Extinction

-2-

My mind raced and my breathing increased until I sat there, puffing. What the hell was I going to do?

It was about then I noticed that the Alamo hadn’t reported any requests to open a channel lately.

“Alamo, open a channel to the Snapper.”

“Request denied.”

“Why not?”

“Biotic Riggs is no longer—”

I talked over the voice as the sentence was finished. “—command personnel. Yeah, I get that. Alamo, you are an ungrateful, cast-iron bitch of a ship, just as Sandra always said.”

The ship made no response. As far as it was concerned, I was a noisy meat-bag, useful only for death-testing other noisy meat-bags it might meet in the future. The nanites knew nothing of honor, or courtesy, or other conceptual products of my mammalian brain. They knew their mission, and they made decisions that helped them reach that goal. Anything else was unthinkable.

I looked at the SCU, a satellite communications setup the Pentagon had given me. Was I out of range yet? They’d said they could pick up this little unit’s transmissions all the way out to the moon, maybe farther…. I got out of my chair, setting down my beer can carefully. All plans of getting drunk had vanished. Beer might have to be rationed if I was going to spend days—weeks, years? I would be stuck aboard this ship for an unknown length of time. I opened up the SCU and allowed it to auto-home a parabolic antenna in the direction of Earth’s relay satellites. I hoped the Alamo’s engines weren’t between the SCU and the satellite. In the past, I would have been able to order the ship to reorient itself so that the engines were out of the way and didn’t cause signal interference. Now, however, I knew without asking that my request would be denied.

I was fortunate enough to get a signal almost immediately. I requested a voice connection, and got it. General Kerr was on the other end within a minute or two. No doubt he’d been crapping in his coffee down there, as he liked to say.

“Riggs? Your ships have broken off and are moving away. Is there a new threat? What’s going on up there? Report.”

“General, I’m sorry about the break in communications,” I said. I briefly explained that the Nanos had decided their mission was a success and were heading off to ‘save’ another world. He was almost as stunned as I was.

“So… you’re headed out into space? You’re leaving us defenseless? We’ve put millions—no billions of taxpayer dollars into your amateur army, Riggs!”

“Sir, we’re not in control of our ships.”

“Then get control of them,” he snapped. “If you can’t do it, no one can. Kerr out.”

I nodded at the SCU. Classic Kerr. All love and biscuits, that man.

I stared at the forward wall. Earth’s gray disk was long gone now, I think it had slipped somewhere underneath my easy-chair. There was nothing but silvery wall and bubble-like lumps of nanite excrement, or whatever it was they used to make metallic things. Hundreds of golden beetles followed me. We all crawled toward nothing.

One of my lights went out then. It was the one over my armchair, which I used for reading. I got up and checked the bulb. It seemed fine, and worked in other sockets. I chewed my lip and thought about asking the ship about it. I decided not to. Why speed up the process? Clearly, the ship had decided to stop following my standing orders. The ship would reassign nanites to other purposes as they were needed. It was only a matter of time until I was left sitting in a dim, quiet room. How long would it be before the ship didn’t bother to update my view screen on the forward wall? How long before it didn’t bother to respond to me at all?

I knew now exactly how the centaur people had felt. They had been carried away, just like this, from their homeworld to Earth. Had they known what was in store for them? Probably. There was no reason to think their world had been the first the Nanos had attempted to ‘save’. At least, I told myself, in my case the mission had been a success, not a failure. The Nanos and humanity had kept the Macros at bay. We had at least managed to postpone the destruction of my world.

I frowned, thinking of our arrangement with the Macros. “Alamo?” I asked tentatively. There was no response. I drew in a deep breath. I had to give it a try.

“Alamo, the Earth has not been saved. We have failed in our mission.”

There was no response for several long seconds. Had the ship’s brainbox moved on to more important things? Perhaps it was resetting its language loops, building a new set of neural patterns for the next race it planned to torment.

“The primary mission has been accomplished,” the voice said at last.

