Backyard Starship

Book 1: Backyard Starship

by J.N. Chaney, Terry Maggert

Genres: Space Exploration; Science Fiction; Alien Invasion

Synopsis

When Van Tudor returns to his childhood home, he inherits more than the family farm.

His grandfather used to tell him fantastic stories of spacemen and monsters, princesses and galactic knights. Little did Van realize, the old man's tales were more than fiction. They were real.

Hidden beneath the old barn, Van's legacy is waiting: a starship, not of this world.

With his combat AI, an android bird named Perry, Van takes his first steps into the wider galaxy. He soon finds that space is far busier and more dangerous than he could have ever conceived.

Destiny is calling. His grandfather's legacy awaits.

Embark on the adventure of a lifetime with USA Today Bestselling Author J.N. Chaney and Terry Maggert in this brand new science fiction series. If you're a fan of found spaceships and galactic quests for glory, this might just be the story you've been waiting for.

Release date: September 19, 2021

Publisher: Variant Publications

Print pages: 510

Sample

Chapter 1

The rain slammed down in hard, unrelenting sheets, rattling on the rental car like bullets and almost drowning out the rhythmic thump of the wipers. In one hand, I held my phone, a custom-built unit that did everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. Its screen, and the glow from the dashboard, offered the only steady light. Beyond the windows sprawled nothing but rainy gloom, split by sporadic flashbulb bursts of lightning.

My phone wasn’t why I was here, though. At least, not directly. I really was just using it for light. It was the thing in my other hand that had brought me to this place, at this time, sitting in an idling car on a gravel driveway with water sluicing from puddle to puddle.

Another flare of lightning blew apart the night. Its brief crystalline glare etched the shape of a farmhouse and a fence, beyond them a barn, and beyond that the rolling fields that had been my family’s land for—hell, I wasn’t sure how many generations. At least four. Maybe five.

Until recently, it had all been my grandfather’s. God’s green acre, he called it, a rambling farm granted to my family by the railroad at the end of the Civil War. The tracks still ran along the west edge of the property, in fact—

Another flash of lightning. This time, my gaze stayed inside the car, on the documents unfolded in my lap. They looked important, all purposeful text and signatures and seals embossed right into the paper. They even felt important, much heavier than the paper alone. They bore down with the weight of meaning.

Of course, any document starting …being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath… was weighty and important. These papers were a bridge, vaulting from one generation to the next. Or, in this instance, the generation after that. In any case, they were an end, closing another chapter of my family’s lineage, bringing it right up to date. But they were a beginning, too.

…being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath all property and goods and chattels above and below the surface of Blackthorn Farm, address County Road 1100, Pony Hollow, Iowa, United States of America. (Earth), to my grandson, Clive VanAbel Tudor III.

I had to smile at that last bit about Earth. “Just in case it got mistaken for Iowa, Mars,” I said to the page. “You always were thorough, Gramps.”

I killed the engine, freezing the wipers in mid-stroke. Rainwater celebrated this little victory by cascading down the windshield. I folded up the will, tucked it and the car key in my jacket pocket, and prepared to step out into the storm.

As soon as I gripped the door handle, the front door to the house opened, an island of warmly inviting golden light amid the rainy gloom. It framed a woman—small, older, tidy. Miryam Nunzio, our family’s attorney, and my grandfather’s friend. She was here to deal with the last wishes of a man who lived as he died—with secrets.

I popped open the car door and ran. It didn’t matter, of course. Some things are simply too fast or relentless to avoid. Like the rain.

Or the future.

* * *

I pounded up the front steps to the house, muttering curses as water squelched between my toes. It seemed like I’d managed to slam my feet down into every puddle between the car and the porch. Miryam let me in the house, shaking her head in disapproval as I stalked past her while dripping on the ancient hardwood floor and then toed off my sodden shoes.

“You were never a clean boy. Smart as the proverbial whip, but never clean,” she said, taking my jacket.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s raining,” I snapped back, but that drained all the snap out of me. I sagged a bit and smiled. “I’ll take it as a compliment, though. The smart part, anyway.”

A quiet pall hung over the house. I heard only the tick of the grandfather clock in the living room and the soft, irregular patter of water dripping from both me and my coat on the floor. Miryam and I found ourselves just standing, staring at each other, kneading the silence with our grief.

Although, grief is a funny thing. I missed my grandfather, but more in the way something that had just always been a part of my life suddenly wasn’t. Miryam, I suspected, missed him much more. I was pretty sure this wasn’t her first time in the old house on a cold, rainy autumn night.

Another second or two and the silent moment would topple into awkward. On impulse, I stepped forward and hugged Miryam. She hugged me right back. She had known me since birth, and I’d grown up with her as much a fixture in my life as my grandfather had been. She was a confidant, a friend, and sometimes even the mother I didn’t have.

She finally pulled away. “You’re soaking wet. And now, so am I.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, there’s coffee on, and your room is ready. He never changed anything up there. Not since you left, anyway.”

“You know, at the risk of dripping on the hardwood some more, I think I’ll grab that coffee first. I took the red-eye out of Atlanta and got to spend four amazing hours enjoying a layover in Chicago.”

She smiled and made a follow me gesture. A few minutes later, we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, steaming mugs in hand. Again, the silence fell like a shroud. But I could see Miryam struggling to formulate something, words that would break it, but in the right way.

