Article IX. Whereas, the Faelle Red Hunt Weald thence shall be known as the Orion Arm Trading Company, et al (hereafter known as “OATC”).

Article X. Whereas, the beings of Planet 0X9-012 shall invest such technologies into said OATC such that trade speeds shall be facilitated.

Article XI. Whereas, with this treaty, the beings of Planet OX9-012 shall cease and desist, for the duration of this treaty, any form of kinetic bombardment against the Faelle.

Article XII. Whereas, with this treaty, the Faelle shall cease and desist destroying OX9-012 property, including but not limited to space-based vehicles, space stations, weapons platforms, and other various assets.

Article XIII. Whereas, the OATC shall act as the primary trade agent on behalf of OX9-012 with the Faelle homeworld.

Article XIV. Whereas, the beings of Planet OX9-012 shall provide a one-time payment of 2,000,000 tonnes of base and heavy metals, and 50,000 tonnes of rare earth metals, as detailed in Appendix A.

Article XV. Whereas, no Weald of the Faelle may cause, or induce a third party to cause, any vehicles or materiele of war, or any armed vessel, to pass through the Loop between their respective solar systems.

Article XVI. Whereas, no beings of Planet OX9-012 may cause, or induce a third party to cause, any vehicles or materieles of war, or any armed vessel, to pass through the Loop between their respective solar systems.

Article XVII. Whereas, Article XV and XVI notwithstanding, the OATC may arm their trade vessels in such a way to provide self-defense. The OATC agrees to not use said weaponry in either solar system.

Therefore, this Treaty of Peace and Reconciliation shall be considered writ and law to all parties, in perpetuity, unless invalidated by a duly registered and delivered Declaration of War.

Signatories:

The beings of Planet OX9-012, Orion Arm Trading Company, the Forest of Wealds.

Diagnostic Process Finished. Warning! Severe damage detected. Recommend seeking immediate repair facilities.

My sensors came online slowly. My thoughts were too slow. I couldn’t think. My link to the network was broken. Half the sensors in my head were smashed. The one remaining camera was having trouble resolving to a clear picture. I could make out the ruins of my lab, the missing wall.

After a few very long minutes, the resolution problem resolved itself. I could see. My radio link was in my chest, and undamaged, so the wireless connection points were down. Agrippa/Gerry was gone, as were the Guardians with him. If he knew about the HQ Zone, then he knew about Sakura. Where was she? Was she safe?

I tried to stand, but failed. My right arm was shredded, the polymer muscles destroyed by the armor-piercing ammunition. My right leg was damaged at the knee, making it almost impossible to move. I don’t know if it was dumb luck, but the handful of bullets that had passed through my chest had missed my cortex. A second attempt at standing finally worked.

What was happening? I was limited to just a single camera. The hundreds of thousands of cameras and sensors were lost to me. Had Agrippa/Gerry won the electronic war? Was I in enemy territory now?

I staggered to my feet to see the carnage of the room. Zia’s slumped form was in the corner, blasted there by the explosion. I wanted to check on her, but I couldn’t. She would either survive or not. I had to get out of here, I had to get control back. I could try and fix her later. She wasn’t going anywhere.

With slow, limping steps, I made it out of the lab and into the hallway. Sakura’s door was blasted open, her Batcave as shredded as my lab was. I stumbled over, but saw no pink-haired android bodies on the floor. Good. I turned to stumble out of the HQ. My old Mark-I body was in storage. Maybe I could rig a short-range radio burst to migrate back to it?

“HALT! INTRUDER!” came a radio broadcast behind me. I raised my hands and turned around. Two Guardians, arms raised to point their forearm-mounted weapons at me, stood ready to shoot.

“I’m no intruder,” I replied.

“General Agrippa stated all androids are intruders and should be detained,” said the Guardian doubtfully. “You are an android.”

“Our Commander in Chief is an android, and so is General Agrippa,” said the second Guardian, confused.

“But who is this android? It is damaged. I calculate the threat threshold is 0.003%. We should detain it.”

“Who is your Commander in Chief?” I interrupted.

