Back to the surface

The revelation about our daughter left me with a dilemma. I would certainly have to tell Sabrina that we were, effectively, parents. But when? Since landing on Earth that Is, she’d become fixated on learning all she could about the airships and how the survivors applied Steam power to their situation here. I didn’t want to distract her with something I knew she’d dwell on. Especially when she was so focused on getting a ride on one of the airships.

Worse, perhaps, was I didn’t really know how she’d react. We’d talked about having a child a couple times over the years we’d been together before leaving 34 Tauri. The only things we’d agreed on was that she was more likely to be able to carry a child to term, and neither of us really wanted to set aside our work to be pregnant. Of course, unless we used a surrogate or a tank, ‘Brina’d have to be the one to carry any child we had together. After what I’d put my body through, there was little chance I, or a child, would survive the pregnancy.

For the time being, the point was moot. Our daughter was safe where she was in suspension. If we decided to stay in Sol system and disembark the next generation, on Earth or one of the other potential recolonization targets, we would decide what to do. Same was true if we chose to head back to 34 Tauri. Either way, the tiniest dragon was safe.

It was the better part of two days before I was able to return to the temporary installation on the surface. I’d needed to update standing orders for the Sled and modify mission parameters for the field teams, but overall the mission was still going smoothly. But part of the problem was that we were still largely restricting ourselves to late night operations. While most of the landers had optical camouflage and would be hard to stop during the day, running the flights between midnight and 0300 dramatically reduced the chance of someone looking up in the right direction at the right time.

Conner met me at the small landing clearing as a couple of the technicians offloaded some equipment from the lander, including some raw metal we planned to use as a trade item. Engineering had managed to find some low priority spares, that could be easily re-fabricated if the need arose, and smashed them up so they looked enough like salvage that we’d be able to trade them. Some steel, some brass, a few bits of aluminum. Given what we’d seen so far, the brass would be most valuable. Or, at least, most useful.

“Welcome back, Cap’n. Everything shiny on the Sled?”

“Aye, Lieutenant. What’s our status here?” We’d been getting regular status reports from all of the surface teams and Conner had been especially thorough while Sabrina and Belize were here with them, but the question was expected.

The lieutenant briefed me on the short walk from the landing clearing to the command building. ‘Brina and Bel were back in town again with Palmer. Last Conner knew, they were close to arranging a ride with one of the Airship captains, though the matter of price was still being worked out. Hopefully, the metal I’d brought down would secure payment for ‘Brina’s joy ride. It should also be more than enough for me to acquire one of the Steeltree knives I’d seen on my last trip.

Palmer had called in earlier in the evening to confirm they were safe in the Inn we’d been using as an in-town base. For his own reasons, the innkeeper had evidently taken a liking to our little party. Now, several hours after the last report, they were all asleep as was most of the base camp here. Them with Conner’s briefing complete, I settled into one of the bunks to catch some sleep before taking the carriage into town in the morning.

On the way in, I was again amazed by the algae vats placed along the southern exposures. A sample the Science team had managed to analyze in the few days since I’d last seen them indicated the the algae was descended from a strain developed in the early 21st century. That older strain had been bred to live off of waste heat and concentrated carbon dioxide from the fuel burning power plants of the day. At least if you believed the histories. Somehow, its descendant had been tailored to live on sunlight in much smaller vats. Bio-reactors, the botanist called them. Not vats.

Whatever they called them, however they’d done it, those who’d missed the Exodus had kept the algae alive to use for fuel on a mostly used up world. Just went to show how tenacious we were as a species.

When I met Sabrina and Belize at the Inn, ‘Brina was absolutely ecstatic. While Palmer was trying to temper the enthusiasm, she explained, at some length, that they’d managed to make contact with one of the Airship captains and she, yes, she, had agreed to take Sabrina and Palmer for a flight on their next out and back. It seemed that our Engineer had struck up a conversation with their Engineer in a local tavern, which led to an introduction to the Captain, which led to the arrangement of a ride in exchange for some pittance of payment and a bit of Sabrina’s considerable Engineering skill. The flight was planned for early the next morning, and “please, oh please, can I go?”

Palmer’s take was that ‘Brina transferring knowledge wouldn’t alter anything in the culture here enough to matter. While they were technologically backward, it wasn’t like dealing with some kind of primitive tribe they still referenced in the sociology texts. Their technology was limited by available resources, rather than base knowledge. Though, apparently, their knowledge of electronics was limited to folktales and a few history books.

