The Life Engineered Read online

  “Mining ship?” I figured the vessel was meant for asteroid mining, but at the same time it seemed rather awkward and large for even that function.

  “Actually, it’s a mass driver. It picks up rocks and shoots them at larger rocks until it finds one with a rich enough content of whatever material it’s looking for, then shoots it toward a refinery.”

  “It’s a giant, asteroid-shooting space gun?” My implication must have been obvious, as I immediately noticed us moving toward the Spear of Athena.

  “Yup,” was all Skinfaxi could add.

  We approached the titanic ship carefully. Skinfaxi flooded the surface of the vessel in light, and I managed to get a better view of the monster. It had an ominous quality to it—dark and evidently old. Every surface was pockmarked from the impact of a million micrometeors, giving it a rough texture reminiscent of rust. Hints of markings long erased by radiation could still be seen despite the ship’s age and wear, though they could barely be read.

  “Should we be getting this close? It destroyed Yggdrassil, it could probably destroy us.”

  “Nah,” my companion reassured me. “Very few Capeks are equipped with any kind of weapon, and even fewer of our tools are weaponized. This mass driver and your plasma cutter are probably the most powerful weapons within several light-years.”

  I was tempted to ask how he knew about the powerful tool Yggdrassil had given me. Perhaps he had scanned my body as I came on board. Still, I could not bring myself to feel any safer.

  “What if it’s been modified with some kind of defensive capabilities? Shouldn’t we notify some sort of authority?”

  “Ho-ho,” he laughed. “You misunderstand a fundamental of Capek society: we do not have a central government or authority.”

  That seemed strange to me, that a society could be intentionally unsupervised. Without a governmental body, how did anything get done?

  “What about human authority? Surely they have a stake in this.”

  “They have a stake, yes, but you wouldn’t call it immediate. Yggdrassil didn’t have time to explain much, did she?”

  I let my silence speak for me, looking within instead for the answers. I quickly found out that there were no human governments because there were no humans. Anywhere. There hadn’t been for centuries. You’d think Yggdrassil would have mentioned this. There was more, of course, but it would have to wait.

  “I’m bringing us close to an access port. Since I’m not getting any answer from the ship, you’re going to have to go inside.”

  I looked around, mildly surprised I was asked to do anything.

  “Oh. Sure. What am I looking for?”

  “Find the bridge. You should be able to access the ship’s logs from there. If you can’t, open transmissions so I can download them myself, then feel free to cut out the memory core and bring it back.”

  At least the mission was something I already had experience with.

  “What about this?” I held aloft the torn-up fragment of the Nursery I had rescued from Midgard.

  “Leave it here. I’ll keep it safe.”

  And without further ceremony I made my way back to the hatch.

  THE SPEAR OF ATHENA

  Less than twenty-four hours after my birth, I witnessed a cataclysm on an astronomical level, survived a meteor crash, made and lost a friend, traveled through a wormhole, and now I was preparing for my second space walk. In all honesty it was more of a space hop. Skinfaxi had positioned the hatch (his belly?) very close to what looked like a main access port. It was just a matter of a short jump to latch onto the railings that framed the thick, wide door. As soon as it was clear I had made it safely, Skinfaxi moved to a more comfortable distance.

  The door itself was four meters wide and set into a larger access port that measured at least eight times that size. Both were rectangular, with chevroned splits in the center, which I assume was where they each opened.

  My automated systems informed me of a low-yield magnetic field that encased what looked like an access panel. It was consistent with an NFC lock. I waved my hand around the panel, and a small blinking blue light activated, letting me know that my magnetic signature had been read.

  A second later I felt the rumbling of powerful motors through the railing, and the small door came to life, split open, and let forth a beam of yellow light from the airlock within. No sooner had I maneuvered into the airlock than a spinning light activated, warning of the closing hatch. This ship looked and felt primitive. It had none of the sleek and polished curves of Yggdrassil, relying instead on sharp angles, thick bulkheads, and clumsy design. Everything looked rugged, functional, and ugly.

