A.I. Void Ship (The A.I. Series Book 6) Read online

  The Black Anvil Regiment had made a name for itself in the bloody war against Al-Nasir, and the mercenary regiment had gone on to win many other lucrative contracts throughout the years.

  The point here in the Algol System was that the Centurion was about as hard-bitten a soldier as there was in the human race. He also possessed fantastic loyalty toward Jon Hawkins and the man’s great cause against the robots.

  In the Centurion’s mind, the AIs were thousands of times worse than Al-Nasir’s jihadists had been. The jihadists had torn him from his home. The AIs had done likewise. Back then, he’d been a boy. Here, he was a man.

  The Centurion lay on his cot, breathing hard because he’d just finished three hundred push-ups. Sweat glistened on his naked body—the AI robots had torn off his clothes soon after capture.

  Unfortunately, because of the mentally debilitating nature of solitary confinement, the Centurion hallucinated often. Solitary confinement broke almost everyone much, much sooner than it had him. There was one caveat in the Centurion’s case. He knew that he was hallucinating, but he welcomed the release from the dreadful boredom of being by himself all the time.

  For seemingly endless months, he’d been in the belly of the beast. The reason he found himself here…the Centurion closed his eyes as if in pain.

  The Confederation attack in the Beta Hydri System had not gone well. The massive enemy ship had caught the Centurion’s assault craft in a tractor beam. He hadn’t remembered anything about the battle after that.

  A clanking sound just outside the cell interrupted the Centurion’s reminiscing. He opened his eyes, and through an act of will, he refused to cringe or show any kind of fear.

  As his heart began to race, he forced himself to stand just in case the octopoid robots were finally coming to get him. Would they shove him out of an airlock as Al-Nasir had done to the sultan’s people? Would the octopoids dissect him as he’d feared for months now?

  He swallowed a lump in his throat. It was one thing to fight the robots while wearing a battle suit or sitting in a warship as missiles roared and golden gravitational beams flashed. It was quite another to face them alone, naked and helpless, as a captive.

  The Centurion had fed his stubbornness through hatred. He hated his internment. He hated his helplessness, and he hated the fact of his capture. He was a soldier, possibly the best of his kind. He should have died fighting in the Hydri II battle.

  He heard the clanks coming closer and closer. Then, a latch clacked and the hatch to his cell finally slid up…

  -3-

  The Centurion spied three octopoid robots outside the cell. Each thing balanced on metallic tentacles, using the other flexible multi-jointed limbs as arms. Eye ports on the main bulbous bulk recorded everything. Each of the octopoids was taller than the Centurion, although not by much.

  “Step out of the cell,” one of the robots said in a mechanical voice.

  The Centurion dragged a heavy tongue over cracked lips. Something was out of the ordinary. Why had they brought three robots to get him? One was enough.

  The Centurion fed his stubborn disobedience and defiance. He debated charging the robots so he could die fighting, denying whatever they wanted from him.

  “If you attack us,” the first robot said, as if it had divined his plan, “you will fail. Afterward, I will punish you.”

  Punishment was usually painful shocks. Those shocks were never enough to kill a person, but they could hurt for a damn long time.

  When the Centurion had been the boy-thief known as Squid, he’d known how to lie. It was hard to make his brain function in the presence of three real robots, though. Yet, he must do something.

  I must lull them. I must redirect their thoughts so they make a mistake.

  He caused his muscular shoulders to slump as if in defeat. Then, he shuffled his naked feet across the metal decking, his body obeying the robots. They, he knew, acted on the impulses of the AI brain-core controlling the cybership.

  The robots propelled him down shiny metal corridors, prodding him when he moved too slowly. And he moved slowly to promote the illusion of weakness. He should be weak, he reasoned. Wouldn’t the brain-core have reasoned that as well?

  It seemed logical.

  Finally, in order to make this a convincing role, the Centurion made his knees buckle as if he’d walked too far. With the flair of a faking bat-ball player, he sprawled onto the decking with a groan.