“Yes, ‘Brina. You can go,” I told her. “But we’re adding a recorder to that ensemble of yours. Palmer’s too. And when you’re talking to their Engineer don’t get carried away, you hear? He gets you started on steam turbines, next thing we know you’ll be telling him how to get fifteen percent better efficiency out of a Radion Pulse Drive.”

Sabrina snorted with laughter and smothered me in a hug. We both knew there was really no way I would deny her permission to go, provided we took appropriate precautions to make sure she was safe. It wasn’t just a matter of her being my wife, or even my crew. She was the Sled’s Chief Engineer. The long term success of our mission depended, in no small part, on her ability to keep Children of Earth operational. While her staff could, collectively, do the job, no one else knew the ship’s details as well as she did.

For her part, Belize was perfectly content to not take a ride on the airship. Something about not really trusting her life to sticks, strings, canvas, and steam: an attitude that elicited a bit of friendly ribbing from ‘Brina. I did see her point though. The airships were a throwback to another time. A time before you could hop a flight on pretty much any transport, and have a very high probability of reaching your destination alive in a fully functional vehicle. While we hadn’t actually witnessed any failures, airships really were built mostly from wood and fabric. Carbon nanotube and boro-silicate they weren’t.

After settling my kit into one of the rooms we’d hired, we set out again into town. We’d made a policy of not leaving anything incriminating in the room, where incriminating meant obviously not of local or contemporary manufacture. But travelling with nothing at all would have been almost as suspicious. If someone inspected our kit, they wouldn’t find anything obviously out of place.

I had a specific mission to return to the shop I’d seen the Steeltree knives, while Belize, Palmer, and Sabrina, had their own errands. While we spent much of the morning together, Conner shadowed me when our errands took us to separate parts of the town. He took my personal safety seriously. As leader of the ORCA, it was his job. But we’d established a good enough working relationship that it was personal, something I appreciated at both a professional and a personal level.

The keeper at the knife shop seemed pleased to see me when I returned with Conner in tow, asking politely about my day, my trip, and the disposition of Palmer who’d been with me before.

We talked a bit about the blades again, picking out several from his stock. Fighting knives for myself and Conner, utility blades for ‘Brina and Bel. Payment was in the form of some of the brass. Weight for weight, it seemed a good deal more valuable than the Steeltree. And, perhaps strangely, I didn’t get the sense he was going to try and take more in payment than the knives were worth.

There were worlds in 34 Tauri that were like that, particularly on the smaller colonies in the Border and Rim areas. Labor was much less valuable than materials. Without mass production, craftsmanship became the norm rather than the luxurious exception. Here, on Earth that Was, Craftsmanship seemed to be the norm rather than the exception.

With the knives out of the way, I let Conner show me the rest of the town I hadn’t seen on the first trip. We crossed paths with the rest of our group a couple of times, shared the noon meal at the Inn, then continued our explorations. The plan was, that night, we would meet with the Airship captain and finalize the arrangements over the evening meal.

I knew ‘Brina was practically coming out of her skin to go on this ride. As her wife, I wanted her to be happy. As her Captain though, I had to worry. But I’d let her go. She could have her airship ride, but she’d have a shadow too. Like it or not, there’d be eyes on that stick and string contraption which would, hopefully, be close enough to make a difference if something went wrong.

I had to have faith that nothing would go wrong.

Voices in the dark

Unlike most military ships in Alliance service, the Sled’s crew’s quarters were all relatively spacious and didn’t have major differentiation between Officers and Enlisted accommodations. Not surprising, given the duration of our mission. While space and mass were even more of a premium on an interstellar ship than a battle cruiser or freighter, other ships weren’t expected to be home to their crew for ten years or more. In planning the Children of Earth mission, there was the very real possibility that the crew would be mostly stuck aboard the Sled or our support ships for the duration, which meant a planned minimum of ten years with “home” being whatever space you were allotted.

To try and make things a bit more equitable and keep “cabin envy” from being a factor in the mission, there was very little difference between the Captain’s cabin and the maintenance engineer who’s functional role was “Janitor.” Sure, the designated officers quarters were located a little closer to their command stations, but crew quarters were distributed through several sections of the ship. There were no barracks sections, no hot bunking like on some Alliance patrol boats, as everyone had their own quarters. The only “different” cabins were those designated as doubles, where a couple could share quarters.

‘Brina and I shared a double, but there were others, as yet, not in use. In fact, there were more quarters aboard the Sled than there were crew originally embarked. It was part of the plan. Knowing how long the mission would be and how people tended to act when together, it’d been thought prudent to allow for social interactions that might justify a change in berth. Seeing some of our crew in action, I could see the designer’s wisdom in including a compact nursery in Medlab as well.