I made it easy. I just asked.

“How?”

She nodded. “A stroke, I think, but we’re not really sure. He was a big man, but at the end, he was… depleted. Small.” Miryam shook her head, her brown eyes hard with sudden anger—the worst sort. Anger at circumstances, at the universe. “It’s no way to go. Not for him, not for anyone.” She sighed and seemed to exhale the anger with it. Tears suddenly glistened in her eyes. “Especially not him.”

“So you don’t think—”

“He was killed because of what he did? No, I don’t. And believe me, I looked. I checked his room over—discreetly, of course. Had a heart-to-heart with the coroner—I know him pretty well—and he found nothing unusual either. Whatever happened to him was—it was natural. If you can call it that. All I know for sure is that no one from that life cared when he—when he went to lick his wounds and die.”

Bitterness shot through Miryam’s words like the lightning still occasionally pulsing through the windows. I nodded, thinking about those wars he fought in. El Salvador. Honduras. Bosnia. Others, places he refused to name. Dangerous places, mostly on the periphery of the headlines but sometimes not in the headlines at all.

Black ops, they were called. A sinister term, even though my grandfather insisted that they were considered black mostly because the details were kept off the government’s accounting books, all of them rendered into a single, bland line item in a budget—Non-specified operational costs, one gazillion dollars. He’d always said it like a joke, but I never missed how his smile or laugh never seemed to quite touch his eyes. His mouth might have said one thing, but he gazed at something very different, something painful.

My father had followed in his footsteps but in a more conventional way. Instead of the shadowy, silent world of special ops, he’d chosen the exact opposite, big and showy. He’d gone Navy, fighting Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf and pirates off the Horn of Africa and amid the island sprawl of Malaysia, and staring down Chinese warships in the waters around Taiwan. He met an untimely end almost four years ago when a Super Hornet fighter crashed while landing on the carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Indian Ocean. You didn’t get much bigger and showier than that.

And then there was me.

I joined the Army, of course, with vague plans to go Airborne, or Rangers, or some such hard-assed outfit, because what twenty year-old didn’t imagine they could fight bad guys with a knife clenched in their teeth. I was ninety-nine percent committed to it. The trouble was that one percent, which turned out to be my right knee. Flexion deformity, it was called. My knee worked just fine through a normal range of movement, but I couldn’t bend it through the last ten degrees or so most people could. It was enough to wash me out of all except the most basic of military trades. But trading Rangerfor cook or vehicle mechanic wasn’t going to cut it, so I left after only four years.

And I took my bitter frustration—well, here, actually. I came to live with my grandfather, and he taught me the finer points of hunting and fishing and shooting. And all the while, he went out of his way to express how proud he was of me. My father, too. I knew both men were still a little disappointed. I could see it in their eyes. But, strangely, both seemed even more relieved that I wouldn’t be following them into the service. I never asked either of them about it, and now I couldn’t.

But they weren’t nearly as disappointed as I was in myself. I was determined to be a warrior, and if I couldn’t wage it on a real battlefield, I’d wage it in the virtual one. I jammed myself back into school and immersed myself in a sort of warfare that didn’t care about trick knees—the electronic kind. Maybe, I thought, I could fight our nation’s foes with weapons made of data, IP packets and route sniffers and encryption-crackers. If I couldn’t stick the knife in my teeth, maybe I could support those who did from behind a monitor. Maybe I could even find solutions to burgeoning conflicts before men like my father and grandfather had to get involved at all.

So I went to war after all, but a quiet one, fought through back doors and hacked firewalls, wielding secrets and disinformation so grand that the truth was often reduced to a myth. I got very good at it and started picking up contracts—mostly the white-hat sort, but a few were grey, and one or two were as black as anything my grandfather had ever done. I rarely left my apartment, which overlooked a park in the suburbs of Atlanta. The people living around me—Janet, the guitar-playing loans manager next door, or Missus Evans with her multitude of cats across the hall—none of them knew how their lives were open books: for sale or for the taking. Either was possible for the right price.

“Hello?”

I looked up. “Sorry?”

“You were somewhere far away, Van,” Miryam said.

“I was just… remembering.”

She nodded. “Oh, I’ve spent a lot of time in this house doing that these past couple of days. Anyway, I should be going. I just wanted to make sure you got in okay and got the keys to the—to your house. They’re over there on the counter.”

“Thanks, Miryam. I really appreciate it.”

I followed her back to the front door. “I’ll be back in the morning. I think you pretty much know what decisions you have to make.” She pulled on her jacket, then leaned up to kiss my cheek. I leaned down, in turn, to let it happen, but I was a little numb to it.

My house. Not my grandfather’s house. Not anymore.

Mine.

* * *

I watched Miryam’s headlights flash as she turned her car around, then dim as she pulled away into the night. The rain seemed to have slackened, so I stuck my sodden shoes back on, jogged out to my own car, retrieved the single backpack I carried as luggage, and hurried back into the house. The oil furnace kicked on as I shut out the night behind me. I once again pulled off my shoes, considered more coffee, and decided against it. It was late, and I was tired. Instead, I squelched wetly up the stairs.

The last time I’d climbed them was-- some time ago, and I felt a pang of guilt at that passage of time. I’d gone from childhood, to an awkward teenager, and beyond in that house. For years, I’d been a kid who stayed hidden away from the world in this remote piece of the Midwest, lost in my books and the electronics workbench I kept out in the barn. That boy was long gone now. But so was my father, at least in the sense of feeling any real sort of closeness. And, of course, my grandfather, who was just gone.

