Battle Station (16 page)

Things went from bad to worse. We were lifted up and tossed around like leaves in a storm. Making further progress was out of the question. We couldn’t even see the dome anymore. The winds picked up sifting masses of material from the pit and threw it at us.

“What the hell is going on, sir?” Kwon shouted.

“I’m not sure, but I have an idea. Marvin, talk to me.”

“Yes, Colonel Riggs?” Marvin asked calmly. He sounded remarkably unconcerned despite the fact he was orbiting us now in the swirling, dark mass of dust, smoky-aerogel and stiff winds. Only by using our repellers were we able to maintain our relative positions.

“Link arms,” I shouted to men I could no longer see, “form a circle and hold on tight. Marvin, contact this smoke-monster of yours.”

“Reference unclear,” he said, drifting past me. “Do you possibly mean the entity known as Introspection?”

“Yes, dammit. Get in contact with him.”

“Referring to him as male may be inappropriate for these beings—”

“I don’t care, Marvin. Just connect me to him and translate.”

“Done. Converse when ready. I simply wanted to point out that avoidable cultural misunderstandings might—”

“Point taken. Transmit this: being known as Introspection, we respectfully request that you stop blasting us with wind.”

“Done. However, wind isn’t an accurate description, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said. “I believe we are experiencing the creature’s digestive processes.”

We’d managed to get into a circle now, and I peered from side to side to count noses—or rather faceplates. Kwon had them sound off. I thought some were missing.

“Two lost, sir,” Kwon said. “No response on their com-links.”

I now understood why the area was empty of other Macros. Usually, the region around Macro factories was churning with small, worker-type machines. The only ones I’d seen in this pit had been a few huge earth-movers. Maybe the smaller models had been off-handedly crushed by this creature when it became angry—or hungry. It was a chilling thought. If we couldn’t get this crazy thing to settle down, it might well kill us.

“What’s it saying, Marvin?” I shouted.

“It is projecting an emotion, rather than strings of symbolic concepts.”

“What emotion?” I demanded, my voice cracking to be heard over the wind. My helmet was slashed with handfuls of grit every few seconds now. The sound reminded me of being in an automatic carwash.

“Disinterest.”

“Marvin, you know a little about these creatures. Tell it we can free it from the Macros. Tell it we can free the entire system, and allow the Blues to roam the cosmos again.”

“Ah, a new emotion is coming through now, Colonel: fear. Concern-for-safety and—
determination
, I think. Yes, that’s it.”

The storm grew in intensity. I felt my arms slipping now and then. “Tighten up, men!” I shouted. I thought I heard Kwon relay the order, but no one needed to be told what to do now. We all clung to one another in the most powerful dirt-storm I’d ever imagined.

I was one second from ordering my people to abandon their kits and fly straight up to exit this cloud of angry debris. Maybe some of us could make it. But I held on, and tried to think of what would get through to a creature that called itself Introspection.

“You are an unjust being!” I shouted. “I want you to know that. It was your people who released this plague upon the universe! You created the Macros and the Nanos, and let them destroy countless biotic beings such as ourselves. They killed my children, and millions of others. We are here to fix your mess, to right your wrongs!”

Marvin didn’t have to translate the answer to that one. The storm intensified. I could no longer see anything. It was all black with occasional flashes of gray, as if I’d been buried under ashes. I couldn’t hear anything either, other than the roar of the endless, angry winds.

But then, just when I’d given up hope and decided I would die here in the churning guts of an angry Blue, the living storm relented. I looked around, and saw my men were in a huddled mass. We were up to our waists in fine, swirling dust.

“What did you do, Colonel?” Kwon asked when we could hear each other again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I made it feel bad.”

-16-

“What is this thing, sir?” Sloan asked me. “Some kind of freaking jinni? We heard about those while we were out in the deserts on earth, you know. The locals believed in them. But I never did. Until now…”

I glanced at him, wondering about aliens and earthly legends. Could the two be connected? I’d always thought those fake documentary shows on the topic were full of crap, but now, I wasn’t entirely sure. What was a demon, after all, but an alien?

