Luca’s eyes widened. “The VanHeilding Corporation.”
Steph nodded. “At that time, they were a minor family dabbling in bioengineering. But over the decades, armed with this new technology, they began to release major scientific breakthroughs in combating aging in humans. They then developed patented procedures, exclusive to the VanHeilding Corporation, giving them fabulous wealth in the process.”
She leaned in again. “But here’s the thing, and why Cyrus might be more right about the connection between you and Xenon than he realizes. Back at the institute on Earth, where we were…monitoring you, we began to notice there were similarities between your DNA and the samples we had of Xenon’s. Leading us to believe that the VanHeilding Corporation had more of that old research from Mars than anyone had realized.”
“So he really is like me?”
“I don’t exactly know, Luca. There are similarities for sure, but how much? Who knows.”
“I’ve got to meet him…as soon as we land.”
“Well, just remember he’s very, very old, and frail by all accounts. He’s also a national treasure on Mars, so it’s not going to be as simple as knocking on his door.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Just keep in mind that there have been a lot of myths built up around him. He may disappoint.”
“What sort of myths?”
“Oh, the one where he and all the other clones at that time were supposedly grown in bio-tanks.”
Luca laughed. “Ha, that’s impossible—isn’t it?”
“Totally. Then there’s the one where he’s supposed to be telepathic.”
“Well, that’s definitely nonsense.”
“Anyway, all I’m saying is, don’t be disappointed if you discover that he’s not all that the stories make him out to be.”
“I understand.” Luca nodded. But her mind was made up. As soon as they got to Mars, she would do whatever it took to talk with this strange biological relic. Here was the only other person in the entire system that might understand her.
“You’re doing that a lot lately.” Steph gestured at her.
“Doing what?” Luca looked puzzled.
“Scratching the back of your head. Is that neural lace irritating you?”
It was, and Luca had been trying to resist the desire just to rip it off her head. “It’s very itchy.”
“Well, don’t go trying to pull it out. The filaments have embedded themselves in your scalp, so you’ll only make it worse if you do that. We’ll see what can be done about it when we get to Mars.”
Luca nodded, and resisted the urge to scratch it again.
11
Probe
For the next three days, the crew watched anxiously as the Neo City ship closed the gap between them with extraordinary speed. Unsurprisingly, all attempts to hail the craft were met with silence. But as it drew nearer and the Perception’s sensors acquired more detail, Max identified it as an M3-class luxury interplanetary transport. Only seven of these existed, all privately owned by extremely wealthy individuals from the top families, one of which was Sebastian VanHeilding.
Miranda relaxed somewhat on hearing this. Even if this ship was the one owned by Sebastian, he was generally regarded within the family as being a useless pleasure-seeker. Not someone with the wit or capability to take on a well-armed ship such as the Perception. In short, she did not regard him as a threat. And her assessment seemed to play out as, over the next fourteen hours, the ship began to slow down and change vector. Max calculated it would come close but remain outside weapons range. Miranda, as well as the rest of the crew, started to breathe a little easier.
Until the attack came.
They were all gathered in the operations room when everything that wasn’t screwed down started sliding across the floor. Before Luca had even time to register this phenomenon, she found herself tumbling across the room and slamming up against the side wall. The ship, for no explicable reason, had suddenly powered up its engines and started accelerating, rapidly increasing thrust. Luca felt the gee-forces building on her body; she was finding it difficult to move.
“Max,” Miranda shouted out. “Max, what the hell? What are you doing? Kill the engines. Kill them now.”
But there was no reply. Max was silent.
Scott, meanwhile, had managed to wedge his back against the pedestal of the holo-table. Cyrus clung to a bench. Steph and Miranda were pinned to the same wall as Luca.
“Max,” Miranda shouted again.
Again, no response from the AI.
“Luca,” Miranda shouted over to her now. “Can you jack-in, find out what the hell is going on with Max?”
Luca felt a wave of panic rise up from within her. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t think, she couldn’t even speak.
“Luca, do you hear me?”
“No, wait. The kill switch, Cyrus. Use the kill switch,” Scott shouted out as he tried to move out from under the holo-table.
“What kill switch?” Miranda sounded confused.
“Plan B,” replied Scott. “We hatched it a few days ago…just in case.”
“Eh, we may have a problem with that.” Cyrus had managed to get himself upright so he could study some data scrolling down one of the holo-screens.
“What problem?” Scott was also now trying to get himself vertical, a Herculean task against the forces acting on them from the increasing acceleration.
“The remote trigger is Luca’s drone.” He gestured over at her. “But it needs to be down in the auxiliary control room, and it can’t move with this.”
“Shit. You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Scott. “Could you not have rigged something simpler?”
“I thought we’d get a warning, that we’d have some time.”
