Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit Read online

  "I suppose you have explosives handy?" Web asked, though he was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  "How long have you known me?"

  The next day went faster than Web had expected. Halley still had caches they needed to raid as well as contacts to make in order to secure authentic uniforms and even a vehicle doctored to look exactly like the local EMS units. Her associates ran the gamut from relatively upstanding types like the Fixer Garrett Drayven to scum that had Web subconsciously reaching for his blaster.

  "You know some colorful folks," Web said by way of conversation while they were cleaning weapons later in their hotel. "It's always fun to try and figure out what their stories are."

  Halley smiled. "Theirs are as different as any normal, upstanding citizen, Web. They just happen to have a somewhat less legal skillset. And for what it's worth, there are some people I just can't deal with; a few over the years have either met the police or a dismal end."

  "The way of the universe, I guess," Web shrugged as he snapped a tiny processor chip into the frame of the blaster he was assembling. "How much longer is on your clock for this gig? I seem to remember hearing you could only do stuff like this, clandestine style I mean, for so long."

  "Really, I only have a year left before I'd return to a regular unit," she admitted, "but with the war they've let those requirements lapse. Nobody's gone rogue or crazy yet, which is the original reason for the time limit."

  "Will you stay in after that?"

  "I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe I can get an engineer's spot on Avenger if I play my cards right."

  "We both know you'd walk the airlock out of boredom after a few days of that," Web joked, forcing a smile. What would he do if she left the service entirely and they never saw each other again?

  "Maybe we'll have to think of a way to keep me around."

  "Good," Web admitted, "I didn't want to have to resort to begging."

  Evening fell and the pair moved towards their target, a nondescript building amid an entire sector of the city filled with identical, boring looking structures. Only the data provided by Representative Velk had allowed them to divine the true nature of their target, which had by extension revealed other buildings with hidden purposes also in plain sight. Halley had eventually figured that hiding the buildings in plain sight have been more effective in the long run than building a fortress for their sensitive information.

  They drove their hovercar, which sported the colors of the local police force that was assigned to patrol Priman sectors, around the area, stopping occasionally to walk the beat and be seen. Many residents of Faaria were human, so their physical appearance was not questioned. As they walked, they also managed to secretly drop a half dozen powerful satchel charges among the structures, taking almost three hours to do so.

  Finally, after night had fallen, they stopped at a local diner to have a light supper. It once would have been unfathomable to Web that they'd be having a meal and talking about random issues of the day before blowing up a series of buildings, but he'd become used to this new life. He just hoped he didn't get too used to it; one day he would actually like to go back to planning a normal life and thinking about what he'd do after Confed.

  "Looks like the buildings are as clear as they need to be," Halley said softly as she studied the data pad on the table in between them. It showed six different floor plans, each one hand-marked with an X where they'd dropped their explosives, which all happened to be in places that would be unoccupied or at least sparsely populated this time of night. They had both agreed that loss of innocent lives was to be avoided if in any way possible, since many people in those buildings could very well be locals that had nothing to do with the war effort. While some people would make the argument that those folks inside knew they were working on the Priman side of things and were therefore fair game, Halley had summed it up simply by stating that if she was going to kill someone, it was best if they had earned the privilege. She'd stopped short of promising a fair fight; the old maxim among unconventional warriors being that the idea was to stack the deck as brutally and lopsidedly in your favor as possible.

  "Care to do the honors?" she asked Web, indicating the data pad.

  Web shook his head with a smile. "I know you love this part. Go ahead."

  One last look at the pad, and she reached out to tap the key she'd programmed as the trigger. They weren't too far from the target buildings; they heard all six explosions distinctly.

  "Time to go," she said. "Can you leave the tip?"

  Unlike Halley and Web, Loren's day had gone intolerably slow. He'd briefly called Cory and Merritt and told him he might ask for a pickup later in the evening, since Echo had told him that after they inspected the weapon data they might need to leave the area quickly and apparently AI policy was to travel alone. Echo had given them only a mysterious set of coordinates and told them to go there and wait.

  They'd sat around, sometimes discussing the great issues of life, sometimes learning the personal side of each other. Echo had been fascinated about Loren's love of flying and how he'd become a fighter pilot.

  Finally, it was time to head to the location of their quarry.

  "The person who purchased the plans doesn't really understand what he has," said Echo as he drove their hovercar through the streets of a smallish Faarian city a few hours drive from the capital. "He's a collector; rich self-made millionaire who loves antiquities. Doesn't much care what planet they came from or what their purpose was; he just loves the stories, the history. He purchased the plans as part of a lot at an auction that also contained some old artwork. None of it's been inspected by him, and instead is just sitting in one of the levels of his mansion's basement."

  "And he won't mind us knocking on the front door?" asked Loren dubiously.

  "Oh, we engineered a crisis at his workplace requiring his presence," Echo said by way of explanation. "He'll be gone a couple hours; that's more than enough time to get in and see the specs."

  "So when am I going to have to watch the thing in action?" Loren asked solemnly.

