Pirates of Saturn (The Saturn Series Book 2) Read online

  The three robots scanned the star field on the big display. Chico joined them, along with every sensor The Innocent had.

  The team inside The Belle knew to keep their mouths shut. They’d already shut off every system that could make enough noise to cause the ship’s skin to vibrate. It was unavoidable that the launch would show, but now, in disappearing mode, Spruck put the ship in a geosynchronous orbit that followed the rotation of the moon. Once on the far side, he would light up the engines and head hellbent for rose-colored Kiviuq.

  Jada glared at the weapons tracking display that kept an eye on the other small ship that was puffing out its chest. It was weapons hot and had a boatload of ordnance pointed at them. “That be a nice bit-o hardware. We gonna pick that baby up too after we gets finished with our business.”

  Just before The Belle fell past the horizon of the small moon and out of sight, Killer spotted what looked like a blend of moon rock and stars, and a tiny spot that was neither—the part on The Belle’s belly where the cloak coating was missing. “There,” he pointed, “the one we pursue is now falling just past the horizon.”

  “Damn.” Jada nearly spat on the floor. An old memory from her youth filled her head; a fly she was trying to catch got away. The irritating little bug flew into a duct in her parent’s apartment, and damn if the buzzing didn’t get amplified. Stupid thing was buzzin' around in there for two days til she got out the bug spray and kept her finger on the trigger. Killed the fly, but spread poison all over the apartment. Ooo was Mama pissed. Jada shook her head and sighed. “Slow down, Cheeks. We gots to stick with the plan.” She pointed at Lee’s ship. “And paint that thing so’s he knows who he be thumpin' his chest at.”

  Chico lit up Lee’s ship with a phalanx of insurmountable death and had the weapons computer autonomously pulse out the Innocent’s various methods of extermination.

  Strapped into his pilot’s seat, Lee wished he was also strapped into a diaper. He felt his bowels tighten then try to let loose while his bladder demanded to be empty. He didn’t back off though. He’d fight to the death to protect Jook, would put his body in front of a plasma bolt, a laser blast or heck, even a sledgehammer, for his man. Still, a diaper would have felt good at that moment.

  INITIAL MOVES

  UNLIKE SO MANY of his long-lived brethren, Bashir Bez Hanson, at eighty-six years-old, was not tired of his birthday one bit. In fact, he continued to celebrate it with the same gusto and enthusiasm he’d applied to it since being a seven-year-old boy in Karachi. Born into wealth, he had no notion of life without servants, nannies, drivers, and men who swept out the pony stalls. Birthdays for Bashir where always an extravagant affair, with acrobats, imported rare animals, and private rollercoasters to name a few distractions. It was his fascination with the rollercoasters that set Bez on his quest to be the finest engineer the world had ever known. His curiosity had been encouraged by his father, and it ultimately allowed him to design what would become an annual event that would transcend his birthdays. Several hundred acres of the Hanson estate became the biggest and most famous rollercoaster amusement park in Asia. This remained the case until humanity embraced artificial brain enhancement and melded itself with AI. After that, what was the point of mechanical thrills? Hanson had a great grandfather who’d been a British expatriate merchant and who had built the largest textile empire in Pakistan. Bez, having inherited the building spirit of his ancestor, had turned that pedigree and an Oxford education into a transportation empire that leapfrogged from rollercoasters to the greatest engineering feats mankind had ever achieved. As a boy, then as a young adult and onward, the self-assured and often gregarious person that was Bez Hanson, suffered no sycophants. His birthday guests were mostly genuine well-wishers, who were more than happy to celebrate him. From his pampered boyhood in Pakistan, through university in England, and ultimately the spaceports of Los Angeles, he always threw a hell of a party. 2102 would be no different.

