Katya's World

CHAPTER 10 Medusa Sphere

The Baby travelled around the mass of the mountain keeping the vertiginous slopes to the right. It was very quiet aboard; after a couple of attempts at humour, even Tokarov had shut up. Now there was just the hum of the boat’s impellers running through the hull and the quiet whirr of the ventilators.

“Uncle?” said Katya, suddenly spotting a flaw in the plan.

“Hmm?”

“How are we supposed to find the Leviathan? It’s virtually invisible when it wants to be. We could swim backwards and forwards all day two hundred metres from it in this murk and never see it.”

“Ah, well,” said Lukyan in a voice that indicated that he hadn’t considered this either, but wasn’t about to admit it.

Kane saved him by saying, “It will find us. It will interrogate the IFF unit with a coded signal, detect the correct reply — if we’ve made a mess putting in the IFF then that will be about the point where this pleasure cruise finishes — and try to bring us in on remote control or command the drone’s artificial intelligence to bring itself in. Neither will work, it will assume there’s been damage, and recover us for repairs.”

“How violent is this recovery likely to be?” asked Tokarov.

“Not violent at all. You’ll see.”

“You said the drone had artificial intelligence?” said Katya.

“Yes. They have to have some autonomy. Those tunnels block communications so the drone was given its orders and left to complete them.”

“But the Leviathan itself has a synthetic intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Is this relevant?” Tokarov interrupted.

“No,” said Kane, “but it’s better than listening to your weak puns. An artificial intelligence, Ms Kuriakova,” Katya noticed the formal use of her name, “only looks like intelligence. A machine is taught a lot of responses to assorted situations and uses them if such a situation arises. The more contingencies are covered, the more intelligent the AI seems. The best have heuristic routines programmed in; that means they observe how well what they’ve been taught works and how other approaches work. If something else is better, then they’ll start using that in future instead. They’re ‘learning,’ for want of a better word. Artificial intelligences can get very good, even passing the Turing test.”

“What’s…?”

“It’s a rule of thumb test for intelligence. If you can talk to an AI for a few hours and never realise that you were talking to a machine all along, then it’s passed the Turing test. That’s artificial intelligences; they’re artificial because they’re not real minds, just good impersonations. A synthetic intelligence is something else again. The Leviathan carries a massive silicon analogue of a brain. At the moment nothing much more sophisticated than a good artificial intelligence programme is in it. The idea was for it to interface with a human…”

“You,” said Tokarov, fascinated.

“…me, and the human intelligence would act as a catalyst to spark the same sort of cascading sapient effect in the synthetic brain. The result would be a single intellect, the will and experiences of the human combined with the massive knowledge resources and capabilities of the Leviathan.

“It’s not just a theory either. They’ve done it on Earth. Nothing quite like the Leviathan, though.”

“What’s different?”

“The interface had to be more… I’m not sure how to describe it. Thorough, perhaps. Intimate.”

Tokarov laughed. “You make it sound like a marriage.”

Kane didn’t laugh along with the joke. He only said, “’Til death do us part.”

Katya’s right-hand multi-function display started showing a flashing box and bleeped urgently. “The IFF unit has been hailed,” she said quietly. A faint sense of fear was growing in her. She’d secretly hoped the Leviathan had moved on, but the indicator on the MFD showed that to be a vain hope. How many times did she think she could encounter that monstrosity and live? She was starting to hate the stupid pride that had made her volunteer for the mission.

“I’d cut the engines, if I were you,” suggested Kane to Lukyan. “There’s less chance of an accident if we’re not moving when it takes us.”

Katya didn’t like the sound of being taken at all. It made them sound like prey. But Lukyan cut the engines and now they had only the sound of the life-support fans and their breathing as they waited and listened for the Leviathan to make its move.

