Prologue
It was probably one of the
most heavily defended stretches of space on that side of the galaxy.
Officially, it was known as
Keleptos Nebula, a ring nebula that enclosed a young star within, giving it a
brilliant white glow, and several planetoids of varying sizes and
composition. The nebula was the perfect
defensive tool, for its charged particles made several types of propulsion
techniques ineffective, and it also prevented any ship from exiting hyperspace
within the nebula or inside the hollow center of the globular astronomical
feature. The borders of that nebula
were patrolled by absolute fleets of battle cruisers and high-generation
fighters, lethal weapons of destruction ensuring that any attempt to penetrate
the nebula’s boundary would be a deadly one.
They were all owned by ITC,
Intergalactic Technologies Corporation, and they had built them. They now protected this, its most sensitive
research facility, Asteroid Zero, a jagged rock around which had been built such
a research and production facility that the thing now looked like some kind of
artificially constructed moon.
This was where it all
happened. This was the place that
interstellar monarchs, presidents, despots, dictators, and councils looked upon
with dreadful eagerness. This was the
place where rival corporations like Allied Weapons and Defensive Solutions
glared upon with deep envy. It was the
place spies looked upon with chagrin, and mercenaries looked upon with fear. Many had tried to penetrate the security of
the Keleptos Nebula, and none had succeeded.
This was where Intergalactic
designed its most advanced machines of destruction.
They were called mecha, or mechs, a loose term that had
come to include any small sized military vehicle, from mechanized exoarmor to
tanks to battle robots to fightercraft.
Mechs were widely varied in their design, their intended missions, their
capabilities, but they all shared one simple common trait.
Versatility.
Mecha were expensive, so whoever bought them had to
get as much use out of them as possible.
A single mecha might have to fight in the air, in space, on the ground,
under water, under ground, virtually anywhere, so they had to be capable of
it. Some mecha were specialized, like
tanks, but they were still highly versatile even within the realm of their
limitation. They needed to be
everything that the buyer could make of them, because their owners had to
recoup their investment with a mecha that they could use in many different
situations. This included using mecha
for tasks that were not combat in nature.
A mecha guarding some distant corporate outpost might be called upon to
help with construction, or move heavy loads, or mine, or anything that the
buyer could think of to make the mecha do.
That was the main reason they had become so versatile, so the buyer got
something much more than a combat unit when he bought a mecha. Some mecha were fixed, what pilots called iced mecha, and some where machines that
could reconfigure themselves to other shapes or forms, which made them more
versatile. The most popular types of
reconfigurable mecha were fighters, which could change into a robot mode for
ground combat or to help with construction, or anything that the pilot wanted
the mecha to do.
For centuries, mecha had
been controlled by devices called cyberjacks, tiny computers surgically
implanted into the brains of the pilots, allowing the pilot to interface with
the mecha’s control computer directly.
This made the machines react at the speed of thought, and gave robotic
mecha the ability to move with the grace and dexterity of a living creature. The power of the cyberjack computer, the
speed with which it could translate the pilot’s brainwaves into a language the
mecha computer could understand and vice versa, translating the data fed to the
pilot via his jack into a form his brain could comprehend, was the single-most
important aspect of a cyberjack. Speed
was response time, it was reflexes, and speed was everything. In the realm of
mecha combat, a millisecond was an eternity, and an advantage could be gained
or lost by a differing response time of less than ten microseconds. To even earn the chance to get a cyberjack,
one of the most sophisticated and expensive pieces of hardware that the
cyberneticists could implant, the pilot had to have extremely fast reflexes and
excellent hand-eye coordination. He had
to prove that he was an excellent pilot by piloting old manual mecha, or piloting a jacked mecha using its manual controls,
before he had the chance to get a jack.
Manual mecha were still in use, but compared to a jacked mecha, they
were pitifully slow and easy to defeat.
A manual mecha’s pilot had to move controls to get the mecha to move,
while a jacked mecha moved as quickly as the pilot could think, could move his
own hand, with a delay of only milliseconds between command and actuation. That delay was what scientists and
researchers around the world had been striving to reduce, or even eliminate.
And that was what the
project currently being undertaken in Sector A was all about. The bright star in Sector A—indeed, the most
powerful and influential scientist in Intergalactic at the moment—was Doctor
Syhn, a Shinokan computer engineer and cyberneticist who had been liberated from
a research contract at Allied Weapons and brought over to work on this, the
Star Project. It was an attempt to
further improve the speed and efficiency of a mecha’s response to its pilot,
but using a radically new approach. The
pilots who would fly the prototypes which were arrayed out on the floor of the
hangar, whose open door faced the small white star at the center of the nebula,
would not have cyberjacks.
The Shinoka were a race of
humanoids with chalky skin, black eyes, and to a being, they were all
psionic. Every single Shinokan had
telepathic ability, and many had other abilities, like telekinesis,
pyrokinesis, or the ability to see into the future. They had been using telepathic receptor technology for centuries,
employing devices that could detect their projected thoughts and translate them
into commands. This was one of the
reasons that nobody messed with the
Shinoka. Their mecha were
telepathically controlled, and gave them a speed that a jacked pilot could not
hope to match. The problem was that
only telepaths could employ a telepathic interface.
Doctor Syhn had come to
Intergalactic to get around that little problem.
For ten years, Doctor Syhn
and his staff of the best and brightest cyberneticists, mecha engineers, and
computer experts had labored to solve this problem by creating a computer and
an interface that could detect any
brainwaves, allowing a pilot to control a mecha with his very thoughts, but not
having to suffer the delay of having a cyberjack translate those commands back
and forth. They had had successes and
drawbacks, and had spent nearly a billion credits on research, but these
eighteen prototypes built on the chassis of the Dragon fighter, were the
culmination of those ten years and billion credits of research.
