The Altreian Enigma (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 2) Read online

  He scanned the sensor feeds, taking in imagery from the entire company of robots. He knew that they waited without the tightness in the chest he felt. Robby wondered if Heather was as emotionless over the outcome as these automatons were. After all, her goals were very different from his. She just wanted to confirm that these robots reliably acted together in a sophisticated swarm that carried out the intent that had been transmitted to them, not caring which side won or lost or even how many would be destroyed in the process.

  Why should she care about those losses when this facility was manufacturing more than a thousand robots and drones per day? Initially, Robby had worried about that. After all, what good would it do to have tens of thousands of robotic combat machines if you lacked the ability to transport them to the vicinity of their targets?

  But once again he had underestimated Heather’s genius. With her detailed knowledge of the design of Dr. Stephenson’s wormhole gateway, she had created miniature versions that she called Earth gates. These required far less power than an interstellar wormhole gateway and were only capable of linking to other such gateways right here on Earth.

  These Earth gates would enable them to transport robots and weapons in an instant. Of course, someone on the other side could send enemy soldiers through the same gateway. For that reason, Heather had designed the remote gateways so that they were incapable of initiating a connection. That could only be done from the Earth gate within the New Zealand facility.

  “Ten seconds.” Eos’s voice returned Robby’s focus to the coming battle.

  When the robots activated, Robby was startled by how fast they moved. All the small multicopter drones zipped away, splitting up as they reached connecting passages and caverns. Eos organized the data, creating an image of a wall filled with the broadcast imagery from hundreds of cameras along with another mental display that showed the health of each member of his robot army.

  As the drones departed, a group of seven robots moved to defensive positions to protect the blue-force flag.

  The remaining robots raced forward to the first side passage, where a dozen dog-shaped robots peeled off, their four legs propelling them along that tunnel as the bulk of the force continued through the main passage.

  First contact with the enemy came shortly thereafter, when two of his forward drones were blasted out of the air by laser pulses, their video feeds going black as their status changed to red. Robby watched in stunned silence as three more of his drones winked out, quickly followed into death by seven others. They were rushing forward into the enemy in a suicidal charge of the light brigade.

  “What the hell are they doing?” he asked, consciously trying to sound like his dad.

  “Building a map,” Eos said.

  As Robby studied the data being relayed among his swarm, he understood. His robots had decided to immediately attack with a forward-deployed covering force dashing directly into the enemy, intending to meet them as far forward of the blue flag as possible and to identify where and how the red force was deployed. Those sacrifices were rapidly building a map of the enemy formation that was shared among all members of the blue swarm.

  Red had adopted an initial defensive posture, designed to inflict heavy damage should the blue side attack, no doubt intending to follow up with a swift counterattack into the weakened enemy.

  But instead of calling off the assault as Robby expected, his blue forces swarmed into the concentrated fire within the kill zone. The attack was happening too fast. Although the red army was now taking casualties, their losses were far fewer than what blue was experiencing.

  Suddenly a group of two dozen blue-force robots converged into a single mass and charged directly at the center of the red army’s defenses, as incoming laser fire ate into the outermost robots, stripping them away like the layers of an onion. This was insanity. Even if this group reached the enemy lines, as it appeared they were going to, there would be so few left that they would be torn apart by the superior force awaiting them.

  Something else was wrong, too. The sixty-three other robots that were all that remained of blue force had pulled back into covered locations, not even bothering to provide fire support for those who charged. Just then, the three robots that remained functional from the assaulting group penetrated the line of defense, and before they could be destroyed by enemy fire, they detonated in a blast that wiped his view from all of the forward sensors.

  “Oh my God!” Robby gasped.

  For once, Eos said nothing.

  Robby glanced over at Heather sitting in her own command couch, a lump forming in his throat. Her eyes had turned milky white.

  As Heather watched the data on her mental view-screens, many of which had suddenly gone dark, the visions that cascaded through her mind varied in predicted outcome, but the general consensus was far from good.

  Pulling herself back to the present, she pondered what had just happened. Clearly the blue force had launched an all-out assault on the red swarm, which had opted for a defensive strategy. Blue had poured its robots into what appeared to be a suicidal charge into the teeth of the red defenses, taking losses that made a drawn-out fight unsustainable. But just as the red were about to launch a counterattack, a couple of blue-force robots had penetrated the red front line. What should have been a simple problem to clean up suddenly morphed into something unexpected and devastating.

  Although the robots had only been outfitted with laser weaponry, one of the blue robots somehow managed to detonate itself, destroying scores of red’s forces and blowing an impressive hole in the defensive formation. On cue, the bulk of the blue force charged into that hole, raking the red forces that had survived the blast with covering fire as its lead elements raced toward the chamber containing the red flag and its last group of defenders.

  How had that happened? The answer formed in her mind even as she asked herself the question. Somehow the attacking swarm had hacked its way into the laser-firing controls and created an overload that had blown a power pack.

