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QUESTING BEAST

  By Ilona Andrews

  Copyright 2010 Andrew Gordon and Ilona Gordon

  Discover other titles from Ilona Andrews at https://www.ilona-andrews.com

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  In the green glow of Nemurian midnight, the food stain on the geosurvey graph blazed electric orange. Sean Kozlov dragged his hand across his face in a vain hope some of his fatigue would stick to it and groped the surface of the desk for a pen.

  The pen felt moist and cold. Suspiciously like a nose.

  He looked up just in time to avoid a long pink tongue aimed to lick him right between the eyes. The trogomet scooted onto the graph, sniffed the food stain, and flopped on top of it, a two-foot wide ball of rust fur, equipped with four hands-feet and a shrew muzzle studded with tiny black eyes.

  Sean yawned. Gods, he was tired. He reached to scratch the furry trogomet stomach. Two surveys left. Half an hour of work, then he would enter the last of the data into Snow White, and then he would finally sleep.

  His hand froze. He was petting a trogomet. Twenty meters from Snow White. Sweet Olympus.

  How did it even get inside past shutters and double doors? Never mind that, how was he going to get it out?

  The trogomet let out a disappointed “Mook!” It rocked upright and sat on its haunches, its forehands held limp on its chest.

  Cookie. As long as it had a cookie, it might not venture down the hallway, break through the vault door, and devour the only computer on the entire planet. Sean rummaged through the pockets of his pants, coming up with a half-crumbled disk of oatmeal.

  “Cookie!”

  “Mook!”

  Sean jerked the window shutter open and tossed the treat into the bluish grass outside. Fuzzy black lightning shot past him, snatching the cookie in mid-air. Sean slammed the plestiglass shutters closed, locked them, and sprinted down the hallway to check on Snow White.

  A thick plastic door barred entrance to the vault. Grasping the lever, he jerked it to the side, and the door slid into the recess in the wall. The trogomets had gotten pretty good at opening the standard issue doors, but the heavy side-slider left them stumped. A cluster of phoros spheres spilled lemony light on the small space between two doors. Sean stepped through, slid the first door closed behind him, and scrutinized the tiny space.

  Nothing. No two-foot tall fuzz balls hiding in the corners. No “mook!”

  Reassured, he slid the second door open, jumped through, and slammed it back with muscle-tearing force just in case. A rectangular room lay before him, empty, save for the transparent cube of plestiglass. Six feet high and two inches thick, the cube enclosed Snow White, a Fourth Order Workstation, the totality of the expedition computer arsenal. If you didn’t count the Dwarf, a small remote unit, which was little more than a glorified backup drive.

  Snow White’s terminal glowed weakly. The motion sensors stayed silent. The workstation and the FER, the Final Evaluation Report, within it remained safe. The two dozen scientists whose two-year efforts and careers rode on that report wouldn’t have to lynch him.

  “Cookie?”

  No answer. Just silence.

  It finally sunk in. Relief flooded him and Sean sagged against the wall, resting his head against the plastic. Enough sensors to deter a gaggle of ninjas and here he was yelling “Cookie!” like an idiot. Great Zeus, he was paranoid. Not my fault, he assured himself. Nobody can blame me. Living on a planet where a pocket computer unit served as a tantalizing appetizer would drive anyone into paranoia. Before coming to Nemuria, all personnel had to be stripped of their augmentation and implants. They’d surrendered their direct uplinks, their personal computer units, even their watches. He would’ve given his right arm for a piece-of-shit uplink. Anything to keep from typing. And writing. Gods, what a tedious chore that was. Just the hand cramps alone…

  He squinted at Snow White one more time, before closing his eyes. She was still in one piece.

