Godlike Machines (4 page)

“Then the rumours were right,” Nesha says. “You did go mad after all.”

Falling inward, the Progress began to pass through another swarm of free-flying obstacles. Like those of Shell 1, the components of Shell 2 were all but invisible to the naked eye-dark as space itself, and only a fraction of a kelvin warmer than the cosmic microwave background. The wireframe display started showing signs of fuzziness, as if the computer was having trouble decoding the radar returns. The objects were larger and had a different shape to the ones in the outer shell—these were more like rounded pebbles or all-enveloping turtle-shells, wide as cities. They were covered in scales or plaques which moved around in a weird, oozing fashion, like jostling continents on a planet with vigorous plate tectonics. Similarly lethal field lines bound them, but this far in the predictive model became a lot less trustworthy.

No runaway Chinese probe had ever collided with Shell 2, so we had no good idea how brittle the objects were. A second apparition probe operated by the European Space Agency had tried to land and sample one of the Shell 2 obstacles, but without success. That wouldn’t stop Galenka from making her own attempt.

She picked a target, wove around the field lines and came in close enough to fire the sticky anchors onto one of the oozing platelets. The Progress wound itself in on electric winches until it was close enough to extend its tools and manipulators.

“Damn camera’s sticking again. And I keep losing antenna lock.”

“It’s what they pay you for,” I said.

“Trying to be helpful, Dimitri?”

“Doing my best.”

She had her hands in the waldos again. Her eyes were darting from screen to screen. I couldn’t make much sense of the displays myself, having never trained for Progress operations. It looked as if she was playing six or seven weirdly abstract computer games at the same time, manipulating symbols according to arcane and ever-shifting rules. I could only hope that she was just about winning.

“Cutting head can’t get traction. Whatever that stuff is, it’s harder than diamond. Nothing for the claws to grip, either. I’m going to try the laser.”

I found myself tensing, as she swung the laser into play.

How would the Matryoshka respond to our burning a hole in it? With the same cosmic indifference that it had shown when the Chinese robot had rammed it, or when the American probe got in the way of its field lines? Nothing in our experience offered any guidance. Perhaps it had tolerated us until now, and would interpret the laser as the first genuinely hostile action. In which case losing the Progress might be the least of our worries.

I tensed.

“Picking up ablation products,” Galenka said, eyeing the trembling registers of a gas chromatograph readout. “Laser’s cutting into
something
, whatever it is. Lots of carbon. Some noble gases and metals: iron, vanadium, some other stuff I’m not too sure about right now. Let’s see if I can cut away a sample.”

The laser etched a circle into the surface of the platelet. With the beam kept at an angle to the surface, it was eventually possible to isolate a cone-shaped piece of the material. Galenka used an epoxy-tipped sucker to extract the fist-sized sample, which already seemed to be in the process of fusing back into the main structure.

“Well done.”

She grinned at me. “Let’s take a few more while our luck’s holding, shall we?”

She pulled out of the waldo controls, disengaged the sticky anchors and applied translational thrust, shifting the Progress to a different platelet.

“You sure you don’t want to take a break? We can hold here for hours if we have to, especially with the anchors.”

“I’m fine, Dimitri.” But I noticed that Galenka’s knuckles were tight on the joystick, the effort of piloting beginning to show. There was a chisel-sharp crease in the skin on the side of her mouth that only came when she was concentrating. “Fine but a little hungry, if you must know. You want to do something useful, you can fetch me some food.”

“I think that might be within my capabilities,” I said.

I pushed away from the piloting position, expertly inserting myself onto a weightless trajectory that sent me careening through one of the narrow connecting throats that led from one of the
Tereshkova
’s modules to the next.

