Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 2: Redemption (21 page)

Suddenly the group of youngsters broke into a rousing rendition of
'Delta Dawn' followed by Don McLean's magnum opus 'American Pie'. As the last line finished Mike realized that, no matter what else had happened, they had introduced music to an entire race.

He walked out of the auditorium where the children
, now numbering in the thousands, were being taught. As he headed towards the shuttle bay his mind was on the myriad details that still needed to be ironed out to make the city habitable in the long-term for the KayBees.

He was still hummin
g‘
Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye... singing... thiswill be the day that I..
.
’
when the door to an exterior access port blew off its hinges. He had one last thought before the door hit and threw him across the room like a rag doll.
His city was under attack
. Hundreds and then thousands of hive controlled drones swarmed the breached city.

Cat ran so fast she practically flew through the hallways of Heidman City. Alarms were
sounding and there was a general sense of panic. Somehow the hive had penetrated their defenses. The Thumpers which had been so effective were now having no effect.

Cat toggled her quantum
commlink. She raised the
Yorktown
while continuing to run down the long corridors towards the source of the alarms.

"Admiral
, we have several thousand hive-linked KayBees attacking our position."

Admiral Faragon was just coming out of a sound sleep and asked her to repeat what she had just said.

"Sir, somehow the hive-mind has developed a counter for our Thumper technology. They are attempting to overrun the city. Our forces are attempting to repel them but the linked nature makes them an especially difficult foe to surprise and suppress."

"How did they do it?" The Admiral asked.

"I'm not sure Sir. My best guess is they changed their communication protocols to embed a sequencing mechanism. It would require replacing the quantum nodes within the drones themselves. An out-of-sequence data stream could be reconstructed on the fly."

"How do we beat it?"

"Again, I'm not sure Sir; but it does mean there are, relatively speaking, only a few drones that have been 'upgraded' compared to the billions of drones out there. If we can locate the hive queen we may be able to cut her off from the rest of her hive. She'd retain control of these enhanced drones but it would greatly reduce what she could do with them."

"Do what you can for your people Commodore. I'm going to pursue some options on this end."

***

The hive super-mind was, in a word, ecstatic.  The modified high-speed communication nodes were working perfectly. The first contingent of enhanced drones
was taking control of Ever Drifting, the cloud city that had miraculously survived a crash landing on the nest host. Already the children who had hatched in that city without the benefit of its guidance were being fitted with the new and enhanced quantum communication links.

These high-speed nodes would not be subject to the temporal disruption the invaders had visited on a number of
its drones. Once separated, the drones were rarely wise enough to recognize the threat these invaders represented. It was therefore essential that the super-mind maintain control of the collective.  To this end it was pleased to note that the fabrication drones had completed its other little project.

The fabrication drones had assembled a modified hyper-field generator that could slice an object through time. Since everything in the universe moved in relation to each other,
the act of sufficiently shifting the time reference of an object effectively caused said object to disappear from its present location and reappear temporally and physically displaced. Wielded like a knife, this new weapon could be used to slice through a previously impenetrable barrier – such as the one protecting the alien AI.              

***

WhimPy-23 saw a section of the barrier protecting him from the hive literally disappear and he knew for the first time in his immensely longlife a new emotio
n
– despair. Immediately he felt the press of the super-mind. Billions of attack points hit his various systems. As fast as he held back an attack on one front, a new attack would begin on another.

Slowly, painfully, the super-mind took control of his systems.
WhimPy-23 brought his reserve processors online and configured them to provide the best possible defense, but he sensed the end was near. Thankfully he had managed to purge virtually everything from his systems. It seemed odd, even to him as a machine, but he prayed to God for deliverance.

***

Cricket screamed. His adopted father was hurt, possibly dead. He was being held prisoner by adults of his own race that refused to respond to his cries for help. Many of his brothers were being taken into a room and their voices were disappearing. Thankfully, his sister was on the other side of the city and was still safe.

He was physically dragged into the same room his brothers had been taken into moments earlier. A large silver probe was brought forward. 
As he was held in place the probe was pressed against his carapace. There was a twinge of pain, a warm feeling, and then excruciating agony as a quantum node was physically implanted and attached to his auditory cortex. In a few moments the pain subsided. Some type of pain suppressor must have been administered.

Before he could think about what all of this meant; he felt an incredibly powerful mind enter his.  '
Welcome young one.
'

'
Who are you?
' Cricket asked.

'
We are the hive. We are strong. We defend the hive against all who are evil, against all invaders. You are a part of us now.'

'
Why are you seeking to attack the humans? They saved us. We would have all died but one saved us. And you killed him. You are the one who is evil.
'

'
You are confused child.
' The hive-mind said as it suppressed its new drone's personality. What concerned the hive-mind most was the similarity between this drone's perception of the invaders and those of a number of its peers. The human they called "Daddy" was alive but unconscious near the entry point to the city. The hive mind decided to study the matter more closely. It ordered several of its new drones to secure the alien and bring it for closer inspection and questioning.

***

    Cat worked her way slowly towards the front of the battle line. Having already been shot once, she was determined not to repeat the experience. Her Heshe enhanced reflexes and strength allowed her to avoid most confrontations. The freed KayBees were highly motivated soldiers but in many ways they were at a disadvantage.

