Tenacious

10

Kris and Jack were just sitting down to another bland breakfast in the wardroom. The main course was oatmeal, a crop the colonists on Alwa grew and stored as famine rations. The Navy was eating a lot of oatmeal.

It was sweetened by dried berries and nuts gathered in the deep woods, now less dangerous thanks to Marine hunting teams both making them safer and hunting for a bit of red meat. The Alwans didn’t donate the berries and nuts but traded them for electrical products from the moon factories. The Alwans drove a hard bargain, but for now, food was harder to come by than basic commlinks and TVs.

As Kris was about to take her first bite, Nelly said, “Kris, I think I may have made Professor Labao mad at me.”

“And why might the good professor be upset with you?” It was never good when Nelly made Kris pry bad news out of her.

“I kind of borrowed one of the survey rovers.”

“I thought he had those rovers booked pretty solid,” Jack said.

“They are,” Nelly admitted. “I borrowed it last night after they put it to bed. Then I had it drive just two kilometers to look at something we’d discovered from the mapping survey.”

“Nelly,” Kris said, “those surveying rovers don’t have much battery life.”

“Yes. We just about ran it dry. However, there was enough for it to carry out our test before it ran out.”

Kris and Jack found themselves rolling their eyes at the overhead. When Professor Labao and the scientists found out that one of their nine surveyors had been hijacked by Nelly and left in the middle of nowhere with a dead battery, there would be hell to pay.

“However, Kris, we did verify that the orbital slingers were not made on this planet.”

“What?” came from both Kris and Jack.

“Kris Longknife, I have a bone to pick with you and that so-called smart computer of yours,” was less of a shout and more of a bellow. It came from the doorway into the wardroom and preceded the expected Professor Labao into the officers’ mess by a good three seconds.

“We found what everyone was looking for,” Nelly repeated, but in a voice more appropriate for a teenage girl coming in several hours after her curfew than for the Magnificent Nelly.

“Do you know what that computer of yours has done?” the professor demanded as soon as he located Kris in the wardroom.

“Yes, she just told me,” Kris replied evenly.

“She’s burned out the batteries on one of the handful of rovers we have.”

“It is not burned out,” Nelly said. “It’s taking a charge, a bit slower, but it’s taking a charge. In two hours, it will be fully charged,” Nelly insisted.

“I will not stand here bandying words with a random collection of matrix and gunk.”

“Well,” Kris said, “this random collection of self-organizing matrix seems to have gotten around all your safeguards and taken control of your little robot without your noticing it for an entire night.”

“Are you defending that pile of junk?”

“Nelly says she’s found the smoking gun that connects this attack to the next system over. Have you?”

“She,” the professor began, then stopped. He blinked several times, then settled into a chair two down from Kris. After a long pause, he went on.

“My computer is updating me on what he and his mother and brothers and sisters did last night.”

NELLY, YOU DIDN’T HAVE HIS OWN COMPUTER KEEP HIM IN THE DARK, DID YOU?

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME, KRIS. THERE WAS NO QUESTION HE WOULD NOT ALLOW US TO DO THE ANALYSIS WE KNEW WE NEEDED TO DO. I’D ASKED NICELY. I’D GOTTEN NOWHERE. SO, YES, WE DID TAKE MATTERS INTO OUR OWN HANDS.

YOU LIED TO HIM.

NO, KRIS, NEITHER I NOR MY SON LIED TO HIM. WE JUST DIDN’T TELL HIM.

NELLY, YOU AND I ARE GOING TO HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS.

YES, KRIS, I EXPECTED THAT YOU MIGHT SAY THAT. I’M SORRY, BUT IT WAS SOMETHING WE DECIDED HAD AN EIGHTY-NINE-PERCENT CHANCE OF SETTLING THE QUESTION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE ATTACK. I DECIDED IT WOULD BE BETTER TO ASK FORGIVENESS THAN ASK PERMISSION.

Oh, where did I hear that one before? Father always said, “Your sins will find you out.” Today is going to be interesting.

The glazed look in the professor’s eyes went away; Kris took that to mean that the update from his computer was over.