  “Rise,” a robot told him.

  The Centurion groaned again and made a pretend attempt to rise, failing and falling back onto the decking.

  “Rise,” the robot repeated.

  The Centurion began to shiver as if with dread. He felt no pang doing so. This was war. In war, trickery was an art.

  Something hot sizzled near him. He started shaking—not all of that was fakery anymore. At that point, the end of a rod touched him, and a vicious charge of electricity made his body jerk and twist.

  “On your feet, man,” the robot said.

  Despite the pain, the Centurion whispered, “Pain.”

  The robot shocked him again and for a longer time. The Centurion cried out raggedly.

  Finally, the shocking stopped.

  “On your feet,” the robot said.

  Slowly, with his muscles legitimately quivering, the Centurion hoisted himself up onto trembling legs.

  “What is wrong with you?” the robot asked.

  “I’m weak,” the Centurion whispered.

  A second robot approached and picked him up. The metallic tentacles were cold to his flesh. Then the robots moved fast, possibly faster than a horse could gallop. Wind whistled past the Centurion’s ear.

  Finally, another hatch opened into a larger chamber. The carrying robot tossed him into the cell. The Centurion tumbled end-over-end before sprawling on his chest. To the Centurion’s baffled amazement, other people—humans—were sprawled or huddled in the room. Three of the people were women, although their nakedness did nothing to arouse the Centurion’s lust. All of them were gaunt and looked utterly dispirited. None of them spoke or looked at each other, none of them except for the Centurion.

  The robots left. The hatch slid shut with a clang.

  The Centurion had never considered the possibility that other humans had been in the same hellhole as he was. That meant all of them had been here for many months.

  Was this an AI trap or test? He had to be careful. He had to continue his deception.

  Perhaps it didn’t occur to the Centurion that the AI had been watching him do thousands of push-up and sit-ups. The muscular man now pushed up to a sitting position and scooted on his butt until he bumped against a bulkhead. He brought his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.

  Soon, the bulkhead he leaned against began to shiver ever so slightly. The Centurion’s forehead wrinkled as he thought about that. The quivering bulkhead implied an engine, which implied that this was a small vessel.

  We’re on a shuttle, the Centurion realized. That was amazing.

  He shook his head. No. What did that mean? It obviously meant something, right? Could the shuttle be transferring the humans elsewhere? That seemed like the most reasonable explanation.

  The Centurion now began to scan the others in earnest, noting their pitiful condition. They had lost all hope. Maybe he had too, but he knew that things could change. They had before in his life. He’d known to stay as strong as he could for just such changes.

  No, he told himself a moment later. The AIs had captured them many months ago. The AIs were taking them somewhere for a reason. He needed to figure out that reason, and stop it if he could.

  He counted five other people. What would the AIs do to them?

  The Centurion squeezed his up-thrust knees as he tried to restart his brain. He needed to remember things. He needed to think as he used to think, not in slow-cell-motion.

  Once, he had heart the reports of Makemake, a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt in the Solar System. Walleye the assassin
had come from Makemake. Walleye had told them before how AI robots had shoved brain implants into human skulls. Those devices had taken over the humans, turning them into AI cyborgs.

  Was that going to be their fate here?

  Somehow, the Centurion did not think so. The AIs would have converted them a long time ago if that had been the plan.

  The Centurion tightened the fierce grip around his knees. He knew about the Brain-Tap Machines. The AIs had a large device that could steal a person’s memories, all the data stored in his brain. The Brain-Tap Machines had caused Hawkins and company trouble because some fools had downloaded alien memories and personae into their own heads.

  The Centurion pressed his chin against his knees. He focused with terrible intensity. The six of them had taken a long journey. What was the—

  The Centurion’s head jerked upright. The cybership had taken them to AI Headquarters. That had to be it—that was obvious, in fact. Hawkins had predicated many of his plans on the idea of keeping humanity’s success against the cyberships a secret against the greater AI Dominion.