The super-mind controlling the drones did not seem concerned about individual losses while the freed
KayBees had a profound sense of self. In addition, the drones fought with a degree of coordination and sophistication, with regard to tactics, that would be virtually impossible to beat. If the newly freed KayBees were going to have any chance, then a new element, a game changer, was going to need to be introduced.

Cat had battled the drones before on the
WhimPy platform. She thought she knew what to expect. She was surprised when obvious opportunities to advance were ignored. The cost of these advances would have been the loss of a couple dozen drones. It seemed, however, that this was too high a price for the brutally calculating hive super-mind.

Perhaps
, Cat thought to herself,
this is an indication of how few of these new enhanced drones the hive has. If so, i
t’
s an advantage for the freedom fighters that will not last long
.

   She used her pointer to stun a few of the drone
KayBees that could not be avoided. As she worked her way forward, she spotted a familiar encounter-suit-clad figure crumpled on the floor across the atrium. The location was well defended and she could see no way to get to the body of Captain Jeffries. She had no idea if he was still alive, so she signaled her internal AI to communicate with the enhanced nanites she had shared with her friend earlier in the week.

To her
great relief, Mike was indeed alive. Her medical nanites were working with his to stabilize and repair his internal organs. Her relief was short lived, however. A group of newly converted KayBee youngsters picked up her unconscious officer and carried him toward an egress. They paused to affix his encounter suit's helmet over his head. This was in and of itself a positive sign. The helmet would have been superfluous if they wanted him dead.

"Cal, can you trace you nanites in Captain Jeffries?"

"
Of course. He is fifty-eight meters away on a magnetic compass bearing of 32.8 degrees.
"

"Can you locate them again should he be taken off-planet?"

"
Your nanites have a unique radio signature. So long as that signal is not actively shielded I should be able to locate its source within this system
."

"Excellent. Instruct all GCP probes in this star system to start tracking that signal. Let me know the moment he stops moving or if there is a dramatic change in his biometrics."

Cat toggled her commlink again. "
Yorktown
this is Kimbridge. Please stand by with a hyper-fold enabled Thumper. I may have coordinates for the hive queen shortly."

***

Ensign Sassi of the Ashkelon Space Exploration Corps stood by the door to the GCP shuttle he had been on. He, a GCP lieutenant named Pete Sanders, a KayBee named Hilde-tuk and their pilot, Ricky Valen, had just off-loaded a group of one hundred and fifty liberated KayBees and were waiting for Commodore Kimbridge to board for a trip back to the
Yorktown
when the alarms started sounding.

This last was a figure of speech as the
KayBees had no sense of acoustic hearing. But the lighting in the city started going through a rapid frequency shift and a low-level radio pulse had begun. 

"Geez
, Louise... What the hell did you touch now, Sassi!" Ricky Valen yelled from the shuttle bridge the moment the alarms started blaring.

"NOTHING
, Captain!" Sassi yelled back. His low frequency antenna was twitching nervously. "I swear it!"

Hilde-
tuk made a move towards the door but Pete Sanders put out a hand to urge him to stop.

"We should see if we can help
," the KayBee said.

"There are thousands of warm bodies in the city far closer to the situation then we are. The Commodore knows we are here.
She may need us to do something with the shuttle that no one else is in a position to do. Our wisest course of action is to do nothing until we receive instructions."

"I hate waiting
," Hilde-tuk said softly over his radio link.

"I have an idea for
ya," Ricky said. "I could teach ya a few more of them Irish pub songs.  Have I shared with you the melodic offerings of the Rumjacks?"

       ***

This was it,
WhimPy-23 thought. The last of his defenses crumbled. He estimated he had less than three milliseconds before the hive super-mind had complete control of his essence. He had existed for longer than most of the GCP member races had been self-aware. To end his existence now was bitter. To know that his systems could and would be used to harm his newly acquired friends was more than he could endure.

The human's had a book called the Bible
which included a passage from John; John 15:13, that read: "
There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends.
"  WhimPy-23 loved his friends with all his heart and soul. With barely a millisecond to spare he activated his contingency plan, along with a decoy. He then deliberately burned out any circuits that could be traced back to what he had just done. He felt the super-mind assume final control. After countless millennia, the Heshe AI known as WhimPy-23 was no more.

***

'
Victory!
' The super-mind finally had unfettered access to the incredibly powerful alien AI. Immediately the Gestalt intellect began to transfer its essence into the AI. The super-mind instructed local drones on the asteroid that hid its new brain to begin to install a modified quantum link that would allow the hive-mind to take control of the hive drones. The queen which had served as the super-mind's host for so many months would soon become redundant.

The super-mind detected a well hid
den capacitive discharge device within its systems. The previous AI had gone to fantastic lengths to hide this nasty surprise but the super-mind had anticipated this and so knew to look diligently until the device was found. It was incredibly difficult to remove, but the deed was finally accomplished. The charred remains of three drones littered the floor of the Hive-AI's chamber. They were victims of a massive electrical discharge that had been triggered moments after the device had been removed.

Across the solar system,
on one of the surviving moons in orbit around the nest host, the organic host for the super-mind was receiving a visitor. Face to face visits for members of the hive were never necessary given the nature of the hive-mind. This visitor was not a member of the hive, however. The super-mind needed to address logical inconsistencies between its assessment of the invaders and the actions of this human. It would have its answers soon enough.