“No idea,” echoed Lukyan, with hollow disgust.
“No idea at all. I wasn’t expecting garlands and flowers when I came back, but I was hoping for a little tolerance at least. Perhaps I should have come by myself.”
Nobody answered, but nobody argued. Suddenly more beams sparked out of the sphere, bright reds and blues, the dots travelling across the walls clearly visible against the slightly reflective whiteness. They swept and whirled and then quickly drew together on Kane. They travelled quickly across him like scurrying beetles. The only one that didn’t move was the dull violet dot in the middle of his forehead.
“You are identified.”
Katya had no idea where the voice came from, it seemed to be in the air all around. Deep and sonorous, like the dying tones of metal striking metal in a large cavern, the voice was full of incorrect inflexions and emphasis. It was clearly not the product of a human throat.
Kane looked upwards, uncertain how to respond. Finally, he tried. “Hullo.”
“You were rejected. You have no function here.”
“Yes, I know. I was…” he shrugged, rolled his eyes looking for inspiration, “…just passing. Thought I’d drop in.”
“Where is drone six? The object in the retrieval bay is not drone six.”
Lukyan winced to hear his beloved Baby called an “object.”
“I’m afraid it, drone six, that is, I’m afraid it met with a bit of an accident.” Kane waited for an immediate reply, but none was forthcoming. “Sorry for your loss.” Still no answer. “So, I took its IFF unit so I could visit you.”
“You were rejected,” repeated the voice of the Leviathan. Katya wondered what it meant by that. Kane had simply left, not been rejected. At least, that’s the way he said it had happened. “You have no function here.”
“I think I do have a function here. It’s your current activities; they are not within your operational parameters.”
“Operations are within acceptable parameters.”
“No,” replied Kane in a chiding voice, “they are not. I’m very familiar with them and you are operating outside them.” He crossed his arms — slowly so as not to antagonise the Medusa sphere — and started to lecture the Leviathan. “You are pursuing a seek and destroy strategy. You know full well you’re not supposed to do anything that is actively aggressive without a human in that seat over there. Self-defence is all very well, but you saw off the vessel that first reactivated you. That should be that. You should have stood down afterwards, because that’s what your standing orders tell you to do.” Kane stopped and waited with his chin thrust forward as if expecting an apology.
“You are incorrect,” said the Leviathan.
Kane couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d been told he been spelling his name wrong for the last year.
“What do you mean, incorrect?”
“Parameters state that when discovered, strategies of covert offence are to be employed. These strategies are being employed.”
“That’s not right,” said Kane under his breath. Then, speaking up, “What are your targeting priorities?”
“Category one combatants comprise the following.” The Leviathan started to list possible targets in the most abstract ways. Katya could follow them at first, but after a while even Tokarov started to look confused. Then Kane interrupted the list.
“Hold on, hold on. I need some clarification here. Which target category are we in now? Three? Four?”
“One.”
The colour leeched out of Kane’s face. “But you were listing civilian categories. Non-combatants. You were listing babies and the sick.”
“Category one targets.”
Kane spoke as if he didn’t want to hear the answers. “What is in category two?”
“Category two contains no definitions.”
“Category three. What’s in category three?”
“Category three contains no definitions.”
“What is in category blue?”
Katya looked sharply at him. During school, they’d seen historical simulations of important battles of the War of Independence. Category blue was the generic name for allies.
The Leviathan replied immediately.
“Category blue contains no definitions.”
Something was terribly, terribly wrong. The Leviathan was prepared to attack and destroy even vessels from Earth. There was only one possible conclusion; the great warship was insane.
Lukyan, Tokarov, and Katya stood in silence as Kane tried to find what had gone wrong. The Leviathan answered each question fully and, as far as they knew, accurately, but none of it helped. Synthetic intelligences are complex, but they are predictable at least as far as their motivations and goals, for these are the very things programmed deep into their fibres. An SI simply couldn’t go mad and decide to kill everybody because it felt like it. Nor could a simple malfunction suddenly turn it from a precision weapon into a threat to all sides. The only other possibility was that the vessel had somehow been reprogrammed. Kane was trying to find out by whom in the hope that this might reveal the reasons behind such an irrational act.
“Those were not the operational parameters you left Earth with,” Kane said, his irritation starting to show. He barely seemed aware of the Medusa’s sighting and sensor dots on him anymore. “They were not the ones you had when I left, either. You have been reprogrammed. Identify any and all personnel who have accessed your command levels since arriving at Russalka.”
“Kane, Havilland.”
“Yes, but when and for what purpose?”
The Leviathan gave a date ten years before and added, “Maintenance and examination protocols were enacted.”
“What changes were made?”
“None.”
“Fine. That’s good. I didn’t break anything by accident. Now, list all subsequent accesses.”
“None.”
“None?” Kane shook his head angrily as if somebody was telling him black was white and expecting him to believe it. “What do you mean, none?”
“No subsequent access demands were made to command levels subsequent to arrival at Russalka.”
“Kane,” whispered Lukyan, very conscious of the laser dot on him, “perhaps the Terrans programmed this in before you left.”
“What?” said Kane. He snorted with derision. “They told it to regard them as deadly enemies? Does that seem likely to you? Besides, even if they were crazy enough to enter such a program it would still have been registered as a command access.”
“Not if it was programmed not to…”
“No,” interrupted Kane firmly, “it does not make sense. They had no way of knowing I wouldn’t end up in that chair, no way of predicting this little scene. Therefore, why spend a lot of time and effort covering up a trail they never expected anybody to even have the chance of finding? It can’t be so.”
“Kane,” said Tokarov, “something’s bothering me about all this.”
“Only one thing? You’re ahead of the rest of us then.”
“Seriously, if it considers us all enemies, why are we still alive?”
Kane started to open his mouth to reply, but stopped. He frowned. His gaze wandered back and forth across the floor as he worked through possible reasons and discarded them one by one. “You know, lieutenant,” he said finally, worry evident in his face, “I have no idea.” He looked back at the exit. “I’m not even sure how we’re going to get out of here.”
“Go?” said Katya. “We can’t go. We came here to…”
A warning glance from Kane made her reconsider her words. She’d been about to say “…destroy this thing.” Saying out loud that they were a threat to the Leviathan while it was pointing high energy lasers at each of them might have been a fatal mistake. Instead, she said, “…deal with the situation.”