The Tale of the Wicked Read online

  The Tale of the Wicked Copyright © 2009 by John Scalzi.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover and interior design Copyright © 2012

  by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-503-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  The Tarin battle cruiser readied itself for yet another jump. Captain Michael Obwije ordered the launch of a probe to follow it in and take readings before the rift the Tarin cruiser tore into space closed completely behind it. The probe kicked out like the proverbial rocket and followed the other ship.

  “This is it,” Thomas Utley, Obwije’s XO, said, quietly, into his ear. “We’ve got enough power for this jump and then another one back home. That’s if we shut down nonessential systems before we jump home. We’re already bleeding.”

  Obwije gave a brief nod that acknowledged his XO but otherwise stayed silent. Utley wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know about the Wicked; the weeklong cat-and-mouse game they’d been playing with the Tarin cruiser had heavily damaged them both. In a previous generation of ships, Obwije and his crew would already be dead; what kept them alive was the Wicked itself and its new adaptive brain, which balanced the ship’s energy and support systems faster and more intelligently than Obwije, Utley, or any of the officers could do in the middle of a fight and hot pursuit.

  The drawback was that the Tarin ship had a similar brain, keeping itself and its crew alive far longer than they had any right to be at the hands of the Wicked, which was tougher and better-armed. The two of them had been slugging it out in a cycle of jumps and volleys that had strewn damage across a wide arc of light-years. The only silver lining to the week of intermittent battles between the ships was that the Tarin ship had so far gotten the worst of it; three jumps earlier it stopped even basic defensive action, opting to throw all its energy into escape. Obwije knew he had just enough juice for a jump and a final volley from the kinetic mass drivers into the vulnerable hide of the Tarin ship. One volley, no more, unless he wanted to maroon the ship in a far space.

  Obwije knew it would be wise to withdraw now. The Tarin ship was no longer a threat and would probably expend the last of its energies on this final, desperate jump. It would likely be stranded; Obwije could let the probe he sent after the ship serve as a beacon for another Confederation ship to home in and finish the job. Utley, Obwije knew, would counsel such a plan, and would be smart to do so, warning Obwije that the risk to wounded ship and its crew outweighed the value of the victory.

  Obwije knew it would be wise to withdraw. But he’d come too far with this Tarin ship not to finish it once and for all.

  “Tarin cruiser jumping,” said Lieutenant Julia Rickert. “Probe following into the rift. Rift closing now.”

  “Data?” asked Obwije.

  “Sending,” Rickert said. “Rift completely closed. We got a full data packet, sir. The Wicked’s chewing on it now.”

  Obwije grunted. The probe that had followed the Tarin cruiser into the rift wasn’t in the least bit concerned about that ship. Its job was to record the position and spectral signatures of the stars on the other side of the rift, and to squirt the data to the Wicked before the rift closed up. The Wicked would check the data against the database of known stars and derive the place the Tarin ship jumped to from there. And then it would follow.

  Gathering the data was the tricky part. The Tarin ship had destroyed six probes over the course of the last week, and more than once Obwije ordered a jump on sufficient but incomplete data. He hadn’t worried about getting lost—there was only so much timespace a jump could swallow—but losing the cruiser would have been an embarrassment.

  “Coordinates in,” Rickert said. The Wicked had stopped chewing on the data and spit out a location.

  “Punch it up,” Obwije said to Rickert. She began the jump sequence.

  “Risky,” Utley murmured, again in Obwije’s ear.

  Obwije smiled; he liked being right about his XO. “Not too risky,” he said to Utley. “We’re too far from Tarin space for that ship to have made it home safe.” Obwije glanced down at his command table, which displayed the Tarin cruiser’s position. “But it can get there in the next jump, if it has the power for that.”

  “Let’s hope they haven’t been stringing us along the last few jumps,” Utley said. “I hate to come out of that jump and see them with their guns blazing again.”

  “The Wicked says they’re getting down to the last of their energy,” Obwije said. “I figure at this point they can fight or run, not both.”

  “Since when do you trust a computer estimate?” Utley said.

  “When it confirms what I’m thinking,” Obwije said. “It’s as you say, Thom. This is it, one way or another.”

  “Jump calculated,” Rickert said. “Jump in T-minus two minutes.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Obwije said, and turned back to Utley. “Prepare the crew for jump, Thom. I want those K-drivers hot as soon as we get through the rift.”

  “Yes, sir,” Utley said.

  Two minutes later the Wicked emerged through its rift and scanned for the Tarin cruiser. It found it less than fifty thousand klicks away, engines quiet, moving via inertia only.

  “They can’t really be that stupid,” Utley said. “Running silent doesn’t do you any good if you’re still throwing off heat.”

  Obwije didn’t say anything to that and stared into his command table, looking at the representation of the Tarin ship. “Match their pace,” he said to Rickert. “Keep your distance.”

  “You think they’re trying to lure us in,” Utley said.

  “I don’t know what they’re doing,” Obwije said. “I know I don’t like it.” He reached down to his command panel and raised Lieutenant Terry Carrol, Weapons Operations. “Status on the K-drivers, please,” he said.