“That doesn’t prove it is from the next system over,” he said, continuing a conversation that had, no doubt, begun in his head.

“Yes,” Nelly said, “but it does show that the metal in that counterweight is not a product of this planet or of the asteroid belt. If you can persuade Kris, you can send ships to survey the other planets in this system, but I bet she’d rather push on to the putative alien home world and check the isotopic makeup of iron and nickel and distribution of rare earths on that world than spend more time on this one.”

“Would someone please bring the rest of us into this briefing,” Kris said. She noticed that munching of oatmeal had ceased all around the wardroom. Clearly, if she got her briefing here, there would be no need to have the Wasp’s news feed updated.

Nelly took up the briefing in a voice clearly intended to carry through the wardroom. “The problem with all the sites that we have been sending the surveyors to is that they have had a hundred thousand years, maybe more, to be contaminated. What might once have been a unique isotopic structure with particular impurities that could give an off-world fingerprint has been worn down by wind and frost. Fragments have been blown away and blown in. Simply put, nothing special was coming from where the surveyors were being sent.”

Nelly paused to let that sink into human minds with their slow absorption rate. So she had learned a few things from Kris.

“However, there was a possibility that some uncontaminated, or at least less contaminated samples of material from the time of the attack might exist. Those were the orbital slingshots, or more particularly, the centrally located counterbalances. They were big, heavy, and likely to survive entry into this atmosphere. Why the aliens didn’t just deorbit them when they were done, but instead launched them off on their own orbits that crossed this planet’s orbit is something I am not prepared to conjecture about.

“However, we found one still orbiting the sun, and that left me and my children to speculate that there must have once been more. Based on that hypothesis, we searched the map for meteorite objects that were large enough to make their own craters when they hit. We found several that might well be younger than the strata they sat on. We asked permission from the boffins to include them in their survey and were turned down. Yesterday, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and we did, indeed, answer the question we’d all been asking.”

Kris glanced around the room. Had any of the other listening officers spotted what Nelly had so quickly glossed over? A few might have; Kris could tell by the narrowed eyes as here and there, officers, usually younger ones, reflected on what a world would be like when computers decided to ignore the orders that humans gave them.

Most, however, looked on expectantly for Nelly to finish the briefing.

“Every planet has a certain fingerprint, a signature if you will, that is embedded in its metal. There is a specific distribution of isotopes in each different type of metal. There are also rare earths that get mixed up in the ores as well. Back on Earth in the twentieth century, one of the first suspicions that an asteroid had struck near the end of the dinosaur era was the different distribution of the rare earth iridium in the makeup of the layer of earth that separated the geological stratus that held dinosaur bones and the next layer up that held none.

“Last night, we parked a surveyor next to a large mound of metal that we thought was a counterweight for an orbital slingshot. When we burned through the surface contamination, we found a nickel-steel center whose composition did not belong on this planet and did not originate in the asteroid belt.”

Again, Nelly paused.

“We propose to you that the composition of this metal will suit very nicely the metals found on the home world of the aliens.”

“It could come from one of the other planets of this system,” Professor Labao said.

“Professor, there is no evidence that any of the other planets in this system ever supported life. There is also no evidence that they were bombarded at the same time this planet was. No, if we are to find where the bullet of this smoking gun came from, we need to look farther afield. I suggest we try the next system. If it turns out not to fit there, we can come back here, but I strongly propose that we are wasting our time here and now. Let’s go see the more likely source before we spend more time here trying to prove a negative.”

Kris canted her head and waited to see if Professor Labao would say anything further. He didn’t.

Captain Drago had been looking on like the rest. He was also likely the oldest one to narrow his eyes as Nelly admitted her newfound ability and freedom to ignore her human instructions. Kris caught his eye.

“How soon can we get underway?”

“Give me four hours to make sure we’re shipshape and ready.”

“Then send to the fleet. In four hours we will detach from our shared moorings and prepare to break orbit. Have gunnery lay in a shoot to destroy all evidence that there were ever rovers on this planet. If that means an extra orbit, so be it.

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” came the reply, and it quickly became so.