Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read online

  Burgton turned to address them. “Here we have Kushiel, bombed by the Merki from orbit with nuclear and kinetic ordnance over a prolonged period. All life extinguished by them and the planet ruined forever as a warning, we assume, against further use of atomics in atmosphere against them. I say we assume, because we’ve never managed any dialogue with them about Kushiel or any other subject. But, we got the message. The Accords were written, and all Alliance members signed it. We don’t know what the Merki think about that, but neither side has used orbital strikes or atomics in atmosphere against the other since then. And no other planets have suffered Kushiel’s fate, so we can assume they’re at least satisfied with it.”

  Gina didn’t interrupt, but it wasn’t true that neither side had used atomics. Admiral Meyers had in fact deployed Zeus on Child of Harmony. Zeus missiles were atomics, though they were classed in the micro nuke range of weapons carried aboard fleet carriers. The risk of using them against the Merkiaari had been extreme. If the Merki high command somehow learned of it, the consequences could be dire. Fortunately, and probably a mitigating circumstance Meyers used to justify her decision, her ships had owned the system at the time, and the Shan elders had specifically requested the strike. By ensuring no Merki survived the experience, the details of how the victory was achieved had been hidden.

  “That’s the background,” Burgton said and manipulated the controls. The image changed to a cityscape. “This is the capital city of the colony; obviously the images were taken long before the war.”

  Gina nodded as image after image appeared. The city had been designed using an older colonial style—lots of stone walls and columns rather than the more modern but sterile steel and glass. She liked it. It reminded her of places she had visited while on leave. She’d chosen to visit Earth on her last leave as a marine just before she was recruited into the regiment. She remembered the ruins of the original Washington DC on the shores of Crater Lake that had been preserved as a memorial. The final image that Burgton displayed was of a building that had an impressive dome, just like the broken Capitol building she had seen back then.

  New Washington on Earth was the capital of the Alliance, but the architects of that city had turned away from the past and embraced wholeheartedly their concept of the future. Perhaps they had simply wanted to blot out the memory of Washington’s destruction at the hands of the madman Douglas Walden during the Hacker Rebellion, perhaps not, but by creating something completely different and separate from old notions of architecture they had also lost something. Steel and glass mega-scrapers, though technologically impressive, could never replace the heart swelling beauty of old weatherworn stone columns and domes. New Washington had no Capitol, no domes, just super modern mega-scrapers and needles... it made Gina feel a little sad. Romantic foolishness, she thought, but she did admire Kushiel’s old colonial style of architecture.

  “Kushiel was governed as a republic, but one with a twist. Its colonial administer was an A.I named Sebastian, and it was he who was effectively the head of state.”

  Gina gaped.

  Burgton nodded at her surprise. “I don’t mean he was named president. Kushiel’s government had all the trappings of a republic as we understand it. No, I mean the A.I ran the colony’s infrastructure without outside input—even back then everything was mostly automated like today. They took things further by swearing the president in before him. In effect, Sebastian was the ultimate supreme court judge and guardian of Kushiel’s constitution.”

  Wow. That was taking things too far, Gina thought. The A.Is were almost mythical beings to most people. They were a part of history. Even so, Humans had created them as helpers and even friends, not as some kind of Praetorian Guard policing their creators and deciding whether they were fit to govern.

  “That brings me to this,” Burgton said and the holotank changed. “This is Oracle.”

  Gina stepped closer to the tank. Oracle was a massive installation—she picked out a significant datum—built subsurface, 3km down. Under The Mountain then, had to be. It made sense. The geothermal power plant that serviced Oracle was even deeper. The central chamber drew her eyes. It was a stadium sized spherical void in the middle of the display and it told her what Oracle had to be.

  “Good name for something designed to predict events,” she said quietly. Eric gave her a questioning look, but she didn’t explain. “I assume you didn’t sweat the ban on neural interface technology either?”

  Liz shrugged. “Not so much. In for a few trillion, in for a few billion more.”