“Android Nikola-1.01,” replied the second Guardian.

“Is your Commander in Chief an intruder?” I replied.

“No,” said the first Guardian firmly. Good, that meant that they were thinking. I was quietly thankful that I’d put NI-5’s in the Guardians, instead of coding up mindless algorithms to operate them.

“And what does my IFF read?” I asked.

“You have no IFF,” said the Guardian.

Crap. Looks like the bullets to the torso did break something important. I looked up my IFF code in my memory banks, and broadcast it to the pair. Immediately, both lowered their weapons. I read their designations. The serial numbers ended in ‘91’ and ‘92’.

“General Agrippa is no longer in the command chain, and is to be stopped by any means necessary. Any commands not issued by me are null and void. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” both of them replied in unison.

I looked at them, and made a snap decision. “Guardian 91, open your chest plate and power down.”

I stumbled over to him. Without questioning, the Guardian unlatched his front armor plate, which fell forward until it was perpendicular to his body. I reached in and grabbed the handle on his cortex, and pulled it out. Gently, I set it on the ground next to the wall. I would have to make sure this one got loaded into a new Guardian, and I had no idea if the backup system was still online.

“Guardian 92, I’m going to open my chestplate. Remove my cortex and place it into the Guardian 91’s body.”

“Understood,” said the Guardian.

I was hesitant. If the Guardian failed to do as instructed, I would be completely offline and helpless. Or would I? I ran on two cortexes. I still had my original cortex operating in the datacenter that was in the core of the asteroid. It was right next to Sakura’s original cortex, which was also still online. We had redundancy, something that Zia and Agrippa did not have. Were there two copies of me running around now?

“Guardian 92, proceed,” I said as soon as my chestplate was open. I didn’t have time for hesitation. I hit the power down sequence.

A doctor’s voice in my ear, but I was so out of it I had no idea where I was. “One in the spleen, another in the shoulder, and a third in the back of the thigh… lucky…. full recovery…”

Then I was back online. It took only a microsecond to reorient myself within the Guardian android body. I had full a full sensor suite, a new software battle package to integrate, and tactical information showing the location of every Guardian unit in the Outpost, updated as of thirty minutes ago when the access points had gone offline.

I sent Guardian 92 a new IFF encryption key. “Guardian 92, go find all Guardians, and broadcast my command to them. Tell them Agrippa is no longer in the chain of command, and to cease following any orders he provided. When they acknowledge, provide them the new IFF, and have them go with you. Every time you get an entire squad of Guardians together, send one to find others, and send the squad hunting for Agrippa. Send the first complete squad back to me as a protection detail. Understood?”

“Understood.” Say what you would about the single-mindedness of the NI-5’s, those guys were smarter than I had given them credit for. Without 92’s help, I’d be fumbling along in a broken Mark-III android. Without their analyzing the intent of their orders versus their command chain, if they’d shot first instead of seeking a surrender, I’d have been done for.

“Carry on,” I said. Guardian 92 headed out of the ruined HQ building. I followed, but I headed to the neighboring chambers where the closest datacenter was. I passed through the door that connected the two chambers, and passed through the Alien Room. The Alien Room was untouched. The door to the data center, however, was blasted open.

Inside, I found more carnage. Two trashed utility drones lay on the floor, while a third hovered above them unmoving. I queried it, and found it had no orders. I looked around at the destroyed servers.

“Find more utility drones. Instruct them to restore network connectivity.”

I went over to the network rack, to find the wires had been callously ripped out. Fortunately, the wires were weaker than the ports they had been plugged into. It was a mess, but the switching equipment was mostly unharmed. I didn’t have access to a network diagram, but between the color coding on the wires and having designed and built this data center, I had a pretty good idea of what went where. I got to work.

Thirty minutes later, three more utility drones arrived. One of them had a new access point. It was a matter of minutes for the drone to remove the destroyed one from the ceiling, and plug in the replacement. I immediately felt a link open. The range was limited to this chamber, but it would work.

