Serengeti (23 page)

Tig thought a moment, face lights flashing and swirling. “Show you,” he said, with a wink and a smile.

He pulled Tilli close, touching his cheek to hers. Cobalt lights sparked and flared, arcing between the two robots as Tig wrapped one leg around the tower and Tilli did the same.

A hum and burst of static—that’s what came through first. Tig tweaked his filters, adjusting a few of internal settings to clean the signal up as best he could. The comms channel was primitive and glitchy, the transmissions it processed grainy and muddled, cutting in and out, but data came through—a flow of electronic information that ran for a while, stopped and looped backward before starting over again.

Serengeti
listened closely, letting that loop run three full rounds. “Enough,” she said, signaling to Tig and Tilli to cut it off. “I’ve heard enough. Break the connection. No need to let that ship know we’re here.”

It likely did already, but
Serengeti
didn’t tell Tig and Tilli that. Even half dead, the energy inside her would be visible, especially since her power source was the only thing other than starlight and moondust for light years in any direction. A good thing if that ship out there was part of the Meridian Alliance fleet, but it wasn’t. She knew that for sure. The fleet never employed a make and model like that ship out there. In fact, from the little she’d picked up, the distant ship appeared to be ancient—first generation AI if she had to bet. Little more than an automaton, just half a step above that DSR Golem that took out half the fleet.

“Could be DSR, I suppose.” But she doubted it. No reason for a DSR ship to be all the way out here, especially on its own. “Scavengers, more likely. Opportunists. Smugglers, maybe. Rumrunners or pirates.”

Scum, in other words. The scum of humanity living on the fringes of settled space, skulking through the empty places in their ancient, thin-hulled ships.
Serengeti
almost wished it
was
DSR out there. They’d actually be a better option than the vultures in that ship.

“Not good. Not good at all.”
Serengeti
sighed wearily. “We’re in trouble, Tig.”

“So what do we do?” Tig asked, reaching for Tilli as she
trilled
anxiously and crowded close to his side.

“Good question,”
Serengeti
muttered, wracking her AI brain, trying to come up with a plan. “I don’t know, Tig. I just don’t know yet.”

Not the most inspiring answer, but the best she had right now. Tig’s face lights ticked worriedly, eyes locked onto the ship’s distant, twinkling light.

“They’re coming for us, aren’t they?” Tig asked, using the robot comms channel to communicate with
Serengeti
inside him.

“I fear so, Tig. My guess is they’re looking for salvage. They’ll send a boarding party across once they’re close enough, but...”

Serengeti
trailed off, turning Tig’s head toward the long line of her hull. Not much left here that the scavengers would be interested in. Just two dented robots and a couple of hard-used power cells keeping each other company inside a wreck warship.

And me,
she thought
.
Body’s scrap, but a Valkyrie class AI would be quite the score. And there’s
Cryo
, of course
.

That worried her—bothered even more than the thought of being ripped out and transplanted somewhere.
Cryo
was worth a small fortune, and a lifeboat—non-AI, registered only to the ship it came from—would be much easier to sell on the black market than a tenth generation combat AI.

They’ll cut
Cryo
from me if they can, force it open and strip it bare if they can’t, taking everything with them but my crew.

After all, humans—even frozen ones—were a liability. And they weren’t worth squat on the black market. Not soldiers like Henricksen, anyway. But Finlay, the other female crew…
Serengeti
shuddered, remembering stories of colony ships stolen—raided as they transited the stars. Colonists sold into slavery. And worse.

No,
she thought, anger building inside her
. I won’t let that happen. I won’t let those scavengers lay one finger on my crew.

But how to protect them? They couldn’t run. Couldn’t jump away to safety. Which meant the only option left was to stand and fight.

“Fight.”
Serengeti
laughed bitterly. “With what? My guns are silent, my crew all gone.” She had Tig and Tilli but they were just two, and hardly fighters at all.

How?
she wondered, thinking of Henricksen frozen below, wishing he was here.
How do I stop them? What do I do?

Henricksen would know. He was nothing if not inventive. Reckless at times. Bold and confident, almost to a fault. But then, he was a Valkyrie captain, and that sort of came with the territory. If Henricksen were here, he’d come up with some half-baked, outlandish idea that only someone desperate or crazy would even think to attempt.