My feet instinctively turned left at the top and took me to an open door. The first thing to catch my attention was a poster on the wall, pronouncing a 2011 concert date in Chicago for Coldplay. The music world might be like the shady world of internet security—what thrived today was obsolete and forgotten tomorrow—but I still liked that band. The hours on the bus to attend that concert had been one of the few major excursions I made off the farm until I finally left it for good eight years ago.

I sniffed and shook my head. Left it for good. Yeah, okay, except here I was.

“Kinda like being seventeen again, except for the acne,” I said to my old room, stepping in and dumping my backpack on the bed.

It was, as Miryam said, ready. Actually, more than just ready. More like utterly unchanged. I could have just clomped up the stairs, fresh off the bus from a day of high school. A time capsule.

I undressed and draped my damp clothes over a chair I maneuvered over the warm air register. Then, with movements made of memory and the creak of old floorboards, I brushed my teeth and readied myself for bed. Sliding under the blanket and comforter, into the coolness of the sheets, I finally let out a long, slow breath.

I’d expected grief, and there was some, sure. I missed my grandfather. He’d been more of a father figure than my father had. But if my sadness had any focus, it was less on that he died, but rather how he died. Larger-than-life men like my grandfather were supposed to have larger-than-life deaths. They were meant to end in desperate struggles against impossible odds, not the mundanity of a stroke or heart attack.

But, as I rolled over, I gave myself a mental jab. That was a boy’s way of thinking about his hero. Facing a stroke or heart attack was every bit as desperate a struggle against impossible odds as a firefight. If anything, I felt bad more because Miryam had implied it hadn’t been quick, the finality of a bullet. She hinted that he’d lingered, which meant that there might have been time for me to see him before he passed away. If only I’d stayed in closer touch—

Thunder boomed, truncating the thought. I nodded to the storm and its elemental wisdom. Good point. Don’t go down the if only road—just don’t, because it never led anywhere good.

I wondered what the morning would bring? What time would Miryam return? Should I set an alarm?

Nah. Screw it. Morning could wait—

Beep.

I turned back toward the door, frowning.

Beep.

Lightning flickered and thunder muttered, but more distant, as the storm rolled off to the east.

Beep.

Shit.

I levered myself out of my bed, which had started to warm up quite nicely, and planted my feet on the cold hardwood. Smoke detector, I thought. Dying battery. I’d just rip it out and risk spending one night without its dumb vigilance watching over me—

Beep.

I stopped. The sound hadn’t come from above me, in the hallway, where I could see a tiny red LED glowing from the smoke detector. It had come from behind me, back in my bedroom.

 

 

Chapter 2

I turned to face the room.

Beep.

Huh. Eight years ago, nothing in this room made any persistent beeping sounds. Nor had I heard it, it occurred to me, before I climbed into bed. I was sure of it. And Miryam was a careful woman, fiercely attentive to details. It was kind of implied in her job.

Beep.

So that meant two things. There was something new in my room. And either Miryam hadn’t known about it or hadn’t told me about it. Her deliberately not telling me about it wouldn’t have even occurred to most people, but most people didn’t have a grandfather who’d done shadowy things in shadowy global corners.

Was she afraid someone might be listening?

Beep.

It was entirely possible, I supposed, that someone from my grandfather’s past was watching him. And now, in turn, they watched me, incidentally or not. He had controlled a lot of money, as well a lot of secrets. And his past wasn’t thatdistant. Knowledge of the things he’d done could probably still hurt people working in the government now.

A bit of a thrill shivered through me. The thought of being watched—while standing in the doorway to my room in my underwear—was actually kind of dumb, even funny. But it was also titillating, in the way that virtually poking around in someone’s computer halfway around the world, while they sat nearby, was titillating.

Beep.

I’d been waiting for it this time. The sound pulled my attention to the battered rolltop desk beside the window. It was filled with science fiction books—stories of dragons, and heroes who never took a bullet. The sound came from inside it. Left-hand side. Second drawer, I was pretty sure.

More distant thunder muttered, and I took that moment to pad across to the desk, pull open the drawer—

Beep.

—and pick up a—

A remote?

It looked like a remote, anyway, but heavier, with the polished heft of something meant to last. It rested easily in the palm of my hand. The metal—at least I was pretty sure it was metal, though it also had kind of a glassy luster to it—was cool and featureless, but a sense of hidden depths lay beneath it. On the back was a small disc, barely recessed and made to be pushed.

I hesitated. My grandfather must have left this here on purpose. In another home, I’d have just passed it off as what it seemed to be—a fancy remote. But given my grandfather’s past, it might be more than that, with a purpose well beyond any apparent use.

As soon as I had that thought, though, something else struck me. It hadn’t beeped since I picked it up.

And then there was that damned button just begging to be pushed.

I should just put it aside until morning.

But that wasn’t going to work, and I knew it. I could be patient if I had to but, by nature, I needed to know things. I needed to see and learn. It was baked right into the mindset of a cyberwarrior whose battlespace shifted and changed by the minute.

