Swarm (10 page)

“The metallic content of the injections given to the Sandra-biotic was approximately seventy-two percent. The exact proportions vary depending on nature of the injections and their purpose.”

“I’m full of metal?” asked Sandra in alarm. “I don’t like that. Aren’t most metals poisonous?”

I shrugged. “You seem okay. They must have flushed them out of you somehow. Remember how you had to go after you woke up? I built a bathroom for you.”

She nodded thoughtfully. I could see the look of disgust on her face, however. No one wants to hear they had just peed out a mysterious puddle of liquid metal.

“Alamo, let me get this straight. If I let you give me—
protective injections
, you will allow Sandra to move about more freely?”

“Yes.”

“Kyle, don’t do it. There’s no need right now. Crow said the injections were nasty, remember?”

“You came out okay.”

“You shouldn’t make any big decisions right now. You are grieving. You aren’t yourself yet.”

I looked at her, knowing she was right. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, I knew what was going on. The fact I hadn’t realized it right away demonstrated Sandra was right. I was a computer scientist. I should have known instantly what the ship was hinting about with these injections.

“Alamo, you said the injection contained
us
. As in, a portion of your collective self. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“This ship isn’t really a ship at all, is it? It’s a swarm of nano-particles. That’s what you are, isn’t it, Alamo?”

“Your description is imprecise, but partially correct.”

“Partially? You are more than just a mass of nano-particles?”

“Many of the ship’s systems are built of massed compounds.”

I thought about that. “Like the engines maybe?”

“Yes.”

I nodded to myself. It made sense to me. How would you build something like the firing chamber of an engine out of billion tiny robots? These things had to be very small, to make up the ship’s hull. Perhaps they didn’t compose the ship’s hull itself, perhaps what they did was build the walls and hull up or removed it, quickly. That was the liquid shimmer I saw when ‘doors’ opened or closed between chambers.

“Kyle?” asked Sandra.

“Yeah?”

“What the hell is a nano?”

“It’s short for nanorobot, or nanite. The concept is so new, and so experimental, that we computer types haven’t even all agreed on what to call them yet. We can’t build anything like this ship, of course. Not yet, anyway. But the idea is essentially that you build not one big robot, but billions of tiny ones, so small you can’t see them with the naked eye. Working together, these microscopic robots can build things human hands could never construct.”

“You are saying that they injected me with a zillion tiny robots and they rebuilt my fingers and restarted my heart?”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

I shook my head. I reached out to take her hand. No less than three thin black arms snaked out of the walls, and pinned her wrist. Then I was able to gently pat her. It was horrible, however, as I could see the pain on her face. The arms were hurting her, making my entire gesture of comfort into a joke. She tried to smile back to protect my feelings.

Was this my future?
I thought. In order to touch someone they had to be tied up? In order to walk the Earth again, I had to be part machine? In order to escape this fate entirely, the only option was death?

I closed my eyes. I decided then to try to get past the death of my children. I would put them away in my mind, at least for now. Too many world-changing events were happening. Thousands of people were dying on the Earth, just as my own kids had, due to these ships. I had to keep working and thinking in order to save other people the pain I was feeling now. At the very least, having a higher purpose might channel my grief into something constructive and make it more bearable. It was a coping technique counselors had suggested when my wife Donna had died.

“Alamo, let’s talk about the enemy ship we just defeated. Who was aboard that ship?”

“They are the enemy.”

“Yes,” I said patiently, my eyes still closed. “Was that ship like this one? Was it made up of nanites?”

“No.”

“Was it manned then by—by
biotics
you call them, organic life forms something like Sandra and I?”

“No.”

“Great,” I said. “Where do I go from there?”

“They aren’t alive?” asked Sandra, alarmed. “They aren’t even robots? What else is there? Are they ghosts or something?”

I thought for a moment. “Alamo, are the enemy alive at all?”

Hesitation. “Unknown.”

Sandra made an unhappy sound. I knew how she felt. You could not help but think of space-zombies.

“Are they possibly
large
robots?” I asked on a hunch.

Hesitation. “Yes.”

I nodded, but I did not smile. I suspected it would be a while before I smiled again. But this sort of thing, this problem-solving, was helping me. It kept my mind from spiraling into black depression, or rage. I had something to work on, something to prevent emotional pain from overwhelming me. My grief was like a fire, and it had been contained for now. “Do you have a name for these enemies, Alamo?”

“No.”

“What shall we call them, Sandra?” I asked.

“Hmmm. We’ve got the Nanos... how about the Macros?”

I nodded. “Sounds good. Alamo, name these enemies the Macros, and refer to them that way from now on.”

“Reference renamed.”

“What do the Macros want here on Earth?”

“Raw materials.”

That didn’t sound good. Sandra and I exchanged worried glances.

“Are they coming back soon?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“Unknown.”

“Alamo, what do your kind want?” asked Sandra. “What do the Nanos want here?”

There was no response.

“Alamo,” I said sternly, “I want you to listen to Sandra.”

“The Sandra-biotic is not command personnel.”

“I know that. You don’t have to take commands from her. Just answer her questions.”

Hesitation. “Permissions set.”

“Okay, now answer her last question.”

“Current primary objective: Locate command personnel.”

“Current objective?” asked Sandra, thinking aloud. “What was your previous objective?”

“Previous objective: Scientific examination.”

Sandra nodded and smiled, clearly proud of herself. “See? These little bastards are the butt-probing aliens we’ve all been scared of for years.”