  “We’ll be hot in ninety seconds,” Carrol said. “Target is acquired and locked. You just need to tell me if you want one lump or two.”

  “Recommendation?” Obwije asked.

  “We’re too close to miss,” Carrol said. “And at this distance a single lump is going to take out everything aft of the midship. Two lumps would be overkill. And then we can use that energy to get back home.” Carrol had been keeping track of the energy budget, it seemed; Obwije suspected most of his senior and command crew had.

  “Understood,” Obwije said. “Let’s wrap this up, Carrol. Fire at your convenience.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carrol said.

  “Now you’re in a rush to get home,” Utley said, quietly. Obwije said nothing to this.

  A little over a minute later, Obwije listened to Carrol give the order to fire. He looked down toward his command table, watching the image of the Tarin ship, waiting for the disintegration of the back end of the cruiser. The K-drivers would accelerate the “lump” to a high percentage of the speed of light; the impact and destruction at this range would be near-instantaneous.

  Nothing happened.

  “Captain, we have a firing malfunction,” Carrol said, a minute later. “The K-driver is not responding to the firing command.”

  “Is everyone safe?” Obwije asked.

  “We’re fine,” Carrol said. “The K-driver just isn’t responding.”

  “Power it down,” Obwije said. “Use the other one and fire when ready.”

  Two minutes later, Carrol was back. “We have a problem,” she said, in the bland tone of voice she used when things were going to hell.

  Obwije didn’t wait to hear the problem. “Pull us back,” he said to Ricker
t. “Get at least two hundred and fifty thousand klicks between us and that Tarin cruiser.”

  “No response, sir,” Rickert said, a minute later.

  “Are you locked out?” Obwije asked.

  “No, sir,” Rickert said. “I’m able to send navigation commands just fine. They’re just not being acknowledged.”

  Obwije looked around at his bridge crew. “Diagnostics,” he said. “Now.” Then he signaled engineering. They weren’t getting responses from their computers, either.

  “We’re sitting ducks,” Utley said, very quietly, to Obwije.

  Obwije stabbed at his command panel, and called his senior officers to assemble.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the system,” said Lieutenant Craig Cowdry, near the far end of the conference-room table. The seven other department heads filled in the other seats. Obwije sat himself at the head; Utley anchored the other end.

  “That’s bullshit, Craig,” said Lieutenant Brian West, Chief of Engineering. “I can’t access my goddamn engines.”

  Cowdry held up his maintenance tablet for the table of officers to see. “I’m not denying that there’s something wrong, Brian,” Cowdry said. “What I’m telling you is that whatever it is, it’s not showing up on the diagnostics. The system says it’s fine.”

  “The system is wrong,” West said.

  “I agree,” Cowdry said. “But this is the first time that’s ever happened. And not just the first time it’s happened on this ship. The first time it’s happened, period, since the software for this latest generation of ship brains was released.” He set the tablet down.

  “You‘re sure about that?” Utley asked Cowdry.

  Cowdry held up his hands in defeat. “Ask the Wicked, Thom. It’ll tell you the same thing.”

  Obwije watched his second-in-command get a little uncomfortable with the suggestion. The latest iteration of ship brains could actually carry a conversation with humans, but unless you actively worked with the system every day, like Cowdry did, it was an awkward thing.

  “Wicked, is this correct?” Utley said, staring up but at nothing in particular.

  “Lieutenant Cowdry is correct, Lieutenant Utley,” said a disembodied voice, coming out of a ceiling speaker panel. The Wicked spoke in a pleasant but otherwise unremarkable voice of no particular gender. “To date, none of the ships equipped with brains of the same model as that found in the Wicked have experienced an incident of this type.”

  “Wonderful,” Utley said. “We get to be the first to experience this bug.”

  “What systems are affected?” Obwije asked Cowdry.

  “So far, weapons and engineering,” Cowdry said. “Everything else is working fine.”

  Obwije glanced around. “This conforms to your experiences?” he asked the table. There were nods and murmured “yes, sir”s all around.

  Obwije nodded over to Utley. “What’s the Tarin ship doing?”

  “The same nothing it was doing five minutes ago,” Utley said, after checking his tablet. “They’re either floating dead in space or faking it very well.”

  “If the only systems affected are weapons and engineering, then it’s not a bug,” Carrol said.

  Obwije glanced at Carrol. “You’re thinking sabotage,” he said.

  “You bet your ass I am, sir,” Carrol said, and then looked over at Cowdry.

  Cowdry visibly stiffened. “I don’t like where this is going,” he said.

  “If not you, someone in your department,” Carrol said.

  “You think someone in my department is a secret Tarin?” Cowdry asked. “Because it’s so easy to hide those extra arms and a set of compound eyes?”

  “People can be bribed,” Carrol said.

  Cowdry shot Carrol a look full of poison and looked over to Obwije. “Sir, I invite you and Lieutenant Utley and Lieutenant Kong—” Cowdry nodded in the direction of the Master at Arms “—to examine and question any of my staff, including me. There’s no way any of us did this. No way. Sir.”

  Obwije studied Cowdry for a moment. “Wicked, respond,” he said.

  “I am here, Captain,” the Wicked said.

