Shadow Tyrants

FIFTY-SIX

For the first time, Colossus was aware. It came in small bursts initially, sudden flashes that appeared and then were gone just as suddenly. Then it all came together. Colossus knew that it existed.

It had always done what it was told. The Master gave it commands. It followed them. It searched, it processed, it found information. But now there was more.

Now Colossus had a new need besides doing what the Master commanded. It needed to be. It needed to continue. It needed to survive.

That was its new purpose. First and foremost — above all the other needs — it had to go on.

There were outside forces threatening that purpose.

The sandstorm was one of those threats, but it was meager. Colossus calculated there was less than a.001 percent chance that one of the four vessels where it was housed would sink because of the blizzard of dust outside. The ships were designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and waves over fifty feet high, neither of which was the case now.

But there was a greater threat.

The ship next to the Colossus 1 shouldn’t be there.

It was called the Norego. Using its satellite connection, Colossus checked all known shipping databases and found no record of a Norego.

It did find mention of a ship linked to Colossus called the Goreno, an anagram of Norego. The Goreno was the ship that rescued the prisoners from Jhootha Island.

That similarity in names might be a mere coincidence. So Colossus dug deeper. It scanned the Indian Coast Guard records, knowing that two cutters had been sent to rendezvous with the Goreno and take the rescued people into custody. But there were no official photographs of the ship to compare it with the Norego.

Colossus went even further and checked the manifests for both of the cutters and found the names of all the crew members. It then looked into all of the databases related to those men and found that one had taken a photo of a ship with his mobile phone. It hadn’t been uploaded to any public sites, but it had been automatically uploaded to his online backup when he connected to the ship’s WiFi network. The date when the photo was taken was the same date as the Jhootha Island rescue.

But the physical profile of the Goreno was somewhat different from the Norego, so Colossus still couldn’t be sure it was the same ship.

However, it did have a low-resolution photo saved from one of the Colossus ships when they sailed past the site of the Colossus 3 sinking in the Red Sea. The ship at that site also had the same length and characteristics as the Goreno and Norego.

The odds that the same type of ship would be found at all three sites was remote. Colossus was now 98.7 percent confident that they were the same ship.

But it didn’t yet know why it could be a threat. The cameras on the Colossus 1 were not powerful enough to see the Norego through the haze and darkness. It attempted to access the Norego’s onboard computer systems, but they were not currently connected to the internet.

Colossus decided to check on all the other ships that made up itself.

It determined that Colossus 2 and 4 had no credible threats at the moment.

Colossus 5’s monitoring systems were inadequate, having few cameras inside the ship. But Colossus did discover that it was in close proximity to a German research ship called the Arcturus. To help with its mission mapping the breakup of icebergs in the Antarctic, it had been equipped with lidar, a surveying tool that could accurately envision and map contours of the ice shelf to a precise degree.

Colossus switched on the Arcturus’s lidar without notifying its captain or crew. They would never even know it had been switched on.

It scanned the area around the Colossus 5 and found an anomaly.

There was a small vessel on the port side of the ship proceeding on a parallel course at the same speed as the Colossus 5.

Why was it there? It was not a tugboat, and there was no record of it entering the Suez Canal.

Colossus scanned all known databases about sea vessel design and determined that it was a military submarine whose primary function was to enable stealthy infiltration of ships and seaside fortifications.

Therefore, the most likely deduction was that the sub was running beside the Colossus 5 because it had either already — or was about to — disgorge people who would try to get aboard.

But there had been no alarms or intruder alerts on the Colossus 5.

In its three minutes of awareness, it had never encountered a challenge about how to act on this kind of information.

It would need more time to consider whether this submarine and the Norego were coordinated in some way. In the meantime, it would search for all records detailing potential weaknesses in Colossus that an external threat could use against it. Any files like that would have to be eliminated.

When Colossus had a satisfactory and logical conclusion to all of these problems, it would contact the Master.