  Gina winced. Trillions? Yeah, she could well believe that looking at all this. The installation itself, just the empty chambers would have cost many billions as deep as they’d had to go.

  “What’s going on?” Eric said. “I seem to be the only one not in the know.”

  Burgton raised a hand. “Gina knows a little of this because I confided in her on Child of Harmony for background before we went to pick up Shima. Oracle is Snakeholme’s A.I.”

  “But the ban...” Eric began, but tailed off. “Sir, you’re risking too much. Building our own little fleet of ships, and our own weapon’s factory made sense even though it’s illegal as hell, but breaking the ban on A.Is and neural tech? If the Council learns of it, they’ll shut us down with nukes from orbit if they have to!”

  “Calmly, Captain, calmly,” Burgton said. “There are reasons for everything I do, no matter how mad they may seem at first. Gina, the ban on neural tech has never been applied to us. Every viper ever built has neural interfaces because we need them to function. The regiment hasn’t been specifically excluded from the ban, but viper design implies it and the Council is well aware of that. That leaves the A.I ban. The technology isn’t under the ban, the software is. The Oracle installation is therefore safe.”

  “Semantics,” Eric said angrily and Gina glanced at him worriedly. “You risk everything.”

  Burgton looked at Eric coldly now. “You’ve been with me a long time, Captain Penleigh. You’ve seen some of the things I’ve had to do or order done to keep the Alliance safe and on course. You’ve been sent to carry out many of them. This is just one more of those things. It’s a little late to be growing a conscience, don’t you think?”

  Eric stiffened, his eyes grown cold.

  Gina watched Eric closely and her eyes widened a little as she realised she was watching Eric’s right hand and evaluating how to intercept him if he drew. Preposterous, he wouldn’t draw on the General. She watched him close regardless, prepared to intervene.

  Burgton drew a sharp breath and then let it out as a sigh. “There are a lot of things I do that break laws large and small. I’ve been doing them and ordering them done since the Council betrayed me after the war. They had to be done. Some were to keep the regiment going even at a subsistence level so that we would be here when needed, others were to head off disasters in the Alliance that would have weakened us all against the Merkiaari threat.

  “You may not know this, Gina, but Eric is one of my best operatives. He has often been tasked with doing my dirty work so to speak. He has the right, if anyone does, after all this time to get up in my face over things and question me like this. I value his council as well as his other skills. In the end, I know I have his loyalty. He will follow his orders.”

  Gina watched Eric’s eyes narrow just a bit, and knew that even Eric didn’t know where he would draw the line. Loyalty was earned, and Burgton had earned his many times over, but Eric’s look told Gina there might come a time when loyalty would no longer be enough.

  “Now,” Burgton went on. “Oracle is a reality. Liz built it for me at great expense, but there’s a problem.”

  Liz snorted. “Problem he says. I’ll say there’s a problem. It doesn’t bloody work!”

  Gina blinked. “Then we haven’t broken the A.I ban?” she turned to Eric triumphantly.

  Eric shook his head pityingly at her.

  Liz shrugged. “Yes and no... not that I care. Stupid law shoul
d never have been written let alone enforced for over half a millennium. We learned our lessons from Walden and his fanatics a very long time ago. There’s no way the Hacker Rebellion would succeed today. The ban could have been removed just decades after it was introduced without risk, but public paranoia wouldn’t allow it. The Council knows all this, but for reasons of its own keeps the ban in place.

  “As for Oracle, the software is operating within the matrix, so yes the ban is broken, but it isn’t self aware, and that’s the problem. It’s just a very expensive calculator right now.”

  “Expensive, right,” Gina said thinking of all those trillions of credits.

  The regiment’s budget couldn’t possibly cover that kind of expense, which meant Burgton had used Snakeholme’s treasury to fund it. He had the right of course. Snakeholme didn’t really have a government. It was run like a military unit or maybe a corporation. Yes, a corporation with department heads like Liz running various aspects. That made Burgton the CEO of Snakeholme Inc., sort of, another word for which was dictator. Dictator or not, he had a moral duty to spend Snakeholme’s treasure wisely. Whether he was wise or not remained to be seen.

