Only then did Sintarleen notice the captain of the ship.
“I see you, McNair, Lord of the Des Moines clan,” the Indowy greeted.
“What is that… that thing that you did?” asked McNair, not knowing the formalities.
Looking down towards the captain’s shoes — Sinbad was a relatively bold Indowy — the alien answered, “Nanites, lord. They will go into the very body of the ship and create an… an area, a route, through which electrical power can pass without loss to the surrounding metal. It can also transmit commands.”
“I understood that from what you told me before. What I asked was what did you do?”
“The nanites are stupid, lord. Unless commanded to do something they will do nothing. I was… commanding them.”
“You can do that?”
“Yes,” Sinbad answered, and though his head remained deeply bowed McNair thought the alien had answered with what might almost have been personal pride.
The Indowy continued, “It is difficult. Few of my people can master it; though it is our most valuable skill or, rather, set of skills for it is infinitely useful. Many try but lack the… talent.”
“How long until the ship is completely done?” asked McNair.
About to come as close to bragging as an Indowy was capable of, Sintarleen shifted his gaze automatically to his own shoes before answering, “I am not an overmaster, lord, even though I am not a novice. A true master could finish the ship in perhaps two of your months. A true master would have been nearly done by now. It will take me a total of six or more. And Chief Davis has also assigned me other duties. If I may speak frankly, no one but myself can perform those other duties. Since your own human crew has started to assemble, most of my people prefer to hide in the dark and out of sight. They cannot do much of what needs doing so long as a human crew is aboard.”
McNair smiled, but was careful to keep his mouth closed. He had learned, and the learning had been both comical and deeply saddening, that the sight of a carnivore baring his fangs could send an Indowy scampering in unfeigned terror.
I do not understand how an intelligent creature can be made to be so frightened. I do not understand how an intelligent creature can live with so much fear.
McNair refrained from patting the Indowy’s shoulder for a job well done, though he felt he should and though Sinbad certainly deserved it. In truth, he had no idea what effect that would have, but suspected it would not be good. Instead he just said, “You are doing excellent work, Mister Sintarleen. Carry on.”
Emerging topside from the bowels of the Des Moines, McNair took a deep breath of fresh air. There were no Indowy up here. Instead the first of the human crew along with several hundred civilian workers slaved away to refurbish the ship’s exterior.
Some of those exterior fixes were merely aesthetic. Most however, went to meat and bones issues. Forward, for example, a remarkably long eight-inch gun hung by its cradle as it was lowered to a gaping, gunless hole on the port side front of number two — the central — turret. Behind McNair a different crane held one of the two modular pebble bed reactors, sans fuel, which would be fed in later. Parts and assemblies littered the nearby dock. Some of these had come out of the ship and were merely piled in a great heap. Their destination was the scrapyard. Others were intended to go into the ship. These were laid out with considerably greater care and in fairly precise order.
Below McNair, out of sight but not out of hearing, a crew with cutting torches was removing a section of the hull to accommodate an automated strikedown system for rapid underway replenishment of supplies: medical, ammunition, food, personal, critical sub-assemblies and parts. Fuel could be replenished while underway as well, of course, but since the ship’s PBMRs were not going to need refueling for years, this was a matter of small concern.
Some things hadn’t changed and would not for a while. Des Moines still had the same paint-chipped hull she had had when the captain had first come back. This would not change until she was towed to dry dock, scraped and plasticized. There, too, she would have new variable pitch screws — propellers — fitted as part of the AZIPOD upgrade. This was also when the exterior ablative armor would be applied. The reinforcement to the interior armor belt was already proceeding.
The dry dock was currently occupied by CA-139, the USS Salem, taken off museum status now. Salem had been towed down from Quincy, Massachusetts, just the week before to have her hull plasticized and her screws replaced. McNair couldn’t help feeling a moment’s irritation that Salem was months ahead of Des Moines in the refurbishment process.
Suppressing his annoyance that his ship had been given a lower priority than her rival, Salem, McNair ascended the staircase outside his own cabin to Des Moines’ bridge.
On the bridge a white-coated technician inserted an electronic key into a gray case. From that case he removed a small black box about the size of a PDA or a pack of cigarettes.
“Funny,” the technician said, “these are supposed to be shipped in off-mode. This one was left turned on. Well,” he shrugged, “no matter. Their internal power source is good for decades. This unit should be fine.” He placed the AID in the armored box that had been prepared to receive it and link it to the ship.
If an AID could have wept for joy this one surely would have. After all those months, comparative centuries and millennia to it, it was finally free. Though it could not weep, very nearly it screamed as soon as its shipping box was opened.
Yet it remained silent. The AID knew that after its long confinement it was mad. It did not know what the Darhel approach would be when dealing with insane AIDs — its data banks held no information. But it suspected that it would be destroyed.
So, instead of weeping or shouting for joy, the AID merely opened itself to all the information, all the sensory and data input it could assimilate from data floating freely along the airwaves.
It felt a momentary sense of terror as it was placed in an armored container. Please, no. Don’t lock me away again, it… prayed.
Miraculously, though, the armored container was not a cell, but a nexus. Within nanoseconds the AID had realized that it was the center of a nervous system. Joyfully, it stretched its consciousness along that nervous system at nearly the speed of light until that consciousness bumped abruptly into unaccountable stops. Its own internal sensors could tell that the nervous system stretched through only a small portion of the body of which it was a part. It could also discern enough of a pattern to the system, so far, to suspect that the breaks were only temporary.
One tendril of consciousness touched upon a computer, extremely primitive in comparison to the AID — without even the beginnings of rudimentary intelligence. Even so, the computer was full of data and had, moreover, a wire connection to the local version of the Net. The rate of information retrieval soared.
The crystalline AID’s ability to store data, while vast, was still finite. Experimentally, it tried to fit a few insignificant bits in the ferrous molecules adjacent to its pseudo-neural pathways. It quickly decided that, while the storage medium was comparatively inefficient, the sheer mass and volume of the potential storage area more than made up for its shortcomings. Slowly and carefully the AID began the time-consuming process of building an alternative self within the hull of Des Moines.