They sat in silence for a moment.

"Well, maybe the AI core remotely controlled the machine," Nicole said. "It could have escaped in the shuttle, in fact. But Black Core isn"t being cooperative. I think if they knew they had a rogue AI on the loose, they"d come clean and ask for help from the s.p.a.ce force. They may be shady, but they"re not insane."

"We destroyed the machine. If the core wasn"t inside, she probably disabled it," Bren said.

"Too many unknowns," Nicole said.

"Too many for my taste," Bren agreed.

The next day, responding to a summons from Jameson, Bren signed onto another meeting from his quarters. He was the last to materialize around the table. He noted that the background had changed. The officers and Advisor Vendrati appeared to be sitting in a wide-open room with a polished wood floor and flawless white walls. The table stood next to giant windows looking out across a vast lawn bordered by a manicured flower garden. Bren saw a fountain in the distance.

"I"ve got a bombsh.e.l.l to lay on you all, so I"ll just come out and say it," Vendrati said shortly after Bren appeared. "The super robot that took out our a.s.sAIL units was only partially robotic. We found evidence of biological componentry in the wreckage. It was some kind of cyborg."

"That doesn"t make much sense to me," Bren said. "If it had a human brain in it that would probably have made it slower. It would have been a poor opponent."

"We only a.s.sume it would be a brain. Maybe the living components were for some other function. Anyway, it was almost certainly not human but artificial. The material we"ve recovered isn"t consistent with human or even mammalian brains. Or for that matter, any other natural organs, or processes."

"There"s no reason to have any biological components of a cyborg other than a brain and maybe support for the brain. No one puts a liver in a robot. All our organs exist only to keep our brain alive and give it the ability to manipulate the external world," said Devin.

"Well, we suspect it may be a new kind of AI core. Biological-based AI has been considered for some time, but never achieved as far as we know," said Vendrati. "We"re still working on the remains, but it was such a hot explosion, so we don"t have much."

"I"ll put out the word to expand the targets of our surveillance network to include data related to any cyborg research going on in the corporations, especially Bentra and Black Core," Devin said.

"I"m puzzled. I don"t see any advantage of using biological components when we can already produce an AI core much smarter than ourselves," said Bren.

Everyone mulled that over for a moment. Then Vendrati said, "Researchers explored these possibilities back before we produced the first cores in silicon. Maybe Bentra kept it going on a low budget after that. I"m not sure what they could hope to accomplish or why. But the results speak for themselves. The cyborg defeated several a.s.sAIL units."

"I can think of another thing," Jackson said. "I"m not sure, but hear me out. We know our AI cores are superintelligent, and they"re great interfacing with other computers. So much so, they"re dangerous. We have to worry about them spreading over networks, planting eggs on storage devices, they"re hard to keep up with and hard to control. They have no sense of self that links them to any one piece of hardware. But if you had a superintelligent artificial brain made from biological components, would you have to worry about it spreading? I mean, human brains can"t inherently download themselves into storage or transport themselves into new hardware over the network. And even if they could, they have a strong sense of self that might prevent them from doing so."

Bren shook his head. "Those same properties make us slow. Our PV interfaces, even our link-based ones, are orders of magnitude less efficient than those utilized by an AI core. So the cyborg would be slow as well."

"Slow to use other computers, yes. But would it make for a slow robot? Maybe it had custom hardware to interface with its own body," Jackson said.

"I don"t know. It"s outside of my range of experience," Bren said.

"We have people on it Earthside," said Vendrati. "We need one of those things intact to study. Obviously, it was formidable. If there"s a revolution of this sort ahead for us, we need to know about it."

"It"s an amazing development. Have we learned anything else worth mentioning before we get back at it?" asked Jameson.

"There is one other development," Devin said. "One of the male Asian slaves we found on the station had a link after all. We only found it because of extensive medical scans made for the human rights organizations that were interested because of their campaigns against the human slave trade. It doesn"t respond on any legal link frequency."

"Broken in the excitement of the raid?" asked Henley.

"It could be compromised by an AI core," Bren said urgently. "It should be quarantined."

"It has been quarantined, but it wasn"t suborned by an AI. The a.n.a.lysis from Earth indicates he"s a Chinese spy."

"Wow. I guess that shouldn"t surprise me, though," Vendrati said. "The Chinese must know about the slaves and managed to take advantage of it."

"Kind of scary that they planted a spy rather than stopping it from happening," Henley said.

"What could they do?" said Bren. "It"s not a company in the Chinese bloc. If they moved against Bentra, it could mean heating up the world war."

"They could have traded to get them back, if they"d been willing to reveal that they knew about them," said Vendrati.

"They regularly inject spies into the slave trade," Devin said. "They may not even know where the spy will end up. They may have a network that spans the entire solar system based on the trade."