  As soon as the door clamped shut, the normal lights came on, bright, yellowed, and blinding. After a moment I started to hear a low hissing emanating from a ceiling vent.

  Hearing?

  I quickly looked at my internal monitors for confirmation, which showed the airlock was filling with a mixture of mostly nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen in proportions that might have been breathable by humans. How old was the Spear of Athena, anyway?

  As soon as air pressure reached ninety-nine kilopascals, the hissing stopped, and the inner airlock door groaned open. On the other side was a sizable room suspended above a hangar. Everything was lit brightly but irregularly, creating large patches of shadows.

  I started walking, or rather pushing myself, in search of the nearest elevator or access ladder, marveling at the simple miracle of generating sound. I hadn’t realized how much I missed hearing things, and I wondered if Capeks made music—if so, was it any good?

  My journey to the bridge happened without incident. Once outside the hangar, I had to climb up an access vent to reach the upper levels, as none of the service elevators were functional. My size and the lack of gravity made the task easy, if a little annoying.

  The bridge itself seemed designed for human-sized creatures. Stranger still, there were chairs attached to what I assumed was the floor. At some point this vessel had some kind of artificial gravity, it seemed. It wasn’t a large room, designed for functionality rather than comfort. Six apparent stations were distributed evenly in front of the squat window that spanned almost the entire width of three of the four walls. The view outside was of the enormous latticed girders that formed the barrel of the mass driver. There did not seem to be a chair for a captain or commanding officer.

  Every workstation was different, designed specifically for whatever specialized task its user had to perform. I activated the terminal for the mass driver, quickly realizing that I had no familiarity with how any of these systems functioned. Basic navigation of the operating system was instinctive enough, but digging to find specific data was going to take some time. Thankfully, that was something I had in ample supply.

  I spent almost an hour playing around and digging through the system, making slow progress at figuring the archiving protocol of the logs. A good fifteen minutes were wasted looking for a search function to no avail. I’d found the logs themselves, millions of them dating back several thousand years, when I was interrupted by a sound.

  The ship had been built to last. I hadn’t heard a single instance of the structure groaning or machinery grinding. At best, and only when I paid extremely close attention, I could sometimes catch the maneuvering thrusters firing in the far distance. Otherwise, the ghost ship was almost as silent as the cold vacuum in which it floated.

  Yet I heard a noise, and it was unsettling. It was like metal on metal. A cold, high-pitched clicking that emanated from the sole corridor that led to the bridge. I turned to see what might be the cause, but I saw nothing.

  When I turned back, my terminal had reset. For a moment I was nostalgic for the ability to sigh in exasperation. As sturdy as the Spear of Athena might have been, the centuries had clearly taken their toll on the computational system that served as its nervous system.

  Frustrated but persistent, I traced my steps back to the log archive and quickly figured out the dating system. Once I
knew how the archiving was filed, it was a simple task to find the latest entry. Just as I was about to access the file, though, the noise interrupted me again. I turned to the corridor but saw nothing again, and when I turned back, the terminal had reset a second time.

  Frustrated but no more the fool, I switched my vision to the infrared spectrum, remembering how I had seen a multitude of heat signatures zipping around the ship during our initial approach.

  Then I saw them.

  Half a dozen heat signatures. Each with obviously mechanical configurations built around a low-emanation power core, appearing as orange, glowing orbs with spidery webs of red and purple tendrils. One was loitering just outside the door to the bridge and was probably the source of the annoying sound. Were they Capeks? Automatic systems native to the Spear of Athena? Considering what had happened to Yggdrassil, I wasn’t about to take chances.

  “Faxi?” I called out through quancom. “I’m not alone here. There’s about half a dozen small robots swarming around.”

  “Oh? Are they Capeks?” he answered, more curious than worried.