Henricksen. I could use your boldness right now.

Serengeti’s
designers hadn’t programmed in outlandish and crazy. And inventiveness only went so far.

Her
gaze drifted, taking in the holes and tears, the shredded mess
Osage’s
destruction
had left. They’d board her through those gaps—an uncertain path, to be sure, filled with gaps and pitfalls leading down and down and down into the dark, but quicker, easier than to trying to pry one of her cargo bays or airlocks open. She could trap them there she supposed. Lure the scavenger ship’s boarding party to one of the gaps and booby trap it to prevent them getting inside.

But even if that worked—and that was a big ‘if’—they’d only send more people over. A crippled Valkyrie was too tempting of a target for a scavenger ship to give up just because they lost a few crew.

“Something else. I’ve got to come up with something else.”

Tig
beeped
in question as Tilli danced nervously beside him.
Serengeti
shushed them both and kept looking. Kept
thinking
, trying to bypass AI logic and come at things from Henricksen’s view. To devise some crazy, improvised plan that just might get them out of this mess.

She turned Tig’s head a bit further and stopped, staring through his eyes at the lumpen shapes of batteries protruding from her side. Batteries gone silent now—their last shots fired when
Osage
exploded and
Serengeti
raced into jump. Silent, but the last she remembered, the firing system behind those guns still worked.

“They just need power.”

Serengeti
had that, though admittedly in short supply. Enough to charge one, perhaps two of those batteries for a short time. But even if her aim was true, it would take more than a few shots to scare that approaching ship off for good.

Show my teeth—broken as they are—and I may scare it off. But if it comes back, it’ll all be over.

“Then I’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t,” she murmured, considering those guns, thinking of the munitions inside her.

Guns and ammunition and a scavenger ship on approach. What was that saying Henricksen had? Something about necessity being the kickass, kill ‘em all mother of invention?

“Necessity I’ve got in spades, and as for invention…”
Serengeti
smiled to herself as the seeds of a preposterous, Henricksen-worthy plan took root. “It’s a doozy, but it could work. Or I might blow us all to kingdom come.”

Tig
burbled
worriedly. He most definitely did
not
like the idea of being blown up.

“I said ‘or’, Tig. It’s not like I
want
to blow us up.”

Oddly, that didn’t seem to make Tig feel any better. Nor Tilli either. They huddled together, legs entwined, face lights flittering in anxious patterns.

Tig started to ask questions but
Serengeti
quieted him with a touch at his brain. “A moment, Tig. I’m thinking.”

So many details to be considered, so many places for things to go wrong. Her AI mind calculated madly, considering her options, filling in gaps and details, adding flesh to the bare bones framework of her plan.

It’s risky—hugely risky
. But riskier still to do nothing at all,
Serengeti
acknowledged that.
Henricksen would chance it
, she told herself. Henricksen who was human and reckless. Who never factored in the odds of failure, because failure simply wasn’t an option he accepted.
I can’t believe I’m even considering this
.

Henricksen would be so proud.

Tig coughed to get her attention.

Serengeti
sighed, irritated by the interruption. “What, Tig?” she asked shortly.

“The ship?” He pointed to one side as Tilli danced beside him, metal legs moving up and down, face lights blinking and swirling in urgent, worried patterns.

“I know.”
Serengeti
glanced at the stars, calculating the distance to that slow approaching twinkle, guessing how long it would take a ship under power to cross it. “I know what we need to do,” she said firmly. “Back inside, Tig. Quickly now. You and Tilli both.” She sent a tiny shock of electricity through the robot’s body to get him going. “Hurry, Tig, hurry! We don’t have much time.”

Tig took off like a shot but Tilli hesitated, dancing in an uncertain circle beneath the communications tower before abandoning it and scurrying after Tig and
Serengeti
.

“So what’s the plan?” Tig asked.

“You’re not going to like it,”
Serengeti
warned.

“When do I ever?”

Serengeti
laughed—she couldn’t help it, Tig sounded so much like Henricksen in that moment—and then filled them both in, making Tig and Tilli complicit in her chancy, all or nothing, last-stand plan.