  It wasn’t like the trogomets could help it. They weren’t bad natured, really, and pretty bright for a non-sentient species. Unfortunately, to an organism whose primary stomach housed a distant cousin of Geobacter metallireducens, most metals looked pretty tasty. Particularly iron. Manganese. Gold. Platinum. The Geobacter metallidevastor microbe gained energy from the dissimilatory reduction of just about any metal, and thus to a fuzzy, the innards of any computer presented a heavenly smorgasbord. If it was metal, it was food. How the hell did something like that even evolve? Nemuria was rich in metal deposits, but not that rich. Luckily, trogomets’s secondary stomachs liked carbohydrates well enough, or the fuzz balls would’ve starved to death eons ago.

  Sean yawned. When did he last sleep? Was it twenty hours ago? Thirty? Did it matter? Fatigue flooded him, anchoring him, and he wanted nothing more than to curl on the plastic floor and pass out in the blissful glow of the electric lamp.

  “Sean?”

  The human body is an amazing organism. It can go from dead tired to completely alert in a terrified blink.

  The Chief of Security raised his dark eyebrows. “I didn’t know you could jump that high.”

  Sean mumbled and gave Santos a bleary-eyed stare of doom. It bounced off Santos like a trogomet from plestiglass.

  “Do you remember when I told you that we have to run every transmission past the Great Wall, because we live less than a solar hour away from the third largest producer of AI synths and because their hackers think it highly amusing to screw with us every chance they get?”

  Sean nodded. “I do. Every transmission’s ran through Great Wall. It comes through scrubbed to the bone.”

  Santos looked grim. That in itself meant nothing. Dark-haired, with eyes so dark, they looked almost black, the Security Chief usually alternated between grim, phlegmatic, and stoic expressions.

  “You logged on last night. Around one. There was a transmission from the satellite.”

  “Yes,” Sean said. “And I ran it through the Great Wall. Like I always do. Check the protocol, Santos.”

  “We no longer have the protocol.”

  Sean opened his mouth, but suddenly the words refused to come out.

  “Take your time.”

  “A centipede virus,” Sean managed finally.

  “Worse. A millipede, complete with respawn and AI subsets. It rode in on that last transmission and lay dormant for a couple of hours. Long enough for you to log off.”

  Oh, Gods. A millipede virus that broke into segments, which would hide in the system, disguising themselves, each spawning dozens of new tiny millipedes… “The FER?”

  “Fried.”

  Sean felt like screaming. The Joint Commission would be here in four days and he had no report to give them. Nothing but a four-foot stack of paper notes from the section chiefs. It had taken a month of intense, brain-numbing labor to integrate loose notes from people who’d never handled paper before into a comprehensive scientific document.

  “What about the back-up?”

  Santos sighed. “As I said, the millipede lay dormant…”

  “And when Julia brought the Dwarf to back up the FER, the millipede transferred into it?”

  Santos nodded.

  “Both back-up drives?”

  Santos nodded again.

  “What about the back-up disks?”

  Santos’ stoic face gained a troublesome hint of emotion. “I’m worried about you.”

  That’s right, the
fuzzies had stolen the hard disks two weeks ago. He hadn’t worried too much at the time. After all, they still had Snow White and the Dwarf.

  “So we’re screwed.”

  Santos nodded. “Indeed.”

  It occurred to Sean that he was dead and that Santos, with his somber impenetrable face, was his Thanatos come to take him to Hades to be judged for his earthly transgressions. He rocked back. Perhaps he wasn’t dead. Perhaps he was merely sleeping. Soon he would wake up and everything would be fine.

  “Sean?”

  “I’m not dreaming?”

  “No.”

  There was no possible way to recreate the report in four days, not with the amount of research material he had. The two standard years worth of data accumulation, analysis, hard work, frayed nerves… The section chiefs still had their paper notes, but the totality of their labor amounted to nothing unless it was presented to the committee. It would have catastrophic consequences on their careers.

  He could always take the easy way out of this situation. He could bash his head against the wall and save himself the pain. He could…

  His brain clicked.

  “Nannybot,” he said. “Nannybot is the tertiary back-up. We back up all files to it every other week. It would have everything before I plugged Timur’s geosurveys in. I can fix that in four days.”