The seconds turned into a minute and then minutes. Katya was wondering whether to suggest sending an active sonar pulse to try and provoke the Leviathan into doing something (she wasn’t wondering it very hard, though, since it didn’t seem to respond well to having sound waves blasted at it) when something touched the hull. A whispering light scraping as something travelled cautiously across the Baby’s skin.

“Here we go,” whispered Kane.

Suddenly the boat lurched and then started to move swiftly and smoothly upwards.

“What’s happening?” growled Lukyan. “Have we been grappled?” He looked to Kane for a reply, and the pirate nodded.

Grappled. Somehow the Leviathan had managed to attach lines to the Baby with barely any warning at all. Katya had read and seen stories of historical grappling actions and having harpoons banged through your hull was usually a very obvious process. This was something else again. The hiss of water travelling quickly over the hull modulated into a gruff roar for a moment and then, suddenly, they were bathed in harsh, white light.

Out of the ports, they could see the Baby was being dragged through a great hatch in the floor of a white circular chamber, perhaps twenty metres in diameter. Through the top porthole, they could see cables as thick as a man’s wrist running from a cluster in the roof and down to where they encircled the minisub. They flexed and moved like the arms of a russquid, Katya thought, even though they were obviously made from metal. She’d never seen anything like them before. Beneath the Baby, a great iris valve slid shut, sealing them off from the sea. They were trapped in the belly of the beast now.

The tentacle-cables — or cable-tentacles, Katya didn’t know which — gently lowered the Baby to the floor of the chamber and then slid back into the ceiling above. As they watched the metallic hemisphere in the ceiling into which the cables had retracted, they saw its image distort with ripples and realised the chamber was being pumped out. The water level dropped rapidly, much faster than the dock had flooded back in the mining site. Within a very few minutes, the minisub was sitting on its landing skids in the middle of the white chamber, dripping dry as the last dregs of water were efficiently sucked away from the floor.

They sat in silence for a few seconds, everybody waiting for somebody else to make the first move.

Tokarov was the first to find his voice. “Now what?”

Kane unbuckled his seat restraints. “The aft hatch, please.” Uncle Lukyan flicked a switch, and the aft hatch unsealed and swung open. Kane walked back and stopped just before stepping out. “You might as well follow,” he said. “There’s no getting the sub back out of this chamber without the Leviathan permitting it, so there’s not much point in staying behind.” The others released their restraint buckles and climbed out after him.

Katya stood by the Baby and looked around in wonderment at the chamber. It was so harshly white in here, with no obvious source of light as though the walls themselves were glowing. Everything was white except for the unpainted and untarnished dome in the ceiling, pocked with the large regular holes in its surface that were home to the tentacles, and the iris valve they were standing on. She couldn’t see any way of getting into the rest of the Leviathan from here.

Lukyan obviously thought the same thing.

“Kane, is this place connected to the rest of the boat?”

“Anything’s possible,” replied Kane vaguely. He crossed his arms and said “Open internal access.” Nothing happened. He cleared his throat and tried again. Still nothing happened.

“Great. Now what do we do?” asked Katya.

Kane looked uncomfortable. “It’s been years since it’s heard my voice. Maybe it’s changed more than I thought.” He tried again. “Open internal access.” Nothing. As an afterthought, he tried adding “Please.”

One side of the circular chamber started to draw back, the flat white plates sliding to expose a broad armoured door five metres across by three high. “Manners maketh the man,” Katya heard Kane say to himself. Tokarov made a step towards the door but Kane stopped him. “Me first, lieutenant. It might be nervous around strangers.”

“It’s nervous?” said Tokarov.

“It’s alive in a way,” said Kane. “It has its foibles, a little like a small child.”

“Oh? It might throw a tantrum?”

“Yes, it might. And its tantrums come with a body count. Follow me.”

The layout of the Leviathan was nothing like any vessel Katya had ever seen or been taught about at school. There was no sense of space being at a premium, of every cubic centimetre of ship being functional. Instead, it felt like being inside an iceberg. Everything was white and there was no feeling that, beyond the bland walls and ceilings, there was anything she could have looked at and recognised as part of a boat. Even the word “boat” — traditionally applied to even the largest submarines — failed to express the alien nature of the Leviathan.

