Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3) (3 page)

I stepped forward, placing my hands on my hips. Yamada was still staring down into the factory floor, fascinated and horrified at the same time.

Zye was fixated upon Vogel. I could tell from long experience she wanted to murder him immediately.

For once, I couldn’t fault her for her instincts.

“Let me explain our negative reactions, Director,” I told Vogel.

His mouth worked like that of a fish, and his eyes bulged in alarm. His insipid smile had vanished completely.

“The creatures below us are all too familiar to me and my veteran crew. They are the enemy. They are Stroj.”

Vogel made a choking sound. His slender fingers clawed at Zye’s own thick digits.

She relaxed them only enough to let him speak.

“Of course they resemble such creatures,” he said. “How else did you think we could build
Iron Duke
in such a short time? Humans couldn’t do it. Robots would take too long to be programmed for each task.”

I stared down at the floor, my heart sinking. Had CENTCOM gone mad?

“You admit, then, that these creatures are hybrids of humans and machines? Cyborgs? You copied our enemy’s designs to speed up production of the fleet?”

He was unable to answer, so I waved for Zye to put Vogel down.

Reluctantly, she released him. He rubbed at his neck and looked at us strangely.

“It was the only way,” Vogel said. “It’s my greatest achievement. These workers aren’t Stroj. I’m not a Stroj.”

“If I thought you were, you’d be dead already,” Zye growled again. “You’re worse than a Stroj. You’re a fool.”

I nodded, unable to disagree.

“I’d never anticipated such a reaction,” Vogel said. “Dignitaries I’ve brought here have always laughed and applauded.”

“That’s because they’ve never met the Stroj face-to-face,” I told him.

I was unable to take my eyes from the scene below us. The entire time we’d argued and watched from up here, the creatures below us had remained absolutely focused on their tasks.

They were the ultimate workers, I had to admit that.

-3-

At length, we received a more complete explanation from Director Vogel. The Phobos team had been assigned an impossible task: to come up with a means of multiplying industrial production. Worse, this improvement had to be realized in space, not on any planetary surface. Once the Council had approved the budget to build a new fleet, development of experimental industrial methods had quickly become the sole purpose of the lab complex here on Phobos.

In the past, the academics stationed on this remote outpost had limited their interests to things like asteroid mining techniques for ice and gas reclamation. They’d never been fully-funded or allowed to push the limits of their scientific know-how.

That had all changed after Earth had encountered a serious threat from her colonies. Now, the powerful people who ruled our home world wanted their best minds to produce miracles. Nothing was off-limits. No plan would be rejected—as long as it achieved results.

“So,” I said, speaking in the relatively neutral ground of a conference room, “you were inspired by the design of the Stroj. You studied them, took samples, and built your own versions?”

“No,” Vogel said, “we did
not
copy the colonist tech. We appropriated the concepts only. In my opinion, we vastly improved upon their primitive, ad hoc designs.”

“You think you made improvements?” Yamada asked. “Like what?”

“We’ve built a variety of highly specialized types, for one. Some are brutes for lifting and placing parts. Others—the ones with numerous small limbs and thin fingers—do the finer work. Still others start off with many optical organs to keep watch on the rest and coordinate the complex manufacturing steps for maximum efficiency.”

Pride had crept back into his voice, despite our group’s obvious disapproval.

“Who then, Director, approves the final state of these… beings?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not us,” he admitted. “We give them a starting point which consists of one of the basic designs. After working for a time, the variants begin to reconfigure themselves. They seem to enjoy it.”

“Variants?” I asked.

“That’s what we call them. They’re not entirely human, admittedly. They’re
variant
humans. People who’ve been enhanced for the good of us all.”

“I see…” I said.

Director Vogel eyed each of us in turn, and he took offense at our dour expressions.

“Look,” he said, “we’re not monsters. Neither are the variants! For raw materials, we only use volunteers shipped up here from Earth. These people are patriots who wish to forward the cause of Earth’s defense. After a minimal mind-scrub, we regrow their basic biologicals and plant them in an artificial chassis. They do the rest, adding mechanical enhancements as they see fit.”

Yamada leaned forward. “Do these things
talk
to you? Are they happy? Are they even human anymore?”

Vogel shrugged and avoided her gaze. “They don’t speak much—but not because they lack the wit to do so. They don’t always need speech. They communicate with packet radio faster than we can with words. They seem happy with their status. Each of them does the work of a hundred trained men. That’s a source of great pride to everyone on Phobos!”

Yamada shuddered. I caught that, and I understood it. So far, we’d been unable to get Director Vogel to understand our misgivings. He seemed stubbornly defensive concerning his abominable creations.

“You have to meet them for yourself,” he insisted. “You have to witness their incredible efficiency.”

Yamada and I exchanged glances, saying nothing, but then Zye spoke up.

She hadn’t spoken since we’d first reacted in shock to the variants. Now, she leaned forward and fixed the Director with an unfriendly stare.

“You believe yourself to be wise and powerful, but you’re not. You are foolish.”

Director Vogel’s face reddened. I doubted he was accustomed to having his intellect questioned.

“Zye—” I began, but Vogel waved me off.

“No,” he said. “Let her speak. She knows what she means to say, and I’d like to hear it. Accepting criticism of one’s own work is the hallmark of any scientist.”

“You’ve created evil here,” Zye said. “These beings aren’t human—at least, not human enough to trust. They must be destroyed.”

