New Alliance Read online

  “Greetings, visitors. As our mutual acquaintance has advised you, you may call me J-NAK.” The voice was robotic, reminding me of the old phone voices you’d dial to get the local weather or time.

  “I’m Dean. This is Suma; Rulo; W, or Dubs as we call him; Karo is back there; and that” – I pointed to the ground, where Slate was blinking his eyes open and reaching for his gun again – “is Zeke, but you can call him Slate.” I shook my head at my friend, and Slate left his hand off the weapon.

  “That was uncalled for,” Slate said, and I moved over to him, helping him to his feet.

  “We do not want to be threatened. We will not tolerate further destruction,” J-NAK said plainly.

  “Good to know.” Slate rubbed his head. “Don’t worry about me,” he said with some attitude. “I’m fine.”

  “Can you help us get home?” I asked, nodding to the stone Karo was kneeling beside.

  “We do not travel through the portal. It takes an organic to activate.” J-NAK moved toward it, his four legs moving methodically.

  A disturbing vision crept into my inner mind’s eye: robots like the one in front of us spread across New Spero, thousands of them building a hive like the city around us, stifling our human life in favor of their own AI needs. We couldn’t let them or this Origin travel through the portals with us. They had to remain here. It also begged the question of why they hadn’t created space travel yet, or maybe I was being short-sighted and they had. It wasn’t a question I was willing to broach with the robot quite yet.

  W cut in. “I did mention the portal’s erratic behavior, referring to the potential crossed wires between the locations and the symbols.”

  I silently wished he hadn’t talked about the portals with this robot at all, but since he already had, I decided to press it. “How did it respond?”

  “It thinks it could work out a program mapping the issues, if given time,” W said.

  I sensed some logical bait being placed. “What should we do in the meantime?”

  Karo got up and blinked at J-NAK, as if it was the first time he’d looked at the robot who’d been in the room with us for the last ten minutes. “Isn’t that clear?” he asked. “This J-NAK would like us to go to the pole, retrieve Origin, and bring their leader and founder back safely. Then they’ll trade us safe passage to wherever we choose on the portal table.”

  For a guy who hadn’t seemed to be paying attention, he’d hit the nail on the head.

  “This one is accurate in his understanding of the situation. If it pleases you to begin your quest now, that would be ideal,” J-NAK said through a speaker. He didn’t have a head or face, so I stared toward the center of the torso, where the couple of dozen arms moved slowly.

  “Can we have a moment?” I asked it, and when I didn’t receive a reply, I motioned everyone to come with me to the far corner of the clear-walled room.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I muttered, angry with our predicament. “Why can’t a rescue mission in space ever be simple?” The question almost made me laugh.

  Rulo was the first to speak. “We either risk another portal trip or we do what they ask. W, do you believe they’ll find a way to get us to Oliter?”

  W paused before speaking. “I do. They appear to be quite high-level. When this model communicated wirelessly with me, I could sense others pressing in to join its conversation. As it said, many are aimless in their intelligence now, because the core of their hive is Origin. If this creature came and took Origin to the magnetic polar fields, where Origin can no longer function, then they do need it returned. We would be doing a great favor to these robots.”

  “I want to get Magnus home, not save a bunch of robots from wandering through the streets of their constructed city,” I said, and regretted the words as W averted his gaze. “Dubs, I didn’t mean it like that. I only want to help our friends.”

  “Boss, this might be the one way we can do that. How hard can it be?” Slate asked.

  Now I did laugh. It was an asinine quest. We had no idea what we were up against out there at the poles. “I guess we have no choice. Are we all in agreement?” I had a bad feeling about it all. What was to stop these robots from all becoming activated, then forcing us to help them through the portal to devour and expand to other words? Unfortunately, we were out of options.

  One by one, they nodded. First Rulo, then Suma, her snout waving lightly side to side. Slate was next, a determined look across his face. Karo met my gaze and nodded softly.

  “Then it’s settled. J-NAK, tell us everything you can about this being that took Origin.”

  Seven

  We were ushered into the dark cube, and we each set our lights on as we entered. The walls were black, no light emerging from the outside. The door shut, and I couldn’t discern if we were moving or staying still. J-NAK was silent as we waited, and a few minutes later, I felt the cube settle onto something solid.

  “I guess we were moving,” Slate whispered to me. We were in our full EVA suits, and I felt claustrophobic in mine. W claimed the air was breathable, and I expected to take the helmet off as soon as possible. It was kind of ironic to find a world that would suit our needs for air, but to find it inhabited by robotic beings.

  We were led by the six-foot-tall multi-armed robot out onto the ground, which was a strange sight in its own right. The entire pathway was smooth light-gray metal, not a bump or ridge to be found.

  A drone whirred by above us, and now that we were on the surface, I noticed different devices roaming without purpose. There were a couple of models much like J-NAK; some had more legs, or fewer arms, but that was where the differences ended.

  “Come with me. We will supply everything you need for your journey,” J-NAK said, and a hovering platform approached us. White light emanated from beneath, and a glowing barrier like a fence surrounded the trolley. It was meant to carry us to a destination.