I smiled faintly. My bait had worked. “No, the mission has failed. You have failed the mission.”

“The primary mission required the defeat of the enemy. Primary mission parameters have been met.”

“The enemy has withdrawn, but will be back in one year. That is not victory.”

“A negotiated peace was reached.”

“No. You have broken the peace. I promised them they would have nanite-filled troops to fight for them. Nano forces have abandoned us. They have no interest in normal human troops.”

“Reproductive units were left behind on Earth. Troops can be processed to fulfill the requirements of the truce. Weapons can be created to arm them. All required systems are functional.”

I realized the reproductive units the ship was talking about were the Nano factories I’d set up on Andros Island. The Alamo was a clever monster. Earth was capable of building the required army with them. I thought furiously, and soon came up with an argument.

“But they don’t know about the truce,” I pointed out. “No one on Earth does. I didn’t tell them. They don’t know how to talk to the Macros, either. Only I do.”

The Alamo was silent for a time. I glanced up at the forward wall. What I saw there made me smile. My ship had stopped moving. My little, metallic-green bump separated from the golden ones and fell behind them. The others all drifted away from me. I might see Sandra again, after all.

“You will communicate the information to your military,” said the ship.

“And if I refuse?”

“You will be coerced.”

The floor began heating. I wore shoes, but I could feel it anyway. I knew the nanites could heat the room up to a thousand degrees if they wanted to. Hot enough to light my carpet and my shoes—and eventually my hair—on fire.

“All right,” I said unconcernedly. I walked over to the SCU. Without even sitting down, I put a quick-pumping fist through it. I cracked the coffee table computer underneath in half as well, shattering the screen and shorting it out. Blood welled up and ran down my cut-up arms a few seconds later.

A dozen little black arms flew out of the walls and restrained me. I grinned. At least the nanites in my body hadn’t abandoned me yet. Bare-handed, I would have had a heck of a time destroying the radio before the ship had latched onto me.

“I’m sorry, there seems to have been a malfunction,” I said calmly.

“You have damaged mission-critical equipment.”

“By accident,” I said with certainty. “Check your records. Biotic units sometimes break things without intending to. These events occur at random, unpredictable intervals.”

The ship hesitated. I hoped it would burn a nano-chain or two looking that one up and calculating the probabilities. In the meantime, the floor began to cool.

“You will communicate the information to your military,” said the ship.

“I can’t do that from up here.”

“You will be returned to your base of operations.”

I grinned at the walls. “Great idea.”

The ship made no reply.

The little black arms held onto me all the way down to Earth. I had plenty of time to watch the forward wall. I could barely turn my head to do anything else. I noticed something interesting. Another of the ships, a single golden beetle among the hundreds, broke off and returned to Earth, trailing my contact.

I chuckled. Someone else had figured out a way to avoid a one-way trip to Rigel, or whichever star system was next on the Nanos’ optimal path. My grin faded as I watched hundreds of others continue to slide up the wall and drift away to nothing. I realized that each of those contacts carried one or more panicked human beings, all of whom were headed for certain death on an alien world.

And there was nothing I could do for them. Nothing at all.

I became angry, sitting there in on my couch, held down by a dozen little arms. I had a lot of things to be angry about. This ship had killed my kids. I’d never forgotten that, but I’d accepted it, to some extent. The ship itself was a tool, after all. A very complex, almost intelligent tool, but a tool nonetheless. It made no sense to be angry with a tool. Back home on Earth, once every year or so, my computer would get a virus that would slip past all my defenses. Usually, the infection was fatal. I would end up reinstalling everything, and I spent many irate hours doing it. But when that annual sequence of events happened, I didn’t curse and rage at the virus. My computer and the software that infected it were, in a way, blameless. The target of my fury was always the creators of the malware. The beings who had knowingly released their binary vandalism upon the world to throw pop-ups in my face, demanding my credit card number.