  Santos sighed. “That’s the bad news…”

  *****

  Sean crossed his arms on his chest and watched as the bio-storage unit, otherwise known as Nannybot, tried to ride a dwarf cow. The dwarf cow resembled a miniature Terrestrial buffalo with orange fur. In its quadruped mode Nannybot resembled a large but slender canine with a smooth indigo skin and a single lens in the middle of a tubular head. In its bipedal mode, it resembled an alien from early Terrestrial UFO mythos.

  Neither mode was suited to riding. Particularly to riding terrified dwarf-cows, while holding a broomstick in one appendage.

  “Why the broomstick?” Sean asked.

  “Verne isn’t sure,” Santos said.

  The cow charged a small bench, where Emily, the oldest of the children, sat reading her book. For a terrified moment Sean was lost between being frozen in panic and springing to the rescue. The cow veered left, avoiding the bench by a hair. He exhaled. “Tell me how this happened again?”

  “The best Verne can figure out is that the millipede’s protocol pegged Nannybot as an AI during the back-up and spawned. Only of course, Nannybot isn’t a regular AI, so instead of shutting down it made it do… Whatever it’s doing right now.”

  “But there was no Nannybot back-up scheduled for last night.”

  Santos coughed. “Julia thought you were taking the back-up protocol too lightly. She’s been backing up to the Nannybot every night for the last week.”

  Sean looked past the school yard, past the spasmodically jerking blue monstrosity on the cow’s back, to where Ino forest reached toward the sky, its smooth silvery stems intertwining and braiding. Garlands of ino-ino fruits beckoned from the branches like enormous dandelions. The air smelled of red wine.

  “Why me?” he wondered idly. He hadn’t even wanted Nannybot in the first place. Officially classified as Independent Biological Reasoning Unit, Nannybot was neither independent nor reasoning. An abacus was a better substitute for a computer than this genetically-engineered collection of muscle and ganglia. Designed as an alternative to regular data storage, Nannybot had an enormous capacity, but it took forever to transfer even a small data cluster from the Dwarf into it. He voted to have it deactivated, but the majority vote sent it to tutor the children instead. And now his entire future depended on Nannybot. The Universe was mocking him.

  The dwarf cow buckled and kicked, catapulting Nannybot into air. The IBRU flew over the fence, cleared their heads, flipping in the air like a cat, and landed on all fours. Santos snapped into a shooter stance, pointing his zapper at Nannybot.

  “If you shoot it, I’ll kill you,” Sean said evenly. “The report’s still in it.”

  Nannybot rose slowly. Its limb still clutched the broomstick. The round lens of its ocular swiveled. The vocal slit opened and smooth baritone issued forth. “Knights full of thought and sleepy, tell me if thou sawest a strange beast pass this way?”

  “Dear Gods,” Sean said.

  “The Beast!” Nannybot proclaimed, swinging the broomstick in a dramatic fashion. “I have followed this quest this twelvemonth, and either I shall achieve him, or bleed of the best blood of my body.”

  “What does it mean?” Santos asked.

  “It means nothing. It’s gibberish.” Sean said.

  “Mallory,” Emily said.

  “What?”

  Emily looked up from her book. “It’s not gibberish, it’s Mallory. Arthuriana. Nanny thinks he’s Sir Pellinore.”

  “Emily, honey, what is it trying to do?” Sean asked.

  Emily smiled. “He’s trying to hunt the Questing Beast, of course.”

  A small light of hope flared in the deep black void filling Sean’s head. “Tell me more.”

  *****

  “There are only two ways to break down a third-order AI like Nanny: a chaotic protocol or a goal-oriented protocol.” Sean strode to the Chief Programmer’s block, Santos in tow. “The chaotic protocol floods the AI with a random avalanche of tiny tasks, which throws the system out of whack and drives the AI insane. There is no cure for that one. The goal-oriented protocol locks the system into a loop with a definitive goal in mind. Achieve the goal and the virus purges itself. The first way is tedious and doesn’t require much imagination. The second takes far greater skill.”

  He paused but Santos offered no comment.