  “And you think Kushiel holds the answer to Oracle’s problem?” Eric said.

  Burgton nodded. “We hope it does, but we don’t know for sure. Kushiel was one of the worlds that still had a functioning A.I after the Rebellion, but three centuries or so later along came the Merkiaari and killed everything on the planet. Nothing further is known about the A.I, except it was there at the end.”

  “It can’t still be there, surely?” Gina said.

  “We don’t think so,” Liz said. “There’s no mention of it at all. I’m assuming one of the orbital strikes took it out. No, we’re not looking to salvage the A.I. We want its backup memory module... if it still exists and if we can even find and access it. The world is frankly a poisonous snowball now. It’s going to be a challenge however you slice it.”

  Gina nodded thoughtfully, but already she could feel the pull of the quest stirring her. A bit of excitement was in the offing, and one that didn’t involve combat. Sounded like just the thing.

  “Do we have a starting point to look?” Eric said. “And what about the salvage side?”

  “My people will handle the actual extraction,” Liz said. “One false move and we could destroy the data we need. In fact, I’m almost certain I’ll copy the data on site before extraction as a backup. We only get one chance at this, and we’re talking about ancient equipment that’s been left in a hostile environment.”

  Burgton used the holotank controls again. “We think the A.I was housed in Haverington. It was the capital and a logical place. Liz thinks any backups would be close to the actual A.I, but not necessarily in the same building. I’m hoping that if the A.I was taken out by the Merki its backups survived. No way to tell without going there.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a very secure site for an A.I, sir,” Gina said doubtfully. “I would expect something like Oracle to house it.”

  Burgton nodded. “Now yes, but don’t forget Sebastian was installed centuries before the Merki War.”

  “Still,” Gina said. If she’d been there, she would never have let the A.I sit above ground in the city, war or no war.

  “I’m not sure why you need us,” Eric said. “Sounds like a job for Liz’s engineers not vipers.”

  Burgton smiled. “You know me, I never expect trouble but I’m always prepared for it. Operation Oracle is Liz’s baby, but you two are to take care of her and any security related issues. If I knew what they were I would tell you. Chances are, on a dead world like this, all you’ll have to do is keep her engineers from wandering off without their environment suits on.”

  Eric laughed and Gina grinned.

  Liz scowled at the mockery, but it didn’t last. “My people are ready to board, George. All our equipment is aboard. When can we go?”

  Burgton looked at Eric. “Tomorrow?”

  Eric glanced at the holotank and nodded. “We’ll upload all this to study on the way. Tomorrow is good. What ship?”

  “Hobbs, one of our freighters. Kushiel is classified as a war memorial and gravesite. Going down world is prohibited because of that.” Burgton grimaced. “The system is rarely visited, but if a ship did pass through for some reason, a freighter will raise fewer suspicions than a destroyer.”

  Eric nodded. “We can go down in one of her cargo shuttles.”

  Gina listened as they hashed out a few more details and watched Liz at the holotank controls. She had found the cityscapes again. Gina wondered if the buildings in the pictures were still standing.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” she said and joined Liz at the controls.

  * * *

  14 ~ Lost World

  Aboard Hobbs, in orbit of Kushiel

  A snowball, Gina remembered thinking back at base. Kushiel did indeed resemble one. The terrible bombardment that had tortured the planet more than two hundred years in the past had triggered an ice age beyond anything Gina had ever heard tell of. The kinetic and nuclear strikes had thrown so much debris into the air that it had shrouded the planet with cloud, some radioactive, that had lasted years. Sunlight reaching the surface had been badly reduced, lowering mean temperatures and starting the long decline into permanent winter.