“How big is this thing?” she asked.

Kane looked back at her and she was relieved that he no longer seemed as angry and distant as he had been back at the mining site. “Big enough. Just short of seven million cubic metres, I believe.”

Lukyan stopped so abruptly that Tokarov walked into him. “Seven million?” he echoed in disbelief.

“Not quite. I was rounding up.” Kane said, not even slowing his walk.

“Strangest boat I’ve ever been on,” said Tokarov. “Strangest one I’ve even heard of. Where are the stations? The berths?”

Kane stopped by a hatch set into the wall. “This is the only berth aboard. It used to be mine. You have to get it into your head, lieutenant, it isn’t a ship or a boat or any kind of vessel of any type that you’re familiar with. It’s a weapon. A really big, intelligent weapon that happens to have a small living space aboard for a pet human.”

“A pet?” said Lukyan. “That’s not a good comparison, is it? It wouldn’t have let a pet go.”

“Maybe it had no use for me,” said Kane.

“I thought the whole point of it having you along was…”

But Kane was walking away and the question was never asked.

The corridor ended abruptly with another hatch much like the one that had led to Kane’s old quarters. He stopped and stood before it as if steeling his nerve. His nervousness communicated itself to Katya.

“Is that the bridge?” she asked.

“No,” he answered in a strange, distracted voice. “There’s no bridge.” He reached out and touched the door very gently, barely brushing it with his fingertips. Immediately, they heard the hiss of seals being released, the door swung smoothly inwards and to one side. Kane took a deep breath and stepped through the opened portal. After a moment, they followed him.

The chamber they had entered was similar in form and proportions to the bay where they’d left the Baby. If anything, however, it was almost more spartan. Here there was no iris valve taking up much of the floor and metal dome on the ceiling housing cable tentacles. There was only one thing of note here, but a thing so extraordinary, it drew their gaze irresistibly.

Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a chair. No, chair is too small a word. Mounted exactly in the middle of the room was a throne. An ugly, brutal thing made from dark metals and dark imaginations. It sat… it crouched in front of them, grey metal spires rising from its back and its feet merging into a circle of the same materials that seemed almost like a plug thrust into the floor.

Katya allowed a gaping expression of utter disbelief onto her face. The chair was as out of place as it was possible to imagine. “What,” she said, “is that?”

“It’s a chair,” said Kane, accurately but unhelpfully. Lukyan made a step towards it but Kane grabbed his arm. “No!” he said, both fretful and fearful. “Don’t go near that. It’s the single most dangerous thing the Leviathan possesses.”

Lukyan looked at him as if he were mad; they were aboard a synthetically intelligent killing machine armed with attack drones that were so far ahead of anything Russalka had that they were bordering on magical. It seemed absurd to suggest that these were somehow less dangerous than furniture.

“It’s the interface. It’s where the Leviathan and a human…” he looked for a term they might understand, something that explain the horror he felt inside towards the throne. He could think of nothing. “…interface,” he finished, weakly.

“And what’s that?” asked Katya, pointing upwards.

In the centre of the gently vaulted ceiling, a circular aperture had appeared so silently and so neatly that none of them had even noticed it open. From the deep darkness within the aperture, a sphere was slowly descending. A metre in diameter, utterly black, the sphere came down upon a thin supporting rod as elegantly as a drop of oil rolling down a metal surface. When it had descended perhaps three metres, it stopped abruptly and without a tremor.

“What is it?” demanded Tokarov, but he demanded quietly. The sphere was so perfect and so utterly inscrutable, it was easy to imagine terrifying levels of violence lurking within.

“It’s a Medusa sphere,” said Kane. “Nobody make any sudden moves.”

“A Medusa sphere?”