“I don’t know, Sloan. But it isn’t trying to digest us right now, so let’s quietly move closer to the dome.”

All of us helped one another out of the sifting pile of ash the region had become. Kwon lifted a man out with each of his arms, but it took four more men to pull him up in turn. We stayed in a tight group and walked calmly toward the dome. It was still dark, but not pitch-black, and we could see the shimmer of the smooth walls ahead.

“What are you getting from Introspection now, Marvin?” I asked. I almost whispered the question, not wanting to piss it off again.

“Anger is dropping in volume now,” Marvin said. “Regret has risen, and possibly crested.”

“What do you mean by dropping and crested? Doesn’t it just send one concept at a time?”

“Not exactly, sir. It provides a list of variable intensities. Mixing them in a blend, I can read its emotive state.”

“Is that all it does? Transmit emotions? What about concepts? You must have sent it something akin to words in order for it to understand my meaning.”

“Yes, that is true. But I don’t think we’ve yet become interesting enough for it to communicate with us at that level.”

I thought about that. I supposed, to a huge thing like this, we were like prissy insects, taking ourselves very seriously. I was glad it wasn’t an abusive monster, as it might have enjoyed our pain. Fortunately, it seemed capable of empathy.

Now that the winds had died down to a whistling, swirling mess instead of a thundering hurricane, I found it easier to think. The being knew it had released the Macros, or so it would seem. It felt regret for doing so. I suddenly had a thought.

“Marvin, is this creature really talking to us? I don’t feel like I’m having a conversation.”

“The entity doesn’t view us as worthy of notice. It does  not consider this interaction to be a conversation between peers.”

I snorted. “That’s great. What are we, then?”

“Difficult to describe.”

“Try me.”

“I’ve made a study of humans. They have two essential states of mind.”

“Two states? That’s all?” I asked.

“Yes. One you refer to as sleep. The other is primary, and might be described as consciousness.”

“Are you telling me we are talking to a sleeping Blue?”

“No, but from its point of view, we are errant thoughts in its unconscious mind. We are too small to be thinking individuals. We are concepts—ideas.”

I rubbed crusted filth from my visor. This was one strange beast, and I’d dealt with a number of them. “Let me see if I have this straight, it thinks we are ideas in the back of its mind?”

“That is a good analogy. Remember, it is not human. It is not remotely like you in composition. I find this interchange between the two of you to be fascinating.”

“I’m so happy for you,” I said.

We now stood at the edge of the shimmering dome. Above us was a hanging mass of smoky nothing, which I knew to be the guts of a daydreaming Blue. Inside that dome—God only knew what was in there waiting for us.

“We should go inside, Colonel,” Kwon said. “Before this crazy thing gets mad again.”

“Tell the men to take a rest. I want everyone to drink some water and get their heart-rates down.”

Kwon walked among the surviving marines—there were only fourteen that still drew breath. He shouted at them, ordering them sternly to relax. This seemed counterproductive, but I wasn’t a sergeant.

Sloan walked up to me and engaged me in a private channel. I made the connection.

“What are we doing sir? Sight-seeing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m having so many thoughts, so many questions. This thing we are inside of—this is the core of everything. Somehow, these creatures started this whole thing. Without its science, choices and mistakes, you and I would still be back on Earth, surfing the web and watching sports channels.”

“Yeah? You think so?”

“Yes, I do. There are so many questions to ask it.”

“It isn’t like you to overthink things, Colonel. Let’s ask it when we come back out of the dome. After we finish the mission.”

My head swirled with thoughts of my lost family, of the millions of people who had died back home and in space—and the hundreds of them I’d met personally. But I nodded. He had an excellent point. He never got off-target. Maybe that’s why he’d lived so long among the doomed souls of Riggs’ Pigs.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s head inside.”

The first thing I noticed was the instant silence. Stepping under the dome was like entering a cool, calm world. Cut off from the outside completely, I could feel the barrier as I passed through it. The sensation was like walking through some kind of plastic film, as if I’d been swallowed in bubble-wrap. We pushed inward and it pushed back. But we persisted and it soon gave way.