So I got dressed in dry clothes from my backpack, went downstairs, and waited for the rain to stop. I wasn’t sure why. I just had some vague sense that if something happened, I didn’t want to get rained on and wet through again. So I waited thirty-eight minutes. That was how long it took for the line of squalls to finally roll beyond Pony Hollow and scud northeast to punish Garnavillo for a while, before pushing on to Wisconsin.

Less than an hour, and I was still sitting in the kitchen, trying to convince myself to push that damned button. Outside, the world dripped in darkness, the soft, steady plink of water from eaves and trees a far cry from the storm’s fury when I first arrived.

I was dithering.

So I shrugged and pushed the button. It recessed, but slowly, like the mechanism was tired or old. The circular spot only sank a quarter inch or so, but it was apparently enough to cause—something. Deep blue light suddenly glimmered beneath my finger. I pulled it away to find—

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

My fingerprint had been impressed on the button in soft whorls of blue light, perfect in every detail. The effect lasted for a few seconds, then faded.

And that was that.

“Huh.”

Whatever it was, it seemed to incorporate a biometric lock, a fingerprint reader that would only activate the device. While that was tech I understood, it was certainly not expected, and my only source of information was Miryam, who I respected too much to bother again. We were both in an hour of grief, and the remote, or object, could wait until morning. I placed it on the table with a deliberate motion, then closed my eyes as the weight of the day began to catch up with me.

Tap.

I twitched at the sound, my eyes snapping open with instant awareness.

Not a beep this time. A tap—distinct, sharp, and right in front of me on the window over the sink. I stood and moved to the glass, then realized I couldn’t see a damned thing except my own reflection. It was truly pitch black outside, meaning the barn light was out, probably cooked off in the storm.

I moved to turn off the kitchen light to get rid of its glare—

Tap tap.

I jumped back. Something had indeed just banged against the glass maybe a foot or two away from my face.

What the hell?

I thought about going to the back door and walking around the house to see what was out there. But the thought of squelching through wet grass and mud in that thick gloom to find myself facing—something—didn’t appeal to me at all. Instead, I did go and snap off the kitchen light, then returned to the window and lifted it.

Something large and dark immediately pushed through the opening. For the third time, I felt a pang of nervous curiosity as my eyes tried to make sense of the moving object before me. The dark shape bounced on the edge of the sink with a sharp rattle and leapt to perch on the back of a chair.

It was a bird.

But a bird wholly unlike any I’d ever seen in Iowa, or, well, anywhere for that matter. Big, the size of a large eagle, with eyes that seemed to glow golden—not from reflected light but from some place behind them. Its feathers were blacker than space, its silver talons glittered like daggers, and its beak looked as though it could shear my hand off.

I stared.

It stared back.

Finally, the bird cocked its head at me and spoke in a smooth baritone with a hint of something like wind chimes.

“You rang?”

* * *

“I—”

“You should get dressed,” the bird said.

A flicker of reason finally found its way to my mouth.

“You can talk.”

“An astute observation. And it doesn’t change the fact that you should get dressed.”

I glanced around, then scraped my finger across the corner of the kitchen counter, hard. It hurt, just like it was supposed to. I’m awake, and aware. Good to know.

But the talking bird didn’t vanish, or even stop talking, like it was supposed to.

“A test to determine if you’re dreaming, am I right?” the bird asked, glancing at my finger.

My voice crackled to life after a moment. “Can you blame me?”

“I suppose not. At least as long as you don’t bumble around convinced you’re dreaming, or crazy—oh, that’ll be next, by the way, the thinking you must be going crazy part. Anyway, there are things we need to do, so please, get it all out of your system right now.”

I held up a hand. “Okay, wait a second. I get it. You’re a talking bird. Like a parrot, or—I hear ravens can be taught to speak as well.”

“You’ve never owned a parrot, or ever really interacted with one, have you?”

“I—no. Why?”

“Because if you had, you’d know that they don’t actually speak. They mimic. Therefore, unless your grandfather spent a lot of time drilling this particular conversation into me so I could flawlessly mimic it in this particular way—” The bird cocked its head. “You’re a smart guy. What are the odds of that working?”

I could only shrug. “No idea. I don’t know what factors are involved, the variables—”

“Take a guess.”

“Probably not very high.”

“There you go. So keeping with the smart guy thing, here’s the next logical place your mind should go. Maybe I’m not actually a bird at all…”

The bird ended it with a dramatically sinister flourish. All it was missing was an ominous burst of organ music.

I almost laughed. Almost. Well, if this is what going crazy is like, it could be a lot worse, I suppose.

“Okay, I’ll play along. If you’re not a bird, what are you?”

“Metal-ceramic composite chassis with a quantum neural net, broad-spectrum sensors, on-board fusion power-cell, and a mono-bonded feathering system that allows actual flight.” The creature spread its wings—an impressive sight, as they were nearly six feet across—and promptly knocked the mug containing the last dregs of my unfinished coffee off the counter. As it banged to the floor, the bird settled them again with a tidy metallic flick.

“Sorry about that,” the bird said, glancing at the small puddle of cold coffee.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied, but I only had eyes for the bird. Another possibility was taking shape amid the swirling tumble of thoughts now spinning through my mind. It had been triggered by words like metal-ceramic compositeand quantum neural net. Tech words. In other words, my language. They finally gave my thoughts some traction, letting me start arranging them back into something resembling sense.