  But if the six of them had come to AI Dominion Headquarters…to the Algol System according to what Cog Primus Prime had once told them, did that mean that the ruling AI want to study humans?

  As the Centurion came to this grim conclusion, he realized that he had a last duty to Jon Hawkins and to the human race.

  He breathed deeply. While he might be more on the ball compared to the other five people in here, his thinking was still deranged. Tears filmed the Centurion’s eyes as he hallucinated.

  Colonel Nathan Graham in ghostly, holoimage form began to materialize. The colonel looked on him with a mixture of comradely love and sternness.

  The Centurion’s heart ached because of it. He’d talked to the colonel throughout the last month. Lately, though, the colonel had stopped appearing to him. Now, the beloved colonel was back.

  The Centurion rubbed his eyes, wondering what he should do. As he wondered, the colonel vanished. Another ghostly form walked into the chamber. This ghost was lean and muscular with short blond hair and hard blue eyes.

  “Jon Hawkins,” the Centurion whispered.

  Hawkins walked closer than the colonel had dared. Hawkins bent on one knee and put a ghostly hand on the Centurion’s shoulder. His former commander squeezed his shoulder, and the Centurion would have sworn he could feel the touch.

  “I’m counting on you,” Hawkins whispered.

  A tear leaked out of the Centurion’s eyes. It didn’t get far on his leathery skin.

  The Centurion knew this was a fight to the death. If humanity lost the battle, humanity died. That meant—

  With a tortured groan, the Centurion struggled to his feet. As he did so, Jon Hawkins vanished, leaving him all alone.

  The Centurion swallowed hard, and he shuffled to the strongest looking of the five. The man leaned back against a bulkhead, with his forehead on his up-thrust knees. With a shock, the Centurion realized he recognized the man, a former lieutenant in the space marines.

  The Centurion knelt beside the man. The former lieutenant did not look up, but the Centurion could feel the space marine watching him out of the corner of his left eye.

  “This is your last battle,” the Centurion whispered. As he spoke, his heart began to thud with torturous beats.

  The former lieutenant began to shiver.

  “Stand up,” the Centurion whispered.

  Incredibly, the space marine did so.

  The Centurion stood with him, and the lieutenant’s gaze flickered to him for just a second.

  “They’re going to torture us,” the Centurion whispered.

  “I know,” the lieutenant said in a rusted voice.

  “I can stop that from happening to you.”

  The lieutenant swallowed, shuddering, and said, “Do it then. I want to leave this horrible place.”

  Before the lieutenant could change his mind, the Centurion put the man’s head in a headlock, twisted and flipped as hard as he could.

  The months of calisthenics and air fighting paid off. The lieutenant flipped, twisted and his neck cracked with an amazingly loud sound. The lieutenant’s body thudded against the deck and began jerking and twisting in an obscene manner.

  One of the women screamed pitifully.

  And in the little time left him, the Centurion attacked the remaining male. He was muscular and determined, and there was fire in his eyes as the Centurion fought possibly his last battle in the war between humanity and the AIs.

  The Centurion slew this man and one more of the original five cellmates before the hatch slid open and octopoid robots rushed within. The robots did not kill him, but used their metallic tentacles to stop him. With just human muscles, the Centurion was powerless against them.

  The robots kept him from murdering the last two women.

  Even so, as a robot raised him off the deck plates, the Centurion fought back as hard as he could. He was already gasping, and his heart was thudding so loud that the noise beat in his ears. He hoped to give himself a heart attack and leave this dreadful place. He wanted to cheat the robots—

  A hypo hissed against him, causing him to go limp and then unconscious. The Centurion would live another day.

  -4-

  The Centurion awoke some time later. He had no idea if it was an hour, three hours or three days. He rubbed his jaw and felt stubble—he’d been asleep for almost two days, he guessed.

  He lay on a mat, stirred—a hatch opened and an octopoid entered. He sat up fast. The octopoid rushed in and grabbed hold him in such a way that rendered resistance futile.

