometers range from Earth,” he said. “Any message will take five minutes to get there and five minutes back. Ten minutes round trip to hear the response.”
“I’ll send the message blind, then. Send this: Unknown contact on Venus, please respond and indicate your intent. You are not authorized to be in this region. If you are damaging Star Force equipment, you will be held accountable.”
Major Barrera glanced up at me. “Do we want to start off with a threatening position, sir?”
“Just send it. If the ship is one of ours I’m definitely in a threatening mood.”
The signal went out, and we waited for the response. Major Sarin trotted in as we waited and we briefed her on the situation. She took over communications and Major Barrera went back to whipping people out of bed. We soon had staffers wandering the top floor, looking bleary and worried at the same time. Donuts, coffee and bacon arrived just in time, and I dug in.
While sipping the coffee and chewing a piece of bacon, I continued to stare at the screen. Two more mines had gone off the board since I’d sent out the message. Out of roughly fifteen hundred mines, we were down to about six hundred now. We could rebuild them, but it would take time to get them out there.
I happened to glance back out on the ledge outside. There was Sandra, on the other side of that thick glass, watching us. For the first time since we’d returned from deep space, she looked worried.
Crow was the last man on deck as usual. By then, the response was due back from Venus, if they were going to respond. Finally, it came in.
“Hello? Colonel Riggs? Is that your voice? I’m authorized to be here. You gave me that authorization.”
Everyone exchanged glances. We all knew the voice. It was Marvin.
On our fateful return journey from Helios and Eden, we’d rebelled against our machine masters, the Macros. We’d formed an informal alliance with other biotic races we met along the way, including the Centaurs, a herd people with an odd outlook on life. I’d asked for an exchange of information, and they’d sent me the neural contents of a grand old brainbox. It was so full of petabytes of information, we’d barely been able to build a brainbox big enough to hold the download. Unfortunately, we’d had to retreat from the Eden star system before we could complete the transmission.
What we’d gotten after that aborted download became known as Marvin. He was a genius-with gaps. His knowledge and personality weren’t complete. He had set about helping us, however, with translation duties and the like. I’d given him a few robotic pieces to make him self-mobile, and he’d added more of his own design. After we’d returned to Earth, I’d honored my bargain with him, giving him a spacefaring body.
Apparently, keeping my bargain with him had come back to bite me in the ass. I gripped my headset and pressed it into my cheek. I wanted to apply enough pressure to destroy it, but I resisted the temptation.
“Marvin,” I began as calmly as I could, “this is Colonel Riggs. We are monitoring your activities. You have disabled a large number of our mines on Venus. You do not have the authority to do so. You will cease and desist, immediately. In addition, you will begin reactivating the mines you turned off.”
When I’d finished and transmitted the message, Crow let loose with a long, nasty laugh.
“I enjoy a good joke as much as the next bloke, but this is too much, Kyle!” he cackled. “Hoist by your own petard, eh mate? Such a perfect metaphor, only this time it seems the petards are being turned into duds by your pet robot.”
I ignored him with difficulty. Major Sarin, sensing my mood, raised her hand slowly. I gestured impatiently for her to speak.
“I think we can stand down our full alert now, sir,” she said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Well-because there isn’t any threat. It’s just Marvin, turning off the mines so he could go through the ring. Right?”
I shook my head. “Marvin has the same onboard codes as the rest of us. He doesn’t need to deactivate the mines to go through the ring. He can sail right by the minefield just like any Star Force ship.”
“What’s he doing, then?”
“I have no idea.”
“You’ve got that right!” Crow hooted at me. He walked over to the breakfast tray I’d had wheeled in and served himself some coffee. He continued muttering and chuckling to himself, stuffing croissants into his mouth. “I almost soiled myself when the call came in from Barrera. You lot really should verify your nonsense before you hit the panic button.”
I gave him a dark glance, then returned my attention to the big screen. “Have the mines stopped being deactivated? How many do we have left?”
“Our sensors will take five minutes to update the count of mines, sir,” Sarin said. “I can tell you the orbital field is intact. Eighty-five percent of the mines laid on the surface around the ring, however, have been deactivated.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the horror of the situation sink in. Not for the first time, I wondered if I should have destroyed Marvin upon our return to Earth. I’d felt some form of loyalty toward him, and had treated him like a person. Had that been a mistake? He was a machine, after all. No matter how sophisticated, he was not alive. Perhaps this had always been the error biotics had made in the past when they accidentally created their own replacements. I could imagine working for long decades to craft a human-like intelligence, then feeling attached to it-defending its mistakes exactly as one would a child. But what if this immortal, alien intelligence turned out to be a killer? Or in Marvin’s case, it was just too smart, inquisitive and independent to be trusted in the same universe with the rest of us?
I looked at the digital clock over Crow’s tall, mahogany doors. It wasn’t even five a. m. yet. Much too early for philosophical introspection.