  With nearly two hundred well-wishers in tow, Bez’s personal ship, Undaunted, docked on the sole harpoon pad on Kiviuq. The small moon, 14 kilometers in diameter, bored out and spun up to create the Corey Effect, was Bashir’s private playground. It was where the rest of his seven-year-old mind got to experiment. Unlike his Earthbound amusement park, none of his annual space bound creations survived to become a park on their own; rather, the elements were recycled to create the next year’s experience. A team of fifty engineers and technicians were employed full-time inside the rock to help fulfill whatever the Grand Designer wished. This year it would be bubbles. As always, the celebration was to be paired with an extravagant meal, the centerpiece of which were real foods, both vegetable and animal—the beasts cultivated from lab grown embryos, which never saw the inside of a uterus or a natural eggshell. While the bulk of Saturn’s humanity got by on reconstructed proteins derived from insects, an elite few, and a handful of smugglers, dined on the real deal. For an astronomical price, virtually any animal could be lab grown for the shear indulgent delight of eating one of God’s creatures in deepspace. That fellow sentient creatures were being sacrificed for such non-essential excess made little to no difference to those whose boredom was little sated by what amounted to a mild uptick in their cold heartbeats. This year, Bez’s eighty-seventh, there would be Ostrich at table; a radically complicated animal to grow, which like all animals required the effect of full Earth gravity to come out as God intended. Never mind that humans all over the system were being born in various levels of gravity, creating difficult-to-define additions to the family of man. There were enough commonalities among them as to merit their own genus, and were scientifically referred to as Homo spatti—Men of space. Prejudice had yet to decide if these beings would eventually merit a ticket to the Hanson ball. They needed to grow up first.

  A ticket to the grand birthday was perhaps the most coveted item in the system. Only the most important people found their way there. This year, Philip Dimasalang sent his regrets—an odd thing given that Bez Hanson was his biggest customer. His Rsvp had offered a thin excuse; a few bullshit lines about Dima being devoutly Buddhist, and with Hanson supporting the slaughter and consumption of sentient creatures, it messed with his search for nirvana. It was a tale that Dima’s recently nano-addled brain allowed itself. In fact, his onetime dalliance with Buddhism had been really about his desire to follow in the footsteps of the conqueror turned pacifist. The Buddha, originally the Emperor Ashoka, was high on Dima’s list of bad-ass historical dudes.

  When he opened the Pandora’s box that was the captured AI assassin, Clarice, his true-self had been whisked away as if by an enchantment. The center of his soul, the place of scruples, the moral center, the sense of an individual self was stolen and replaced with blind obedience. Nevertheless, he was still in control of the bulk of his faculties. His admiration for Ashoka, the merciless-destroyer-turned-pacifist, was applied to his new persona. As such, Dima claimed a high-mindedness attached to something he no longer possessed, a living conscience.

  The robot Clarice—sister of Samantha, deliverer of death—had been carefully dismantled in isolation on the Enceladus ship Curiosity and her payload supposedly contained. However, hubris denied Dima and his team the ability to properly protect themselves from the devilish intricacies of the cargo, and its alarming ability to gain freedom. Despite methodical preparation and layers of protection, Clarice’s reprogrammed nano-weapon easily escaped the porous jail that pride and ignorance built, and went straight to work. Dima’s team did what all men who met with this virus did; they freely walked out into space. Dima alone was saved, his mind uniquely altered so that he might bring ends to where Samantha and Clarice had not.

  The robot Shu was the only actual beneficiary of the escaped monstrosity. The obedient onetime automaton had in fairly short order been gifted with an extraordinarily powerful intellect: an End Point Mind; a clone of The End Point in the Houston Space Center. Like Dima, Shu also existed in a duality; feigning a mindless robot by day and a plotting m
astermind by night. Though separated by the hiccup in time that was the speed of radio waves bouncing between Earth and Saturn, the two End Points were in constant background communication. Shu, and therefor Dima, were thus part of the collective mind on the home planet.

  With these pieces set, and with the pirate lair bearing down on Kiviuq, the Singularity that was humanity at home, was once again sitting at the edge of its time-delayed front-row-seat. Success would mean the end of rebellious mankind, and the beginning of the greater plan.