By any standards she was a large spacecraft. Nuclear power had brought us to the Matryoshka. The
Tereshkova
’s main engine was a “variable specific impulse magnetic rocket”: a VASIMIR drive. It was an old design that had been dusted down and made to work when the requirements of our mission became clear. The point of the VASIMIR (it was an American acronym, but it
sounded
appropriately Russian) was that it could function in a dual mode, giving not us only the kick to escape Earth orbit, but also months of low-impulse cruise thrust, to take us all the way to the artifact and back. It would get us all the way home again, too—whereupon we’d climb into our Soyuz re-entry vehicle and detach from the mothership. The Progress would come down on autopilot, laden with alien riches—that was the plan, anyway.

Like all spacecraft, the
Tereshkova
looked like a ransacked junk shop inside. Any area of the ship that wasn’t already in use as a screen or control panel or equipment hatch or analysis laboratory or food dispenser or life-support system was something to hold onto, or kick off from, or rest against, or tie things onto. Technical manuals floated in mid-air, tethered to the wall. Bits of computer drifted around the ship as if they had lives of their own, until one of us needed some cable or connector. Photos of our family, drawings made by our children, were tacked to the walls between panels and grab rails. The whole thing stank like an armpit and made so much noise that most of us kept earplugs in when we didn’t need to talk.

But it was home, of a sort. A stinking, noisy shithole of a home, but still the best we had.

I hadn’t seen Yakov as I moved through the ship, but that wasn’t any cause for alarm. As the specialist in change of the
Tereshkova
’s flight systems, his duty load has eased now that we had arrived on station at the artifact. He had been busy during the cruise phase, so we couldn’t begrudge him a little time off, especially as he was going to have to nurse the ship home again. So, while Baikonur gave him a certain number of housekeeping tasks to attend to, Yakov had more time to himself than Galenka or I. If he wasn’t in his quarters, there were a dozen other places on the ship where he could find some privacy, if not peace and quiet. We all had our favorite spots, and we were careful not to intrude on each other when we needed some personal time.

So I had no reason to sense anything unusual as I selected and warmed a meal for Galenka. But as the microwave chimed readiness, a much louder alarm began shrieking throughout the ship. Red emergency lights started flashing. The general distress warning meant that the ship had detected something anomalous. Without further clarification, it could be almost anything: a fault with the VASIMIR, a hull puncture, a life-support system failure, a hundred other problems. All that the alarm told me was that the ship deemed the problem critical, demanding immediate attention.

I grabbed a handrail and propelled myself to the nearest monitor. Text was already scrolling on it.

Unscheduled activity in hatch three
, said the words.

I froze for a few moments, not so much in panic as out of a need to pause and concentrate, to assess the situation and decide on the best course of action. But I didn’t need much time to reflect. Since Galenka was still at her station, still guiding the Progress, it was obvious what the problem was. Yakov was trying to escape from the
Tereshkova.

As if we were still in Star City.

There was no automatic safety mechanism to prevent that door from being opened. It was assumed that if anyone did try and open it, they must have a good reason for doing so-venting air into space, for instance, to quench a fire. The notion that one of us would do something stupid, like trying to leave the ship because we thought it was a simulation, must never have occurred to the engineers.

I pushed myself through the module, through the connecting throat, through the next module. The alarm was drilling into my head. If Yakov really did think that the ship was still in Russia, he wouldn’t be concerned about decompression. He wouldn’t be concerned about whether or not he was wearing a suit.

He just wanted to get out.

I reached a red locker marked with a lightning flash and threw back the heavy duty latches. I expected to see three tasers, bound with security foils.

There were no tasers—just the remains of the foil and the recessed foam shapes where the stunners had fitted.

“Fuck,” I said, realizing that Yakov was ahead of me; that he had opened the locker—against all rules; it was only supposed to be touched in an emergency—and taken the weapons.

I pushed through another connecting throat, scraping my hand against sharp metal until it bled, then corkscrewed through 90 degrees to reach the secondary throat that led to the number three hatch.

I could already see Yakov at the end of it. Braced against the wall, he was turning the big yellow wheel that undid the door’s massive locking mechanism. When he was done, it would only take a twist of the handle to free the hatch. The air pressure behind it would slam it open in an instant, and both of us would be sucked into space long before emergency bulkhead seals protected the rest of the ship. I tried to work out which way we were facing now. Would it be a long fall back to the Sun, or an inglorious short-cut to the Matryoshka?