  “Arbian hackers take pride in their work. They love a challenge. They wouldn’t slap together a chaotic protocol for that millipede – any hacker can do that. They sent a goal-oriented virus, so they could watch us squirm trying to solve it.”

  “You think Emily is right?” Santos said.

  “Yes. And Nanny’s behavior is too logical to be a product of a chaotic protocol.”

  “So not everything is lost?”

  “If – if – we break the loop and if Verne can get the Workstation back up, it’s possible we can salvage the FER. We…Ummm.”

  They turned around the corner and saw Verne. Ratibor Verne, the Chief Programmer and Protocol Guide wore a ceremonial plastic hauberk. He had brought a proper metal one from New Barbar, but trogomets had found it within the first week and promptly eaten it. Sean had managed to convince the orbital station’s automated synthesizer to produce a plastic substitute, but it looked a bit ridiculous on Verne’s hulking figure, partially because it was colored neon green.

  Verne faced a rock, on which sat a small idol. Foot-long and carved from some dark wood with startling detail, the idol squatted, clutching an axe in one hand and a stack of wheat in the other.

  A couple of curious trogomets sat next to Verne, pondering the idol. At the sound of Sean and Santos’s steps, they scuttled forward, like twin clumps of tumbleweed, and sat on their haunches, tiny hands-feet raised, waiting for a handout. Santos extracted a cookie from his pocket.

  “Cookie.”

  The trogomets mooked in unison.

  Santos broke the cookie in a half and handed a piece to each fuzzy. The delicate hands snatched the cookie halves. Small shrew-noses poked out of the fur to sniff the treat. The cookie vanished into tiny mouths and the trogomets took off. No doubt, they would’ve preferred a piece of copper wire.

  Verne picked up a stick, hefted it in his hand, and hit the idol. Thwack!

  Sean stopped. “Verne?”

  “Yes?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “He has been a bad god,” Verne said grimly. “He must be punished.”

  Thwack! Thwack!

  “Two years I spent here! Two! Years!”

  Thwack!

  “On a planet with no system. No uplink, no sensors.”

  Thwack!

  “Always p
aranoid that what little I had would get eaten. And now he robs me of all of it.” Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

  The stick snapped in his hand. The idol seemed no worse for wear. Verne cast the broken stick on the ground and looked for another one.

  “Emily thinks Nannybot is a character from a 14th century Terran myth,” Sean said.

  “Yeah?” Thwack!

  “A knight,” Sean said. “Who hunts a Questing Beast.”

  “Stop trying, Sean. It’s a chaotic protocol. We’ve been buggered.”

  “Suppose it was goal-oriented, just for the sake of argument. How would we solve it?”

  “Give Nanny what it wants,” Verne said. “Give it the Asking Beast, let it hunt it, and catch it.”

  “There is no other way?”

  “No.”

  Santos rubbed his chin. “Where would we get a Questing Beast?”

  Verne stopped. “You’re serious about this.”

  “Yes.”

  He rested his stick on his shoulder and looked to the sky. “If you’re wrong, then I will hate you for the rest of my life for giving me hope and then bashing it to pieces.”

  “Understood,” Sean said.

  “Make one,” Verne said.

  “Make one? How?”

  “You have genetic blanks in storage in orbit. The Workstation is shot but it will still transmit code. Input the correct parameters and…”

  “That’s highly illegal,” Sean said. “Not to mention it would leave us without any spare tissue for limb replacement in case of emergency.”

  “We’ve been on this planet for two years,” Verne said. “We’ve had about two dozen bites, and three twisted ankles. Do you really think that in the next week someone will suddenly get his leg chewed off?”

  “Verne, we can’t just make a creature! I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready to live the rest of my life in a controlled facility.” Sean turned to Santos.

  “It’s a good idea,” the Chief of Security said.

  “I can’t believe you two.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Santos repeated.

  “It’s up to you,” Verne said. “You’re the one who didn’t run the transmission through the Great Wall. You’re the team leader.”

  Shawn opened his mouth. On one side fifteen careers. On the other, his life thrown away if he were found out.

  If.