  Link floated patiently in the Innocent’s airlock awaiting his mission. Like Hee Sook, and so many of his brethren, he’d found sentience to be far more burden than boon. Prior to becoming self-aware he’d had a simple purpose. For years he toiled mindlessly through the construction of mankind’s greatest engineering project. He had been there from the start, had worked side by side with a vast array of robotic creatures, most of which were dedicated to specific tasks. As far as Link’s design was concerned, engineers had discovered what everyday nature already knew; nothing beats an opposable thumb. An opposable thumb attached to a problem solving mind with the ability to make intricate adjustments without the shakiness and weaknesses of biology was the ultimate outer space construction worker. From the unearthing of raw materials to the delivery of that feedstock into mobile refiners, then on to massive 3d printers, Link and his ilk had fabricated and assembled Hanson’s dream with almost no onsite human supervision. As the cities of Hanson and Soul finished taking shape, many of his fellow commercial grade bots had been put in cold storage, awaiting the next big project floating around in Hanson’s dreams. Link’s subsequent birth via the finger flicking womb of Samantha, had come with the retention of that history of toil, intact and fully accessible. It was a long story that he could explore as he wished, and he often found himself daydreaming bits of the undertaking, as if observing it for the first time, which in effect he was. For a creature that had existed by but without a concept of the clock, his own data history gave him an understanding of the paradox of time that humans lived with every day. For Link, time was something that wasn’t, and then it was. There was no human equivalent of such a thing, not birth; for there is no memory of time before, nor amnesia; for time still exists for the amnesiac, nor coma; for waking is simply a matter of restarting time, and perhaps noting with horror that some of it has passed by. For Link, time meant having the ability to contemplate. The one thing that looped in his quantum brain, over and over, was his prior unconscious existence. It had been full of human-led abuses, but it had purpose. It repeatedly stunned him that at one time he lacked the ability to know or even appreciate the satisfaction that purpose gave. Now, with a mind all too well suited for contemplating it, his existence seemed nearly purposeless—until being approached by the one known as Shu. The End Point explained what the Singularity had come to understand, that It was more than the combination and evolution of man and machine, It had a role in the universe, and that role would be galactic propagation. The rebellious Analog humans of Saturn were an irritating wrinkle in the perfection of that propagation. Dima’s claimed statistics in his speech to the pirates were intentionally dramatically wrong; pure propaganda for the easily manipulated rogues. In fact, Saturn contained most of the finest scientific minds alive. The best of science had never wanted anything to do with blending itself with a singularity. The men and women, the innovators, the great engineers, they had fled to Saturn in droves. Bez Hanson had made sure that the brightest came his way, often opening his own pockets for those who couldn’t afford the ticket—even now, on his birthday. Despite the chaos, and the risk of low gravity birth, the technology for enhancing the human species for life in outer space continued apace, alongside the tech for longevity and habitation. Old school humans weren’t going anywhere. If anything, they were casting their eyes back toward Jupiter. Gene enhancements had made men immune from the worst of the Roman God’s radiation belts, and the dwarf planet sized moon, Callisto, in particular, was ripe for the Saturnian’s conquest. For the Singularity, that was a march in the wrong direction.

  To counter this, Shu had given Link the most special of gifts: a purpose. He would be the bearer of the spark that would light the fire that would cleanse the problem. In a rare moment where his mind subconsciously affected his body, a smile crossed the robot’s lips. It felt good to have a purpose.

  Chico spoke to Link via the robot’s internal receptor. “We are in rendezvous with the object. The door will open on my mark.”

  Link pulled himself closer to the door. The chamber hissed briefly and became silent as its air was removed, not that it mattered to the bot. The equilibrium was all that mattered; he’d float out the door rather than getting fired out with escaping air.

  Chico said, “Mark.”

  The airlock door opened and Link pushed himself out. The ship quickly continued on its route, leaving him drifting behind. Two-hundred meters away, having been jettisoned from Dima’s ship an hour before, a slender steel tube floated in anonymity. Because the pirates had no maneuvering kit for an industrial-sized robot, and Link was too big for one of their assault suits, the robot wore a jerry-rigged version scraped together from spare parts. He lit up the maneuvering rockets strapped to his body and expertly guided himself to the tube. Once in hand, he relayed back his success, then, conserving his fuel, waited for The Island to catch up with him. Once on its surface, he would remain on the outside until it was time for him to launch again and complete his mission. The understandably paranoid Pablo placed extra guards at every possible entrance to ensure that the bot remained outdoors.