I knew the dome was designed to allow slowly moving things to walk through, allowing the entry of worker Macros without allowing projectiles to follow. Once past the barrier, we stood in a gloomy world. A machine hulked in front of us, dimly lit by internal sources. It was illuminated by many pairs of suit lights from my marines as more of them came through to stand with me.

I could hear the big machine that squatted under the dome now. It sort of
thrummed
. It was a deep, steady, ominous sound. It gave me a chill to hear it again. I hadn’t been this close to a Macro factory for years.

“Marvin, are you here? I don’t see any super-brain Macros.”

“No,” Marvin said. “I’m disappointed. The factory seems to be undefended.”

“Well, I can’t say that I’m unhappy about that. Slither up to the machine and do your magic, robot.”

Marvin was already slithering. He moved closer to the factory than any of the men. I think Kwon was the only man who may have seen a Macro machine this big before in person. The rest of them were standing suspiciously close to the edge of the dome.

“Shouldn’t we shoot it, or something, Colonel?” Sloan asked.

“Negative Captain. That monstrosity is our goal. If we can capture it and make it work for us, we will have more production power than every machine back on Earth combined.”

Sloan seemed nervous. “Should you be talking that way about it—right here, sir?” he said in a near whisper.

I chuckled, but I knew he wasn’t just being paranoid. In the past, Macros had tracked me down in particular, following our radioed messages. There was evidence they listened to us all the time. Even if they didn’t usually say much—they were listening.

“I don’t think this thing works like that. I expect it’s more like a big version of one of our factories. Not overly bright, but able to follow precise programming.”

Sloan muttered something about hoping I knew what I was doing. I didn’t take offense. I’d heard that one before.

“Any progress, Marvin?” I asked.

“I’m having protocol-engagement problems,” he said. “The channel opens, then closes immediately.”

I grimaced. As an ex-programmer, I knew all about that. Often when writing an original piece of software for networked devices, the most difficult part was to establish the initial communication. You had to get everything exactly right, any mistake would cause it to abort or crash. In this case, we could only change and examine the software on one side of the devices trying to synch up with each other. Or, to be more precise, Marvin could.

“Do you think you are using the right version of the protocol?”

“Standard Macro binary,” Marvin said.

I looked at him. Was he getting testy? It wasn’t like Marvin. But then again, when software didn’t work for no apparent reason, the experience could drive anyone mad with frustration.

“Try different versions.”

Up until now, all ten cameras had been locked onto various parts of the huge machine in front of us. Now, one of them swung to me. The lens refocused with a tiny whirring sound. “Why would this unit not be upgraded to the latest version of the communications software?”

My armor prevented me from shrugging. “Just try it.”

“It will require a complete reinitialization.”

“What will that take? A second or two? Come on, Marvin.”

He turned all his cameras back to the Macro factory. “Done,” he said.

“You got a response?”

“Yes. But it may have been a delayed acceptance of my earlier requests.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. Marvin was like a lot of touchy engineering types. He hated to be wrong, especially about something technical. I could understand that, as he was a mass of technological wizardry himself. It probably hurt his pride.

“Should I attempt to make it bring down the dome?” he asked.

“No!” Sloan said quickly. He was standing at our side.

Marvin and I looked at him.

“Uh, if we brought down the shield, the Macros and that crazy cloud out there could get in. We need this defensive position, sir.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Let’s try something simple, Marvin. Have it produce a mass of constructive nanites.”

Marvin was quiet for a time. “Program rejected,” he said. “Symbol table limit exceeded. Unknown identifier. Errors too numerous—”

“I get it, Marvin,” I said. “Hmm. I should have thought of this. It is similar to our nanite factories, but not identical. It doesn’t seem to know much about nanite technology. I suppose that makes sense. If the Macros had been able to produce nanites, they would have sent different weapons systems against us. Let’s go easy on it. Tell it to build me a block of ferrous alloy. A cube.”