So maybe I wasn’t dreaming, I wasn’t crazy, and this bird was real, as in a real piece of advanced military hardware that my grandfather had somehow kept under wraps here, on the farm. Whether he’d done that deliberately, which might mean he’d stolen the damned thing, or somehow just managed to die without returning it, I wasn’t sure.

“See, if your grandfather had better prepared you for this, we wouldn’t have to go through this whole shock and wonder step,” the bird said.

“Shock and wonder—?”

“Yes. The part where you start by thinking you’re dreaming, or going crazy, and then you slowly come to believe it's all real. I told him this would happen, but he didn’t care.”

This time, I did actually smile. The bird was doing a fantastic job of simulating frustrated irritation.

“That’s amazing,” I said, shaking my head.

“What is?”

“Well, you. You’re amazing.”

“Why thank you. And you don’t even really know me yet. So let me properly introduce myself. Probably should have done that right up front, but it’s been a while since I’ve paired with a Peacemaker.” Now the bird actually managed to sound apologetic, even dipping his beak in contrition. A fresh rush of chill, damp air swirled into the kitchen through the open window. I glanced outside, but the night was still utterly dark.

“Yeah. Introducing yourself is a good place to start, I guess,” I said, reaching over and sliding the window closed. “Along with, ah, what a Peacemaker might be. I get the sense that it means me, but I’ve never heard the term used for anything but an old strategic bomber.”

“The Convair B-36, the largest piston-engine production aircraft ever built, in service with the US Strategic Air Command from 1949 to 1959,” the bird replied matter-of-factly.

I blinked. The bird had nailed it for sure. I’d once built a plastic scale model kit of one of the giant bombers. It was probably still upstairs, in fact, on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, along with a few other kits I’d built.

“So you know about that,” I said.

“I know about lots of things. For instance, would you like to know the acceptable operating temperature range for the Peacemaker’s Pratt & Whitney R-4360 radial engines? The maximum dynamic shear-stress load of its main wing spar? The absolute best way to make crème brulée?”

“Not really, no.” I leaned back against the counter. “Well, maybe the crème brulé thing sometime.” I laughed, harder than I normally would. But I normally didn’t end up talking to AI birds who could make crème brulé. I gave my hand a vague wave. “I’m sorry, but you’ll understand if this is all a bit much.”

Again, the beak dipped, which I guessed was a sort of cross between acknowledgement and apology. It made sense. After all, a bird-construct would be pretty limited in the emotional range it could convey. Mind you, the fact this construct could convey any emotions at all made it—

I shook my head, stunned at the elegance of the machine before me. I must have been looking at the most advanced expression of AI on the planet. And it was a bird, perched on a chair, in the kitchen of an Iowa farmhouse.

“I understand,” the bird replied. “Anyway, you may call me Perry. And while the peregrine falcon doesn’t have black feathers, I’m willing to take some artistic license regarding my coloration. Besides, birds are not a galactic species, but they are unique to your world. At least, falcons are.” He cocked his head again. “And I like the name Perry.”

“Perry.”

“That’s right.”

I shrugged. “Sure. What the hell. Nice to meet you, Perry.”

“As to what a Peacemaker might be, you’ve correctly surmised it has nothing to do with strategic bombers. Well, not directly, anyway. But, yes, you’re the Peacemaker in this case. The term refers to a Galactic Knight Uniformed. But let’s take this all one step at a time, shall we? So our next trip is outside, which brings me back to the fact that you should get dressed.”

I glanced down at myself, then back up. “I am dressed.”

“Not for going outside. It is a rainy night in Iowa.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the barn.”

“I—oh. Wait. To the barn? Why?”

“That’s easier to explain in the barn than here.” Perry opened his wings slightly, as though he were going to hop back to the now-closed window. I suspected he’d have no trouble opening it again. But he stopped and folded his wings back up.

“Before we go, it strikes me that you implicitly asked me a question, which I haven’t yet answered—that is, who am I?”

I guessed I had, so I nodded.

“I’m a combat AI. Yours, to be specific,” Perry said.

“Wait. My combat AI? Not my grandfather’s?”

“I was his combat AI, but he’s, you know, dead now. And you’re his successor.”

“But why do I need a combat AI? I’ve never even been in combat.”

Perry’s golden eyes glittered back at me.

“You will be.”

 

 

Chapter 3

I put on my shoes and jacket, then opened the door into the cool, rainy night. Perry leapt from the kitchen chair to the top of the short flight of stairs that led down to the back door, then paused.

“Excuse me. AI bird coming through.”

I stepped back and gestured. “After you.”

The bird spread its wings and launched itself into the night in one smooth motion. The wings extended just enough to clear the doorframe, then spread as it sailed off into the gloom.

I just stood, staring, shaking my head. Amazing. I had no idea AI had come so far. Or, for that matter, materials science that allowed a bird-construct to be that large but still able to fly with what appeared to be only wings for propulsion. Or power-cell technology, which had to provide it all with enough juice to keep running for—

I didn’t know how long, I realized, stepping into the drizzle and closing the door behind me. Presumably, the bird had been in some sort of low-power state when I pressed that button. It had been just enough to allow it to receive and respond to whatever signal the remote control thing had produced. I expected it would need to be recharged soon. Power-source life was still the big Achilles’ heel of these sorts of constructs. No matter how fancy or sophisticated they were, when they ran out of power, they were just elaborate works of high-tech art.

I squelched through mud and grass, heading for the barn. I could barely see it, just a shape in the darkness, but that was okay. My feet knew the way. It let me keep ruminating about Perry along the way.