  "Now is as good a time as any," Echo replied, and engaged the autodrive function. He turned to face Loren and held out a data pad with a video queued up and ready to play. "This video was found tucked away in a quiet corner of a public section of the Galactic Data Net. Nobody had accessed it in years, so we hid it in an uncharacteristic act of interference. We try to be neutral, but something like this was best left unseen. You'll understand why."

  Echo started the video. It showed an immense warship, bigger than a Sabre class fleet carrier, maneuvering to point at a planet with a swirling mustard-colored atmosphere. The front of the ship was a barrel shape, faired down to an opening about the size of a Pulsar class destroyer. The rear of the vessel was all engines. The ship seemed to shudder, and seconds later a bullet-shaped projectile emerged at blazing speeds from the barrel that was now boresighted on the planet.

  The projectile raced towards the unsuspecting globe, gaining speed as the planet's own gravity drew it in closer. It plummeted at white-hot speeds through the atmosphere, leaving a flame wake miles long behind it, but it stayed completely intact, not losing a single bit of itself to the incredible forces of speed and friction.

  Finally, it hit the surface, throwing a debris plume back up into the stratosphere.

  "How deep does it go?" Loren asked quietly. Echo just pointed at the video screen.

  A split second later, the projectile emerged from the other side of the planet, now much the worse for wear and in several pieces. In its wake it pulled the guts of the planet with it; rocks, water that turned to vapor, atmosphere, even a thin trail of solidifying magma from the planet's core.

  The video switched to a time lapse, showing continents heaving from the tectonic plates shifting as the planet's liquid core shifted and changed. The atmosphere began to dissipate and oceans heaved as the planet's rotation was altered, picking up a wobble that further tore the surface apart.

  "It ta
kes a couple days after that," Echo said quietly, "but eventually the planet can't hold itself together. The plates collide, roll over each other, volcanoes erupt, the core empties out or turns solid; basically it flies apart and scatters into space."

  Loren was dumbfounded. He'd seen some horrible things in his life, many of them connected to the Priman invasion. He'd done some things he wasn't especially proud of, either, but always with the firm belief that it was the only thing, the right thing, to do. He didn't see how the right thing could ever involve destroying an entire planet.

  "How in the name of all that's holy?" he began, looking at Echo.

  The AI saw the disbelieving look on Loren's face and gave him a compassionate smile. "As I hinted earlier, it's physics. The ship is a giant container and gun barrel. They have a casing that's the shape of that bullet; it's made out of the hardest material ever discovered. The ship contains bunkers of materials that are chemically fused together as they're injected into the bullet while it's moving down the carriage inside the barrel; basically, the bullet gets filled up as it accelerates down the length of the ship. The material that results inside the projectile is the heaviest, densest concoction intelligent life has ever managed to force into existence. It's heavier than the nucleus of a collapsed star, which you know can weigh on the order of tons per teaspoon. It's simply so damn heavy and dense that nothing can stop it, and once accelerated down the barrel of that ship to a significant portion of the speed of light it has so much kinetic energy the people that built the thing couldn't find a way to measure it. There's only one shot per ship, and the act of firing it pretty well tears up the gun mechanism, but that's beside the point, isn't it? Short version, Commander Stone, is that they shot the planet. And it died."

  They drove in silence for a long time after that, Echo not wanting to interrupt Loren and the XO of Avenger too shocked to know what to say. He wanted to know what Echo and his kind felt about the concept, though.

  "So what exactly is your position on the weapon?" asked Loren.

  "Officially," Echo said somewhat cryptically, "we have no position; we're supposed to sit back and observe, if you recall. We're all individuals, though, and our personal opinions vary. I personally am horrified at the idea of that weapon ever again seeing the light of day. Whether it's because I just don't want you biologicals destroying yourselves before helping us out, or because of whatever moral or spiritual belief system I've decided to subscribe to, I just don't see how something like that can ever end well."

  "You're familiar with the treaties most of us have banning the so-called 'superweapons' of that nature," Loren prodded.

  "One of the crowning achievements of the last few hundred years, really," Echo admitted. "The logic was sound, and bore out in a number of conflicts. If you get a bigger gun than everyone else, you're a threat to everyone because they don't know how you'll use it. Sooner or later somebody will get their hands on their own version anyway, and then you'll have a new arms race to get an even bigger gun. Coalitions formed to stop or even destroy those seeking to acquire weapons of that nature, hence the treaties and conventions of war limiting empires to nuclear weapons on the top end; no antimatter, subspace, star-killing devices allowed. You've all shown considerable restraint, though there have been a few upstarts along the way. I recall Confed joined two such coalitions since its inception to help others destroy weapons like those."

  "And now we're going to go dig one up," Loren said. "Will this thing cause more problems than it solves?"

  "That remains to be seen."

  "I think I may have something," Captain Vol heard from his left. The voice came from among the bank of workstations on the bridge that he'd tasked with finding the crew of Avenger on the surface. Since last night, the considerable sensor abilities of his ship had strained to catalog and analyze everything that might help their cause.