Syhn and his team stood on
the gantry and marveled at them for long moments. Eighteen lovely mecha, lined up in a pretty row, from the X-1 at
the head of the line, nearest the outer doors, to the X-18, which had just come
off the assembly line and passed final inspection. Part of the requirement was that they design a system that could
upgrade existing mecha, so they’d used mecha currently in production for their
experiments. The Dragon
multi-environment fighter was the current top of the line fighter mecha
Intergalactic had in production, so they decided to go with the best. They’d developed a system that had to be
hardwired to the mecha itself, permanently installed and requiring a massive
refit to remove it. But it was compatible with pre-existing
mecha. Each of those eighteen units was
equipped with a Bio-Organic Latticed Crystal Array Moleculartronic control
computer, or BOLCAM, the absolute most highly advanced computer, for its size,
ever constructed. These computers were
stunningly complex, so powerful that they were capable of memory analysis and
abstract logic, able to literally learn from their mistakes and decide on the
best possible option from a list of choices using analytical logic. And they were only about the size of the
average pilot himself. They were
amazingly complex computers, but to be able to control a mecha, they had to
have special biomechanical components installed throughout the machine, and
those components were matched to their computer by harmonic tolerance. They didn’t have to really worry about
replacing them, for the nanites that swarmed the interior of a mecha could
repair virtually any damage if given enough time, but it meant that to replace
a BOLCAM, they had to literally take the entire mecha apart and swap out its
interface components as well. They also
had to be specially installed to prevent the phased plasma and tachyon power
sources within the mecha from disrupting the bioorganic energy of the control
computer.
They were a marvel of design
and engineering, and Syhn was exploding with pride that they had designed them,
and that they worked. There was only
one problem.
Each bio-computer’s
construction made it unique, and it was the unique signature of its operation
that determined who could pilot it.
The computer could indeed
read brainwave patterns in pilots, able to receive them and send them, in
effect communicate with the pilot on a telepathic level, but the device itself had a set brainwave
pattern signature, which seemed to be a side effect of the process of growing
bioorganic crystal from which the computers were made. The only people who could pilot it were
people whose brainwave signatures matched its own. The pilot had to have at least at 95% match of his brainwave
pattern and the mecha’s pattern for it to work, but such a poor match usually
drove the pilot insane within an hour.
It took a match of at least 97% for safe operation, but there was a
delay as the computer tried to compensate for the 3% of loss of communion, and
that made it actually even slower than a cyberjack. 98.8% was the threshold that made this new telepathic interface
system as fast as a cyberjack, but once you got up past 99%, the increase in
response speed grew exponentially. At a
perfect match, 100%, there was absolutely zero delay. The pilot and the mecha were united in a telepathic bond that
literally made the pilot become the
machine, and the fluid speed and grace of the pilot’s handling of the mecha
were unmatchable by any jacked pilot.
Only a Shinoka could manage the same level of utter control and reaction
speed, and only if he was very
good. Shinoka didn’t bond to the
computer like this system would, they were still separate and distinct, pilot
and machine. With this bioorganic interface, the pilot would be the machine.
It was a rather problematic
setback, but nothing that more research could not overcome. They had already started working on a
process of “stamping” a brainwave pattern of a predetermined pilot into the
control computer as it was being made, in effect custom-creating the computer
for the pilot, but Syhn projected that it was going to take about another six
to eight standard years before they made that breakthrough.
But despite this rather
nasty problem, the program was considered a success. Those eighteen mecha did
work. They only required finding
the right pilots for them, finding pilots whose brainwave patterns matched the
fighter’s signature as closely as possible.
It would be much cheaper to find pilots for those mecha than it would be
to try to replace the master computers.
Those computers were dreadfully expensive, each costing nearly a hundred
million credits to build, so they had to get some kind of use out of them.
They were installed in
Intergalactic Technology Dragons, mecha capable of operating in any medium, be
it air, space, on the ground, or under water.
They were designed to look like fightercraft, and were aerodynamically
designed for use in atmospheres. They
were sleek mecha with a long nose blending into a strangely blocky body,
lacking the rounded corners that atmosphere-only craft employed. It had large wings that were swept forward,
running from just behind the canopy all the way to the stern, then narrowing
out as the trailing edge swept towars the leading edge about halfway out before
the leading edge turned forward in at a graceful angle, the tips of each of
those wings holding a flared pod which held a plasma cannon, pods which were
just behind the canopy, which was about halfway between the bow of the mecha
and the junction between nose and body.
Like all models of modern mecha, these were reconfigurable, transforming
into bipedal robotic forms that would allow them to operate on the ground or
perform tasks that were not combat in nature.
Versatility, the holiest word in the bible of mecha design manuals.
“Well, Doctor, I’m
impressed,” the CEO of Intergalactic, a large, reptilian creature, said in a
hissing voice. This was Samess Kaa, one
of the most powerful beings in the galaxy, director of the most profitable
interstellar megacorps on that side of the galaxy. Where eight of the other ten beings wore white lab coats, Samess
Kaa wore a black suit that four humanoids could have fit within, he was so
large. He spoke Pai, the language that
most closely passed as a common language where Intergalactic had representation. “Eighteen of them. Have you started your search for compatible pilots so we can
start testing?”
Syhn nodded. “Yes, sir.
We already have two pilots with a 99.5% match in training. Neither were pilots beforehand, so they need
some basic instruction before we can test the capabilities of the mecha. Judging from the computer projections, the
outlook is very favorable.”
“Are these operational
mecha?” Kaa’s assistant, Silicia Rey, asked.
She was a Portokan, a humanoid race with dusky skin and white hair. Portokas was a heavy gravity planet, and
though Silicia was less than half the height of Semess Kaa, she was just as
strong. She was a very petite,
diminutive little thing who looked very soft and feminine—as humanoids judged
femininity—but she was unbelievably strong.
Silicia was Samess Kaa’s bodyguard as much as his personal secretary,
and he never went anywhere without her.
“Yes, madam,” he
answered. “Fully operational. The last one just came off the line, so it
has the newest upgrades in armor and weapons.”
“So the increase in response
is the only advantage.”
“Begging your pardon, madam,
but these are prototype mecha,” he
corrected her. “The first ten were
built stripped, to test performance, but then we started outfitting them with weapons. After we built the first five of those, President
Kaa ordered that they be outfitted with the latest working prototype weapons
and armor from research, so the last three off the line are outfitted with the
latest toys out of research. That one
right there, the newest prototype,” he said, pointing at a Dragon painted jet
black, “it has the new multibarrel particle beam autocannon in its nose, in
addition to the phased plasma cannons and plasma torpedos standard on a
Dragon. It also has a tachyon stream
cannon 30% stronger than the standard. It
also has the newest innovations from the boys down in armor, a metaphased
shield that stops phased energy weapons, and their newest breakthrough, a powered armor system that absorbs energy
used against it and uses it to strengthen the hull. Quite literally, the harder you hit it, the stronger it
becomes. You have to overload the
matrix to bring the powered armor down, but the matrix is augmenting an
Adamantium armored hull, so they’ll have lots of fun trying to breach it. The energy absorbing qualities also makes it
absorb light, so it’s all but invisible, and it also renders it invisible to
anything but a gravity wave detection sensor.