Clearly, the bird was a piece of cutting-edge, experimental military tech. Why my grandfather had it, I had no idea. Maybe he was involved in trialing it. It did make a sort of sense, I supposed, to try out something like that in a remote corner of Iowa. But it seemed awfully strange that Gramps could just bring the thing home with him. No matter how much he might be trusted in the shadowy circles of his former profession, that just wasn’t how things like that were done. You didn’t simply sign out a super-advanced piece of no doubt multimillion dollar, probably irreplaceable hardware and bring it home with you for the weekend to try out. Or, if you did, then the spooky world of defense research was a hell of a lot more laid back in terms of its real-world security than it was online. I’d only occasionally bumped up against it during the course of my day job, and never with the intention of trying to penetrate it. But even if I had, I doubted I’d ever find a way through its labyrinthine, almost paranoid depths of protection.

But despite that, you could apparently stick super-secret tech in the trunk of your car and bring it home with you.

I wonder if Gramps had stolen Perry? But why would he? And why wouldn’t the bird have its own security protocols installed, causing it to immediately try to escape to some safe place and signal for recovery? Or even just not boot up in the first place? Did the bloody thing not even have a password?

And what the hell was all that nonsense about Galactic Knights and Peacemakers?

Perry had landed just in front of the smaller, man-sized barn door. It stood open. The big roll-back ones were still closed. I glanced up at the light that should have been illuminating the barn, which looked fine but had apparently burned out. I glanced back at the house, just a few rectangles of wan light in the gloom. Yeah, I’d definitely have to replace this light. It was too dark out here.

“This way,” Perry said, hopping into the barn.

I started that way, then stopped. The barn was as dark inside as out. I didn’t have a flashlight, so if there were no working lights inside either, then I’d be left fumbling around in a black space full of tools and farm implements. I knew where my old workbench was, of course. Unlike my room, though, I was sure Gramps would have changed around the barn in the years I’d been gone. He had been running a working farm, after all.

But it wasn’t just that. What stopped me was a sudden thrill of… anticipation? Fear? Dread? All of these things? Whatever it was, it rooted me to the muddy spot, oblivious to the drizzle, focused only on that dark doorway.

What was really going on here?

Of course my grandfather hadn’t brought Perry home to trial it. That’s not how these things worked. The defense research people would have been all over it, certainly once news of his death reached them. So that just made no sense at all.

And as for Gramps having stolen it, I just couldn’t see it. Why? What would be the point? And again, the chances of him or anyone else getting away with something like that, for this long, were—

Small didn’t begin to cut it.

A sudden gulf of what the hell? had opened up between me and that doorway. Whatever was happening here, I just couldn’t see it being good. Or, at least, good for me. An AI construct wants to lead me into a dark, apparently powerless barn in the dead of night to show me something. That was creepy in ways I’d only encountered in atmospherically well-done books and movies. But this was real.

Or was it? Maybe I was dreaming, or going crazy, and I’d followed a phantasm out into the night—

“Are you coming or what?”

Perry stood in the doorway, his amber eyes two glowing points in the gloom. Like the eyes of a cat, only golden.

Okay, that sure as hell didn’t help. It just ratcheted the creep factor up another notch.

“Coming why? What’s in the barn that you want me to see so badly?”

“Your ship. Come on.”

And Perry hopped back out of sight, into the barn.

My ship.

As if that explained anything.

Again, I glanced back at the house. Safe thing to do—go back there, wait until the hard, rational light of morning, and if any of this turned out to actually be real, then consult with Miryam. Find out just what the hell was going on. Surely she had to know.

I turned back to the barn, scowling. Curiosity had thrown itself into the mix of thoughts and feelings bubbling away inside me, like some pressure cooker about to vent—or explode.

Screw it. What I wasn’t going to do was just stand here, in the rain, stuck between two imagined scenarios—one safe, the other sinister and weird, but in an admittedly fascinating kind of way.

If this had been an online mystery, I wouldn’t have just walked away from it. I couldn’t have resisted digging at least a little deeper.

Taking a breath, I splashed my way to the barn, stepped into its familiar stew of smells—hay, animal dung, old wood, hints of gasoline and oil and rusting metal—and immediately stopped.

“Close the door,” two golden points of light said. “I’ll turn on the lights once you have.”

I was already reaching for the light switch. Muscle memory knew exactly where it was. “That’s okay. I’ve got the lights,” I said, my fingers finding the switch and snapping it on.

Nothing happened.

“Those lights aren’t active,” Perry said.

I snapped the switch a few times. “Burned out, I guess.”

“No, I deactivated them.”

“You… deactivated them.”

“That’s right. They’re not necessary.”

“Speaking on behalf of those of us who aren’t AI constructs that can probably see just fine in the dark, they’re very necessary.”

“Just close the door, and I’ll turn the real lights on,” Perry replied. Somehow, he managed a pretty clear tone of indulgent, almost strained patience.

“How about you turn on the lights and then I’ll close the door.”

A pause—no. Wait. Had I just heard Perry sigh?

“Can’t. The lights won’t come on unless the door is closed. That’s how the system’s rigged to work.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. This was ridiculous—

“I promise you, Van, that you’ll have an answer once you close that door and I can activate the lights. You’ll then have about a thousand more questions, but one step at a time.”

