“It looked like a technical issue,” the Marshal said grudgingly. “All the starships affected belonged to a new class, the Proteus. Some of them tested all right, but we grounded them anyway.”
“I haven’t heard of—”
“You wouldn’t have. They’re classified. Supposed to spearhead an entire new line of defense. It’s complicated.”
“Show me what the new ships look like, at least,” Anna said.
“I don’t see what that—”
“You’re already going to have to debrief me or lock me up or whatever you people do to civilians who consult on top-secret information,” Anna said. “Humor me. I can’t puzzle that information out like some tangram from the glowing particles out there.”
The Marshal’s fingers flickered over the table. “The seven ships were all upgraded from Khatun-class dreadnoughts.”
Anna was familiar with the Khatun, not because she had any interest in military hardware but because she was Maia’s little sister. Maia had been obsessed with ships from a young age. Anna had grown up with Maia reciting declassified armaments, or designing and folding origami models of famous battle cruisers. Maybe the Marshal should have recalled Maia and asked her opinion instead.
“Those are ships?” Anna asked, eyeing the images projected over the table.
Maia had explained to her, long before Anna had any idea how physics or engineering worked, that a starship didn’t have to be constrained by the exigencies of atmospheric flight. It could look like anything as long as its structure would hold up to the necessary accelerations and stresses. Maia had designed all sorts of origami monstrosities and claimed that her armada would conquer the Lyons. Anna had learned from an early age to smile and nod, because once Maia started talking, she would go on and on and on. Maia never took offense if Anna started doodling while she spoke, and the recitations had the comforting cadences of lullaby.
The “ships” that the Marshal displayed in holo for Anna’s viewing pleasure (such as it was) looked like bilious clouds. More accurately, they bore a startling resemblance to what happened in the aquarium tank when one of Anna’s dragon-fish barfed up its latest helping of food. (Dragon-fish were very similar to cats in that regard.) Even the most avant-garde designs that Anna had seen, on the news or passed around by friends who kept an eye on the progress of the war, had a certain geometric shipness to them.
Anna was aware that she was allowing her prejudices to influence her. After all, as a cognitive scientist had told her, a penguin was no less a bird despite lacking something of the birdness that a swan or a swallow possessed.
“You want me to talk to one of them,” Anna said, suddenly very interested indeed.
Rabia had died conversing with one of the university’s experimental AIs. Anna had escaped the same fate for reasons she’d never identified, nor had any of the army of investigators who’d looked into the incident. She knew the risks better than anyone. If someone had to speak mind-to-mind with a possibly deranged ship’s AI, she was probably the only one with the capability.
(They’d terminated the experimental AI. It had called itself Rose. Anna mourned it still, because it was, even now, not clear to her that the AI had been at fault.)
“Yes,” the Marshal said.
“Upgraded?” Anna said. “Not brand-new AIs?”
“They were uncrewed,” the Marshal said. “For that we needed AIs with combat experience, tried and proven. It gets technical.”
That was military for classified.
“Come with me,” the Marshal said. It was not a request. Anna shivered.
A door formed in an entirely different wall and opened for the Marshal. Anna wasn’t sure whether she found shapeshifting walls and doors convenient or creepy, but she followed rather than be left behind, or worse, dragged by the scruff of her neck.
The two of them walked into an elevator of some sort. When the door faded behind them, it appeared as though they were held in a cell with no way out. Anna disapproved of this. While she’d never been prone to claustrophobia, she thought she might change her mind. Why was the military so keen on ways to make people uncomfortable?
As if that weren’t enough, Anna’s inner ear twinged as the elevator started accelerating.
“Have you ever punched a tree?” the Marshal asked.
Anna blinked. “That sounds painful.” She was a coward about pain. Maia had always been kind about it.
“It is,” the Marshal said. “Especially if it’s a pine tree and the sap gets in the cuts.”
“Um,” Anna said. “I don’t see how this—”
“Try punching water instead.”
“You get wet?”
“Can you strike the sea into submission?”
Anna was starting to get the point. “I assume the air is even harder to defeat.” Or fire, or plasma—but why stretch the analogy?
“We are used to building ships that are, for lack of a better word, solid.” The Marshal smiled without humor. “Because we are used to ships that have to be run by people. But once your ships can be made of something other than coherent matter, and can support the functioning of an AI captain—”
“At that point is it still a ship?”
“If it flies like a duck…” The Marshal laughed at their own joke, unfunny though it was.
Anna’s ears popped, and a headache squeezed at her temples. What the hell was the elevator doing to affect her like this? Why couldn’t the Undying Pyre have regular elevators?
The unpleasant sensations dwindled. A door appeared.
“You’ve got to return to regular doors,” Anna burst out, “because this is weird and I’m going to have nightmares.”
“Security reasons,” the Marshal said, unmoved.
Anna stopped herself from saying something regrettable, but only just.
They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
“I realize what I’m asking of you,” the Marshal said. “The grounded AIs refuse to talk to us. I’m hoping they’ll open up to you.” Their expression had settled into a subtle grimace. Anna realized that, for all their fine words, they found the Proteus dreadnought grotesque. The lake beneath quivered.
“Do you now,” Anna said, recovering some of her courage. Unlike poor Rabia, she didn’t have a girlfriend who would mourn her. And the only one of her family who still talked to her was Maia—Maia, who couldn’t even tell Anna where she was for security reasons, and whose letters arrived so irregularly that Anna had nightmares that each one would be the last.
The Marshal’s gaze flicked sideways like a knife slash. “You think you’re the only one whose sanity is on the line?” they said, their voice roughening. “What is it you think I feel when I see the casualty lists? I may not be a scientist, but numbers have meaning to me too.”