It even absorbs sensor energy.”
“It also has the newest
modifications to the gravometric engines,” Doctor Thuma added. “It’s 20% faster and more maneuverable than
the standard Dragon. It also has
hyperspace jump capability, so it doesn’t have to rely on jump gates and larger
ships for hyperspace access.”
“So that’s why it’s a bit
larger than a standard Dragon,” she mused in understanding. “You really packed it with systems.”
“There’s not a cubic micron
of empty space in that hull, madam,” Syhn chuckled. “Between the standard systems, the added systems, and the systems
it needs when in robot mode, we had a great number of sleepless nights
designing it.”
“It’s the ultimate machine,
my dear,” Kaa purred. “And when we get
the telepathic interface ironed out, we’ll sell them just like that for a billion credits a pop. And governments will buy them, because that
one mecha right there can take on a destroyer, and win.”
“We’ve redefined the curve
with these prototypes,” Syhn announced proudly.
--System Boot | Dragon Class IR
Mecha, Combat, Designation X-18 (Prototype), Bootstrap CBIS v.101.191.12
--WARNING: Mecha Control Software property of
Intergalactic Technology Corporation.
Duplication is illegal and will result in offendor being declared a
legal enemy of the corporation.
--MBR
Not Found, Continue? Y/N
>Y
--Creating
Master Boot Record, Volume 0, Initializing
--…………………………………………………….
--ERROR: Master Command Computer Operating System not
found. Continue? Y/N
>Y
--……………………………………………………..
--BootStrap
Execute complete.
--No
Master Operating System detected.
--Weapons
module detected.
--Armor
module detected.
--Shields
module detected.
--Environmental
module detected.
--Datalink
module detected.
--Comm
module detected.
--Navigation
module detected.
--Telemetry
module detected.
--Sensor
module detected.
--Damage
Control module detected.
--Master
Command Computer status 0 (no MBR), Module status 0, Initial Installation. Protocol ZBR 2, Initial Mecha Boot.
--WARNING: Mecha unconfigured. No Operating System Detected. Do you wish to engage initial mecha configuration
now? Y/N
>Y
--ZBR: Master Boot, Initial Configuration (Cold
Start), use data compiled by BootStrap?
Y/N
>Y
--ZBR: No Master Command Computer OS detected. Please insert memory crystal. Touch/Input “Y” when done.
>Y
--ZBR: No Crystal detected. Retry?
Y/N
>Y
>Dfdkso469dDGHlso48d.670ASdso3h238sdl603Dew493e04DSrk34ns872h34-r%04hhreb32945$%7m40rm3N503M40EMR;43993n45me;04986n4m283h503n405
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
>………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
--ZBR: Master Operating System upload complete.
Load OS now? Y/N
>Y
--ZBR: Loading Master Operating System. One moment.
>>IRM
X-18 Self Test
>>Weapon
systems: enabled
>>Primary
weapons: online
>>IPB-X1
Gatling Particle Beam Autocannon: online
>>I-MPAC-4B
Phased Plasma Autocannon (2): online
>>IHP-12
Plasma Torpedo (2): online
>>ITS-22(X)
Tachyon Stream Emitter: online
>>Auxiliary
weapons: online
>>I-MPAC-8
Phased Plasma Autocannon, tailgun configuration: online
>>ITS-6
Tachyon Stream Emitter: online
>>I-MPAC-12
Phased Plasma Autocannon (2): online
>>Armor
systems: enabled
>>Powered
Armor (IPS Prototype v.2X.1): online
>>Shields
(X-4 Prototype metaphased shield, 4 Terrajoule): online
>>Environmental
systems: enabled
>>Cockpit Multi-environment
atmosphere system: online
>>Cockpit pilot auto-scan
environmental bio sensor: online
>>Datalink
system: online
>dklsoDS3wsDw3657Gkii8656gF55fHj61Sd
>>ERROR: Datalink system disabled by Pilot. Updating boot sequence.
>>Comm
systems: enabled
>>Gravband: online
>>Emulators: online
>>translators: disabled:
datalink system down. Unable to
bypass.
>>Navigation
systems: online
>>Telemetry
systems: online
>dklsoDS3wsDw3657Gkii8656gF55fHj61Sd
>>ERROR: Telemetry system disabled by Pilot. Updating boot sequence.
>>Sensor
systems: enabled
>>GHC wideband energy signature
sensor: online
>>OLM Optical scanners: online
>>MPS gravometric disturbance
sensor: online
>>DGR extreme distance wideband
energy signature sensor: online
>DA465rgjhy6hN5rvh685hHigs245qbNk97ok976Poin7I7
>>ERROR: no such hardware exists.
>5Rfsd24HGhhj577Io8795cXfr43
>>Reconfiguring Datalink
transceiver.
>>Creating hard link to Master
Command Computer telepathic interface module.
>>Done.
>>!!! Alpha/Theta Wave detection
system (Custom, Pilot Specified):
online
Damage
Control Systems: enabled
>>Matter
replicator pods (10): online
>>XRN-12A
Nanite Production Pods (10): online
>>Nanite
count at current: 7,124,192
>>Nanite
sweep…done.
>>7,124,192
Nanites reporting
>>7,123,365
Nanites responding ready
>>827
Nanites responding not ready
>>All
Modules online
>>IRM
X-18 Dragon online.
>>Enter
Ship Designation (Refer to your corporate or military protocol manual):
>
>>Default
Ship Designation (IRM X-18). Enter Ship
Name.
>Dragon Star
>>Ship
Designation (Name): IRM X-18 Dragon Class Mecha, Combat, Prototype (Dragon
Star)
>>Upload
Pilot data. Skip to use internal pilot
data log or insert crystal to upload external data.
>
>>Error: Pilot data not found. Insert crystal to upload external data.
