Annihilation (Star Force Series) (30 page)

“Nothing like that. I transmitted design documents I’d been working on. Random data, I thought at the time.”

I nodded. “And these design documents were of equipment you thought we might want to build? Something the Macros might pick up and find useful?”

“No. The design documents were all optional configurations for my own body. Ideas I’d worked on while my backup-brainboxes were relatively under-utilized.”

I chuckled. “You’re telling me you sent them imaginary configurations of yourself?”

“Is that amusing, Colonel?”

I thought about the mining robot I’d met up with that had a thousand twenty-foot long tentacles for legs. That had essentially been one of Marvin’s doodles. The Macros must have believed they were getting classified information and had attempted to build some of the things Marvin had designed.

“Yeah,” I said, “it is funny. All right. Just don’t do it anymore. What are you up to now? Why are you out on the hull, sending messages again?”

“I’m following your orders, sir. In fact, this is excellent timing. I wanted your permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“Permission to transmit the final sequence.”

I rolled my eyes. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Marvin.”

“Have you sustained an injury, sir?”

“Several of them. But I haven’t lost my memory, if that’s what you’re implying. Just tell me what you think you’re supposed to be doing.”

“I’m breaking the Yale ring’s code, sir. You told me to turn it on again and flush the Macros back out into the system they came from.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I did tell you that. How’s that coming along?”

“I’m ready, sir.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

I froze for perhaps two heartbeats. I looked over my shoulder, and then turned around fully to see the ocean. North of Tango the ring lay at the bottom of a thousand foot deep bowl of seawater. I couldn’t see it, but I knew that the Macros had placed their factories under domes down there.

“Do it Marvin,” I said in a hushed, excited voice. “Flush them all to Hell.”

“Transmitting, sir. Message sent. Is there anything else?”

“Yeah,” I said, frowning with an immediate afterthought. “Can you turn it back off again? I mean, after the Macros are sucked down?”

“My orders did not include an imperative to research a third reversal of the ring’s state. The enemy is jamming my transmissions in any case. Just getting this command to the receiver—”

“Marvin,” I said, interrupting him. “I need you to turn off the effect again. You did it before!”

I’d been watching the ocean to the north while we spoke. As I stood there on the mountaintop, witnessing the event, the water miles out to sea suddenly blackened. A white ring grew around the dark region. I knew a vast whirlpool had formed, like a giant drain sucking the ocean down an endlessly deep throat.

“You have to turn it off again, Marvin. You’ve got five minutes.”

“It took me several days to figure out how to reverse the flow on each occasion. The ring does not have a simplistic interface, I’m afraid. It’s not ‘user-friendly’. Let me explain: the encoding system seems to alter itself on the basis of the last command successfully executed. When an operation is performed, part of the artifact’s system rewrites the code. I suspect this is some kind of internal security precaution against tampering—”

“For God’s sake, Marvin!” I shouted.

Everyone had stopped what they were doing and was now staring out to sea. It was impossible not to. The sky had even shifted, and the winds were picking up. The mass being transported off -planet must have been tremendous. A singing, roaring sound rose up and up in volume as I listened to Marvin.  I realized a hurricane was forming out there, a few miles from shore.

“Can you stop it? I’m sure the flood you’ve created so far is enough. The machines must have been sucked down by now.”

“We’re having trouble with confirmation on that point,” Marvin said. “Are you sure you want to stop the procedure without confirmation?”

“YES! Dammit, Marvin!
Turn it off!
”

I felt sick inside. All around me, the men were moving again, getting over their initial shock. Major Sloan came close, shouting at me. I couldn’t hear him and I didn’t care what he was saying anyway. I pushed him aside with a single shove and stepped to the edge of the cliff. The wind was so strong now, I could feel it through my bulky suit. It was like having a hand pushing on my back, pushing me toward the drain in front of me.

Marvin was talking to me about dry technical details while he attempted code sequences to turn off the growing whirlpool. He was hacking, and talking, and I was barely listening. My men stopped asking me what was happening, as it was becoming painfully clear by now.

I staggered away when the water level all the way to the coastline of Tango was affected. Even this far out, the water turned white, like one endless series of breakers going down into nothingness. I knew the entire planet was draining away, the way it had been before we’d come out here and interfered.

I knew the Crustaceans were watching this turn of events with horror. I wondered if they knew that we had been the ones to turn the ring on again. I wondered, too, if they’d ever figure out I’d failed to ask if it could be turned off a second time before I’d ordered Marvin to pull the plug.

If they did figure it out, they’d know the truth: that I had killed them all.

-25-

For the next seven long hours, the oceans continued to drain. Marvin had made no progress at all.

I hooked up my maps to Fleet’s sensors and watched as the Macros were indeed swept away into the hole at the bottom of the ocean. The power of moving water could carve rock, and even with their shields and vast weight, the machines couldn’t hold onto the seabed.

The armies they had offshore sat quietly at first, but when they realized they were being exposed and many had been dragged away into the unquenchable maw behind them, they charged the beach. It was a vicious battle, but one where we had the upper hand. Most of their forces were swept away to sea and down the hole in its black depths before they managed to struggle up onto the rocky beaches. When the last of them did reach the beach and make their ragged assault, there were less than a hundred of them left.

As any accountant can tell you, numbers matter. We met them as they rushed out of the water and destroyed them before they could press up to the heights. Even the Crustaceans joined in. I gathered from some of their messages they were under the impression the machines had opened the great drain in the sea again with the intention of killing all life on Yale. I didn’t enlighten them on this point.