  Hobbs was an unarmed freighter, but its sensors were decent and they’d been scanning the surface since the ship settled into Kushiel’s orbit yesterday. They already knew a lot about local conditions, cold and inhospitable, and that most of the surface was covered in ice, making the situation worse. The icecaps covered much of the surface with glaciers marching across once fecund land. They reflected the sunlight, not allowing it to be absorbed, and the vicious circle was therefore complete. Like some kind of runaway engine, ice perpetually generated more ice. Only at the equator was there any land not covered year round, and it was of no interest to them. It had never been settled.

  The atmosphere was laced with nasty stuff too. Sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide levels were dangerously high even now. The Merkiaari had done a real number on it, and not by accident. The result even had a proper scientific name—impact winter—and was akin to something scientists had long known would happen after a prolonged nuclear exchange in atmosphere—nuclear winter. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two, except in the means used to create them, and in their duration. A decade after the event, Kushiel’s atmosphere really should have begun to repair itself. The textbooks all agreed upon that, but the Merkiaari had wanted to make a statement. Their version of impact winter was of long duration because they had kept hitting the planet until they succeeded in stripping the atmosphere of its ozone layer. Other weather effects played a part too. Kushiel’s precipitation levels were way down, not really surprising when you realised that most of the planet’s water was locked up in the ice sheets.

  The planet would never recover, or if it did it would take so many years they would need to be measured on a geological timescale.

  The atmosphere would be lethal to anyone exposed to it even for a short time. Gina knew that she could breathe it if she had to—though she was sure to be unhappy about it—as long as her IMS had the resources to continually repair the damage to seared lungs. Eric and she had packed a lot of viper supplements just in case. Liz and her team would be required to breathe canned air 24/7, absolutely no exceptions. Not that it would be a real problem, seeing as the sub-zero temperatures would require them to wear full environment suits while outside anyway. The suits were climate controlled and contained their own PLSS (Portable Life Support Systems) that should keep everyone breathing good air rather than the poisonous crap that Kushiel now used for its excuse for an atmosphere. During downtimes, everyone could get out of their suits either in a shuttle or in the pressure domes they planned to erect as a base camp when they had a good candidate for the memory module’s location.

  It was that location they were searching for. Captain Gibson would be adjus
ting Hobbs’ orbit many times over the following days until he could deliver a full and comprehensive survey of the surface. Until then, Liz’s team was twiddling their thumbs checking and rechecking their equipment, while Gina and Eric haunted the bridge, annoying Gibson’s crew by looking over their shoulders—figuratively speaking of course.

  Gina was paging through the data available at one of the observer stations. She didn’t literally need to look over anyone’s shoulder to sate her growing curiosity. The data from the ship’s sensors was available in raw form instantly to anyone wanting it, but letting the ship’s computer crunch the numbers for a few minutes rendered a more useful result. The images of snowy wastelands were by far the most numerous. Interesting only for background really, but she didn’t filter them out for fear of missing something. She let her eyes skim each frame, knowing her own internal database was soaking up the data for rapid recall later.

  When the ship passed over the locations where towns and cities had once been located, and there were many of them old as the colony had been, she stopped to study each one in greater detail. Sometimes there was little to learn. Lot of craters down there, she mused, blunted now by age and softened by the ice and snow. Other times, ruins reared up out of ice fields, stark and lonely. Rarely were intact but abandoned towns revealed, undamaged by war but fallen to ruin by time’s gentle caress. When they did appear on the scans, images of streets buried in ice, with drifted snow banked against the buildings and blowing into them through third floor windows were common.

  Kushiel had been a core world with a large prosperous population; its loss had been a horrifying shock back during the Merki War. The fact of the matter was that no matter how much everyone preferred to think otherwise, the Merki were not confined to nibbling around the edges of Alliance space, or invading border worlds. There were no rules or universal laws of physics preventing them from sending incursions directly against core worlds, even against the big six... even Earth itself! The only reason they didn’t try was the size and strength of the defences mustered nearby. Six huge fleets and countless task forces and system pickets protected the Alliance with more added every year, but back then the Alliance had yet to be conceived. Every system was on its own, unless it happened to be part of a political unit already such as the Kalmar Union.