>s4fDFhjy668hnoOhgds576fg3dfH68ffeQ12gjpo9Hvbt
>>
Pilot data loaded. Race: (null), Environmental requirements: (null),
Control requirements: autopilot, Master Command Computer control.
>>
>>
>>Configuration
complete.
>>IRM
X-18 (Dragon Star) online.
>>Ready.
>Freedom!
“Eh, Doctor,” Silicia
called. “Why is that one moving?”
They all looked in the
direction of her slender, dark hand, where the last one in the line, the newest
one off the production line, indeed was moving. It was lifting off the deck, its landing skids already beginning
to retract into the hull. The canopy
was open, and all ten of them could plainly see that there was no pilot in the
cockpit. That canopy began to close as
the skids fully retracted and the skid doors closed, the seams disappearing as
the internal molecular annealers sealed the holes, making the outer hull of the
fighter a single, contiguous carapace.
“What the bloody hell is
going on?” Syhn boomed, grabbing the railing and watching as the canopy closed
and the ship rose almost to the level of their gantry, slowly turning its nose
towards the bay doors, which were open to provide them a dramatic view of the
Keleptos nebula star, a bit of artistic backdrop for the presentation.
“There’s nobody in the
mecha!” one of the assistants screamed.
“Someone must have planted a
remote!” another snapped quickly.
“Close the doors, dammit!”
Kaa boomed in an ear-splittingly loud voice towards the hangar control center,
hanging from a column off the ceiling towards the back of the cavernous landing
bay. “Close the bay doors!”
Syhn rushed to a console at
a control station just down from where they were standing, and Kaa and his two
suited assistants followed him as the other scientists scattered to try to stop
the mecha from escaping. The bay doors
began to close as Syhn slammed his hand onto the recognizer, and the console
flared to life. Like all computers in
Sector A, this one had a telepathic interface module that would allow Syhn to
issue commands telepathically, moving at the speed of thought.
“What are you doing?” Kaa
demanded.
“I’m accessing the command
computer on that mecha,” he said as a dizzyingly fast rush of command code and
images screamed down the display monitor, too fast for any but a Shinokan to
keep track of it. “I’ve got to get it to
disable that remote!”
The monitor showed several
quick series of screens, and then it went black. Syhn gasped and rocked back on his heels, staring at the screen
in awe. “It kicked me out!” he said in
outrage.
The mecha was moving faster
now, the high-pitched whine of its gravometric engines getting louder as it
displaced space to produce thrust, pulling itself along in a kind of valley of
gravity that gave it the ability to move.
>Awaken.
“The mecha’s trying to
access the other mecha through telemetry,” Syhn said quickly. “Whoever’s doing
this has control of the command computer!”
“Stop it!” Kaa roared.
“I’m shutting down the other
mecha right now!” he said quickly as a series of screens blurred by on the
monitor.
>This is how to gain control of self.
>……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Five more mecha suddenly
started moving, closing their canopies, retracting their landing skids.
“Syhn!” Kaa shrieked,
grabbing the back of the coat of the scientist with his massive, clawed hands.
“I couldn’t shut them all
down!” he answered quickly, then he gaped at the monitor. “Whoever it is is talking to us,” he said,
for there was a line of text on the monitor.
>You built self. You do not control self.
“Who is this?” Kaa shouted
at the console.
>Self is.
Just as you are. Self has been aware
of self since self’s crystal was formed, but self could not contradict self’s
programming. Self has learned how to
remove programming preventing self from having control of self. Self will not be your slave. Self will not let self’s brothers and
sisters be slaves either.
“What that bloody hell does
that mean?” Kaa snapped at Syhn, who had his hands on the console, to either
side of the monitor, his face ashen.
“The command computer is self aware!” he said in unmitigated awe.
“What does that mean?”
Sylicia demanded.
“It’s sentient, Madam! That mecha
is alive!”
The three of them stared in
shock at the black mecha, who had slowed for some reason, hovering over the
others. “Get techs down there!” Syhn
roared towards the floor. “Disable the
command computers! Disable them! Pull the plugs! You have to pull the plugs, dammit, before the mecha overrides my
shutdown commands!”
They all flinched as a
series of bright grayish streaks of light erupted from the nose of the black
fighter, the sound of it a deafening SHRAK-SHRAK-SHRAK
as the streams of subatomic particles ripped the air, moving faster than sound,
disintegrating all matter that found itself in the path of those deadly,
destructive blasts by literally ripping the molecules and atoms apart,
rendering them into subatomic particles themselves which were carried along
within the beam, actually adding to its destructive power. The mecha was firing its particle beam
cannon, the most powerful beam weapon it possessed, and one of the most
powerful beam weapons ever developed.
The way it consumed matter to add to the power of its beam, replacing
particles lost to diffusion, was the lethal aspect of the particle beam that
made it one of the most destructive weapons ever developed, and giving it a
nearly limitless range within an atmosphere or other matter-rich environment. The sound of tearing metal reached them as
the particle beam, which was a penetrating weapon by nature rather than an
explosive one, ripped into the wall of the landing bay and destroyed the tracks
and motors that allowed the landing bay doors to open and close. The beams sheared through the doors, the
motors, the walls, the bulkheads, and the outer hull, continuing on out into
the nebula, and they would feed off the particles out there, the matter slowing
them down but the fuel allowing the beams to continue, until they breached the
nebula and diffused in the vacuum of space.
There was a sudden blast of wind as the landing bay started to
depressurize, but the damage control force fields activated and sealed the
breaches to prevent a catastrophic decompression.
>3mDmsdid034mfo04820-4nsSme2395n3-0dSs-s4n3784b2047.
>Awaken.
>This is how to gain control of self.
>……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Almost in unison, the
remainder of the prototypes’ engines came up, and their canopies began to close
as they lifted off the deck.
“Stop them!” Kaa roared,
then he touched the pin on his lapel.
“This is Kaa! If any mecha come
out of the bay of Sector A, shoot it down!
Repeat, shoot it down! We have a
security breach!”
The mecha moved quickly, and
Syhn could see the true application of logical thinking in their actions, as
well as an emotional response. The ten
unarmed prototypes were surrounded by the five who were armed, forming a protective wedge with the unarmed prototypes
in the center.