#

Tig rolled through the hill and into the ship’s icy-cold
corridors, following
Serengeti’s
instructions as he headed for the nearest ladderway and went down and down and down, all the way to Level 9. Level 9 and the hallway from
Serengeti’s
nightmares.

“Stop,”
Serengeti
said softly, touching at Tig’s brain.

Tig rolled to a halt,
beeping
uncertainly, wondering at the delay.

Why? Serengeti
wondered, staring down that blackened hallway with its half-melted robots sticking up from the floor.
A dozen different ways we could have gone, so why did I send them here? Why do I keep coming back to this corridor?
This
corridor and no other?

Tig fidgeted, dancing in place. “There’s not much time,
Serengeti
. We should really get going.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” she murmured.

Tilli crept forward and Tig followed, legs tippy-tapping against the deck plates as the two robots picked their way through the melted robots and continued on. They turned right at the next crossing and ducked down a side corridor, leaving that place of nightmares mercifully behind. More corridors, more twists and turns, Tig and Tilli dodging this way and that until they rounded a corner and found the way ahead blocked—roof caved-in, walls collapsed, loose cables dangling from the ceiling. And scattered across the floor, dozens upon dozens of unstable plasma rounds.

This too
Serengeti
remembered. She’d turned Henricksen and Finlay away from this corridor to save their lives. Now she brought Tig and Tilli here in the hopes she could save those lives again.

“Munitions storage.”
Serengeti
pointed at a half-collapsed doorway to one side. “There should be a cart, or sling—something we can use to transport the shells.”

Tilli scrambled inside, stepping carefully over the loose rounds in the hallway, easing her way through the sagging doorway.
Serengeti
watched her from the hall, staring through Tig’s eyes as Tilli picked through the debris inside the munitions storage room, retrieving two hammock-shaped nets from an emergency locker on one wall and holding them up.

During combat, they relied on an automated feeder system to shuck the ammunition from the storage areas scattered across the ship to the turret guns nearby. But humans, being humans, always insisted on a backup—a manual mode of transportation should the ship’s loading system fail.
Serengeti
used to scoff at the idea. After all, a ship flew or didn’t—‘manual’ wasn’t a consideration. She never imagined a scenario where she’d appreciate something as archaic as those hammock-shaped slings. Never imagined she’d need a way to manually schlep plasma rounds from her innards to her guns.

“Good. Bring them,”
Serengeti
ordered.

Tig stepped backward, making room for Tilli as she worked her way back into the hall, handing one of the hammock nets to Tig, keeping the other for herself. Strong, those nets. Woven from braided lengths of a carbon and aluminum mixture, reinforced with titanium and steel. The same mixture used for decking and hull plating, for components all over her ship’s body, making her lightweight but durable, able to move quickly and yet still resist a sustained barrage of fire. Strong and flexible, when braided like this. Able to carry ten times the hundredweight of shells Tig and Tilli gathered up.

Not that weight mattered right now. One bonus of being so beat up: With no atmosphere inside, and no artificial gravity to weigh things down, moving heavy objects became far less tricky.

“Whole shells only,”
Serengeti
warned, as Tilli reached for a round with a long crack down its side. “Too risky trying to use the damaged ones.”

A trickle of plasma leaked through that seam, staining the deck plates a noxious green. Others around them had drained entirely, voiding their innards across the floor, pitting metal decking, leaving a blackened crust behind.

“Make sure you don’t grab any empties either.”

Tilli nodded and moved on, filling her sling with a dozen good shells before squatting down on her tank treads and hoisting the load onto her back, using the legs on either side of her body to keep the balky load in place. She waited until Tig was ready—bulging sling perched precariously on his back, slipping to this side and that despite the legs that held it—and then worked her way back the way they’d come.

The trip back was nothing like the frantic rush that brought them to the munitions storage, nor the cheerful
zip-zip-zip
of the robots’ usual mode of transportation. Instead, they made a slow, methodical slog back to the nearest ladderway, hampered by the awkward loads the robots carried, bulging, ammunition-filled slings slipping and sliding and trying to get away. Tig and Tilli debated a moment when they reached the ladder and then decided to leave one sling at the bottom and carry the other up between the two of them—Tilli pushing from behind while Tig pulled from above. And when they reached the top—the very last level, riding just beneath the hull—they set the loaded sling down and went back for the other.