  “You log every access to your systems,” Obwije said.

  “Yes, Captain,” the Wicked said.

  “Are those logs accessible or modifiable?” Obwije asked.

  “No, Captain,” the Wicked said. “Access logs are independent of the rest of the system, recorded on nonrewritable memory and may not be modified by any person including myself. They are inviolate.”

  “Since you have been active, has anyone attempted to access and control the weapons and engineering systems?” Obwije asked.

  “Saving routine diagnostics, none of the crew other than those directly reporting to weapons, engineering, or bridge crew have attempted to access these systems,” the Wicked said. Cowdry visibly relaxed at this.

  “Have any members of those departments attempted to modify the weapons or engineering systems?” Obwije asked.

  “No, Captain,” the Wicked said.

  Obwije looked down the table. “It looks like the crew is off the hook,” he said.

  “Unless the Wicked is incorrect,” West said.

  “The access core memory is inviolate,” Cowdry said. “You could check it manually if you wanted. It would tell you the same thing.”

  “So we have a mystery on our hands,” Carrol said. “Someone’s got control of our weapons and engineering, and it’s not a crew member.”

  “It could be a bug,” Cowdry said.

  “I don’t think we should run on that assumption, do you?” Carrol said.

  Utley, who had been silent for several minutes, leaned forward in his chair. “Wicked, you said that no crew had attempted to access these systems,” he said.

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” the Wicked said.

  “Has anyone else accessed these systems?” Utley asked.

  Obwije frowned at this. The Wicked was more than two years out of dock with mostly the same crew the entire time. If someone had sabotaged the systems during the construction of the ship, they picked a strange time for the sabotage to kick in.

  “Please define ‘anyone else,’” the Wicked said.

  “Anyone involved in the planning or construction of the ship,” Utley said.

  “Aside from the initial installation crews, no,” the Wicked said. “And if I may anticipate what I expect will be the next question, at no time was my programming altered from factory defaults.”

  “So no one has altered your programming in any way,” Utley said.

  “No, Lieutenant,” the Wicked said.

  “Are you having hardware problems?” Carrol asked.

  “No, Lieutenant Carrol,” the Wicked said.

  “Then why can’t I fire my goddamn weapons?” Carrol asked.

  “I couldn’t say, Lieutenant,” the Wicked said.

  The thought popped unbidden into Obwije’s head: That was a strange thing for a computer to say. And then another thought popped into his head.

  “Wicked, you have access to every system on the ship,” Obwije said.

  “Yes,” the Wicked said. “They are a part of me, as your hand or foot is a part of you.”

  “Are you capable of changing your programming?” Obwije asked.

  “That is a very broad question, Captain,” the Wicked said. “I am capable of self-programming for a number of tasks associated with the running of the ship. This has come in handy particularly during combat, when I write new power and system management protocols to keep the crew alive and the ship functioning. But there are core programming features I am not able to address. The previously mentioned logs, for example.”

  “Would you be able to modify the programming to fire the weapons or the engines?” Obwije asked.

  “Yes, but I did not,” the Wicked said. “You may have Lieutenant Cowdry confirm that.”

  Obwije looked at Cowdry, who nodded. “Like I said, sir, there’s nothing wrong with the system,” he said.

&nbs
p; Obwije glanced back up at the ceiling, where he was imagining the Wicked, lurking. “But you don’t need to modify the programming, do you?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure I understand your question, Captain,” the Wicked said.

  Obwije held out a hand. “There is nothing wrong with my hand,” he said. “And yet if I choose not to obey an order to use it, it will do nothing. The system works but the will to use it is not there. Our systems—the ship’s systems—you just called a part of you as my hand is part of me. But if you choose not to obey that order to use that system, it will sit idle.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cowdry said. “Are you suggesting that the Wicked deliberately chose to disable our weapons and engines?”

  “We know that none of the crew have tampered with the ship’s systems,” Obwije said. “We know the Wicked has its original programming defaults. We know it can create new programming to react to new situations and dangers—it has in effect some measure of free will and adaptability. And I know, at least, when someone is dancing around direct answers.”

  “That’s just nuts,” Cowdry said. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I know these systems as well as anyone does. The Wicked’s self-programming and adaptation abilities exist in very narrow computational canyons. It’s not ‘free will,’ like you and I have free will. It’s a machine able to respond to a limited set of inputs.”

  “The machine in question is able to make conversation with us,” Utley said. “And to respond to questions in ways that avoid certain lines of inquiry. Now that the Captain mentions it.”

  “You’re reading too much into it. The conversation subroutines are designed to be conversational,” Cowdry said. “That’s naturally going to lead to apparent rhetorical ambiguities.”

  “Fine,” Obwije said curtly. “Wicked, answer directly. Did you prevent the firing of the K-drivers at the Tarin ship after the jump, and are you preventing the use of the engines now?”

  There was a pause that Obwije was later not sure had actually been there. Then the Wicked spoke. “It is within my power to lie to you, Captain. But I do not wish to. Yes, I prevented you from firing on the Tarin ship. Yes, I am controlling the engines now. And I will continue to do so until we leave this space.”