To hell with this, I thought, fully intending to just turn around and head back to the light—and security—of the house. But that part of me that was morbidly curious was already closing the door, the metal latch sliding into place with a soft metallic rasp, then a click.

What the hell am I doing?  

I tensed as I yanked the door open again—and the world turned blazing white.

* * *

I found myself staring at the silvery-grey wood of the old door from about a foot away, my hand still on the latch. But a jarring dissonance hit me like a punch to the face. I’d spent many nights in the barn, working away soldering and testing circuits and electronic components, and had always needed a bright worklight to see my current project. Because otherwise, the barn was lit by a couple of middling overhead lights that lit up the space directly beneath them but mostly cast the rest into shadowy gloom.

Only this light was almost painfully white. Gramps must have installed a few dozen banks of white LEDs to achieve this sort of brilliance.

I turned toward Perry. Amid those last few thoughts before my universe changed forever, one stood out, utterly inane.

Gramps wasn’t dead at all. I was going to turn and find him there, along with Miryam and a bunch of other people, and they were all going to yell surprise as soon as I turned because of some labyrinthine reason known only to a former spy. At least, that was a viable hope, if only for a moment, simply because my mind could find no plausible reason for anything that was happening to me—or what I was looking at.

I stood. And stared. For a while. Seconds, minutes, I wasn’t sure.

Filling the barn, nearly from this end to the far back, and rising to just under the lofty rafters, was a spaceship.

* * *

“Impressive, isn’t she?” Perry said.

I might have responded. I don’t remember.

“Uh, Van? Hello?”

“I—”

It was all I managed. Another indeterminate amount of time passed.

I glanced at Perry, then back at the ship.

“What the f—?”

“She’s called the Dragonet,” Perry cut in. “Vigilant class. I prefer the Vigilants over other classes of this mass. Better combination of speed, protection, and firepower, I think. Not too much of any one, but just enough of all three.”

I took a step. One step. That was it.

The thing sitting in the barn looked like no spacecraft I’d ever seen. And I’d long had a passion for spaceflight, so I knew them all pretty well, from the first Mercury and Soyuz capsules, right up to the new generation ships, like NASA’s Orion, which was only just now hitting the launchpad for the first time. This, though, was a whole different breed. Hell, it was a whole different species.

I figured it for a little under twice the size and bulk of a city bus. The upper section of the forward hull and the nose were enclosed in something reflective and darkly crystalline. Various protrusions extending from the hull sported what had to be thrust bells for engines of some sort. Some of these looked like they could rotate, probably through most of a complete sphere. Larger, fixed exhaust bells extended from the thing’s stern. It squatted on chunky struts and landing skids, and overall had the color and luster of dark smoke. I looked for markings and saw a series of geometric shapes and dots rendered along the hull in medium grey.

“Want to step inside? Check it out?”

I looked at Perry again. “Inside?”

“Yes. Inside. You know, the opposite of outside? As in, you’ll step through the airlock, and you’ll then be—”

“I know what inside means,” I snapped, finally getting at least some wobbly legs under the rational part of my mind. Really wobbly, newborn deer wobbly, but enough to prop up at least a few coherent thoughts.

“What the hell is going on here?” I finally asked.

“See, I told your grandfather to brief you on all of this before he died,” Perry said, shaking his head with a dolorous jingling of feathers.

“Brief me on what?

“Your succession as a Peacemaker. Now, we’re going to have to go through the whole process of indoctrinating you to the system instead of you just assuming your place and getting to work—”

“Okay, wait.” I held up a hand. “Never mind about what my grandfather should have done, or didn’t do, or whatever. Just tell me what’s going on. What is a Peacemaker? What are you? And what”—I swept a hand at the ship—“the hell is that?”

“The Peacemakers are the enforcement arm of an interstellar organization called the Galactic Knights Uniformed. I am a combat AI, model AU-987T, serial number 18974XM6, assigned to your grandfather—and now to you—as personal guard and assistant. And this is the Dragonet, a Vigilant-class starship, used by your grandfather to perform his duties as Peacemaker.”

While Perry was talking, I sat down on a hay bale and stared up at the bulk of what was apparently called the Dragonet. It loomed in the hard glare of the white lights, which emanated from somewhere high up in the barn’s rafters. I glanced up, ready to squint and shield my eyes, but for some reason the light didn’t dazzle me the way I expected it would. It was less actual light and more just a uniform whiteness that originated at the top of the barn and painted itself over everything inside. It rendered every color, right down to the green bits of grass stuck to my shoes, a perfectly saturated, almost idealized version of itself.

“So, let me see if I understand this. My grandfather wasn’t actually a spec ops soldier in government service. He was some kind of galactic knight who flew around in a spaceship with his talking, intelligent metal bird, traveling between planets to enforce—something.”

“The strictures and decrees of the Peacemakers,” Perry said.

“Ah. Right. Of course. So have I got all of that right?”

“Well, in a really, really general sense, yes, you do.”

I shook my head. Chuckled. Started to laugh. Laughed harder.

“What’s so funny?” Perry asked.

I stopped and stared at him, tears in my eyes, then swept my hand around and laughed some more.

“This,” I finally managed, wiping my eyes. “All of this. It’s a thing of beauty. Scary, scary beauty. I always figured when someone went crazy, started hearing voices, that sort of thing, it was all—I don’t know. Just irrational. Nonsensical. But this—”

I gestured again.