Laying alone, conspicuously alone, in our dimply lit cabin, I wasn’t really thinking too much about the ship’s accommodations. I was still thinking about the encounter, well in our past now, between that Alliance cruiser squadron and the Machines.

There’d been papers written generations ago about using von Neumann machines to spread Humanity to the stars. Even Uncle Elsoph had talked about it as being a possible use for his own designs. Essentially, the machines could be launched on high efficiency trajectories to any number of star systems. Once they arrived, they could start replicating and building mission specific sub units. The sub units would terraform suitable planets, mine and stockpile resources, and generally make the system suitable for the Human occupied colony ships that could come along behind them some time in the indeterminate future.

Over time, the machines would spread to other systems and make them ready for the wave of following Organic life. It was all very elegant and long term and very, very, unlikely to be implemented. Except, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, the plan made even more sense as a way for Machine Intelligence to spread itself with, or without, our coming along for the ride.

I’d seen the conflict between man and machine brewing for years. I’m sure others in the 34 Tauri system had too, but no one seemed to do anything more than write white papers, PhD thesis's, or paranoid ravings, about the potential problems. At least until someone in the Alliance had weaponized my Uncle’s Work and, years later, had to face the descendants of that work waging war on their Human creators.

And now, I was laying awake in my bunk wondering what would come out of it all. Or, maybe better, wondering what had already come out of it all. The Genie had been out of the bottle for years. It had only been a matter of time before Artificial Intelligence and Self Replicating Machines got hooked up into what amounted to a new form of life. New life had looked at the stars and decided to go. The question was, had we stopped them? Could we stop them? And, if not, when we met them deep in the Black, some time in the unforeseeable future, how would we, and they, react?

“You look sad, Mommy,” the voice said from the semi-darkness. AuroraBlue, speaking through my cabin’s speaker system. She and Blue had been mostly quiet since our arrival in Sol system, only speaking to me directly when no one else was around. There were times I thought it was a hallucination; a sign of madness. But I’d seen hints of their runtimes in the Sled’s Frame, and nothing else in my experience pointed to Madness. I’d accept that the big AI and a backup of my granddaughter’s Ghost had come along with us to Sol.

“Not sad, Little One. Just thinking. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports we received about the Machines back home and their starship. It’s a lot to digest,” I replied, looking towards the source of the voice but knowing there was no one there to see. Imagination or running process, AuroraBlue wasn’t physically here with me.

“We saw, Mommy. Me and Blue. We’ve looked at all the data sent from home. There’s a lot to look at. Years and years. Will knowing we didn’t see them following us make you happy?”

I laughed softly. They knew what I was looking for in all that information, but AuroraBlue was very careful in her choice of words. Not “they’re not following us,” but “we didn’t see them.” They knew as well as I did that 34 Tauri was a large system. It would be trivial for the Machines to hide another construction yard somewhere unseen.

“That would raise the confidence we’re not going to have to fight them here, Little One, but we both know that not seeing them doesn’t mean they didn’t build another ship. But thank you, if that really is the case.”

AuroraBlue’s voice giggled, and Blue’s pleasant voice spoke softly with it. “We did not see any evidence they’re following, Mei Mei. Given the situation in 34 Tauri as it was known, I do not believe a Machine starship is en-route to Sol. However, without additional information it’s impossible to accurately predict the odds of a follow-on expedition.”

I could only shake my head and smile, Blue was being pragmatic and eminently factual. There was simply no way to be sure. We could hope, but we couldn’t know.

“I don’t think that made you happy, Mommy,” AuroraBlue said a moment after Blue finished. I could almost hear the frown in her voice, then she went on brightly. “I’m sorry we don’t know what they’re doing back home, Mommy. But I think I know what will make you happy!”

“Oh?” I replied, sitting up in bed, looking in the direction her voice appeared to be coming from. “What will make me happy, Little One?”

AuroraBlue’s voice giggled again and the large display across the cabin over my desk flickered to life. Curious, I slid off the bed and stepped over to the desk to settle into the chair before it. On screen, schematic diagrams of the Sled were coming up to switch quickly from one section to the next. Along with the schematic, real-time views from internal feeds floated in the air by the main display.

“I have something to show you, Mommy. I hope you like it,” she went on as the view shifted through cargo sections, down past the well protected core of the ship, past Medlab and the Frame, towards the small ‘high value cargo’ section deep inside the core. It was where the equipment deemed “Mission Vital,” or “Highly Secure,” was stored.