  A change in the action drew her attention. Despite being outnumbered forty-nine to fourteen, ten of the remaining red forces raced to prevent the blue forces from entering the cavern where the red flag was planted—a desperate action almost certain to fail. Heather calculated red’s chances of plugging the breach in their lines at 0.000387 percent.

  Another massive explosion momentarily wiped her mental imagery. When it cleared, what she saw changed everything. Only one robot had been terminated. A red-force defender had run away from the other defenders and detonated itself in a back corner of the red-flag cavern.

  “Oh no,” Heather whispered as a new visualization formed in her mind.

  The red-force robot had triggered its own overload at a spot that had no chance of damaging other robots, friend or foe. But the explosion had punched a hole in the wall that separated the natural cavern from the rest of Heather’s underground facility, just beyond the edge of the stasis field that blocked the exit. Immediately, another red-force robot that wasn’t directly engaged in the fight to keep the blue attackers away from the flag grabbed it from its stand and raced for the smoking hole in the back wall.

  Understanding dawned in Heather’s mind. The mission statement that had been passed to the robots had contained two objectives: capture the other side’s flag and prevent them from capturing yours. The red swarm had made the same probability calculation that she had. Realizing that they had no chance of capturing the blue flag, they had coalesced around the only remaining objective. Save the red flag. And the only possibility of accomplishing that was to escape into the main facility.

  If Heather didn’t do something fast, she’d have the flag robot loose inside the underground facility, along with every surviving blue-force robot that was chasing him.

  “Robby,” she said, knowing that her design decisions for this exercise were going to make what she was about to ask him to do tremendously difficult. “Hack that flag robot and send it back to the cavern.”

&nb
sp; “Already working on it,” he said.

  Without waiting, Heather issued commands to every general-purpose robot that was nearby to converge on the flag robot and destroy it. Seventeen of those machines began lumbering to intercept, but since they weren’t armed combat models, the odds of success weren’t good. That was fine. Right now, she just needed to delay the damned thing.

  Heather shifted her attention to the closest of the colossal robotic boring machines that worked around the clock, digging through rock to make room for the next phase of construction. She delivered a new set of instructions, initiating a route that would take it directly to her calculated intercept point. With its boring nose still spinning at full speed, the machine backed away from the spot where it had been working, turned on its tracked base, and plowed directly through the nearest wall into an unfinished room, then through another wall into a storage space.

  The machine barreled directly through shelves stockpiled with supplies before boring into the hallway toward which the combat robot and its pursuers were heading. Heather performed a quick check of the status of the other robots she had commanded, only to have her fears confirmed. All but one had already been destroyed, and that one was being taken down fast.

  Gritting her teeth, she took direct control of the boring machine, gouging out the load-bearing right wall as fast as the machine could go, moving directly back toward the sounds of battle that echoed down the long passage. Overhead light fixtures shorted out, spitting blue-white sparks into the concrete dust that filtered down. The ceiling groaned as the red-flag-carrying robot emerged through the haze, its laser firing into the borer.

  But this was a machine with a business end that chewed through solid granite, and that formed a perfect shield for the power train that propelled it. Then, as the mining tool and combat robot continued to move toward each other, a deep rumble shook the passage, and the ceiling gave way, dropping tons of rock, burying both machines, and killing Heather’s link.

  One of the problems with combat robots was their vulnerability to hacking. Robby and Eos had worked hard to ensure that Heather’s robots had no such weakness. Right now he found himself desperately wishing they hadn’t done such a great job of it. On the real battlefield, this wouldn’t have been an issue since all he or Heather would have had to do was issue instructions to the robots over the command channel.

  But today Heather had wanted to create a truly autonomous combat situation between the robotic forces involved. To that end, she had isolated the battle in a set of caverns by sealing the only exit with a stasis field. After having given the red and blue swarms their missions, the robots had been placed into an autonomous-operations mode that would normally be triggered by a total loss of communications with the command center during the final phase of an operation. In that mode, the robotic swarm would initiate special precautions designed to prevent the type of hack that Robby and Eos were now attempting.

  Eos had designed these hacking defenses. Robby and Heather had considered instructing Eos to include a back door in the robotic AI routines, but back doors were a big part of what made computing systems hackable, so Heather had decided against it. That was turning out to be a big problem, especially since all the robots manufactured here had circuitry that was hardened against electromagnetic pulse attacks.

  Heather’s mining machine had plugged up the passage that would have given access to the larger facility, but the red-flag robot had reacted with a desperation that threatened to clear a path through that barrier. A small band of red-force survivors had managed to block the passage behind their flag bearer, temporarily stopping the assaulting blue force just outside. They were taking losses, but at the rate the flag robot was tossing rocks aside, the machine was going to break out before the blue force could go in for the kill.

  “Any progress?” Robby asked.

  “I am unable to gain access to the command channel,” Eos said, her calm voice a stark counterpart to what Robby was feeling.

  He paused, desperately searching his brain for ideas. “What about its sensors?”

  “You want me to try to blind it?”