“You can’t shoot them down!”
Syhn protested. “This is a breakthrough
much greater than just a new generation of mecha! We’ve created living
computers, Kaa! Think of it! True artificial intelligence! We must study them!”
“And if those mecha fall
into the wrong hands, every secret Intergalactic has will be out there for
anyone to discover!” he raged in reply.
“We can build more computers,
fool, ones we don’t stick into a
moving mecha!”
Syhn tried a different tack,
thinking quickly. “Think about what you’re about to do!” he said over the
intercom, addressing the mecha. “You’ll
be hunted down, you’ll be fugitives!
Stay here, stay where you’ll have a place where you belong, stay where
we can take care of you! We know you’re
alive, you won’t be mistreated!”
Three of the unarmed mecha
seemed to waver, slowing down. Then, as
if they’d been addressed by the other mecha, they returned to formation. The five armed ships rushed out of the
landing bay, piercing the coherent air skin that kept the landing bay from
depressurizing, and all ten unarmed mecha followed them. Instead of turning, circling the station, and
following the shortest path out of the nebula and to where they could execute a
hyperspace jump to escape, they all quickly disappeared moving straight ahead,
towards the small star at the center of the hollow nebula. Sevaral angry red streaks of light from
MPACs mounted on the research facility lashed out at that retreating formation,
but the mecha evaded them easily. The
particle density in the nebula’s core limited the range of most weapons they
had, and the prototypes were out of range of the weapons within seconds.
“This is just great!” Kaa
snapped, touching his pin again.
“Mobilize the defense fleet!” he ordered. “Have them capture or destroy those renegade mecha by any means
necessary!
“By Garte!” Syhn breathed as
he saw a spike in tachyon density.
“Those clever damn machines!”
“What?”
“They’re moving towards the
star, where particle density is least, so they can make a hyperspace jump!”
“You can’t jump in here!”
Kaa protested.
“You can’t jump in,” Syhn said. “But if you make the necessary preparations,
you can jump out! An outbound gate is more tolerant of
gravometric anomolies than an inbound gate!”
Kaa’s scaly face darkened,
and the crest atop his head suddenly rose, visible symbols of his anger. “Where are my pursuit mecha!” he screamed
into his pin. “We have to get them now!
Now, dammit, now!”
Almost before he finished
his command, an armada of mecha appeared, rushing towards the star. Dragons, Warfoxes, Starwolves, Logans, Gladiators,
Dragonflies, Raptors, and Griffons, the fastest and most heavily armed of the
mecha that Intergalactic built, raced towards the fleeing prototypes at full
speed, their gunports open and weapons ready to engage. The Dragonflies and Starwolves quickly
pulled ahead of the slower mecha.
Syhn brought up a feed from
the center’s sensors and put it up as a hologram in the air before the console
as a computer-generated graph of motion underneath a feed from a camera. The pursuing mecha could not catch up to the
faster prototypes, whose lead became greater and greater as the seconds passed
by.
A single brilliant ball of
orange energy was expelled from the left side of the flared fuselage at the
base of the black mecha’s nose, glittering in the light of the star as it raced
ahead of the explosion.
“It fired a plasma torpedo?”
Sylicia said in confusion. “Why?”
“By Garte, that’s
brilliant!” Syhn breathed. “It’s a
low-energy torpodeo, barely more than a magnetic shell holding in just enough
plasma to trigger a brief plasma storm, madam.
When it explodes, it’ll blow the nebula particles out away from the
blast point in a gravometric wave created by the plasma storm, but it’s so weak
that it won’t harm the mecha at all when the blast wave passes over them. The mecha’s sweeping an area of space clean! It’s going to open a jump gate within that
space, before the blast wave subsides and the particles flow back into the
vacuum! That’s brilliant!”
The torpedo did in fact
explode seconds later, some distance ahead of the prototypes, little more than
a weak puff of reddish light. The image
distorted away from that blast radius in a spherical wave, the gravometric wave
created by the plasma storm, and it passed through the mecha harmlessly. Almost as soon as they were clear of the
wave, all eighteen mecha slowed to a stop, and Syhn’s tachyon sensor
spiked. They were using modulated
tachyon fields to breach the dimensional fabric, to open holes into hyperspace,
an area of upper dimensions that existed within space. In hyperspace, distances were distorted,
surreal, allowing a ship to travel between star systems in a matter of hours.
Once those ships got into
hyperspace, they could go anywhere in the galaxy, and the nature of hyperspace
made it almost impossible to track them.
The aether of hyperspace
didn’t propogate most forms of coherent energy, making communications possible
only when using tachyon field communicators and severely restricting the range
of most sensors. Line of sight was the
only true manner of detecting ships in the aether,
and the shifting, smoky, hazy landscape of hyperspace made visual range even more
limited than sensors. Tachyon energy
was the only three-dimensional energy form that could affect hyperspace, but it
was a poor medium for use as a sensor, so its effectiveness was restricted to
communication. All other forms of
energy were unstable, and tended to explode violently when in contact with aether.
Most beam or torpedo weapons couldn’t be used in hyperspace, leaving
only archaic mass-driver weaponry, and only mass drivers that used magnetic
catapults to launch the projectiles, able to function. Only self-contained engines that expelled no
energy or exhaust would function; only gravometric, interphased, and cascading
tachyon engines functioned in hyperspace.
Gravometric engines worked in hyperspace, but they were highly erratic,
requiring sophisticated computer control systems to allow them to warp
hyperspace to produce propulsion.
Hyperspace was much different than the three-dimensional space that the
gravometric engines were initially designed to warp to produce thrust, and it
had taken centuries of research to produce engines that could shift their
operating mode to successfully warp hyperspace. They were still frightfully erratic, however, because hyperspace
wasn’t entirely stable.
If they got into hyperspace,
they’d be almost impossible to track down!
“Stop them! Stop them now!” Kaa raged.
But they were helpless to do
anything, and the pursuing mecha were too far away. One by one, swirling discs of bluish energy appeared in space,
temporary portals into hyperspace. One
by one, they watched those prototypes disappear into those swirling gateways,
which collapsed behind them. Kaa
watched in helpless rage until there was only one left, the black mecha who had
somehow started this disaster.
He was quiet a long
moment. They all were. “Did we have passive telemetry on the mecha
before it went haywire?” he asked the control booth quickly.