“Yakov, please,” I called. “Don’t open the door.”

He kept working the wheel, but looked back at me over his shoulder. “No good, Dimitri. I’ve figured this out even if you haven’t. None of this is real. We’re not really out here, parked next to the Matryoshka. We’re just rehearsing for it, running through another simulation.”

I tried to ride with his logic. “Then let’s see the simulation through to the end.”

“Don’t you get it? This is all a test. They want to see how alert we are. They want to see that we’re still capable of picking up on the details that don’t fit.”

The blood was spooling out of my hand, forming a scarlet chain of floating droplets. I pushed the wound to my mouth and sucked at it. “Like weightlessness? How would they ever fake that, Dimitri?”

He let go of the wheel with one hand and touched the back of his neck. “The implants. They fool with your inner ear, make you think you’re floating.”

“That’s your GLONASS transponder. There’s one on the back of my neck as well. It’s so they can track and recover our bodies if the re-entry goes wrong.”

“That’s what they told us.” He kept on turning the wheel.

“You open that door, you’re a dead man. You’ll kill me and put Galenka in danger.”

“Listen to me,” he said with fierce insistence. “This is not real. We’re in Star City, my friend. The whole point of this exercise is to measure our alertness, our ability to see through delusional constructs. Escaping from the ship is the objective, the end-state.”

I knew then that reasoned argument wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I gave myself a hard shove in his direction, hoping to overwhelm him with sheer momentum. But Yakov was faster. His hand sprung to his pocket and came out holding one of the tasers, aimed straight at me. The barbs sprang out and contacted my chest. I’d never been shot before and I wasn’t ready for the pain. It seemed to crush me into a little ball of concentrated fire, like an insect curling under the heat from a magnifying glass. I let out a brief yelp, biting my tongue, and then I didn’t even have the energy to scream. The barbs were still in me. Bent double, blood dribbling from my hand and mouth, I lost all contact with the ship. Drifting, I saw Yakov leave the taser floating in mid-air while he returned his attention to the wheel and redoubled his efforts.

“You stupid fucker,” I heard Galenka say, behind me.

I didn’t know whether she meant Yakov—for trying to escape—or me, for trying to stop him on my own. Maybe she meant both of us.

The pain of the discharge was beginning to ebb. I could just begin to think about speaking again.

“Got a taser,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.

“Good. So have I.” I felt Galenka push past me, something hard in her hand. Then I heard the strobing crackle of another taser. I kept drifting around, until the door came into view again. Through blurred and slitted eyes, I saw Yakov twitching against the metal. Galenka had fired barbs into him; now she was holding the prongs of the taser against his abdomen, the blue worm of a spark writhing between.

I reached out a hand and managed to steady myself. The pain had now all but gone, but I was enveloped in nausea and a tingling all-body version of pins and needles.

“You can stop now.”

She gave the taser one last prod, then withdrew it. Yakov remained still, slumped and unconscious against the door.

“I say we kill the fucker now.”

I wiped the blood from my lips. “I know how you feel. But we need him to get us home. If there’s the slightest problem with the engine ...”

“Anything happens, mission control can help us.”

I worked my way down to the door. “He’s not going to do this again. We can sedate him, confine him to one of the modules if necessary. Until Baikonur advise.”

Galenka pushed her own taser back into her pocket, with the barbs dangling loose on their springy wires. She started turning the wheel in the opposite direction, grunting at first with the effort.

“This was a close call.”

“You were right—I should have been more worried about him than I was. I didn’t think he was really serious about all that Star City stuff. I mean, not
this
serious.”

“He’s a basket case, Dimitri. That means there are only two sane people left on this ship, and I’m being generous.”

“Do you think Baikonur will be able to help?”

“They’d better. Anything goes wrong on this ship, we need him to fix it. And he’s not going to be much use to us doped to his eyeballs.”