  “Can you scramble its LIDAR and optical sensors . . . confuse its sense of direction?”

  “Interesting.”

  When Eos said nothing else, Robby felt a twinge of hope, despite the small opening that had appeared near the top of the rubble mound that blocked the robot’s advance into the heart of the Tasman Mining Corporation compound.

  Robby shifted his focus to the telemetry from the flag bearer. One moment it was scrambling to clear the passage ahead, and the next it staggered several steps backward, lost its balance, and fell to the ground. It tried to rise, swayed drunkenly, and crumpled to all fours, losing its grasp on the red flag it carried.

  A glance at the views from its optical sensors made clear why this was happening. The feed from its two forward-looking cameras had been swapped with the rear ones and inverted. Combined with the scrambled LIDAR returns, its loss of balance and direction was complete. This was what happened when Eos decided to screw with electronics.

  As the robot reached out, feeling its way toward the red flag, one of its optical sensors showed six blue-force robots leaping over the bodies of the fallen red-force defenders, looking as if they were running along the ceiling instead of the floor. Then they leveled their weapons and fired. All the red flag bearer’s sensors went dark.

  “It is done,” Eos said. “Blue force has captured the flag. The game is over.”

  Robby exhaled, only now realizing that he had been holding his breath.

  “Thank God.”

  “Excellent work,” Heather said.

  Robby turned to see her remove her headset, stow it inside the arm of her command couch, and stand. He followed suit, watching her study him as he climbed out of his couch.

  “What was the weak point that Eos managed to hack her way through?” she asked.

  “The sensor feeds.”

  Heather nodded, her face masking any of the emotions he knew she had to be feeling.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “If we can hack our way through that, we have to assume that our enemies can, too. Make sure Eos fixes that weakness in the next software update.”

  Without waiting for his response, Heather turned and walked out of the room, an invisible door in the wall sliding open to let her exit. Robby stood, frozen in place, staring after her.

  He had known for some time that something was seriously wrong with Heather. Robby had occasionally seen worry on Mark’s face when he looked at her as well. She had gone dark, her emotions so tightly controlled that she almost seemed like one of her robots. With Mark gone these last few days, she had gotten worse. And, from what he had seen in the execution of this robotic exercise, she was also beginning to make serious mistakes in judgment.

  Robby shook his head to clear arising doubt.

  Bullshit. This is Heather McFarland Smythe, the greatest savant mind the world has ever seen. She doesn’t make mistakes. Robby took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, willing himself to believe it. She doesn’t. And neither does my dad.

  CHAPTER 16

  Jack pocketed the pulse-beam pistol, stepped over the dead guards, rounded a corner, and entered the maintenance turbo-lift lobby. With the Parthian lockdown still in effect, he wasn’t surprised to find the area empty. He reached out and touched the control panel, calling the first-available turbo-lift.

  As he waited, Jack felt a familiar twinge from his intuitive sense of danger. He breathed it in, letting it fill his mind, thankful that he retained that talent even in this alien body. His intuition was one of the few things that felt natural in this outlandish situation in which he now found himself. As the turbo-lift arrived, he readied himself but didn’t draw his weapon.

  The nanoparticle door melted away. Two green-clad guards started to step out of the car, saw him, and froze, confusion filling their faces.

  Jack scowled at them and pointed back toward the room’s exit.


  “My guards are under attack from Khal Teth. You will assist them.”

  The female sergeant reacted first, bowing slightly. “Yes, Overlord.”

  “Do not let anyone approach this area until I order otherwise. Now go.”

  The guards reacted, drawing their weapons and assuming a tactical formation as they moved toward the exit. The female sergeant stopped at the corner, ready to provide covering fire while the other raced into the adjoining hallway. Then they were both gone.

  Without hesitation, Jack stepped into the waiting turbo-lift and selected “Hovercraft Bay” on the control pad, watching as the nanoparticle door reformed. The turbo-lift accelerated downward toward the hovercraft docking bay, where seaborne shipments, large and small, arrived and departed at all hours of the day. The Parthian never slept, and its needs were many.

  The turbo-lift came to a stop, the door melted away, and Jack stepped out into the huge room that housed the shipping docks. Here, sheltered beneath the great building, the natural ambient lighting that filtered in from the open sea was a deeper shade of magenta than the light that illuminated the inside of the Parthian. Crisscrossing the ceiling high above, a vast network of levitating cranes zipped to and from the docks, loading and unloading supplies, goods, and equipment.

  At least that’s what they did under ordinary circumstances. The continuing blare of sirens that accompanied the security lockdown of the Parthian hadn’t entirely stopped work activity, but the heavy presence of guards checking those moving to and from the upper levels of the Parthian were causing a jam-up. From what Jack observed, the impromptu inspections were clearly angering the ships’ crews, who were attempting to stay on schedule.

  The guards monitoring the turbo-lifts looked at him in surprise, his presence bringing a sudden hush to the disordered mob of workers being denied access to the Parthian. Jack heard the whispers of “overlord” ripple through the assemblage.