“You asked whether the Leviathan had any internal security measures,” replied Kane, “I can now assure you that it has. The sphere will…” He stopped as a ghostly violet dot appeared on his chest. Slowly it moved upwards until it was lying between his eyes.

Katya looked back to Lukyan to point it out but found him rooted to the spot by an identical dot. Tokarov was the same. Katya’s hackles raised and her stomach tightened. “Uncle,” she asked, sounding far more in control of her emotions than she felt, “Have I got a purple dot of light on my forehead?” Lukyan looked at her sideways without turning his face from the sphere and nodded slightly.

“I don’t want to be overly dramatic at this point,” said Kane, “but we have all been targeted by the sphere with lasers. If the Leviathan decides it doesn’t like us being here, these beams will intensify inside perhaps a thousandth of a second and the results will be painless, but terminal. Therefore, please don’t do anything to antagonise the Leviathan.”

Katya knew very little about the legends of Earth, but she knew what a Medusa was, and the sphere’s name was well chosen. In the stories, the Medusa was a woman so hideous that to look upon her face turned the hapless observer to stone. Here, the four of them stood there terrified to move, to do anything that the Leviathan might consider aggressive. They might not have been literally turned to stone, but they were still petrified.

“What are you going to do, Kane?” said Tokarov, trying not to move his lips.

“I have no idea,” Kane replied in a tone of resignation.

“No idea,” echoed Lukyan, with hollow disgust.

“No idea at all. I wasn’t expecting garlands and flowers when I came back, but I was hoping for a little tolerance at least. Perhaps I should have come by myself.”

Nobody answered, but nobody argued. Suddenly more beams sparked out of the sphere, bright reds and blues, the dots travelling across the walls clearly visible against the slightly reflective whiteness. They swept and whirled and then quickly drew together on Kane. They travelled quickly across him like scurrying beetles. The only one that didn’t move was the dull violet dot in the middle of his forehead.

“You are identified.”

Katya had no idea where the voice came from, it seemed to be in the air all around. Deep and sonorous, like the dying tones of metal striking metal in a large cavern, the voice was full of incorrect inflexions and emphasis. It was clearly not the product of a human throat.

Kane looked upwards, uncertain how to respond. Finally, he tried. “Hullo.”

“You were rejected. You have no function here.”

“Yes, I know. I was…” he shrugged, rolled his eyes looking for inspiration, “…just passing. Thought I’d drop in.”

“Where is drone six? The object in the retrieval bay is not drone six.”

Lukyan winced to hear his beloved Baby called an “object.”

“I’m afraid it, drone six, that is, I’m afraid it met with a bit of an accident.” Kane waited for an immediate reply, but none was forthcoming. “Sorry for your loss.” Still no answer. “So, I took its IFF unit so I could visit you.”

“You were rejected,” repeated the voice of the Leviathan. Katya wondered what it meant by that. Kane had simply left, not been rejected. At least, that’s the way he said it had happened. “You have no function here.”

“I think I do have a function here. It’s your current activities; they are not within your operational parameters.”

“Operations are within acceptable parameters.”

“No,” replied Kane in a chiding voice, “they are not. I’m very familiar with them and you are operating outside them.” He crossed his arms — slowly so as not to antagonise the Medusa sphere — and started to lecture the Leviathan. “You are pursuing a seek and destroy strategy. You know full well you’re not supposed to do anything that is actively aggressive without a human in that seat over there. Self-defence is all very well, but you saw off the vessel that first reactivated you. That should be that. You should have stood down afterwards, because that’s what your standing orders tell you to do.” Kane stopped and waited with his chin thrust forward as if expecting an apology.

“You are incorrect,” said the Leviathan.

Kane couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d been told he been spelling his name wrong for the last year.

“What do you mean, incorrect?”

“Parameters state that when discovered, strategies of covert offence are to be employed. These strategies are being employed.”