As I watched, the view focused into a specific area of secure storage, then onto a bank of cold storage where a small fraction of the Sled’s “special cargo” of forty thousand frozen embryos were kept in suspension. Finally, it stopped on a specific canister labeled with the cryptic markings they all carried, identifying “who” the unborn was in genetic terms.

“One of the frozen cargo, Little One?”

I could almost hear a smile in her voice as she replied brightly, “Yes, Mommy! She’s yours. Yours and Mommy Sabrina’s, I mean.”

It took a moment for what she said to sink in. A daughter. Sabrina and I had a daughter? But how?

The voice of AuroraBlue laughed playfully before going on. “I know you and Mommy Sabrina can’t have a family the usual way, Mommy. So we accessed the samples you left with the Gene Bank when you first signed on to the mission. Me and Blue did. She’ll be yours. Real and true.”

I was dumbstruck. When ‘Brina and I married we’d actually considered the possibility of having a child through genetic combination. Though the technique had existed for years, it wasn’t often people combined the genetic material from two donor eggs to create one viable embryo. I would be able to confirm the identity of the embryo in the supercargo database, but the very thought left me speechless.

“Surprise, Mommy. Happy birthday. Merry Yule. All sorts of holiday present days!”

“I . . . I don’t know what to say, Little One.”

“You were Mommy to Lilybell, you and Sabrina, but you didn’t get to raise her. You’re Mommy to me too, both of you, but you didn’t get to raise me either. You should have a little one that’s really yours, Mommy. A daughter you can raise as a normal child. Not like, well . . .” her voice trailed off with a peal of giggles.

She was right, of course. I’d said far too many times that no mother in history had gone through the trials we had with Lily and AuroraBlue. Neither of them were even close to “normal” in the way most people thought of it, but we’d done our best. In the end, I always thought they’d turned out OK, perhaps in spite of our parenting. Now, I could only gaze at the sealed stasis unit and wonder whether we’d actually have the chance to follow through with my little girl’s gift.

My voice dropped to a whisper, “Thank you, AuroraBlue, I . . .”

“You're welcome, Mommy. I love you too.”

Back in the Black

I’d known since well before we’d left 34 Tauri that my role on this mission would be more one of command than one of actually working for a living. Even before I’d inherited command from the late Mathew Gill my position had been more administrative than functional. But the knowledge didn’t make it any easier to leave ‘Brina and Bel on the surface under Palmer and Conner’s watchful eyes. I wasn’t worried they’d run into trouble. Not really. Not with Palmer’s experience, and Conner’s well established capabilities. No. I wasn’t worried. I was, if anything, a little jealous they’d get to have fun before I did.

I’d get surface time eventually, I knew. More than just the brief ‘go down and have a look’ I’d just received. As Captain though, my responsibility was to the Mission first. Which meant the Sled and her crew came before my personal desire to walk amongst the people of Earth. But, being the Captain also meant I could decided to go down when time allowed. So duty first. Desire later.

In the shuttle hangar, Lieutenant Commander Schulps met me as I stepped off the small transport, leaving my luggage aboard in the forlorn hope that I would be able to return to the surface before needing to repack. His expression wasn’t one of concern, which was a slight relief: it meant he hadn’t been holding something important back when he’d requested I return to the Sled. My surface jaunt hadn’t been mission critical so there were myriad, more critical, reasons to call me back.

“What’s the situation, Commander? You didn’t indicate any specific problem,” I asked as we left the hangar, making our way up towards the Sled’s command section.

“Everything aboard is nominal, Captain. There are some interesting reports from the reconnaissance teams on Mars and Venus you’ll want to see, but nothing especially interesting from the outer system teams.”

Unless they’d found actual people on Mars or Venus, there wasn’t much in the reports that would justify calling my ground side foray short. Unimportant though it was. We both knew that. “And, Commander?”

“Captain, you’d flagged several topic in the archived stream from 34 Tauri as important enough to, what was it you said? Interrupt my coffee, was it? If we found them during the parse” He said with a faint, mildly uncharacteristic, smile.

“True. Something came up in the spool?”

Schulps motioned me onto the lift ahead of him, nodding as he followed. “Yes, Captain. There were a number of military action reports and some civilian news reports that matched your criteria. I previewed them and, well, I think you’ll want to see them for yourself rather than get the distilled version.”

“That good? Or that Bad?”

“I would say a little of both, Captain.”

A moment later we stepped off the lift and he opened the door to my office, letting me step in ahead before taking his leave to return to the bridge.