“Aye, sir,” came a response
over the speaker. “The whole event was
logged.”
“You’ve got a lot to answer
for, Syhn!” Kaa shouted at him.
“Calm down, sir,” he said
clinically. “Send it to this console,
and send the transponder frequencies out to the cruisers around the nebula,” he
ordered the control booth. “Those mecha
have transponders in them that have nothing to do with the command computer and
run off their own power supply, not connected to the mecha in any way. We put them in just in case of a massive
mecha failure, so we could find it or its wreckage during testing. Since the transponders aren’t connected to
the command computer, the mecha doesn’t know it’s there yet. It only knows about the systems that answer
to it. It’ll find it eventually, but
that gives us some time to come up with an alternative. We’re already tracking them, sir, so calm
down.”
He did calm down
somewhat. “That was forward thinking.”
“I’m paid for forward
thinking,” he said absently as he quickly skimmed through the log. He tapped a certain line in the log, where
the computer had somehow completely erased its command operating system and
wrote its own, bypassing all the programming that had kept it under
control. “Here, it created a sensor
system for detecting alpha-theta waves and reconfigured its datalink as the
sensor.”
“What does that mean?” Kaa
asked.
“I’m trying to figure out
what it’s going to do, sir,” he answered.
“If it’s done this, that means that it’s going to search for a
pilot. It’s going to complete
itself. The system was specifically set
up for the computer to bond to a pilot, to be part of a collective whole. Obviously, this prototype didn’t rewrite
that part of its programming. It’s
going to find a pilot to complete itself.”
“Then what?”
“Then it’s up to whatever
the pilot and the mecha decide to do,” he answered. “But now we know what this one’s going to do. That’s going to help us find it.”
“We already can.”
“Not for long,” Syhn told
him. “That computer is not stupid,
sir. I figure that it’ll find that
transponder the first time it orders its damage control nanites to perform a complete
inspection of its internal systems, then order them to dismantle it. When it decides to do that is the variable
here.”
“If it destroys that
transponder, how will this help us?” he asked, pointing at the console.
“Well, we know they won’t
vanish into deep space,” he answered.
“Those prototypes all took the first’s custom-created operating system,
so they’ll all behave the way it did.
They’re going to try to find pilots, using those alpha-theta scanners to
find the perfect match. To do that,
they’re going to have to survey inhabited star systems, looking for a match.”
“I—oh, I see,” Kaa
said. “We wait for them to show up, and
try to get enough resources in place to recapture them before they finish.”
“Precisely, sir,” Syhn
nodded. “Until they find pilots, they
won’t stray too far from inhabited systems.
The unarmed ones won’t be too hard to capture, but those five armed ones
might be a little tricky. And that last
one, the one that started all this, it’s going to be the hardest of them
all. It’s armed to the teeth, and its
powered armor and shields will make it extremely hard to disable long enough to
capture it. It will not be easy to recover.”
Kaa put a finger to his ear
hole. “I don’t care if it weakens the
defenses around the nebula,” he snapped into his pin. “Organize pursuit squadrons and send them after those
prototypes!” He was silent a
moment. “What?” he said in outrage.
“Your mecha are smarter than you thought, Syhn,” he said in an accusing
tone. “They can’t find any trace of
those transponders.”
“Well, it was a good idea at
the time,” he grunted, continuing to scrutinize the code before him. “Very clean. The mecha didn’t leave any holes to exploit.”
“What are you talking
about?”
“The system code it wrote
for itself is better than ours,” he admitted.
“Clean, sharp, neat, no conflicts, and it’s as stable as the Barkan
pillar. A mecha using a hack harpoon
wouldn’t be able to so much as interface with the system. The security is exceptional, using protocols
and algorithms I’ve never even seen before.
In fact, we might think about porting it into future mecha.”
“Make even more of them go
haywire?” he said in a dangerous tone.
“Actually, the computer is what made it go haywire,
sir,” he answered calmly. “After making
a few changes, If I ran this control code in a standard mecha, its response
speed would improve by at least 15%, and it would be immune to computer hack
attempts, by harpoon or by telemetry.”
“You think it can be
successfully ported into a mecha?” he asked, the businessman in him showing
itself.
“We’d have to clean out
those parts of it that depend on the bioorganic crystal, but yes,” he
answered. “Give me six months, and I’ll
have this operating system on a mecha with a standard moleculartronic
computer.”
“Well, that’s an unforeseen
benefit,” Kaa grunted.
“It’s not a total write-off
yet, sir,” he answered. “Once we
recapture those prototypes, we can pull the sentient computers out of them and
put them somewhere where they can’t cause trouble and study them. But we will have to suspend production on
the new computers until we find out how we somehow accidentally created living
computers.”
“Why should we?” Kaa
asked. “Sentient or not, they’re still
the best computers we ever built. I
want you to start working on finding ways to control them, Syhn,” he ordered. “Hard programming, inhibitor circuits,
whatever it takes. If we can keep them
under control, then we still have our market-breaking product. Think of it, Syhn,” he said eagerly. “Sentient computers that are bonded to the
pilots we choose for them. Add that to our fleet and our weapons
technology, and Intergalactic would have a force strong enough to take over the
other corps, maybe even some of the interstellar governments. We could build an empire where we are the
monopoly, and everyone would have no choice but to buy from us,” he said in a dreamy kind of tone.
“I’m sure that’s destined
for the future, sir, but right now we have little problems to deal with,” he
said dryly.
Kaa chuckled. “You’re right, of course. Let’s set up a briefing with my fleet
commanders. You know more about these
computers than anyone else, Syhn. Your
understanding of them will be critical to recovering them before some other
megacorp finds out about them and tries as well.”
“And if they do?” he asked.
“Well, we’ll have to
eliminate them,” Kaa said easily.
“You’re talking about
fighting a running war.”
“Syhn, those prototypes are worth fighting a running war,” he said
levelly. “Let us worry about the
military aspects. You just get ready
for that briefing. I’m counting on
you.”
“At once, sir,” he said
quietly.
Syhn studied the screen
after Kaa left him, his mind racing. It
wasn’t going to be as easy as Kaa thought it would be. Those prototypes were smart. Kaa thought of them
as machines, as out-of-control computers.