I snorted. But I had to admit, she might be right.

“Listen Kyle,” she told me seriously. “We need to talk. I can tell you are devastated, but you are still thinking reasonably clearly. That’s exactly why the ship made you into a commander. That’s why you are leading this pack of survivors.”

“No need for a pep-talk.”

“Yes, yes there is a need for one,” she insisted. “We need you. Earth needs you. Sure, you’ve suffered. Lots of people have. I
died
, for God’s sake. But this is bigger than us. We have to do our best, because we are everything now. We are all that our world has up here to protect her. Everyone might die if we don’t do it right.”

I sighed. “If you’re trying to make me feel better, you are doing a lousy job of it.”

She laughed. I didn’t laugh with her, but I knew she was right.

But still, in my own mind, I had a different set of goals. I wasn’t really in this to save Earth. I wanted to find out what was going on, who was pulling the strings. I wanted to tear them up. Maybe it would take years. Maybe I would die trying. But I was going to get some revenge if I could, even if it was on a machine that didn’t feel anything and didn’t care as I destroyed it.
Screw them all
, that was what I was thinking.

I was no longer angry with the
Alamo
. It was a tool. I might as well be angry with the fence pole that speared my wife. I wanted to find the creatures who built this ship.

If nothing else, my hunger for revenge would keep me going.

-11-

“Riggs? Commander Riggs, are you there?”

“Yes Jack, go ahead.”

“Give me a break and call me Commodore at least when other people are listening, okay Commander?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“I’ve got some new people now. A whole new crop of them. Take a look at the screen you invented.”

I looked at it, and saw a dozen or more new golden beetles crawling around on the surface of the Earth. You could tell the new recruits from the old hands, they tended to roam around randomly.

“I see them. Are they joining up?”

“Yes. It’s going very well. There are only a few rogues left. After that last battle, people began seeing things my way. All the ships with human commanders aboard went up to meet the enemy, whether they wanted to or not. Watching other ships blow up did a great deal of the convincing for me. They know now they can’t hang back and hide. The screen you came up with helps my recruiting efforts as well. Once I tell them how to show the entire tactical system on their living room walls, they get the picture, literally. I tell them to color us green and themselves a chicken-white. They stand out and look lonely. That gets most of the bloody dags to join up immediately.” Crow broke off, erupting into a gust of laughter.

Somehow I found him less than amusing. “Commodore? I’ve got another idea for you.”

I told him about the Nanos and the Macros. I told him the Macros were coming back, and they wanted raw materials.

“That’s not good. I tried talking to them, you know, the guys in the big red ship. I had several of my lieutenants on it, trying to establish contact. They ignored us completely.”

“Maybe they will listen now that we blew up one of their ships.”

“Let’s hope.”

“I’ve got a new idea, Jack—ah, Commodore.”

“Let’s hear it.”

I described to him another screen, a predictive screen, which we could lay out on the ceiling or the floor of the bridge. If we could show a plan visually, such as how each ship should position itself, everyone would have a much easier time following orders and acting in coordination. It wouldn’t just show where ships were, but rather where we would like them to be.

“That’s a fantastic idea. Let’s set it up now and test it.”

After an hour or so of work, we had a working system. The ceiling worked best. We tried the floor, but Crow complained that furniture kept getting in the way. I gathered that Crow had done a lot of pirating. He had by his own admission a morass of carpets and things strewn over his floor. In the end we set ourselves up in comfortable chairs and gazed up at the planning screen on the ceiling. We found it worked well, we could easily talk and plan strategies. We could even give our ships formations to fight in.

“I’m impressed again, Commander. We make a great team. I’ll relay this to everyone else and next time we’ll be flying in organized squadrons,” Crow said, but then he hesitated. “Do you really think there will be a next time? Soon, I mean? Your ship suggested they would be back, but it might not know the difference between a day, a year, or a century.”

“I think the ship means soon, sir. We have to be vigilant. Logically, it makes sense to me that the threat is real and ongoing. If the Nanos are trying to protect Earth—in their own special way—they’ve overdone it at this point. I mean, just one enemy ship came to the party? We fought with clueless commanders and only forty-odd ships and won easily. Why then, if that was the end of it, did the Nanos send over seven hundred vessels here?”

“I don’t like it,” said Crow. “But you’re right, we have to assume they will be back for more soon, and in strength. And we have to assume we are in an all-out war.”

“We need to alert the governments of Earth to the situation,” I said. “They probably saw the battle. They have to be tracking us. They must do what they can to mobilize and protect themselves.”

“So far, with humanity’s primitive, homegrown tech, they can’t do much.”

“Has any nation tried to nuke one of these ships yet? That would probably do the trick.”

“Not to my knowledge. But you’ve got a point there. We should talk to them before they get desperate. I’ll put another officer on it, I’ve got just the guy, his name is Pierre and he could sweet-talk anyone out of their wallets. He’s an ex-confidence trickster. He’s got a silver tongue.”

“An ex-con man?” I asked doubtfully. Did we really want a criminal as our representative to governments? I supposed plenty of the world’s diplomats came under that description, but still....

“Well, maybe not so ex,” Crow went on. “Pierre’s been living off internet scams for years, I gather. He always kept a loaded weapon with him, expecting some mark to hunt him down for revenge. That’s what saved him when the Nano ship grabbed him.”

“I see. Well, if he’s the best we have for now.”