  “Everyone on board,” I said, taking the lead up two steps. Once we were all on, feet planted firmly, it began moving slowly. We all watched with interest as the city moved by us. There were buildings, but I had no clue what sort of function they had. When I asked J-NAK about it, he said they were integral to the Panel. W tried to translate this, claiming the city was like an electronic panel. The buildings and pedways were bridges, connectors, and conductors.

  Suma nodded along, but this was all well beyond my comprehension. Slate rolled his eyes and laughed. It was good that he could still be in high spirits after today’s events. He’d even been shot with a pulse from J-NAK, which he claimed hadn’t hurt. It had only incapacitated him in an instant.

  “You’re saying this entire city is some sort of computer board?” Rulo asked.

  “In a simplified sense, yes,” W said.

  Rulo reached for our android with a powerful hand, and I stepped between them. “What else can you tell us?”

  J-NAK’s toneless voice told us we would receive a map, and asked W for vehicle blueprints that would suit our needs.

  The hovering transportation platform came to a stop, and I peered up, seeing the sky for the first time. The clouds were dissipating, and the sun was up now, low in the horizon. It was yellow, and across the sky, I noticed a full moon contrasting the star. “This world seems like a good one for a colony,” I suggested.

  Suma agreed. “If you don’t mind sharing it with sentient robots,” she said quietly.

  “I might mind that,” I replied. “W, what does it want with vehicle blueprints?”

  W asked it silently and quickly responded, “The location of the poles is not nearby. They wish to manufacture a vessel to take us there, and they figured one to our specifications would be ideal.”

  “Wait, you’re telling me they’ll make us any kind of ship we ask for?” Slate asked, eyes going wide. “Boss, let’s get a killer copter.”

  “This isn’t a game,” I said, “but that’s a cool idea. If Mary or Magnus were here, that might be a good option, but I don’t think any of us s
hould be learning to fly a helicopter on this alien world.” I turned to W. “Do you have the prints of our basic ten-person landers?”

  “I do, Captain,” W said.

  “Everyone good with that?” I asked, and when no one complained, W sent the details on another datastick.

  “We will comply,” J-NAK said.

  “How long?” I asked the robot, wanting nothing more than to get this task over with. I expected to hear the answer in days, but its response startled us all.

  “Two of your hours.” It didn’t wait for further discussion; instead, it walked off, quickly moving into a walled-off facility that seemed every bit like a robotic manufacturing plant, even from the street. Its walls were at least a hundred feet high, white-paneled, and two hundred feet long.

  “Two hours.” I mouthed the words in surprise, and we settled on the street, leaning against the building’s exterior walls.

  “Can you believe this place?” Slate asked as he took his helmet off. Like every time one of us took our EVA helmet off on a foreign world, I held my breath, waiting for Slate’s reaction to the air. He grinned at me and inhaled.

  “Either they’re producing oxygen or not everything on this world is metal and robotic. There has to be some greenspace somewhere,” Suma suggested, pulling her own helmet off. We all followed suit and began going over the small amount of rations we had. Once all our bags and pockets were emptied, we took inventory.

  “Four water bottles and seven protein bars. Not a lot to go on,” I said, reviewing the meager pile along the edge of the manufacturing warehouse.

  “Good news, one of us is a robot, so W doesn’t need food,” Slate said. He eyed Karo suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re not hiding any pizza under there?”

  Karo’s face broke into the first smile I’d seen on him for a while. “I did, but I already ate it.”

  “We can joke all we want, but we might be in some trouble. I expect these robots don’t have much need for water.” Slate reached for a bottle, and I cringed.

  “W, how far is the northern pole?” I walked over to W as he pulled a screen from one of his multiple compartments. He activated it and showed me the display with a satellite image, presumably of the planet we were on.

  “It looks to be twenty-five hundred and eleven kilometers to the center of the pole,” he said. I scanned the image, which showed most of the terrain covered in streets and buildings, like the city we were inside. The picture showed light clusters spread around the continent, and my gaze drifted to a body of water stretching a couple hundred kilometers south of our current position in Origin’s first settlement.

  “How will we find Origin when we get there?” Suma asked, using English to make it easier to talk among the group.

  “J-NAK said Origin has a unique identifier. They cannot track it from the pole, but they know for a fact that Origin did enter the pole when it was taken,” W replied.

  “What kind of alien arrived back then, and who would risk plucking the main power of an entire world’s robotic hive?” I scratched my chin, wondering if W was given this information.

  “That I do not know, Captain. It didn’t have that information either. They don’t appear to capture video feeds of anything going on here. They don’t get a lot of visitors, and they are all interconnected, so having cameras is an unnecessary use of energy.” W’s gaze turned toward a doorway, but it remained closed. “It is strange here. I feel multiple voices pressing into my mind, some focused communication, some random strings of binary. It is very unsettling.”

  “Are you able to block it at all?” I asked, really having no understanding of how the robots could speak and pass information between each other.

  He shook his head and glanced toward the doorway again. “No.”

  “What are you looking at?” Suma asked Dubs, as she glanced toward the door as well.