“This is amazing. It’s so detailed and realistic, even believable. Who knew I had this much imagination in me? Hell, I knew I should have started writing sci fi a few years back. I’d be raking in the cash by now!”

Perry hopped to a point right in front of me. “Van, I know this is hard for you to accept, or even believe. But you’re not imagining this. You’re not going crazy. Your grandfather really was a Peacemaker. He believed, right down to the core of his being, in protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves. He did that as a spec ops soldier for your military, and when the time came for him to become a Peacemaker, he kept doing it—just not on Earth.”

“You expect me to believe that my grandfather was a starfaring soldier?”

“I can prove it to you.”

I wiped my eyes again. “And how are you going to do that?”

“By taking you for a flight.”

“Into space.”

“Yes, into space.”

I stood. “Sure. What the hell. I’ve paid the entrance fee, might as well take the whole damned tour, right?” I gestured elaborately toward the ship. “After you, my good bird.”

Perry muttered something, then launched himself into the air and flew to a point about halfway along the length of the ship. As soon as he landed, a hatch slid smoothly open.

“Whenever you’re ready, Van,” he said, then he hopped inside and vanished.

I grinned like an idiot. “I’m ready now. To space, Perry, and step on it.”

* * *

I stopped at the entrance. “Oh, wait. Something just occurred to me. A little technical problem in this, ah, adventure,” I said.

I saw Perry standing just inside, in a small, bare compartment. “What’s that?”

“Well, as soon as we… crash through the roof, I guess, and get airborne, we’re going to be illuminated by every radar system from Chicago air traffic control to NORAD. Guess we’ll be a UFO, huh?”

“Van, I’m going to turn off the lights for a moment,” Perry said.

Okay, that broke through my increasingly hysterical bravado. “You’re going to—what?”

“I’m going to do this.”

The lights went out.

The ship, and Perry, were gone.

Not just gone, as in, it was too dark to see them anymore. Actually gone, as though they’d never existed in the first place. My night vision hadn’t even been affected by the sudden cessation of the white illumination.

I sighed, long and slow. Well, that was interesting. And by interesting, I meant the kind of hallucination that felt more real than anything I could even imagine, let alone had experienced.

I walked through the empty space that had been occupied by the—what had Perry called it? The Dragonet?

Nothing. I spread my arms and turned around. Just empty, cool barn air, full of the various reeks I’d long ago come to know and largely ignore.

I laughed. Alrighty, then. First thing tomorrow, I’d head to the hospital and check myself in for a psych evaluation because something was obviously very, very wrong with me—

I gasped as something seemed to grab me and shove me to one side. It wasn’t physical movement, though, but more of a feeling of… displacement is the best way I can describe it. It was like those weird moments when you’re drifting off to sleep and suddenly slam awake, certain you’d just fallen a couple of feet.

As soon as the feeling passed, the white light returned, and so did the ship, and Perry standing inside it.

I glanced down at my feet. I was standing exactly where I’d been when the lights went out.

“So, I guess this hallucination isn’t over, huh?” I asked, looking up from my feet.

Perry gave a very human shrug that lifted and lowered his wings. “I don’t know. Were you having a hallucination? Are you prone to them?”

I barked out a laugh and looked pointedly at the ship looming above me. “Apparently so.”

Although it suddenly struck me that I wasn’t sure if this was the hallucination itself, or if being alone in the darkened barn was part of it, too. Was I still in the house? In the kitchen? In bed asleep?

“Anyway, to answer your question—no, we won’t be detected by any earthly radar or other means. The Dragonet, like all Vigilant-class ships, is fully stealthed against any sort of detection that doesn’t involve—”

Perry paused. “How well versed are you in terrestrial theoretical physics?”

“Uh, I used to watch The Big Bang Theory. They used a lot of theoretical physics jargon in that. Does that count?”

“No, it doesn’t. Suffice to say, for now, that any detection system that doesn’t operate on principles similar to these lights won’t be capable of seeing the Dragonet. That’s why you couldn’t see it, or even be aware of its existence, while the lights were off.”

“But I walked right past where you are now, into the middle of the barn floor.”

“Eh, yes and no. Yes you did, but the ship's stealth system shifted back to where you started the instant the lights came on. That prevents the ship from materializing superimposed on things, which would be a serious problem. Incidentally, it’s also how the ship deals with navigational debris, dust, gas molecules, micrometeorites, that sort of thing, while it’s in flight.”

“In space.”

“Or inside an atmosphere, in which case the air is shifted aside. It lets the Dragonet fly as though she’s always traveling through vacuum.”

The scientific part of me saw a problem with that. If you simply shifted the air out of the ship’s way, you’d create a zone of higher pressure around it—

That thinking didn’t go very far, though. Trying to apply logical reason to fantastic illusion was a sort of craziness all its own.

“Anyway, this would be much easier to explain if you’d come aboard,” Perry said.

I stared a moment longer, then shrugged. What the hell. If I was going insane, at least I was doing it in a rather interesting, even pretty cool way. I might as well enjoy the ride.

I stepped through the hatch, into the compartment. As soon as I did, the door slid smoothly and quietly closed behind me. Soft lighting came up, and a door on the other side of the compartment opened.

A new voice suddenly spoke.

“Welcome aboard, Peacemaker. Do you want to power up the ship to pre-flight status?”