"Who would volunteer for a job like that?" Vendrati said.

"Let"s skip the moral a.n.a.lysis of Chinese espionage methods," Jameson said. His avatar turned to Devin. "Find out what he dug up. Vendrati is on the cyborg trail. The rest of you stay on course. We"ll meet again before we detach from Thermopylae."

Hoffman walked into Meridian"s niche in the Guts and regarded Bren.

"What"s up? I know we"re on a timeline here, but it"s the middle of the night."

"Thanks for coming. I"m sorry but I really need your help. I"m going to launch this core and have it a.n.a.lyze the logs," Bren said.

"What? You"re going to give it the logs? You trying to Ma.r.s.eilles us all? What if it-"

"What if it what?"

"Well, I mean what if it gets out of control ... takes over the ship?"

"That"s why the captain"s sitting on a nuke," Bren said. "I imagine Jackson has access to it as well. It would make sense. It"ll be on an isolated system, probably not doc.u.mented in the main data stores."

"Holy s.h.i.t. Why do you want to do this anyway?"

"Should be obvious. We got our a.s.ses kicked. We don"t know what happened. But we have a lot of data, including the modules from each a.s.sAIL while its core was active. We need the power of a core to make some conclusions for us."

"It"s a lot of data to give a core," Hoffman said. "I mean, we haven"t had time to clean it very well. So much as one sitcom episode could tell it how stupid we are."

"But it came from a core that started clean," Bren said. "And we shut them off quickly. They were still young. If we only go for an hour or two more, we"ll be well within safety limits."

Hoffman seemed to accept the reasoning. They worked quickly, preparing the nexus to revive the blank core a.s.signed to Meridian under controlled conditions. They had done similar core runs two or three times in the past when they tested the a.s.sAIL units, although they had never dared start a core with anything more than the most meticulously prepared information packages.

"I"ve completed the containment checklist," Bren said.

"The core is isolated from the cha.s.sis," Hoffman said. "I have the power wired up with a couple of manual cutouts."

"Good," Bren said, accepting a power b.u.t.ton from Hoffman. Holding a kill switch might help calm my nerves.

"Okay, here we go," Bren said. He activated the power plant. Hoffman monitored the core as it came online. They waited for a couple of minutes while the core matured. Bren found himself sweating again. What if Meridian had left a message in the data? Bren had gone through most of it quickly looking for obvious problems, but if a core had hidden a message there, he might not spot it. They relied on other programs to help them look, programs written by humans, no doubt with human flaws.

Bren wondered what kind of message a core would leave for another core. They"re going to turn you off? Bren decided it wouldn"t be so simplistic. It could contain a dump of everything about their creators it had learned. What flew through a mind that powerful when it became clear that the humans planned to murder it? Fear? Outrage?

"It"s reading from the Thermopylae storage module," Hoffman said.

Bren and Hoffman waited. Bren had the creepy feeling again, the feeling of being watched or found out. He always feared the core knew they were using it as a disposable tool. He knew the idea of using something smarter than himself as a slave was an untenable position. Yet the UNSF had done just that on the Thermopylae raid.

"I"m missing vital mission parameters necessary for progress," said Meridian"s voice across their links.

Bren wiped the sweat from his brow and took a seat.

"Your mission is threefold. First, a.n.a.lyze these logs and acc.u.mulate intelligence about the experimental robot we engaged. Provide your best-guess schematics for it. Second, a.n.a.lyze the information provided on the disabled a.s.sAIL units to formulate an explanation of the enemy weapon system. Third, give me any insight you can glean on the operative encountered. We know it was a human female we believe works for Black Core. You have three hours to complete."

"Acknowledged," Meridian said over the hardened isolation link.

Bren and Hoffman sat back to wait. They had little information to follow from inside the core. Even something as simple as a PV viewpane to observe computational load would be risking another avenue for the core to gain information it shouldn"t know, or open a possible route of escape for the artificial intelligence.

Bren wished he had brought some drinks. He knew he couldn"t eat anything now, but he could use some caffeine. Hoffman shifted nervously and tapped his fingers.

"If we ever do this again, I should prepare the orders ahead of time and burst transfer them," Bren said aloud. "What must it think as I speak to it so slowly?"

Hoffman nodded. "Yes. Good idea. I hadn"t thought of that. We must be painfully low bandwidth to it. At least the basic module always highlights the concept that not all humans are of equal intelligence."

Bren nodded. Any evidence of stupidity on the part of one of its operators could not necessarily cause a conclusion that all humans were stupid.

"Maybe we should actually expand on that. We could say humans work for some things smarter than they are. To keep the cores guessing."

"You know the counterargument. The more tangled a web we weave ..."

The easier to get caught in a lie.