  “I hear them in there. At least twenty drones, working as a strong unit to build our lander.” W stood, while the rest of us sat leaning against the wall as we waited for J-NAK to come back with an update.

  We spent the next two hours discussing where Magnus could have gone, Rulo adding insights to how life was on a Keppe exploratory vessel. I’d made a habit of talking to Magnus with our communicator over the duration of his three-year stint, but he rarely gave his location. Instead, we opted to discuss his mental state, my pressures running between Earth’s new colony cities, New Spero’s ever-expanding Terran sites, and Haven bringing in the Alliance of Worlds members.

  We frequently discussed our children, Magnus telling me about little Dean, whom he and Nat had named after me when they thought Mary and I had died on our trek chasing the hybrids across the galaxy. He was seven years old now, doing well in a Keppe school. Baby Patty wasn’t a baby any longer. She was around a year older than Jules, and we liked to predict how Patty and Jules were going to become fast friends when they returned home.

  I’d tell Magnus about my smart and willful little daughter, sometimes confiding that I was afraid she’d been affected by her time in the womb while Mary had been possessed by the Iskios. Her bright green eyes were only part of the reason I thought she might be special. Only time would tell exactly what that meant.

  Mary didn’t want to talk about the possibility of Jules being different based on her pregnancy’s circumstances. She rarely spoke about the time under the ancient race’s control. Not that I blamed her, but there were nights when she tossed and turned in bed, waking up in a sweat, and I knew it was because of her nightmares of the Iskios. She’d seen herself wielding immense power, destroying moons and planets with no regard for life. I knew I had hybrid blood inside me, and that brought a sort of deeper kinship between me and my daughter.

  Mary admitted it wasn’t her, none of it was actually under her control, but the effects of being used as such a destructive puppet were enough to scar anyone. I loved my wife ferociously, and now my daughter, and I needed to protect them so something like that never happened again. I looked around the strange city as we sat there, chatting amongst ourselves, and I wished I was home.

  I should have brought the portal. What had I been thinking? We could have climbed through to my house on New Spero. At the same time, I’d been right to worry about carrying it on a journey with me. I was always getting into danger out here, and the last thing I needed was an enemy getting hold of the portal device and walking straight into my house, where Mary and Jules resided.

  “Dean, are you all right?” Suma’s voice broke me from my reverie.

  “Sure. I was thinking about Magnus, and our kids. Suma, how’s the academy coming along?” I asked, wanting to talk about something else.

  “They broke ground on it around a month ago on Haven. Can you believe there’s going to be a Gatekeepers’ Academy? I’d hate to be a teacher there. Young ones from dozens of races from around the galaxy, all under one roof.”

  “Isn’t that part of the point? Getting everyone together to work toward a common goal?” It had been Slate’s idea, and after some serious deliberation, our makeshift Alliance of Worlds council had approved it.

  “You don’t throw a bunch of kids together and expect them to forget thousands of years of prejudice and issues passed down from generation to generation,” Suma said, sounding older than her twenty-plus years.

  “You’re right there, but what if this new alliance sets everyone toward a new path? One that makes them not forget the old ways, but look toward the future, standing side by side with their neighboring systems instead of against them?” I said.

  “Always the idealist, aren’t you, Dean? Not everything can be solved by waving a treaty around. But I do think it was a good idea, even if Slate thought of it,” she said with a smile.

  “I heard my name,” Slate said from a few yards away. “What did I do now?”

  The door opened at the side of the building, and J-NAK emerged. “You may see your vessel. It is ready.”

  We all got up off the ground and gathered our supplies
before heading to the entrance of the manufacturing building. I was excited to see inside. A place where a full ten-person lander could be built in two hours had to be interesting.

  There were soft lights cascading from the ceiling, and I wondered if they were for our benefit or the robots’. Did robots need light? I’d have to ask W later. He was beside me, head tilting from side to side as he took in the sight of the space.

  The ceiling opened, sections folding in smooth patterns until we could see the sky above. That was handy. My gaze dropped to the middle of the warehouse floor. The surface was the same metals as the streets had been: their version of concrete. A lander exactly like the ones we’d used at home was sitting there.

  “It appears to be missing a few details,” Suma said, and I noticed the dull exterior. The materials were different from ours; instead of a smooth, polished gray exterior, this was leaning toward a matte black, with no lines painted on or numbers designating the vehicle ID.

  “As long as it does the job, I’m happy,” I said, running a gloved hand along the surface of the lander. The door opened as I tapped the icon beside it, and I let out a low whistle. The seats were metal grates, definitely made for function, not comfort.

  “Let’s make this trip short. I don’t know how long I can sit on something like that,” Slate said, and Rulo grunted beside him.

  “Humans. Always complaining.” Rulo stepped in first, stacking our EVA helmets and packs in a rear storage compartment.

  “Not all of us have armor on our butts,” Slate retorted, getting a shove for his efforts from the large Keppe woman. At least she was smiling now. I’d never seen her so cranky before. I think she’d been excited to go searching for the missing Keppe exploration ship and hated the delay as much as I did.

  “J-NAK, you didn’t do this by yourself, did you?” I asked the lone robot in the warehouse.