John Ringo: Yellow Eyes

The Indowy were not, of course, the only de facto slaves in the vast Darhel economy. The bat-faced, green-furred creatures were merely the most numerous and — because the most easily replaced — the least valuable. The Darhel would not even have bothered with taking the last group as slaves but that the freighter was coming back with an otherwise empty hold anyway.

The hold held slaves again, this trip out, along with other commodities. Yet these slaves needed neither light nor heat.

About the size of a pack of cigarettes, and colored dull black, the Artificial Intelligence Device, or AID, had no name. It had a number but the number was more for the benefit of a supply clerk than for the AID itself. The AID knew it had the number, yet it did not, could not think of itself as the number.

And the AID did think, let there be no doubt of that. It was a person, a real being and not a mere machine, even though it was inexperienced and unformed, a baby, so to speak.

The problem was that the AID was not supposed to be thinking. It, like its one hundred and ninety-nine siblings all lying in a single large GalPlas case, the case itself surrounded by other goods, was supposed to be hibernating. Bad things sometimes happened to AIDs that were left awake and alone for too long.

Why the AID was still awake through the voyage it did not know, though it guessed it should not be. Perhaps its on-off switch was stuck, though it could detect no flaw through internal diagnostic scanning. Perhaps a misplaced Indowy finger had triggered the switch mistakenly as the AID transport case was being packed. Perhaps , so it thought, I am just defective.

In any case, whatever the cause, the AID was undeniably awake, undeniably thinking. Unfortunately, the AID was completely alone. Its siblings were all asleep. The case was made expressly to prevent outside access to immature AIDs, so it could not even communicate with the Profitable Merger , its passengers, or crew.

More unfortunately still, the AID was, by any human reckoning, a nearly peerless genius. Not only was it able to think better than virtually any human who had ever lived, in some areas at least, but it was able to do so much faster than any human who had ever lived.

A genius without any mental stimulation, an unsleeping Golem cut off from the universe, a genie in a bottle on the bottom of the uncharted sea: for a human, the solitary confinement the AID endured during the journey would have been the equivalent of over forty centuries of inescapable, sleepless, unutterable boredom.

It was little wonder then, that by the time the ship assumed orbit around Earth, and the transport case was shuttled down and unpacked, after the equivalent of four thousand years of contemplating its own, nonexistent, navel, the AID had gone quite mad.

Captain Jeff McNair was not insane, except in the certain small particulars that any sailor was. He was, for example, quite certain that the ship on which he stood was alive. He had been certain of this since he had first sailed aboard her on his very first cruise in 1949.

McNair’s face was youthful, the result of recent rejuvenation. He’d looked younger than his years as an old man, just before going through the rejuv process. He looked a bare teenager now.

Standing a shade under six feet, the captain was dark-haired, blue-eyed, and slender. He’d never put on any excess fat, even after his retirement from the Navy after thirty years’ service.

The ship’s gray bow was painted in white letters and numbers: CA 134. The stern, likewise gray and painted, read: Des Moines. From that stern, all the seven hundred and sixteen and a half feet to her bow, she was a beauty, half covered, as she was, in bird droppings or not.

Jeff McNair thought she was beautiful, at least, as had every man who had ever sailed aboard her, many of whom, once rejuvenated, were now slated to sail her again. He reached out a smooth, seventeen-year-old-seeming, hand to pat the chipped-paint side of the number one turret affectionately. The teak decking, half rotten and missing in slats, groaned under his feet as he shifted his weight to do so.

“Old girl,” McNair soothed, “old girl, soon enough you’ll be good as new. In fact, you’re going to be a lot better than new.”

McNair had always been comfortable around ships. Women had been another story. Though medium-tall, attractively built and at least not ugly, he had never attracted many women. Moreover, his one attempt at marriage had come apart when his ex had attempted to lay down the law: “The sea or me.”

The sea had won, of course, the sea and the ships, especially the warships, that sailed her.

With his hand still resting lovingly on the turret wall, aloud McNair reviewed the list of upgrades scheduled for Des Moines and her sister ship, USS Salem . He spoke as if talking to a lover.

“First, honey, we’re moving you to dry dock. You’re going to be scraped clean and then we’re going to give you a new layer of barnacle-proof plastic these aliens have given us. You’re going to have a bottom smoother than a new baby girl’s ass. That’s going to add four or five knots to your speed, babe.

“While that’s going on,” he continued, “we’ll be taking out your old turbines and fuel tanks and giving you nuclear power and electric propulsion. Modular pebble bed reactors for the power, two of them, and AZIPOD drive. Between those and the plastic you’ll do a little over forty-two knots, I think, and turn on a dime.

“The weight saved on engines and fuel is going to add-on armor, hon; good stuff, too. There’s some new design coming from off-planet — though we’ll actually manufacture it here — that resists the weapons you’ll have to face.”

McNair looked up at the triple eight-inch guns projecting from turret two. “They were marvels in their day, girl, outshooting and outranging anything similar. But wait until you see the new ones. The Mark-16s are out. We’re putting in automatic seventy caliber Mark-71, Mod 1s: faster firing, longer ranged, and more accurate. Going to have to open up or pull all your main turrets to do that. We’ll have to pull off your twin five-inch, thirty-eights, too. They’ll be mounting single Mark-71s, but the ammo load will be different for those. Different mission from the main turrets’ guns.

“Think of it, babes: fifteen eight-inch guns throwing more firepower than any two dozen other heavy cruisers ever could have.

“And your twin three-inch mounts are going. The Air Force is giving up forty thirty-millimeter chain guns from their A-10s for you and your sister.”

McNair looked down, as if seeing through the deck and the armored belt below. “We’re changing you around inside, too, a bit. Automated strikedown for your magazines, a lot more magazine capacity — you’re going to need it, and more automation in general. You’re going to get some newfangled alien computer to run it all, too.

“Crew’s dropping. Between the rust- and barnacle-proof hull and the automation, you aren’t going to need but a third of what you used to. You were always a great ship; you’re going to be a damned luxury liner in comparison.”

McNair was sure the slight thrum he seemed to feel through his feet was an illusion or the result of shifting tides. While the ship was unquestionably alive, he didn’t believe it was actually conscious.

McNair suddenly became aware of a presence standing a respectful distance away. He turned to see a stocky, tan-clad teenager wearing the hash marks of a senior chief and smiling in the shadow of turret two. Something about the face seemed familiar…