Monitors everywhere; sophisticated sensors; doors keyed to open upon the detection of human presence. This was the very antithesis of an Amish world.
McAndrew had moved on, through into the next room. He turned, waiting for me to come through the hatch and join him.
I switched to local communication mode, hoping that the circuit would not easily be overheard and unscrambled.
“Mac,” I said softly. “Don’t take another step. I was wrong. This isn’t the Amish Ark. It’s the Cyber Ark. They created their AI, and the damned thing is running the show.”
McAndrew stood dead still. I knew that he had understood exactly what I said — he’s quicker than me on the uptake on any scale that I can devise — but he seemed unsure what to do next.
I said, more urgently, “Don’t act alarmed. Just come back this way. As slowly as you can stand to.”
It was too late. Either the AI read the significance of his movement toward me, or a massive intelligence had received our first transmissions and cracked the compression code used in suit communications. The reason did not matter. What did matter was that the hatch began to slide closed as McAndrew hurried toward it.
There was a control panel on my side of the hatch, but I didn’t trust it. The AI might have an override. I dragged the power laser from my pocket and aimed high, where the upper edge of the hatch met the wall.
There was a lurid sputter of sparks and a vibration that I felt in the soles of my suited feet. The hatch, welded to the wall, ground to a stop and McAndrew ducked his head and hurried through to my side.
“We’ve got to get outside,” I said. “We’ll be safe there.”
I led the way. As I headed for the outer port I experienced an odd sensation that the whole Ark was coming alive around me. I could feel vibrations under my feet, and golden lights in walls and ceiling were winking to life. I ignored the lights, but I used the power laser to burn out every monitor that I saw. A cleaning robot, all arms and legs and vicious scraping blades, rumbled out to block the corridor. I fried its video sensors and soared on over the top of it without missing a step.
Twenty meters in front of me the door of the outer lock was starting to close. I halted, set the laser to tight beam, and aimed carefully. The wall above the top of the door turned orange-white. The door froze in its tracks. Three seconds later I was outside and moving under the baleful light of the Cassiopeia supernova.
I turned to make sure that McAndrew was still with me. He was, but a single glance back at the Ark was enough to tell me that I had erred on the side of optimism. The whole outer surface of the modified asteroid seethed with activity. Cranes were turning in our direction, metal manipulator jaws stretched as far as they could toward us, mobile cargo units clanked our way across the uneven surface, and the long booms of communication antennas swung out to block the path between us and the hovering Merganser.
“Straight up and out, Mac,” I cried, and fired my suit jets at maximum thrust. A rapid vertical rise, a quick controlled zig-zag to avoid a swinging antenna boom, and I was clear. The Merganser lay ahead. In half a minute I was standing in the air lock. I looked back.
McAndrew had reacted more slowly and taken longer to avoid the threshing antenna booms, but he was clear and on the final two hundred meters of his approach. Sighting beyond him, I realized that I had been optimistic yet again.
“Inside, Mac,” I shouted. “Right inside — and hang on.”
Instead of cycling the lock I did an emergency override, allowing all the air in the interior of the Merganser to puff away through the lock and into space. No problem, we had plenty of reserve and could replace it — if we survived and had the chance.
The AI inside the Ark had control over its lifeboats and space pinnaces. Four of them were lifting away from the surface and heading in our direction. They lacked space-weapons systems, but they wouldn’t need them. A direct collision at maximum acceleration would be enough to make sure that McAndrew and I did not return to the vicinity of Sol. If we survived the crash, our fates would depend on the whim of the AI.
Mac was inside, slamming shut the hatch of the life capsule. I headed for the controls. We had no space weapons, either. But we had one thing that the Ark ’s lifeboats and pinnaces did not.
I dropped, still fully suited, into the pilot’s chair and flicked the Merganser’s drive to its maximum value. The life capsule sprang into flight position and a fiery plume of plasma, hotter than dragon’s breath, spewed out on all sides of us and away behind the ship. Everything in the path of the drive exhaust melted away in a fraction of a second to its subatomic components.
The lifeboats and pinnaces exploded in eruptions of violet sparks. When the sky cleared I saw, beyond them and slightly away from the line of the drive, the floating bulk of the Cyber Ark.
I was turning the Merganser to bring its deadly drive into alignment with the Ark when I felt McAndrew’s suited hand over mine on the control stick.
“Jeanie,” he cried — louder than he ever spoke. “What are you doing?”
“It killed them,” I said. We were fighting each other for the controls, and my voice was as shaky as my hands. “Killed all of them, all two thousand people. We have to destroy it.”
“Why do you say the AI killed them?” We were face to face, and his eyes were wild.
“Look at the sequence, Mac. The first message was genuine. It had them trapped, except for the ones who tried to escape in the lifeboat. It grabbed them with the manipulator.”
“But the others — the messages.”
“I don’t think it realized that the others had a way to get a message out until our signal was received at the Ark. But then it knew, and it opened the whole interior. It killed them all. Those jerky messages were synthesized, the AI made them up just for us.”
“That’s why you can’t kill it. Don’t you see, Jeanie, it’s intelligent. Super-intelligent — it learned our language, interpreted our messages in no time at all.”
He was stronger than me, but he had poor leverage. I was winning, and the drive had almost reached the outer limb of the Ark.
“We have to kill it because it’s super-intelligent,” I said. “Super-intelligent, and insane. We have no idea what it might be able to do. There’s never been anything as dangerous to humans in the whole Universe.”
“You wouldn’t kill a baby, would you, because it was crazy?” McAndrew had changed position, and his hold on the controls was as good as mine. “Think for a minute, Jeanie. It’s morally wrong to kill any intelligent being. You’ve told me that a hundred times.”
I let go of the control stick. Not because I accepted his argument, or even because the drive on the Merganser was inadequate to sterilize the whole Ark, though it almost certainly was. I had a more practical reason. We were accelerating at a hundred and eighteen gees. In the ten seconds that we had been wrestling for the controls, the Merganser had flown almost sixty kilometers. Over such a distance our drive exhaust would inflict only minor damage on the Ark.
I took a long breath, moved away from the controls, and forced myself to begin the routine task of refilling the life capsule with air. Until that was done we could not remove our suits. We were quite safe in them, but we faced a long journey home. After a few moments McAndrew came over to help me.