I turned to look at him. He had followed me to stand nearby. His camera panned the length of the leathery tank and finally halted on my face.
“Mass-death?” I asked, feeling a bit sick. “You mean that thing kills the microbial creatures in this bag?”
“That is the most probable interpretation.”
I backed away from the bag in horror. The Macros, I thought. I was in one of their labs. What had they been doing when I first entered such a place? I recalled the first Worm I’d ever seen. They’d been dissecting it alive. But what if their real purpose had been to inflict pain? To torture an enemy until information was gained? I could not think of a more horrible fate than to be tortured by a machine. There could be no compassion, no change of heart. They would only know that causing minor damage to a biotic might gain useful information. They would not know when to quit. Why bother quitting at all? Why not just keep it up until the victim died? After all, at any moment they might relinquish yet more valuable information.
There could never be mercy in a being that felt no pain, which did not understand the concept. The torture would just go on and on. I felt ill, thinking about it, and thinking that under my watch, these tiny beings had been zapped over and over. We could have saved them, but we hadn’t realized…
Another thought came to me as I looked down at Marvin. He was able to talk to these tiny creatures. “Marvin,” I said. “Tell them we’re going to try to turn off the electrode. Tell them we destroyed the Macros and took over this ship. We wish to help them.”
“Concepts transmitted…” Marvin said. “Reply is… confusion.”
“They don’t understand?”
“No, they are confused by your motives.”
“We wish to help them, because they are biotics as we are. We are on the side of all biotics. We are rebels against all machines.”
“Concepts transmitted…”
“Tell me what they are saying in response.”
“They wish to know why you applied the device fifty-seven times since your arrival.”
“Fifty-seven…” I took a deep breath. “It was a mistake. We didn’t know.”
“The machines never applied it so rigorously. Their population is now only one-third optimal for the space provided. You never even asked any questions.”
“We didn’t shock them, Marvin. Tell them that. The Macros left the device active, and we didn’t know what it did.”
“They humbly request the device be deactivated before the next scheduled application. They are more than willing to answer your questions. They assure you that your ruthlessness is clear. You’re cruelty is beyond that exhibited by the machines. They beg for your questions.”
I shook my head. Somehow I felt horribly guilty, even though I hadn’t done anything. I began looking everywhere for an off-switch. I called down a team of engineers, and we worked on it together. Ten minutes passed, and I began to sweat. I could not simply rip the electrode out of the bag, it would rupture the surface and release the contents. Likewise, we couldn’t switch off the power or sever the cable. The same power source provided warmth and circulation inside the tank. Time was running out. All my discussions with this new, possibly helpful race would be lost if the shocks continued without cessation. They would simply figure I was a lying monster.
“Dammit,” I complained. “Marvin, can you turn this shock-device off?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me how to do it?”
“Disconnect the power.”
“But if we sever the line, it will cease giving them life-support as well. Leave it to the Macros to build a torture system directly into the life-support system of their prisoners.”
“They are efficient creatures.”
“Here, give me your camera arm, Marvin.”
Marvin’s camera swung to examine my hands, then face, then my hands again. “What do you intend?” he asked.
“I’ll give it back, or make you a new one. I want to use the nanites to short out the power wire to the electrode only.”
“That is likely to damage the nanites.”
“I told you, I will give you a new arm.”
“How do I know you are truthful in this case?”
“Marvin,” I said in exasperation, “you’ll have to trust me. Have I been truthful so far?”
“Past events do not predict future realities with one hundred percent accuracy.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, trying to be patient. “But they are the best indicators we have on which to base judgments. You will just have to trust me this time. Long term cooperation is built upon trust.”
Marvin considered it. At last, he walked to the thick cable with a humping gait. He was not yet accustomed to his new legs. He crouched and allowed his nanite arm to slip off his back and form a grip around the Macro cable.
I was thinking I was going to have to provide the program, step-by-step, for the nanites to follow. But I didn’t. Marvin, I realized, had written that program by himself.
Soon, the arm shivered and sparked.
“The task is complete,” Marvin said.
I saw the nanite arm he’d deployed begin to crawl back up onto his back.
“Hold on,” I said. “Just leave it there. I’ll give you a new arm. A longer one.”
Marvin did not examine me with his camera this time, as he could no longer move it around and activate it. After a few seconds consideration, he agreed.
I sent one of the marines to fetch a good-sized mass of nanites. Marvin had earned it. I wondered how long it would be before I began to trust him.
Once things were settled with the microbials, who still considered me a cruel god, my mind turned back to the Worms. We only had so long to talk to them before we crossed their system and left it behind.
I received a beeping summons from Major Sarin before I was able to transmit anything to the Worms, however.
“Riggs here, go ahead,” I said.
“Sir, the missiles…they are on-scope again, accelerating. They are closer than we thought, Colonel.”
She kept talking, but I missed the rest. The moment I heard the word missiles, I’d started running through the ship to the bridge.
27
“How long until impact?” I asked.
“Less than an hour, sir,” Gorski said. He was working the numbers on his tablet. “I’ll dump the projections to the main screen now.”
A mass of curved lines appeared on the screen. The lines representing the past were blue, and those predicting the future were yellow. Each line had a red sliver in the middle representing the missile, which crept a pixel closer every once in a while. The yellow lines were like the curved spines of an umbrella, and they arced in on my ship at the end of their paths from a wide variety of angles. I figured they’d been fired on such trajectories purposefully. They were not clustered up, but spread as widely apart as possible. By being spread out, we could not take out more than one at a time with any counterstrike. They would all converge at once in the final minutes, hoping to overwhelm our defenses. I nodded as I looked at the situation.
“It’s time,” I said. “Launch the drones.”
From racks we’d set up on the cruiser’s hull, sixteen counter-missiles were fired in rapid succession. An almost imperceptible shiver went through the ship with each salvo. Sixteen for sixteen. I didn’t like the odds. We had to have a hit in every single case. There was no room for error.
“Suggestions?” I asked my crew.
“We could start dodging,” Gorski said.
I shook my head. “No point,” I said. “We would only lose forward velocity and they would overtake us faster, leaving less time for our point defense cannons to pick any of them off.”
“But they might not hit us all at once if we changed course,” Gorski argued. “We could stagger the incoming attacks and have a better chance at shooting them down.”
I still shook my head. “I don’t think so. The Macros know what they’re doing. The missiles will home in and adjust their speed. Look at the pattern, they are interacting. There is some kind of AI in those things, coordinating them. What else have you got?”