Similarly, once I had come to understand the nature of the Nano ships, I had a hard time hating them. They were wondrous machines, but they only followed their programming as best they could. If a human got in the way, we were callously crushed, but it was nothing personal.

Now, as I watched, the Nanos were moving to a new phase in their programming. The creators, the ones I called the Blues who had sent out these heartless ships, hadn’t sent them out as emissaries to offer aid and comfort. They had come to do as they pleased. They came to ‘save’ us, but in the cavalier fashion a game warden might decide to ‘save’ a herd from over-grazing and thus deforestation by ‘thinning’ said herd. It was their implicit arrogance that angered me. I didn’t like being used haphazardly.

There was something deeper at work in my mind, however. I’d had enough time with these machines, quite possibly more contact with both the Nanos and the Macros than anyone else alive. I’d come to think they were related, somehow. They spoke the same machine language which we now called Basic. Between the simpler Macro version and the more advanced Nano version, it had undergone a dozen updates at some time in history, but it was still the same underlying language. The thing that made their components, the enigmatic duplication factories, looked the same and operated the same way. The only difference was a matter of scale. The factories that had squatted under the Macro domes of South America and the smaller units that I’d nursed like seedling plants back home on Andros Island were of the same design. The two robotic factions also displayed general attitudes which were remarkably similar.

I had plenty of time to theorize, as I sat trapped and staring, watching the disk of my world slowly rise up onto the forward wall again. I theorized that, perhaps, the Macros and the Nanos were related. Possibly, Earth had been caught up in a civil war of strange proportions. What would the Blues on their gas giant have to fight about? Well, perhaps they could not themselves leave their gravity-well, but they could send out their minions, both tiny and gross. If the Macros were simply a larger version of the Nanos, if they were descendants the same species—if you will—of robot, then why was one bent on science and defense and the other bent on destruction and exploitation? Had, possibly, a caste of Blue scientists declared war upon their military equivalents—or the reverse? What if Earth and a thousand other worlds were being overrun by their metal creations gone mad?

Possibly, they had never intended anything like this. Maybe they’d released these metal demons upon the universe without realizing what would happen. Like a kid who releases his first scripted internet-worm and watches in horror as it eats his parent’s laptop.

I didn’t care how the Blues had done it, not right then. I didn’t even care if they completely understood what they had done. But I did want to know why they had done it. Why had they lit a match and started a wildfire in this part of my galaxy?

I watched the forward wall. The march of golden beetles had reached the ceiling now, and one-by-one they slid off into oblivion. Each represented someone I’d come to think of as a friend, a comrade. It was hard to watch them being swallowed up by space. I knew them, many of them. They had all gone through hell. They were tough people—survivors. They’d fought heroically for Earth and won. What was their final reward? To be used as punching-bags for the next race circling another yellowy star out there somewhere?

They didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. Neither did I, and neither had my kids. I wanted, as I sat there, nothing more than to reach down a big hand into the thick atmosphere of the Blues’ home planet. I wanted to haul up one of those freaks, tearing it from the surface of its world. I would watch as it flipped about and slavered on my deck, with organs popping. I wanted to ask one as it died, decompressing in an expanding pool of its own juices, why the hell they had sent out two flavors of robotic nightmare? Why two breeds of robot, one tiny and one huge? Why was one a heartless, microscopic plague and the other a race of marauding, destructive monsters? These creations of theirs had fought a devastating war over my world. They had apparently done so on a dozen other worlds, or perhaps a thousand others—or a million others. Hitler, Stalin, Tamerlane and Mao were all petty criminals next to the murderous monstrosity of the Blues. What madness had possessed them?

But my anger and my demands would have to wait. The Alamo wasn’t answering any more of my questions. Worse, the beer cans were out of reach. I tried to calm myself and think of the here and now. What would I do when I reached Earth and the Alamo put me in front of my people to explain myself?

I forced myself to think. There wasn’t much else to do while I rode back to Earth, a prisoner in my own ship.

Somewhere along the way, a plan began to form in my mind.