  “I don’t know!” I snapped, alarmed by the situation. The silence, couched in the humming of the vessel’s distant power plant, made me hyperaware and consequently nervous.

  “Well, can you see one of them? If you can send me an image, I can probably identify it. I’ve met a lot of Capeks in my travels.”

  “Okay.”

  Slowly, I stood from the seat, floating gently toward the ceiling. With deliberate care, I positioned myself so I could, with very small and hopefully quiet bursts from my thrusters, push myself toward the corridor.

  As I moved silently through the bridge, the small robot at the door moved, presumably scratching at the wall to make noise again. Instinctively, I turned back to the terminal, only to see one of the small robots scrambling over it, disassembling it at incredible speed.

  The synthetic creature resembled a jellyfish made of pseudo-plastics, less than half a meter wide with a hole in the middle—or perhaps an elegant interpretation of a robotic donut with tentacles. A dozen delicate arms protruded from underneath the thing, each busy removing screws and taking apart panels, tearing through the terminal faster than my advanced optics could register. It must have hovered above me near the ceiling while I was focused on my work.

  “Hey!” I called, surprised that my voice came out so deep and masculine. I’d have to fix that later.

  The little robot paused what it was doing to turn and look at me. At least I thought that’s what it did. Without seeing any distinguishable eyes, all I had to go on was the tilt of the toroidal shape that made up the main body.

  “Stop that!” I demanded.

  As I tried to maneuver back to the terminal, intent on doing I don’t know what, the little robot very slowly, and without breaking what I guess was eye contact, continued to take apart the computer that contained the logs I needed.

  “Quit it!” I don’t know why I thought repeating myself would have a different effect.

  “What’s going on down there? Do you see it?” asked Skinfaxi, who I realized was hearing everything I was shouting at the flying donut.

  “It’s destroying the computer!” I whined back to him just as I was about to reach out and grab the annoying little thing.

  I closed my left hand on the little robot in time for it to throw a component across the bridge with one of its tendrils. I turned my head to see an exact duplicate of the metal jellyfish catch it.

  “What the hell!”

  “Send me an image, Dagir. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

  I sent the footage from my memory of the thing ripping apart the terminal. Meanwhile, I propelled myself after the second robot, dragging the first behind me.

  “Ho-ho!” Skinfaxi laughed over quancom as I turned the corner. “You’re in trouble, my friend.”

  “What do you mean?” His tone was amused, but I’d heard him laugh while a moon was being disintegrated, so I was only more or less reassured.

  “It’s a Capek, all right. An annoying little Von Neumann called Koalemos. You’re in no danger, but you’re not getting anything accomplished either.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, pushing myself after the second robot, who was scrambling away. However, just as I closed my right hand on the little bastard, he threw the component to yet a third robot. Meanwhile, the other two latched onto my arms, severely limiting my movements. Then a fourth one came around a corner and grabbed onto my legs. When I saw a fifth one appear, I suddenly realized why Skinfaxi had so little confidence in my chances for victory.

  “Great!” I moaned sarcastically. “Which one of them is Koalemos?”

  “Ha-ha! All of them!” my companion mocked me. “Von Neumanns are single entities with many networked bodies. Quite efficient at complex, large-scale projects. Koalemos has seven bodies, or ‘shards’ as we call them. He’s specialized at scavenging.”

  “Well, what do I do?” I was beginning to fear for myself as I became increasingly helpless.

  “Mmmh . . . Talk to him? He’s not malicious that I know of, but he is named after the Greek god of stupidity, so there’s that.”

  I stopped fighting and allowed another of Koalemos’s shards to immobilize me. Not that I had any choice in the matter.

  “Okay, okay, you got me,” I surrendered.

  “What are you doing here?” a voice came over open-channel communication. I decided that perhaps because of his interesting configuration, Koalemos couldn’t communicate through audible sound. In fact, there was no reason to believe vocal communications would be widespread, let alone standard, amongst Capeks. In the end it might be a very rare ability I had chosen for myself.