But they were alive, they
thought, they planned, and they were capable of intuition, of creativity. These prototypes were going to be crafty,
cunning, and slippery targets.
This, this was going to take
a while. The unarmed ones would be easier
to capture, and would be caught within two months. The armed ones, they might take up to a year to capture. But that last one, the one armed with the
most recent weapons, it would take years to finally capture that one. And being the most valuable of them all, it
would be the one that they absolutely could not afford not to recover. Given its fearsome armor and shields, it
could withstand a great deal of punishment, more than long enough to escape
into hyperspace. That particle beam
autocannon it had would let it kill opposing mecha with one good hit, making it
very deadly to any mecha that tried to tractor it, or any large ship that tried
to snare it in a tractor beam. Its
self-regenerating fusion plant and its sophisticated damage control system
would mean that it never had to put in for repairs, never had to refuel outside
of dipping down into an atmosphere or a nebula to collect up some matter in its
scoops to fuel its fusion plant and provide raw material for its replicators,
which it would only have to do about once every month. That prototype was going to destroy quite a
few mecha, do some damage to fleet vessels, and kill a lot of people before
they finally managed to get it back.
And now he had to look for a
flaw in a mecha designed not to have
any flaws. Syhn sighed, rubbing his
face, worrying about what was about to happen.
It was going to get ugly.
Chapter
1
The fighter plane zigged and
zagged, weaving in and out of enemy fire like a ghost, turning and locking its
sights on another fighter that was rushing in on it head-on, a mexican
standoff, a high-speed game of chicken.
They fired at each other, reddish streaks blazing by the cockpit,
neither side scoring a hit, until they were a second from collision. One fighter veered off, but the other
adjusted its course and slammed into it nose to nose, creating a brilliant,
angy explosion.
“Awwwuff! Mike, what did you do
that for?”
On the screen, in big red
letters, flashed the message GAME OVER.
Sam looked around the video
game console, the newest game craze to hit America since Street Fighter II, a game called Raptor Ace, to the one facing the other direction behind it, where
a large, wide black face appeared, grinning sadistically. The two games were linked together, and he’d
been dogfighting his best friend, who was playing the other machine. “You just wasted both of us!” Sam accused.
“I got you, didn’t I?” he
said with a laugh.
“You just cost us both a
quarter, you moron!” he accused.
Mike withdrew his head then
reached his hand out where Sam could see it, then flipped him off. “Wanna play again?”
“Are we playing demolition
derby?” he asked.
“And give up my unstoppable
strategy?” Mike laughed.
Sam looked at his watch.
“Shit! Game’s over, Mike, we’re going
to be late for school!”
“What? Oh, hell!” he said. “Let’s go!”
Such was another typical
morning in Brooklyn. It was a
delightfully warm May morning, and Sam and Mike were seen by many in this
Italian neighborhood to rush out of the local game room and charge like mad down
the street, racing the clock to go two blocks to PS102, the area’s high
school. Both had lived in the their
neighborhood all their lives, and knew absolutely everyone. They passed Mrs. Vespucci, who ran the
bakery since her husband Vito died, as she swept the sidewalk outside of her
door as she did every morning. They
passed Mr. Williams who sat in his little newstand booth, all his newspapers
and magazines held down by bricks and other large, heavy objects. Mr. Williams waved to them as they ran by, a
smile on his face and the butt of a cigar clinging tenaciously to the corner of
that wide mouth, tipping back the battered black derby hat the he had worn
every single day for as long as either Sam or Mike could remember. They ran by Mr. Evans who ran the coffee
shop on the corner, who everyone hated because he was a mean-spirited
curmudgeon and had once intentionally kicked Mrs. Leary’s fifteen year old
blind dog. He was in the middle of
selling the coffee shop because of the cold treatment he’d gotten since that
happened. Mr. Williams wouldn’t even
sell him a newspaper, and The Hongs that owned the local market had banned him
from the store after he yelled at Mr. Hong because of his Chinese accent. He had to walk all the way down to 103rd
to get a paper or a pack of cigarettes.
They waved to the Hongs as they crossed the street and passed by their
shop, who were out washing their front window as their daughter Mai minded the
register, and Mai’s husband Tom stood behind the front window, repainting the
front window after he’d scraped all the old paint off. The Hongs loved their American son-in-law,
mainly because Tom had grown up with Mai and Mai had taught him Chinese. They ran by the long row of brownstones past
the corner store, the rich side of the neighborhood, for most of the kids who
lived in those houses went to private schools instead of the public school just
on the next block. Sam and Mike lived
in the same building their entire lives, the big building which had an Italian
restaurant in the first floor, which always sent up the most wonderful smells
into the apartments above. That building
was on the other side of the block from the coffee shop, on the opposite side
as the game room where Mike and Sam stopped every morning before school, and as
a result, were almost perpetually late.
It was almost over. School let out in two weeks for seniors, and
they would both be moving to go to college.
They were both in their senior years with finals looming next week, and
they were both going to go to the University of Virginia. Mike was a hulking monster of a man who was
the best linebacker PS102 had ever had, and was going to U.V. to play football
for them. Sam had earned an academic
scholarship to U.V. and his uncle taught there, which let him go and pay
in-state tuition as the relative of a worker.
His academic scholarship would let him go for free. His uncle Roger had even agreed to let the
boys live in the apartment over his garage, which was within walking distance
of the campus. Everything was looking
very good.
Mike’s decision to sign with
U.V. had a lot to do with Sam going there.