“Destroyed? Would you order workers killed after a factory is shut down? Besides, they haven’t finished their task yet.”

“They’ve built your ship, haven’t they?” I asked.

“Yes, but only the mothership. The smaller vessels aren’t all completed. There are thousands more scheduled to be produced over the next month.”

“I’m beginning to understand,” I said. “That massive vessel circling Mars isn’t a battleship, is it?”

“No. It’s a carrier, a star carrier. It’s an entirely new class of ship, and the largest Earth has ever produced.”

“How many fighters can it carry?” I asked.

Vogel shrugged. “That’s classified information.”

“You mentioned thousands?” I pressed.

Vogel let his smile creep back onto his face. “She is a very large vessel.”

“How long?” demanded Zye. “How long will the construction of these fighters take?”

“The variants work with amazing speed. They’re taking in raw metallic ore constantly and processing it as fast as we can bring it in. We have a shipment from the belt impacting every six hours, around the clock. The refinery workers catch the spheroids of high-grade ore as they impact Limtoc Crater. Each shipment is then processed and sent on to the fabrication crews, and after that—”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you’re talking about different teams of variants, right? Multiple teams?”

“Of course.”

After further questioning, I leaned back in defeat. Director Vogel wouldn’t tell me much about the capabilities of the star carrier, but he was boastful about his shipyard. The labs of Phobos had been turned into a construction facility. There were variants all over this tiny moon, performing countless tasks. The few he’d shown us were only the final assembly team.

“And now,” he said at length, “I must bid you farewell. The next tour starts within the hour. This tour is at an end.”

“The next tour?”

“Yes. Admiral Halsey is about to arrive. If you want any further information, you’ll have to talk to him.”

Vogel’s attitude had turned sour. He didn’t want to talk to us any longer, that much was clear. He’d grown tired of our mistrust and dire warnings.

We were ushered out of the facility with expediency. The long ride back to
Defiant
was a brooding one.

Zye looked out the capsule windows, such as they were. She stared down at the rough, curving surface of Phobos.

Yamada tapped at her mobile computer, and it glowed up into the faceplate of her pressure suit.

“I think they have thousands of these variant creatures,” Yamada said, “all over the moon. Probably, there are more of them out in the belt. The old-school belters as we knew them would have a hard time generating all the raw materials needed in such a short time.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The belt represents a nearly limitless source of metals, but they’ve been supplying the effort to build our battleships in Earth orbit all this time, too.”

“I haven’t heard of any serious shortage of steel, nickel or radioactives back home, have you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “They must be using variants to raise mining output as well as construction output.”

“It only makes sense,” Yamada said. “How else could they have increased production so rapidly? With so much orbital construction occurring both on Earth and Mars… they’d have to be producing three or four times their normal levels of mining output to sustain it all.”

I stepped to the slit-like windows and looked outside. The reflected light from Mars made me squint a little.

“So, we have to assume they’ve got these variant things all over the place,” I said. “Working faster than men can work.”

“They must be out there,” she said. “It’s a matter of economics. Building starships rapidly has always been problematic. In the old days, they built colony ships as large as
Iron Duke
, but it took several years to construct each of them.”

“Right…” I said, recalling my history texts of the past. “It was a massive effort.”

“There are two barriers to the rapid production of starships: raw resources and labor,” Yamada continued. “If you build a ship in space, that goes a long way to solving the resource problem. Rather than lifting metals from Earth’s gravity well one ton at a time, you can move it around much more freely. Asteroids have very little gravity to fight against.”

“But humans don’t work well in null-G,” I said, following her line of reasoning.

“They don’t, but I’m willing to bet they solved both problems with the variants. They have teams of them mining at the belt, churning out metals. Construction teams here on Phobos—maybe they’re even using them back at Earth, on the orbital platforms…”

“You really think they might have variants working in Earth orbit?” I asked, freshly alarmed by the concept. “Couldn’t they have simply built robots to do the task?”

Yamada shrugged. “According to Vogel, these variants get up to speed faster. They self-design to some extent. Pure robots are hard to design and build. You have to plan out every detail of their operation. We haven’t done much in the field over the last century. Politics has all but shut down innovation in that direction.”

Her words made me somewhat uncomfortable. My own father was the head of the Equality Party. They’d often stifled innovation on the grounds that it killed jobs for their constituents.

“The end result,” Yamada went on, “is that we don’t have robots sophisticated enough for this kind of labor. A few drones, some repair units with welders, but nothing up to the task of constructing an entire starship. We could develop them in time, of course… but as Vogel said, this was a crash project.”

“They’ve traded an old demon for a worse one,” Zye said suddenly. “They have no idea what they’ve done.”

“You might be right,” I said. “But these variants don’t sound
exactly
like the Stroj. Didn’t Vogel say something about scrubbing their minds before rebuilding them into new bodies?”

Zye shook her head. “He also talked about them being volunteers.” She looked at each of us for a moment. “Do you really think the previous owners of the brains inside the variants were volunteers when they were sent to Phobos?”

Yamada shook her head. I had to agree.

“It seems unlikely,” I admitted, “that anyone would volunteer to have their brains removed from their bodies, processed, and placed inside an abominable construct of flesh and metal.”

“And, who volunteers for a mind scrub?” Zye asked. “Would you?”

With grim thoughts lingering in our heads, we rode the rest of the way along Pier Three to
Defiant
in brooding silence.