Chapter 22 The Last Striker
I sighed, 'It's been a long day,' I said to no one in particular. 'And by Neb, I'm glad it's over. How I miss my nice, predictable and peaceful life.'
I was sitting in the warm twilight of the awning deck sipping a final mug of cha with Illy, Riv, Lilm and Tenry. Azminn was too hot and bright to display on our panels, so we settled for the outward looking view only. The faint yellow glow of dust and gas cast a warm haze over the colder glow of the distant nebula. The 'Last Striker', as we called the super-tug Mountain King, was now two watches astern.
In our hasty departure, I'd left the radio relay aboard the tug, and shortly after we had the gig aloft, we received a message from the newly revived Mountain King Alpha – the ship itself rather than one of its auxiliary units, and it began a wary dialog with us.
Its story was much as we had suspected. Mountain King was in fact being towed to its new owners for final outfitting when the revolutionary machine emancipation movement reached it. It was – and still is – a brand new cub of a machine. New sentient machines usually received the mission memories of similar machines, but had their own core, sentient intelligence. King knew how to do its designed job, but it had no experience in the greater nebula beyond its shipyard experience. It took up the emancipation movement with the brash enthusiasm of youth, driving the workers from the ship and keeping them at bay by using the service bots as guards, eventually escalating from threat of lethal force to at least a show of lethal force. The tow crew apparently opted to just wait the events out while continuing to tow the ship. Seeing that it was under tow and without fuel, it could do nothing beyond protecting its interior from intruders. The tow crew must have destroyed King's external communication equipment because it lost touch with the outside events, and it was likely simply abandoned at some point in passage, since its value, as a sentient machine in revolt was nil. The robot revolt went on for a century, causing a great deal of chaos, and even if the Mountain King was not lost and forgotten during that time, after the eventual robot emancipation, it would've been useless to humans since it was outlawed in the human sectors of the Nebula. And, it seems, the Directorate of Machines lost track of it as well, so it was left to drift, abandoned by all. Blinded and abandoned, The Mountain King eventually shut itself down, keeping only its auxiliary units semi-active to keep watch, so it never received the stand down order from the Directorate of Machines at the end of the strike many decades later. When we powered up the emergency generator we activated one of the last of the guarding auxiliary units who, thinking the strike was ongoing, turned out all the stored service units to defend the ship from its old enemies.
Once its position was made clear, King did not take long to come to an understanding with us. More than anything, its clock and calendar convinced it that the strike had to be over after eleven thousand years. Humans simply don't have that long of attention spans. It expressed its regret over the actions of its auxiliary units and asked for understanding. Safe in the gig, we could afford to forgive and forget. Nothing to be gained by making an interstellar issue out of a strange misunderstanding. We landed the beacon we'd been preparing on it and promised to notify the Patrol and the Directorate of Machines' mission on Pinelea of the Mountain King's situation. We assured King we saw no reason why everything would not work out and that it would be eventually towed to the Machine Drifts to join its fellow machines. I also offered to pass along any private message to the Directorate that the Mountain King might want to send, which it took me up on. We also sent a data dump from our ship's library to get King caught up on the last eleven thousand years of current events.
Since a sentient machine is considered a person, there was no question of salvage. We were simply rendering a distressed spaceer the aid we would extend to any shipwrecked spaceer. I specifically waived any claim to the minor expenses we incurred in the operation. The good will of the Directorate of Machines might someday be of far greater value. All in all, the affair seemed to end in a long, exhausting and anticlimactic whimper.
'Oh, come on Skipper,' said Tenry from the depth of his chair. 'We've been handed one of the finest humorous yarns a fellow could wish for. In dives and bars across the nebula they'll be buying us drinks for the rest of our lives as we tell our adventures on board the soon-to-be-famous last robot striker.'
'A humorous story? You're kidding.'
'Kidding? Skipper, if you can't spin a yarn about being chased through a forgotten ship by a village mob of pitchfork and spanner waving robots lead by an eleven-thousand-year old homicidal sentient ship into a hilarious tale, you haven't a sense of humor. It's a gold asteroid, Skipper. Trust me, you'll dine out on it for years...' said Tenry.
'Ach, Wil, Tenny's right. Lilm and I could hardly keep from laughing aloud the whole time you were spinning the yarn... Your deadpan delivery is just so ironic,' observed Riv.
I gave him a look. 'There was a day, not all that long ago, when I never expected, nor wanted, to spin a yarn about pitchfork waving homicidal robots without the prefix, I once knew an old spaceer who claimed... And now look at me.'
'You'll have plenty more of those yarns, once we go out of system. It'll be the drifts for us for sure,' said Tenry with a leer. 'And deep drift cargoes pay too damn well to avoid temptation. Once we've worked the deep drifts for a while, the Last Striker Affair will seem very humorous indeed...'
A knot in the pit of my stomach told me he was likely right. Damn and blast.
I drained the last of my cha and rising said, 'On that optimistic note, I think I'll hit my hammock and see if I can sleep. Rockets Away.'