AI Uprising by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2018-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Robots always stick together…

10

Interlude III: Captain Farlow’s Return

The man was wrong, somehow, but in ways the Section Manager of the Endurance couldn’t pin down.

It was the way he looked at you, she thought as she watched him through the one-way viewing mirror. Looking at me, she corrected, even though he shouldn’t be able to see her through the black glass.

The search-and-rescue drone had acquired the survival pod (if that was what the thing was) in exactly the same operation as it had been trained to do—strong memory-filament wires exploding from its underside to wrap around the spinning silver coffin, pulling it snugly to the vessel’s belly and turning to fly back to its mother ship, the Endurance.

Everything went according to plan, the woman in the form-fitting black encounter suit had to admit. Too perfect, she also admitted. Given everything that she and her crew had seen over the last twenty-four-hour cycle, from the appearance of the new type of alien mega-ship, and the capabilities that the Alpha-vessel had displayed, the section manager found herself anticipating something more for some reason. That was the thing about her job: Section managers weren’t just elected because of their ability to deliver results, or their adherence to the rules, but also for their ability to adapt to the unexpected. That was what made her excellent material for the Intelligence Division and not, say, any regular infantry captaincy.

The section manager and her charge, the Endurance, had been drafted to ghost the Duergar home worlds, or to report on strange and unexplained seismic and climatic phenomena on a few dozen different worlds. She had been sent to explore Q’Lot sightings in frontier space—a surveillance mission that had never gone anywhere, and had also been one of the first responders to first contact scenarios—monitoring and evaluating the Ghalees as well as the turtle-men of the Vhal’ig, or the microscopic race known as the Fal, as well as, of course, providing deep-black mission capabilities to the many political situations that Armcore took an interest in. She had watched as select house nobles were assassinated, or as particular people who were not deemed profitable to Armcore never got to their ill-advised rendezvous at certain times.

The strange and the unpredictable were a part of the Endurance’s remit. It was natural for Senior Tomas to dispatch them of all of the many war cruisers and battleships that it had at its disposal to evaluate the possible Alpha threat.

But what the section manager hadn’t been expecting was for the person to emerge from the strange survival pod to be a hundred-percent human. A citizen of the Imperial Coalition and an Armcore officer, in fact.

Captain Farlowe appeared to be a well-maintained man in his later years. He had the customary short crewcut of Armcore, but it was now speckled with grey. He had wrinkles around his eyes and the peppering of dimples and scars across his cheeks and broad hands from a hundred firefights. She knew this because she had his records at her side, on a portable screen.

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