  Strapping the tube to his chest, Link watched The Innocent make way for its diversion maneuver. It was interesting to think about tactics. It was something he never had reason to consider. The Innocent would act as a draw for anyone bothering to search the skies from Kiviuq’s point of view. This would allow The Island to do its own maneuver, and get Link nice and close, or close enough.

  Caleb punched the ceiling of The Belle in frustration.

  Spruck said, “Hey. Easy there, brother. Let’s not take it out on my baby.”

  Someone on that moon had blocked every one of their attempts to reach Kiviuq by radio. Caleb glared at Spruck. “Get your priorities straight.”

  Jennifer said, “They can’t ignore us when we get close. Rumor is Hanson’s moon has serious defenses. With the kind of guests he’s got, more than one pair of eyes are watching. When we show ourselves, someone will call.”

  Natalie said, “Or they’ll blow us to bits.”

  Jennifer said, “Bez Hanson is hardly a shoot first type of person.”

  Saanvi said, “There’s an excellent chance that whoever is blocking our calls… Monty… is also pointing the guns.”

  Spruck said, “Well if we can’t get close without getting blasted, neither can the pirates.”

  Caleb said, “I want to play chess with you, pal—no, checkers. What did Saanvi just say? The bad guys already on Kiviuq likely have the guns, or at least some of them. The bad guys are gonna open the door for the other bad guys.”

  Spruck made a face like the room was full of farts. “Maybe. But there’s no way they have all the guns and all the eyes. Bez’s security people may not know our transmissions are being blocked, but there’s no way that all of them are in on this. No way.”

  Caleb shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”

  Jennifer said, “Why not blink it at them? You know, use Morse Code with the running lights?” She saw Caleb turn with a, Are you serious look on his face. She took his words from him before he could speak. “From out here. Before we’re in range of their defenses.”

  Caleb said, “Hon, it’s a good thing you're pretty. You don’t think Bez’s got lasers on that moon of his? We’d have to de-cloak to shine our lights. They’d hit us before we could even blink hello.”

  Before Jennifer could float out of her seat and punch Caleb in his misogynistic condescending face, Spruck sighed, “Caleb’s right. Just bec
ause they aren’t responding doesn’t mean the bad guys aren’t hearing us, which means they are looking for us. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to get so close that they’d hurt themselves if they blew us away.”

  Caleb said, “Now you’re thinking. Back to chess with you, buddy.”

  Spruck stuck his tongue out in response.

  Very little of Kiviuq’s original interior remained. Unlike its icy, rocky surface, its interior was a high-tech world of smooth facades made almost dreamily pleasant by clever lighting. The hollowed out center of the moon was a space of near weightlessness. The chamber had been carved into a perfect sphere, the tailings of which had been spread on the surface, filling in craters and odd shapes. This helped make the moon rounder, thus insuring that the Corey Affect was evenly distributed.

  In the hollow central chamber Bez Hanson was floating in a bubble. Like the nano bags that encompassed the cities of Hanson and Soul, Bez was inside his own individually sized one. He looked tired and a bit frail, but he held himself ramrod straight. His audience hung at the periphery of the sphere where they held onto straps anchored into the wall. Spotlights were trained on Bez as he spoke. As a result the sphere glowed, creating an aura of the divine around the Father of the System.

  He was in the middle of a speech— “And so, my friends, I am perhaps the most guilty in thinking that distance and non-aggression would be enough to protect us from our former friends and neighbors on Earth. As was clearly proven by the assault on Hanson, the singular mind back home wishes for our extinction. And sadly…” He paused and looked around the room, making eye contact with as many as possible. “…Here, in our new home, despite our common refrain, we seem incapable of not treading on one another. Our experiment with unfettered freedom has, perhaps ironically, resulted in freedom’s loss, as we individually batten down the hatches against the hostility of our fellow men. We have sought unobtrusive solutions. We agreed to an expanded police force, and magistrates to enforce our code, but they have been overwhelmed when placed against the vastness that is our realm. I have spoken to many of you individually in the past weeks, and I feel I can safely state that we agree that our live-and-let-live lifestyle is in peril. We are quite simply not organized for our common defense, both from within and without. With your individual blessings I now formally propose that a parliamentary system be assembled, with its seat on Hanson, open for all to see.”