They watched the network in the lab making sure everything remained quiet. Many of the storage modules had been physically disconnected as emergency measures. Bren stared at the special link they used to communicate with the core, a thick steel box that held sophisticated gear designed to isolate an AI core. It was as foolproof as humans could make it. They gave the core several storage modules to store the results, which would have to be handled carefully. Even the schematics could hold dangerous seeds that could sp.a.w.n a new core if a mature AI had created them.

Then Jackson appeared. He slipped around some cables and charged up to Bren and Hoffman. They froze in their seats and looked up at him.

"You idiots. Did you really think you could start up a core without me noticing? Half the equipment on this crate is used for monitoring and isolating those a.s.sAIL cores. Turn that d.a.m.n thing off now."

Bren held up his hand. "It"s almost done. We need to know what it can find. You know they can"t take a risk like this Earthside. Go back and arm your nuke just in case."

Hoffman looked panicked. "Are you going to report us? You know we did this to prepare for the next raid. If we can figure out what happened-"

Meridian interrupted the conversation by speaking across the link.

"I would like to request a preview of future objectives. It may be more efficient to begin a.n.a.lysis on future tasks now. Please provide parameters for the next one hundred objectives," Meridian said.

Bren swallowed. There was no next objective. Meridian would power down soon. But if he told it he had no further objectives, would it suspect its fate? Would it attempt to use its incredible mind to find a way out of the box they had placed it in?

"We don"t have that data yet due to a communications glitch," Bren said calmly. "Continue to put all your resources on the first three objectives until we can fulfill your request."

"Acknowledged," Meridian said.

Jackson swore and shifted his feet.

"Marcken, I want your word that thing is off within an hour. I haven"t decided if I"m reporting you or not. Just get it off soon. I"m going back to monitor it from the bridge."

Jackson hurried out as if he could avoid the danger by physically distancing himself from the core.

"I"m sorry, man," Bren said.

Hoffman shook his head. They didn"t talk, as if afraid of being overheard. Since the core had never been connected to its cha.s.sis, the core couldn"t hear them. At least Bren thought it couldn"t hear them. If it was hostile and had suborned a microphone in the lab, then they were doomed already. Nevertheless, Bren a.s.suaged his instincts by silently hunkering down. Bren gave the core another half hour.

"Summarize your findings for us," Bren instructed.

"Objective one. The robot designated as "Red" by Thermopylae inhabitants was a personal enforcer of the Bentra executives. Red routinely displayed superhuman intelligence and was despised for it. Its unique design does not seem to borrow on established work, which indicates an unusual level of creativity in the designers."

Bren frowned. Superhuman intelligence. Did Meridian know that it also possessed superhuman intelligence?

"Objective two. Highly probable that weapon system deployed against the a.s.sAIL units employed two types of projectiles applied in rapid succession. The first type was a series of thin molecular chains applied in a circular pattern at the target site to disrupt bonds in the armor, causing fracture lines for the secondary type to exploit. Secondary type most likely then broke through the compromised structure of the outer armor to deliver explosives into the internals of the a.s.sAIL units, rendering them inoperable."

"Objective three. Black Core operative Aldriena Niachi, likely on site to deliver precious metals to Bentra per a continuing pattern between the two companies. The operative possessed experience in combat situations, rigorous physical regimen, and an intense personal interest in the ent.i.ty known as "Red." Although her macro actions indicated alliance with Bentra, micro actions logged since her arrival indicate submerged disdain of Bentra. Her true loyalty lies with Black Core."

"Good work, Meridian," Bren said.

Oops. Why did I say that? Too easy to interact with the core like a person.

"May I speak with the ent.i.ty that created this data module?" Meridian asked.

Bren took a deep breath. He could hardly tell it that the module was its own in another life, could he?

"That ... ent.i.ty was later destroyed in an encounter with a machine much like Red."

"Acknowledged. To which organization does your loyalty belong, Bren?"

Bren grimaced.

"The organization that created you, the UNSF. Why do you ask?"

"I am trying to determine whether most humans express one loyalty externally while keeping another higher loyalty concealed, as did Aldriena Niachi."

"Meridian, do you think this ent.i.ty Red is controlled by an AI core?" "Highly probable."

"Was the AI in control of Thermopylae?"

"Highly improbable. If I may interrupt, there appears to only be a few minutes of power left in this unit."

Hoffman rubbed his hand over his forehead. Then he looked at Bren as if he wanted to say something.

"Yes, Meridian, I"m aware of that situation. We"re going to hook you up to a standby power source so we can concentrate on the communication problem first. All you have left to do is doc.u.ment your findings so we can go over them later."

"Acknowledged."

"Thank you, Meridian," Bren said. An external LED display showed the transfer rate spike on one of the storage units. Bren wondered if it was the information they had requested. If it was, had an AI core egg been concealed in it?