  “I’m here to figure out why this ship destroyed Midgard and Yggdrassil with it.”

  “Yggdrassil? Destroyed? No, no, no, no, no.” His voice was stressed, on the verge of panic. Could Capeks have panic attacks?

  “What happened? Do you know why the Spear of Athena fired at Midgard?” Clearly, the strange little group of robots knew something.

  “Yggdrassil put in a request for raw materials. A lot of raw materials. Enough for a Lucretius-class Capek to be constructed.” His explanation sounded like a confession, and I could almost feel a stomach I didn’t even have sink. “I found and captured the perfect asteroid for it and received my coordinates from a Norse Capek, so I figured they must be legit, and I launched. But as I saw the collapsor point expand, I realized something was wrong. I signaled Yggdrassil, but I never thought the meteor would impact. It wasn’t my fault—I used the coordinates I was given!”

  “Oh, it impacted, all right. Why did you steal the memory from the launch terminal if it’s not your fault?”

  “Because this was no accident—I was set up! You’re Norse, just like the one who gave me the coordinates. I thought you were here to destroy the evidence!”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed. “So why trust me now?”

  “What? No! I don’t.” The shards holding me tightened their grip, underlining his point. “I’m not telling you anything the Capek who gave me those coordinates wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, I’m not him! I was constructed less than a day ago and barely made it off Midgard myself.”

  The little Von Neumann dragged me back to the bridge. There, the collective bodies threw me toward the view port before retreating like a pack of cockroaches. They were well out of my reach should I be tempted to strike back, which I was.

  “I’m not alone, you know,” I began threatening, having had my fill of trying to prove myself. “Between me and my friend—”

  I was cut short. While floating in the middle of the bridge, I noticed my ion thrusters had activated to help me keep my position. A strong gravitational pull was manifesting behind me somewhere beyond the large window to space. Even Koalemos, or at least the shards that were here, started falling toward me, in a jumble of metallic toruses, their own engines burning at full thrust to compensate.

&n
bsp; “The hell?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Gravitational singularity dead ahead,” Skinfaxi answered anyway. “Hang on! Incoming space fold!”

  When I looked around to the window, I immediately wanted to rub my eyes—a gesture that was no longer available to me. Technically, it never had been. Instead, the reflex translated into a quick diagnosis of my optics, which returned 100 percent optimal.

  What I saw, however, made no sense. The number of stars in the sky suddenly doubled as a distant pocket of the galaxy was being pulled toward our location, the very fabric of space bending to bring two distant points together. For a brief moment two parts of the Milky Way that had no business being this close to each other overlapped, allowing instant travel between them. It was one thing to read about space folding from my onboard database but quite another to see its effects happen right in front of me.

  The sound was like a terrible grinding of metal being ripped, echoing impossibly through the vacuum, mocking the limits of physical plausibility.

  From the fold emerged a leviathan of impossible proportion. An immense vessel, dark and massive, passed through the violation of reality, ponderously moving forward, propelled by thousands of ion thrusters. A cross between a kilometer-long whale and a titanic hedgehog, the ship bristled with long spines, each independently articulated, each housing dozens of engines that emanated a deep-blue glow. It had no apparent bridge or portholes, only a long line of large hatches all along its broadsides.

  Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the intruding stars in the sky vanished and gravity with them, leaving me and my captors to float away from the window.

  “Lucretius-class Capek,” declared Skinfaxi over quancom.

  “Friend of yours?” I asked one of the donut-shaped robots that made up Koalemos.

  “No. This is of Isian design,” he answered, as if I knew what that meant.

  “Lucretiuses are transgalactic explorers,” interjected Skinfaxi. “We don’t usually see them. They tend to leave the Milky Way almost immediately after construction. He shouldn’t be here.”