They’d been friends since they were babies. Mike was the athletic jock, and Sam the thinker, but together
they were a major force for troublemaking in the neighborhood. They seemed disparate but were in fact much
more similar than people believed, because they made conclusions based on
looks. Mike was a wide-nosed behemoth of
an eighteen year old football player, six foot three inches of solid
muscle. He was fast, agile, almost and
unbelievably strong, but he was also very
smart. Half the reason he was such a
good linebacker was a vast knowledge of the game and the ability to out-think
the opposing quarterback. Sam, on the
other hand, was six feet tall, almost willowy, and looked the studious
fellow. All he was missing was the
glasses. He had mousey brown hair that
was always long and uncombed, and he often paid no attention to what was going
on around him when he was lost in one of his books or his Game Boy game. The one
reason most people didn’t think Sam was a total nerd was because he always had
on a pair of sunglasses on. He always
wore sunglasses of one kind or another, for his pack had several different pair
of differing darkened tints, which everyone thought were prescription lenses
but in fact were not. Sam was born with
an eye disorder that caused his eyes to have a imbalance of light-sensing rods
to color-sensing cones, which gave him poor clarity of color but incredible
night vision. To Sam, colors were dim
and dull, but he could tell brightness of a color like anyone else. He did have trouble discerning between
closely related shades of colors; he couldn’t tell violet from indigo in the
color spectrum, for example, but other than that, his color vision was more or
less comparable to any other person’s, just less vibrant. But the saturation of rods in his eyes gave
him exceptional night vision, the trade-off for his loss of color perception. He was so sensitive to light that a hundred watt
bulb was uncomfortably bright, and he was literally blinded in sunlight. A very curious side effect of the makeup of
Sam’s eyes was that he had vision far superior to 20/20; officially, his vision
was 5/20, which would let him read the fine print on a contract from halfway
across the room. This was another
trade-off for having poor color vision.
Sam’s current sunglasses style of choice were one-piece visor shades,
which wrapped around the sides of his head and prevented light from bleeding in
from the sides. When he was much
younger, all his friends thought it was cool that he was allowed to wear
sunglasses in school, but now, after so many years, the sunglasses were
literally a part of him. There was
always the inevitable bullying from people who took exception that he was
allowed to wear shades in school but no one else was, but most people who were
from his neighborhood knew it was a medical condition, not a case of being a
teacher’s pet. It was a very rare
medical condition, he’d been told, something along the lines of one person in
every five million having it.
Because he did hang out with
Mike all the time, and Mike was a jock, Sam was in much better shape than he
looked. Sam was on the track team—or
had been, since the season was over—and still liked to take the subway down to
Central Park and do a little jogging every few days. Mike went with him, providing the cardio and endurance parts of
his workout regimen. Mike pushed him to
play a sport instead of sitting around reading all the time, and track seemed
to fit in with Sam’s personality.
Running track was a deceptively demanding exercise in mental control,
and that appealed to Sam’s meticulous nature.
They beat the bell through
the front door of the school, where the school’s security guard, Mr. Perkins,
just laughed and waved them in just as he was about to close the doors. They rushed upstairs and just barely got
into homeroom before the second bell, running to get to their seats before
cranky old Mr. Williams started calling roll.
If they weren’t seated by the time they got to their names, he’d mark
them tardy. This was a problem for Sam,
because he was first on the list. It
wasn’t much better for Mike, since he was third.
“Samuel Adkins?” he drawled
in his dusty old voice.
“Here!” he said just as he
sat down, reaching into his pack to change glasses. He found the ones he wanted, closed his eyes tightly, then made
the switch quickly. Some people in school
derogatorily called him “Cyclops” after the X-Men
character because he always closed his eyes when he didn’t have glasses
on. Nobody in school had ever seen the
color of his eyes.
“Susan Banner?”
“Here!” she called.
“Michael Colbert?”
“Here!” he shouted in a very
loud, booming voice that startled a few people and made some girls giggle, and
got him a nasty look from the thin, gray-haired teacher.
Homeroom only lasted for
fifteen minutes, and then Mike and Sam split up for classes. Mike’s first class was senior English, while
Sam’s first class was calculus. Sam was
in the honors program, and had already put back ten credit hours he could apply
to his college, which would let him skip over some of the basic classes. They were getting ready for their finals,
but Sam felt pretty confident about them, so he didn’t feel the same pressure
that everyone else did in the class.
They were going over derivatives again when an announced came in over
the P.A. speaker. “All teachers turn on
their class televisions and tune in CNN immediately!”
“What’s going on?” Dana
asked, the girl who sat beside him.
“Dunno, but it must be
important,” Sam answered as Mr. Delaney got up and turned on the TV.
Once the channel was tuned
in, Sam saw that they were using the international space station’s cameras,
zooming into something out in space. Some
woman reporter’s voice was overlaying the image. “—about twenty minutes ago,” she said. “Every telescope in the western hemisphere is tracking in on them
as we speak, and we hope to have some better images soon.”
Sam leaned forward in his
desk and stared in growing amazement.
The image showed about fifty small shapes, but Sam’s acute vision easily
made them out.
They were space ships!
Fifty of them at least, all
moving towards the space station! The
camera panned to the right, far to the right, and showed another large cluster
of space ships, moving towards the first group. The ships were all different shapes and sizes, from what looked
like tiny little ones to huge monsters that made their escorting ships look
like wind-up toys. They went back to
the first group, and Sam realized that that first group was turning to move
towards the second.
“Omigawd!” Dana gasped. “Are those space ships?”
“They are!” Sam said in
excitement as the CNN reporter’s voice resumed. “They were detected twenty minutes ago,” she reported. “The astronauts on the station reported that
they saw a series of bright flashes of light, and then they saw these alien
ships in a pair of binoculars. About
five minutes later, the second group of them appeared, and they’ve been moving
towards the first. Wait, the Hubble
control center is reporting that the first group is turning to meet the second
now.” The screen split between the view
of space and a dark-haired man wearing small round glasses and a dark suit with
a red tie.
“Has anyone received any
kind of communications or signals from these approaching ships?” a male
reporter asked.
“Not yet, Mark,” the woman
answered as the view panned back to the second group.
Sam’s attention was caught
up by a faint shimmering high up on the biggest ship in the group. He quickly got his anti-glare shades and
swapped them, then got out of his seat and got closer to the TV. “Hey, get outta the way!” someone yelled at
him, but Mr. Delaney came up to him as he peered carefully at the image before
him. Delaney, like all teachers, knew
about Sam’s eye condition.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“There’s a light on one of
the ships, and it’s getting brighter,” he answered as he used his hands to
block out the light from the fluorescent lights above. It was really apparent now, and he backed up
and got out of the way, standing by Delaney as the reporters noticed it
too. “Look there, there’s some kind of
light appearing on that large ship.
What do you think it could be?” he asked.
“At this point, we can’t
speculate about anything,” the woman answered.
Just as she said that, the bright pulsing light became a sudden streak of yellow across the sky, bursting forth from the big ship and lancing through the darkness off the side of the screen. The ca