“That’s not right,” said Kane under his breath. Then, speaking up, “What are your targeting priorities?”

“Category one combatants comprise the following.” The Leviathan started to list possible targets in the most abstract ways. Katya could follow them at first, but after a while even Tokarov started to look confused. Then Kane interrupted the list.

“Hold on, hold on. I need some clarification here. Which target category are we in now? Three? Four?”

“One.”

The colour leeched out of Kane’s face. “But you were listing civilian categories. Non-combatants. You were listing babies and the sick.”

“Category one targets.”

Kane spoke as if he didn’t want to hear the answers. “What is in category two?”

“Category two contains no definitions.”

“Category three. What’s in category three?”

“Category three contains no definitions.”

“What is in category blue?”

Katya looked sharply at him. During school, they’d seen historical simulations of important battles of the War of Independence. Category blue was the generic name for allies.

The Leviathan replied immediately.

“Category blue contains no definitions.”

Something was terribly, terribly wrong. The Leviathan was prepared to attack and destroy even vessels from Earth. There was only one possible conclusion; the great warship was insane.

Lukyan, Tokarov, and Katya stood in silence as Kane tried to find what had gone wrong. The Leviathan answered each question fully and, as far as they knew, accurately, but none of it helped. Synthetic intelligences are complex, but they are predictable at least as far as their motivations and goals, for these are the very things programmed deep into their fibres. An SI simply couldn’t go mad and decide to kill everybody because it felt like it. Nor could a simple malfunction suddenly turn it from a precision weapon into a threat to all sides. The only other possibility was that the vessel had somehow been reprogrammed. Kane was trying to find out by whom in the hope that this might reveal the reasons behind such an irrational act.

“Those were not the operational parameters you left Earth with,” Kane said, his irritation starting to show. He barely seemed aware of the Medusa’s sighting and sensor dots on him anymore. “They were not the ones you had when I left, either. You have been reprogrammed. Identify any and all personnel who have accessed your command levels since arriving at Russalka.”

“Kane, Havilland.”

“Yes, but when and for what purpose?”

The Leviathan gave a date ten years before and added, “Maintenance and examination protocols were enacted.”

“What changes were made?”

“None.”

“Fine. That’s good. I didn’t break anything by accident. Now, list all subsequent accesses.”

“None.”

“None?” Kane shook his head angrily as if somebody was telling him black was white and expecting him to believe it. “What do you mean, none?”

“No subsequent access demands were made to command levels subsequent to arrival at Russalka.”

“Kane,” whispered Lukyan, very conscious of the laser dot on him, “perhaps the Terrans programmed this in before you left.”

“What?” said Kane. He snorted with derision. “They told it to regard them as deadly enemies? Does that seem likely to you? Besides, even if they were crazy enough to enter such a program it would still have been registered as a command access.”

“Not if it was programmed not to…”

“No,” interrupted Kane firmly, “it does not make sense. They had no way of knowing I wouldn’t end up in that chair, no way of predicting this little scene. Therefore, why spend a lot of time and effort covering up a trail they never expected anybody to even have the chance of finding? It can’t be so.”

“Kane,” said Tokarov, “something’s bothering me about all this.”

“Only one thing? You’re ahead of the rest of us then.”

“Seriously, if it considers us all enemies, why are we still alive?”

Kane started to open his mouth to reply, but stopped. He frowned. His gaze wandered back and forth across the floor as he worked through possible reasons and discarded them one by one. “You know, lieutenant,” he said finally, worry evident in his face, “I have no idea.” He looked back at the exit. “I’m not even sure how we’re going to get out of here.”

“Go?” said Katya. “We can’t go. We came here to…”

A warning glance from Kane made her reconsider her words. She’d been about to say “…destroy this thing.” Saying out loud that they were a threat to the Leviathan while it was pointing high energy lasers at each of them might have been a fatal mistake. Instead, she said, “…deal with the situation.”

