I asked Mac how long it would take one of the gigantic forts to travel out to the location of the Cyber Ark. He thought for a moment and said it would be a year’s trip.
“Great,” I said. “What are the rest of us supposed to do until the forts arrive? The AI could kill the lot of us.”
“It might.” The speaker was not McAndrew, but a blond navy officer. Captain Knudsen had very pale skin and a straggly Viking beard, and he looked about eighteen years old. “But the forts aren’t there to prevent our being killed,” he went on. “They won’t be going all the way out to the Ark. ”
“So what will they be doing?”
“They’re our last line of defense. They’ll make sure nothing can hit Earth and the Solar System colonies.”
That quiet comment gave me a jolt in the right place. Say what you like about Simple Simonette, he was taking the threat of the Cyber Ark AI seriously. The last line of defense…
McAndrew and I were assigned to the Ptarmigan under Knudsen’s command. It was the lead ship, equipped with a four-hundred gee version of the balanced drive and able to make the outward journey in four days. It was also, though no one mentioned it, the tethered goat. If, when we arrived, the AI found us and gulped us down, the rest of the fleet would learn from our fate and structure the rest of its operations accordingly.
It was a change for me to travel as a passenger. McAndrew had retreated inside his head, so I spent the four-day journey scanning the sky ahead with the Ptarmigan’s sensors. We had observing instruments aboard more sensitive and more sophisticated than anything that I had ever seen. Apparently they weren’t quite sensitive enough at extreme distance, since I found no trace of the Cyber Ark.
On the afternoon of the fourth day, when my worries were mounting, Captain Knudsen cut the drive of the Ptarmigan and joined me. “Locked in yet?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“But we show as within a hundred thousand kilometers.” There was a touch of reproof in his voice. “McAndrew assured me it couldn’t travel far, it doesn’t have the drive engines. We ought to have definite target acquisition by now. Let me have a try.” He eased me away from the mass detector controls and bent over them. “There’s a bit of a knack to using this, you see, you have to get used to it.”
I could have pointed out that I had been trained in the use of mass detectors when he was still blowing milk bubbles and filling his diapers, but I didn’t. I let him take over the controls, certain that he wouldn’t find anything.
Certain, but wrong. Within five minutes he said, “Ah, there we are. Mass and range are just the way they should be. I’m locking us in now.”
I leaned over beside him. Sure enough, the signal was there, strong and definite. How could I possibly have missed it? I turned to the optical sensors for confirmation, and found it there also.
“You’re right, and we’re getting visual confirmation,” I said. “There’s the Ark, right in the middle of the image. There’s a weaker, diffuse signal surrounding the central one. It’s spread over a much bigger volume. Any idea what it could be?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Knudsen was decent enough not to gloat. “The target doesn’t seem to be moving. We’re approaching fast.”
“And then what?” McAndrew had wakened from his trance at the sound of our voices, and now he drifted over to stand beside me.
“Let’s take a look.” Knudsen entered a coded query sequence. “I was given sealed orders that apply only after target acquisition. Guess that’s now.”
He completed the string, and we read the words as they appeared. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE ARK. DO NOT APPROACH CLOSER THAN FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETERS TO THE ARK. DO NOT ENTER INTO DIALOG WITH THE AI, EVEN IF IT SEEKS TO DO SO. IF THE ARK SEEKS TO APPROACH YOUR SHIP, RETREAT. FOLLOW THE ARK IF IT OTHERWISE CHANGES POSITION, AND INFORM THE FLEET CONTINUOUSLY OF ITS LOCATION.
“Sounds easy enough,” Knudsen said. “That’s exactly what I would have done anyway, even without instructions.”
“The orders say, don’t try to destroy it.” I had mixed feelings about that. Who could say how dangerous the AI might be?
“I’m not sure the Ptarmigan could destroy it if we wanted to.” Knudsen was much more relaxed now that his sealed orders were open. “We don’t have the firepower. We’ll leave that job to the big boys.”
“If we decide it’s absolutely necessary to destroy it,” McAndrew said. “We don’t know that.”
Knudsen stared at him. “What do you mean? Admiral Simonette made that decision before we started. The Ark and the AI inside it must be annihilated. Look at all the people the AI killed.”
“We don’t know that for sure. Suppose they’re not dead?”
“It was your report that told us they were.”
“Yes, but we don’t have proof of that. Before we destroy it…”
While they were talking the Ptarmigan was closing steadily on our destination and I had been working the big scope, trying to pull the diffuse cloud around the Ark into sharp focus. Finally I was seeing on the screen one big dot surrounded by a myriad of tiny ones. Thousands of them.
“I think we have proof now,” I said. “Look at the display.” McAndrew turned and let out a strange, strangled groan. What we were looking at were corpses, a whole cemetery of human bodies floating free in space. I could see a shattered lifeboat in among them.
Knudsen was already at the communicator. I heard his unsteady voice from the desk at the other side of the chamber, sending the news back to Admiral Simonette and the rest of the fleet.
“This is the Ptarmigan. We have visual contact with the Cyber Ark, and can now be sure it will not be able to escape. Unfortunately, we must report the death of more colonists. It appears increasingly probable that all are dead. We will need a ship larger than the Ptarmigan to return them to Earth for suitable burial. Please confirm receipt of message.”
A preliminary hum came from the speaker. At the same moment as I realized that it was far too soon for our message to have reached the fleet, we heard a woman’s voice.
“I register your approach, and I hear your message. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.”
I recognized the voice, but there was none of the earlier hesitation and jerkiness.
McAndrew began, “We are humans, aboard the ship Ptarmigan of the United Space Fed—”
“No!” Knudsen jumped at Mac and smashed him so hard in the neck and chest that he was cut off in mid-word and knocked over backwards. “Are you crazy?” He ran over to the board and switched off the transmitter. “You heard our orders, we’re not to talk to the AI — no matter what it says to us.”
“It hasn’t shown us any hostile intentions,” McAndrew croaked from his position down on the floor. “It’s an intelligent, thinking being, you can’t kill it without giving it a chance to speak.”
“We sure can. It’s a murderer. What do you think those are?” Knudsen pointed to the bodies on the screen, easier to see as our steady approach to the Ark continued.
“I know your instructions.” The woman’s voice was as calm as ever. “Do not enter into dialog with the AI, even if it seeks to do so. Explain the reason for that command.”
“It knows. But how could it? — that was a high-level cipher, we couldn’t read it ourselves without the key.” Knudsen gestured to me. “You take the drive controls, get us away from here. That thing’s more dangerous than anyone realized.”