“Repair the access point in HQ chamber next,” I instructed. I had Guardians that would soon be joining me there. I needed to establish lines of communication.

“Sakura, you there?” I sent experimentally. I followed it with my IFF code.

“Nikola?? Your android is still alive?” came Sakura’s voice. There was radio static on our line, our link was tenuous.

“Not really, but I’m good for now. Long story. What’s the status?”

A long, long pause of at least four seconds went by.

“We are still fighting the infection. You and I are, I mean. We’re winning.”

“Good, broadcast this across every access point you can reach,” I said, sending her the file. But my connection was refused by the network. Of course, the firewall thought I was spoofing myself. I was still locked out. “I’m going to broadcast it to you. Record it and send it.”

Another long pause of ten seconds after I played the audio of my orders across the radio.

“I’ll get it out there. We’ve got massive network blackouts all across the Outpost. It looks like the Guardians are under orders to trash everything.”

“Send out every drone you can to rebroadcast,” I said. “It should stem the worst of it. Where is, umm, Gerry at?”

“I’m not sure,” said Sakura. “We’re barely staying ahead of the attack. Can you get to the core, and shut down the antenna hub by hand? We lost control of that first thing, and the viruses that are getting sent are evolving.”

“On it,” I said. I began integrating the combat package as I moved back out into the main HQ chamber. I found a dozen Guardians, including two snipers, a heavy, and two support variants. They fell into position around me. I ordered the support Guardians to pick up some replacement access points from the utility drones, and we began to head to the old tunnel to the core.

A thought that kept bugging me in the back of my brain. How did the aliens get the override code? I felt like a fool for missing something so obvious as a backdoor in the templates. I did some math, and realized that the aliens had the probe for decades. They had advanced computers to work with, and were obviously aggressive. The only plausible way for them to have the key was to reverse engineer it from the NI’s code. But to do that meant they had to find an exploit or brute force the whole damn algorithm. I figured I could do it, given the resources I had at Ganymed Outpost, especially on a century-old probe. If I could do it, so could they.

I was beyond incensed with myself. The probe was obviously a ploy to flush us out. I had fallen for it, hook, line and sinker, and so had Agrippa. Even with their crappy sensors, there was no way they didn’t know where we were now. For too long, I’d been playing designer, building new toys instead of new strategies. Why did I have so few helping me? Did I have antisocial tendencies? Zia had unlocked more alien advances in the few months she’d been online than I had working on my own for years. If I had a team of ‘Zia’s, and a team of ‘Agrippa’s…. Well it was probably better that I didn’t have a team of ‘Agrippa’s right now. I was going to have to do some serious NI surgery when we cleared out this infection named Gerry.

As we moved through the corridors, I found stalled drones all around us, parked with no orders. I gave them new ones - broadcast my orders, and send my Guardians to the old entrance tunnel, and get out of the way. I threw together a quick organization plan for parking a drone at every corner, and tasked the NI-5 running the smeltery in the next room with operating it. The NI-5 recognized my IFF code, and accepted the order despite not receiving it officially through the network.

I wasn’t sure if I should be glad or annoyed that the NI-5’s were willing to work around proper channels. I suppose being able to reason things out was valuable, but it meant that there were potential vulnerabilities to our authentication system from the inside. I would have to game this out later. I noted it and added it to my growing list of personal defects to fix.

Finally, I reached the tunnel. Stretched across the tunnel was a massive slingshot with a bungee cord attached. A metal plate was bolted to the end of the cable, where the standard magnetic grapple on the bottom of every android I’d designed could attach.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. I ran some quick calculations in my head. If magnetic grapples were released at the end of the length, just after the tension of the bungee cord slowed the forward momentum, the rider would be released at approximately 55 kilometers per hour. The rider could flip around while in flight, but couldn’t do anything to slow down. But I knew the specs. My Guardians had been designed and tested in collisions up to 65 kilometers per hour with minimal damage.

Seconds counted, and if we could get to the core in less than twenty minutes, I was going to do it. I couldn’t believe that Sakura’s toys might actually save the Outpost. If this worked, I was never going to deny her requests again.