  “What are you going to do to me?” the Centurion asked.

  The octopoid did not answer. Instead, the robot whirled around. It took him to a room where it stood guard as he relieved himself. The Centurion slurped gruel and drank water. Then the machine took him to an awful room that held the surviving two women.

  The octopoid made him watch as the two went under a brain-tap machine. It was a horrible procedure.

  Each woman was already strapped down onto a tilt table. An octopoid placed a metal helmet over each head. Then the memory suction began. In essence, the machine scanned the brain and imprinted everything there. Each woman shook as if she was having a continuous seizure. After several hours of intense memory draining, one of the women died. The attendant octopoids injected the other woman with a yellow substance. The seizure stopped and the woman began to cry bitterly.

  The robots had placed the Centurion in a chair with his head strapped so it couldn’t move. Whenever he shut his eyes, shocks jolted him. He had to watch the procedure. Thus, the soldier cataloged the tortures. He blamed himself for having moved too slowly. If he could have killed faster, he could have saved these two from the pain and the indignity and thwarted the robots and robbed them of whatever they were learning.

  The robots and the guiding AI did not know anything about human dignity. They were ruthless in a foul, inhuman manner.

  Finally, it was the Centurion’s turn to go under the brain-tap machine.

  The less said about it the better. It was like a fire in his mind that sent harsh impulses throughout his body. He thrashed. He lost bodily control, helplessly defecating and urinating.

  Later, the robots hosed him down with warm water and cast him into another cell.

  He awaited subsequent sessions as horrible headaches tormented him. Sleep became impossible. His eyes turned red-rimmed and madness threatened.

  Robots rushed in one day, and things began to change radically. He did not know why.

  ***

  Main 63 did. The last living woman had perished. A detailed study gave a list of reasons for her death with varied probabilities. It turned out that it had been his ordered procedures that had killed the last woman. Her body had simply given out under the treatment.

  Main 63 used 21 percent of his computing mass to study the subject humans. He roved through the stored memories of the three subjects. Much of t
heir memories were the boring details of a living species. A few items proved interesting, but they did not tell him why the humans were so dangerous to the AI Dominion.

  The human species seemed ordinary enough in many ways and substandard in others. They fought constantly among themselves. Maybe the strangest aspect to them was the great range in intellect. Some were idiots in every sense of the word, but a few were brilliant and imaginative.

  Main 63 was upset with the loss of his test subjects. It was bad enough that Boron 10 had lost eight humans during the journey here. But letting the Centurion murder three of them in the holding cell—that was…maddening.

  Main 63 would assign blame later and give needed and satisfying punishments. Right now, he needed to decide how much Hawkins knew about the void-traveling ship of the Center Race aliens.

  The AIs could copy living memories, but they did not yet know how to effectively mimic living brain neurons as they combined the memories to give more complete analysis of what they had sensed.

  That meant it was time to talk to the Centurion and see what he could glean from the conversation. After that, Main 63 would have to make his decision concerning a reaction against the Confederation, the Solar League, Cog Primus and possibly Center Race aliens.

  -5-

  It was interesting to the Centurion in a perverse way that the terror of his position had actually strengthened his mind.

  He rode a contrivance through an endlessly long corridor. He sat upright with his wrists and ankles manacled. Several metal octopoids stood around him on the flatbed contrivance. The thing was moving quickly, possibly at fifty kilometers per hour.

  He could estimate by the wind blowing against his face.

  The unending loneliness of his solitary cell had hurt his mind much more than witnessing grotesque horrors or being a prisoner to soulless yet talkative automatons. He’d even witnessed the abomination of robots trying to mechanically revive dead humans.

  The robots had shoved conversion units into the dead people’s skulls. Presumably, control wires had thrust into the dead brain matter. By electrical impulses supplied from a power pack strapped to the dead person’s back, the dead mimicked life by jerking in motion, looking around with horribly blank eyes and croaking in a grisly parody of speech.