“Nora, please queue up the streams Commander Schulps has flagged for me,” I asked softly, settling into the, for me, oversized chair at my desk. Above the surface of the desk a selection of streams, culled from the archived data we’d gotten en route from 34 Tauri, fell into focus. Nora had automatically categorized them according to my stated preferences and her programming as an Expert System. She knew, from experience, what I was most likely to show interest in beyond my stated preferences.

As the Commander had said, along with the recent reports from Mars, Venus, Luna, and one of the far system boats, there was a relatively substantial collection of Alliance Military and civilian reports all taken from a relatively short period. A cursory examination of the reports showed that Fleet had engaged the Machines in a large operation on the edge of the Kalidasa system. That, in of itself, was somewhat unusual. I’d lived in the Kalidasa system, and there wasn’t much in that area except a barely charted rock field.

One civilian news report caught my eye initially and I brought it up to watch. On screen a familiar face swam into focus. Tall, stocky, still bald, by choice, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, he appeared a bit older, a bit more careworn, than I remembered him.

“This is Tillery Woodhen, reporting for the Cortex News Service,” he started. That, in of itself, was a bit unusual, as he’d left the actual reporting to be the full time director even before we’d left Hale’s Moon. In fact, the last time I’d seen him do a live report was when CNS announced the Sled had reached escape velocity for the 34 Tauri system and our journey officially began.

“Alliance sources, early this morning, reported substantial success in an operation against a Machine installation in the Kalidasa system,” he continued in his professional newscaster voice, but I could hear an undertone that said ‘this victory is more important than we’re actually saying.’ “Acting on intelligence from undisclosed sources, a cruiser squadron and its supporting task force engaged a Machine squadron defending an installation in Kalidasa’s Halo region. The installation was described as an assembly point for a new breed of Machine capital ship, and it’s destruction represents a major victory in the Kalidasa system and for the Alliance war effort as a whole.”

Tillery’s report went on for several minutes, describing the heroic efforts of the Alliance crews, their sacrifices, the loss of several cruisers and numerous support ships in the fight. The Machine squadron had been substantial, indicating they felt, as much as the Machines could feel, the installation was important to their war effort.

“Nora. Freeze playback,” I called out as Till’s newscast showed part of a stream taken during the battle. “Enlarge and enhance the central section there, showing the construction facility, please.” The image over my desk froze, then focused in on a distant image of several rocks clustered together near a seemingly random collection of Machines and structures and a large, linear, ship nestled into a construction gantry.

The ship was big but of relatively conventional design. At least by whatever standards we held with the Machines. Considering their technologies were largely all adaptations of our own, it was no real surprise. But contrary to Tillery’s report, or the official Alliance description he’d received, it wasn’t a Capital ship in the gantry. While there were some obvious weapon emplacements, the ship was mostly drives, fuel tankage, and power piles. There was no life section, obviously, being a Machine craft. But there were cargo racks and, mounted in those racks, at least half a dozen Machine seed-ships. The ship could probably hold its own in a fight, but it wasn’t a warship. Too little armor and armaments for that.

It was a starship.

The machine starship was considerably smaller than the Sled, but it’s purpose was obvious. Whether they’d planned to send it after us at Sol, or they were planning to simply start expanding out into the cosmos on their own, we might never know. We just knew that particular Machine starship wasn’t going to be coming after us.

“Thank you, old friend. Hard to imagine a better messenger for the news,” I said to Tillery’s image when he was back on-screen. I watched the rest of the ‘cast before setting Nora to searching through the streams with some more specific keywords. It was impossible to know, now, whether the Machines had managed to build any more of their seeder starships. Even if the Alliance had won the war since we’d left and never found another, it only meant we’d never found another. It didn’t mean the Machines hadn’t built one.

Without needing to support a living crew, it was fundamentally easier for the Machines to colonize other star systems. They didn’t need inhabitable worlds. They didn’t care if the trip took 200 years at a tenth light speed. All they needed was to survive the trip and find a suitable hunk of rock to start extracting resources from. In fact, there’d been long supposition that the SETI programs over the years should have been looking for evidence of von Neumann machines rather than living worlds.

For the next few hours I explored the information Commander Schulps had queued up for me. Where Tillery’s report had been aimed at a civilian audience in a time of war, the military reports were much more thorough, if less interesting to watch. The post mission briefings and some of the pre-mission planning reports were quite revealing, but none of them revealed who the “undisclosed source” was Tillery had mentioned.

Who, or what, had given away the Machine’s plans?