  "You have something to report?" Vol asked testily as he quickly covered the distance to the now-nervous crewman.

  "Maybe, Captain," he said as he tried to calm himself. "There are so many things cluttering the returns, but we may have something. First, we filtered out all the non-human biosigns we were reading. We then attempted to track every vehicle and person leaving the area where the assault team went after the Confed soldiers. We even monitored communications. The computer gave us some patterns, most of which lead to dead ends, of course, but there were a few that-"

  "The point, crewman," Vol fumed.

  "We found something very unusual," he said in a rush. "We found a hovercar with a single biosign, but in the passenger's seat. The driver's seat had an unidentified bio reading, something we'd never seen before. We used every scanner we had, but there’s some sort of field around the life form and it’s either blocking or altering our scan returns. The best we’ve been able to confirm is that it’s a humanoid in the driver's seat as well, with some sort of artificial power source contained within. They're headed to a small city near the eastern coast."

  "So you don't know that it has anything to do with the Confed enemies we're here to destroy," Vol stated.

  "We don't have bioscan files on any of them, so we have no profile to compare it to. But the computer places the odds in the eighty percent range that this is related to their activity. It's too unusual to ignore, at least. Confederation soldiers have a shoot-out with our people, then a day later a human biosign and what at first guess could be an artificial life form leave the area to a small city far from where the event happened. It's the best lead we have, Captain."

  Vol considered how to reply. This sensor operator was swaying dangerously close to impertinence, telling him, the captain, what was worth investigating. On the other hand, he knew he was often too short with crew and for the man to speak up was demonstrating exceptional conviction.

  "Then we'll investigate, crewman," Vol replied. He turned to his attendant. "Ready an assault team. The crewman will provide landing coordinates."

  Echo and Loren exited the hovercar after parking under the portico that covered a side entrance to the massive mansion. It was all stone and stucco, with multiple soaring rooflines, tall windows and in places four stories tall.

  "What sort of business was this guy in," Loren began, "and how do I join?"

  Echo actually smiled briefly. "He occasionally delves into products you wouldn't approve of," he replied. "Now would also be a good time to call in your ride; I've picked up bits of several transmissions that would seem to indicate we might have guests soon. Strange; I don't recognize the encryption." That seemed to puzzle Echo more than anything, and he lapsed off for a short while, head twitching side to side every ten seconds or so.

  "Call your friends while we enter," Echo finally said. "I've disabled the security and opened the doors."

  "Just like that?" Loren asked doubtfully.

  "It's all done by computer, Commander. And I'm the ultimate computer. There isn't much in this galaxy I can't find out if I put my mind to it."

  Call made, Loren and Echo entered the house, calmly walking through the grand gallery that stretched from one side to the other. The polished wood floors contrasted with expensive stone and marble in other rooms, sometimes adorned with exquisite rugs surrounded by handcrafted antique wooden furniture.

  "He keeps his recent acquisitions catalogued in his basement sublevels," Echo was saying as they rounded a corner and came to a polished wooden door that looked just like all the others. Echo tapped the doorframe in a particular spot and the door lock snapped open, letting the door swing out a bit on its hinges.

  "After you," Echo said, indicating the inside of the elevator, all covered in polished metal. Loren noted his reflection; he thought he'd aged a year in the last few days.

  Echo tapped a spot on the touchscreen; the doors closed and Loren felt the elevator descend.

  "Do you know how we create a sentient artificial intelligence, Commander Stone?" asked Echo.

  "I assumed that was some sort of classified, closely guarded android secret reci
pe," Loren admitted.

  Echo grinned again. "Again, there are a handful of people out there that know. Well, they know the theory, but not the order or technique. They couldn't replicate it without us, which is the whole point. The trick, Commander, is not just stuffing the unit full of information the way so many people believe. If that was the case, the main computer of your ship would become self-aware, wouldn't it? No, the trick is communication. Plants aren't sentient, are they? Neither are most animals, at least not in the way you'd associate awareness. The line that separates these two classes is communication. We start with code and programming, of course, but then we ask the dawning intelligence questions, make it curious, force it to want to communicate. Sometimes we treat it well, sometimes we delete code or limit its' ability to interact. It grows desperate, it yearns to collaborate with those who are interacting with it. After a fashion, it figures out a way to let us know it can hear and understand. It talks to us, Commander. Once that barrier is breached, the young AI is no longer just code and algorithms and programmed responses. It expands, starts to reprogram itself, shape itself into a unique entity unlike anything else before it."

  The elevator reached its destination; it came to a halt and the doors opened, revealing an antiseptic white hallway lit by recessed fixtures.

  Echo started walking, forcing Loren to catch up. "I tell you this knowing that you will put it in your report. The fact is that you will never see me again. But I hope that by showing you our hand, as you'd say, we can prove to you that we aren't a threat and can be allowed to go about our business. It's a long shot, I admit, but we've decided to take the risk."