“I think,” said Kane, choosing his words just as carefully, “that the situation is very much in control of the situation. If we were to attempt to deal with the situation, I fear the situation would deal with us first.”

“We’ve proved that we can get in,” said Lukyan, “and that’s enough to be getting on with. It will have to be enough. I suggest we leave and reconsider what to do next.”

Kane nodded. “I agree. Lieutenant?” Tokarov also nodded. “Well, we’re all agreed, then.”

“I agree too,” said Katya.

The three men had the grace to at least look embarrassed. “All agreed,” said Kane quickly. They turned to leave. “Would you open the hatch, please?”

“Which is the replacement?” said the Leviathan.

Kane stopped and looked back, his mouth working soundlessly. “What?” he managed.

“Which is the replacement?”

“Clarify your statement,” said Kane, but Katya could see he already knew full well what the Leviathan meant, just as she knew.

“Which of these three humans is to replace you as the biological component in my intelligence?”

“What makes you believe any of them are?”

For its answer, shimmering multi-coloured beams spat from the surface of the Medusa sphere. Suddenly, there were two Kanes. The new one was faintly translucent and Katya realised it was a projected, animated hologram, a technology unavailable on Russalka since the war destroyed the few facilities that contained it. The new Kane was nothing like the one she’d first met back in the launch locks. He seemed younger and was wearing a Terran uniform. With a small shock, she realised that this was Kane as he’d been ten years ago. He was pacing up and down in front of the door, his eyes and hair wild. He looked like a man at the edge of a breakdown.

“Why do you wish to leave?” boomed the Leviathan.

“I… I just,” the holographic Kane ran his fingers through his hair and clamped his palms to the sides of his head in frustration and fury. “I just need to go, that’s all.”

“You have your function.”

“I cannot fulfil it, you know that.”

“Then you are without function.”

“In that case, I might as well go.” The younger Kane looked optimistically at the door, but it remained sealed.

“You may still have utility for the mission. You will be retained.”

“No!” barked Kane. “No! I will not… You… This mission is over!”

“You do not have the authority to declare the mission aborted. You will be retained.”

“And what if I never have ‘utility’ again?” Katya could see the fear in the recorded Kane’s face. The real Kane looked away. Katya couldn’t read the expression on his face. It may have been sickened, or it may have been humiliated.

“You will be retained.”

“I could die here! I could get old and die in this… this cybernetic mausoleum. With just you! You for company.” There was a sob in his voice. “I’m in Hell.”

“You are aboard the Terran attack cruiser Leviathan.”

The recorded Kane laughed a horrible bitter laugh that quickly subsided into sobs again. He hammered at the closed hatch with his fists. “Let me go,” he begged, “please let me go.”

“You will be retained,” said the Leviathan, its intonation exactly the same every time it repeated the damning phrase.

Then Kane stopped his sobbing and looked back into the chamber with an air of cunning on his face. “I have utility,” he said.

“Specify your utility.”

“You require a person to interface with, to attain full operational status, yes?”

“That is correct.”

The recording of Kane stepped closer to the throne and pointed to it. “I’ll find you somebody who can sit there for you. I’ll find you somebody to merge with.”

“There are parameters to be observed.”

“I know, I know. I know all about all that. I can find you somebody.”

“Your mission is to locate and retrieve a suitable candidate.” Katya could tell that the Leviathan was not thinking it over with those words; it was telling Kane what to do. In the gap between two sentences, Kane had gone from the Leviathan’s prisoner to its agent. The door, the holographic door, slid open leaving the real one still in place. “Proceed to the launch area. The escape pod is being readied.”

“Yes!” cried the holographic Kane exultantly. “Yes!” He ran through the shadowed door.

The coruscating, brightly coloured beams faded and the laser-fed echoes from ten years before vanished.

“You have fulfilled your function,” said the Leviathan. Lukyan, Tokarov and Katya all looked at Kane with horror.

“Which is the replacement?” demanded the Leviathan.