Three races of biotics fought side by side, and when the last machine was brought down and the last Star Force marine raised his fist with a shout of victory, the beach was wider than it once had been.

No low tide in the history of Yale could compare. The water was leaving this world, and I knew the rest of it would soon heat up and begin killing those who’d survived the first great bleeding. I imagined in the Crustacean archives, this would go down as a bittersweet day. At a terrific cost, we’d swept the machines from the planet with a single hard push. We’d cut out the cancer, but killed the patient in the process.

Marvin kept working at his hacking effort. I checked in with him twice an hour, but his answer was always the same: he was working on it.

I knew there was no speeding up something like this. I’d worked with software myself. Technical projects tended to get done when they got done. Beating on the workers didn’t always yield the results anticipated.

But I beat on him anyway. I complained, raved, and almost frothed at the mouth in our discussions. Seeing the ocean drain away and knowing it was all our fault was just too much to take. I paced atop Tango’s highest peak and growled at anyone who came near.

First Night came and lasted a long, long time. When we were in our thirtieth straight hour of unrelenting darkness, the miracle came at last.

“It’s stopped, sir!” Kwon said, shaking me awake.

I’d been dreaming of running water, faucets left on and flooding bathrooms. I came awake with a lurch, and grabbed his hand. He was one of the few people in the world that didn’t flinch when my hand closed on his. He pulled me to my feet.

“What are you talking about, Kwon?”

“The water—I think that crazy robot has done it.”

I walked out onto the cliffs and stared down. It was storming lightly outside. It was hard to see through the night rains, but using my visor with the light enhancers and zooming optics engaged, I determined that the waters had indeed settled. They were still sloshing and disturbed. Tidal waves would race around the planet for months. But the draining had stopped.

I contacted Marvin immediately. “Well done!” I told him.

“It wasn’t me, Colonel. As much as I’d like to have solved the problem, I didn’t do so.”

After a few more questions, I realized he didn’t have a clue who had closed the ring or how. I disconnected and stood in the wind and rain, wondering what to make of it. If the Macros had done it, could they reverse the ring yet again? Could this entire thing start over again? Or was it a trap, baiting my Marines to go down to the seabed and investigate?

A few hours later, I contacted the Crustaceans. I knew almost right away what was going on. They were insufferably proud of themselves.

“We have stopped the machines,” they said. “We’ve been studying your primitive algorithms, watching as the ring is vibrated day and night. Is this truly all the sophistication Earth creatures have when dealing with a quantitative problem? To simply install a random answer into the equation and check to see if it works? Such wasteful iteration.”

“Congratulations!” I said, so relieved they weren’t all going to die and blame me that I didn’t care if they made a speech about it or not.

And speech they did. I was forced to politely listen to every technical detail of their achievement. Like all nerds with wounded pride, when they finally got one right, they crowed about it for hours.

I gave them ten minutes, then five more, before giving them something to get off the subject.

“High Command?” I asked. “I’m sorry, but I must get back to my duties. The crisis here seems to have come to an end. Perhaps we can discuss the matter further at the next Council meeting.”

I waited one second, then two. I knew their translators were generating question marks. It made me smile just to think about it.

At last, they spoke up again. “What is this ‘Council meeting’?”

“Haven’t you been informed? Now that you’ve joined Star Force officially, we can proceed to place your representatives on the council.”

“Joined Star Force? I’m afraid you’re under a series of misconceptions. Possibly, the translation equipment has failed us. It is highly inadequate. We’ve been working on designing our own superior model.”

“I’m sure you have been,” I said. I’d given them brainboxes that knew English and their language to ease our conversations. But they’d never quite accepted any of the technology. It wasn’t good enough for them.

“Perhaps I’m presuming too much,” I said. “But after you ended your state of neutrality and declared open war on the machines, I thought it was clear that you would have to become part of the local alliance of biotic species. The Macros are our shared enemy now, and that simple fact keeps us together.”

“We do not object to occasional cooperative acts. We are not ungrateful for your aid in this recent misunderstanding. But we do not consider ourselves to be at war with the machines, nor do we accept a state of alliance with Star Force.”

I heaved a sigh. I thought it might go this way. The Lobsters were ‘takers’, people who wanted whatever you could give them and always begged for more. They did precious little in return, however.

“All right then,” I snapped. “We’ll be lifting off and shipping out within—ten hours. Glad we could be of service.”

Another hesitation, then, “your service was appreciated. A continued presence on Yale might benefit both of us, in fact. May we propose—”

“Sorry,” I said loudly and with perhaps a touch of relish, “no, we can’t spare these forces any longer. We’ll be moving back to our own borders. As non-alliance members, your neutrality must be respected. It’s in our charter.”

The conversation soon ended after that. I could tell they weren’t going to budge and they’d wasted my time. I was glad to have saved billions of lives, but it had cost me time, resources and manpower for very little gain.

Ten hours later I was back on my command ship. I headed immediately to the observation chamber, which had real windows that let out on the profundity that we call space. Yale hung there under my feet, and I examined it moodily in my shipboard uniform. Simple smart clothes were more comfortable than armor, but they felt flimsy after clanking on Yale for the last several days. I felt like I was walking around in pajamas.

The storms hadn’t subsided yet on the moon below. There were white swirls dotting the atmosphere over slate-gray waters. The islands were still there, but rarely visible through the cloud layer. To me, they seemed like floating bones in the flood. It could have been my imagination, but they looked a little larger than they had a week earlier.