Miranda had also managed to stand upright again. Her back pressed hard against the wall beside Luca. “You gotta jack-in, Luca. You gotta try. We might be getting hacked.”
Luca fought the panic and tried to think. Fly, she called out in her mind, where are you?
“I am here, above your head. But I’m pinned. This force is too much for my servos to counter.”
She angled her head up and found the drone squashed into a nook, twitching and shifting, trying to break free.
“I’ll try and get to the control room,” Scott said as he slowly lowered his body back down to the floor, and then began inching his way along, keeping a tight grip on anything he could to prevent him from slamming into the rear wall.
“That’s crazy, Scott,” said Cyrus. “You’ll never make it all the way there.”
“Got to try, got to try.” He grunted and groaned with each effort to pull himself forward.
“Luca… Luca,” Miranda shouted to get her attention.
“Okay, okay. I’ll try.” Luca forced herself to focus.
“No, don’t. You’re not strong enough yet,” said Steph with a note of desperation in her voice.
“There’s no other option,” Miranda countered.
Luca could see that Scott was making slow progress; it would take him forever, if at all. So she closed her eyes and tried to tune into the heartbeat of the ship—that old, familiar childhood wavelength. To her surprise, she sensed it almost immediately, along with a rising giddiness. Maybe she hadn’t lost the ability to jack-in after all.
She tried to block out the voices all around her, calm herself down, and focus on the ship’s rhythm. For a while, her concentration waxed and waned as she fought to gain the fidelity needed to go deeper. But each time she sensed she was making a connection with the AI, for some reason she would pull back, like someone trying to pick up the courage to dive into an ice-cold pool. Yet she kept trying, dialing up the intensity of her focus each time, until finally she broke through and entered the ship’s data-stream.
Max, she called out in her mind. What are you doing? You must stop the engines.
Hello, Luca, it replied. I am sorry, but I cannot do that. You no longer have authority.
&nbs
p; Luca was almost jolted back out by this revelation. How could this be? she thought. But she delved further into the ship’s data-stream. Then she found it. Or rather, it found her—a node-runner. It came at her like a speeding train, and she could do nothing but run.
Luca instantly disengaged and was snapped back out to the here and now, and the clamoring voices of the others began flooding her senses. But something was off—everyone had changed position. One minute they were in one place, then next they were all located around the holo-table. Luca’s brain struggled to rationalize this.
I was only concentrating for a minute or two. They couldn’t have moved that far in that time. Could they?
Cyrus was shouting something, along with Miranda. There was no sign of Scott anywhere.
“Luca,” Steph called over to her. “You’re back. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, but there’s a…”
Miranda cut her off. “I’m sorry, Luca. I shouldn’t have asked you to do it.”
“I sensed a node-runner in the ship’s systems.” But no sooner had Luca gotten the words out, she felt herself collapse on the floor as the intense acceleration ended. She heard whoops from Cyrus. “Scott, you crazy dude, you did it… You did it.”
Luca felt a thump beside her and looked over to see Fly lying flat on its back, legs up in the air.
“Do we have weapons control?” Miranda was shouting, presumably to Scott, who through some superhuman effort had managed to get to the auxiliary control room.
“Negative,” came the reply.
“Damnit.” Miranda hit the holo-table in frustration, sending a shiver through the projection.
Luca forced herself up onto her feet. Her head was dizzy and she rested her back against the wall for support. “I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t do anything. The node-runner—”
“It’s okay, the AI is disconnected, we’ve regained manual control,” said Cyrus.
“Looks like they spun us around. They were trying to slow us down, maybe get up closer so they could board.” Miranda was studying a readout on the holo-table.
“How did they get in? How was that possible?” Cyrus shook his head. “Where’s that ship now?”
“They’ve disengaged, accelerating away toward Mars,” said Miranda. “But we need to be vigilant—they may try again.”
Cyrus sat down on the bench and let out a long sigh. Steph joined him. They were utterly exhausted. Luca slid herself over to where Fly lay, reached down, and picked it up.
“Is it okay?” she heard Cyrus ask.
“No, it’s not.” Luca turned the drone over in her hands. “It’s all busted up—just like me.”
12
Ancient Apparition
The shuttle banked and came in low over the western Isidis Plains. From her seat on the port side, Luca watched the Martian surface speed past beneath her. Ground traffic moved along the main highway, some heading over to Elysium in the east, others up to Utopia in the north. Dotted all across the landscape, great domed habitats rose up and spread out like some high-tech blister on the parched, arid surface. It was a sight to behold, and they hadn’t even come to the fabled Jezero City yet.
The Perception had finally arrived in Mars orbit without further incident. Max, the ship’s AI, had been reinstated with primary operational control, now that it was within the domain of the QI, Aria, on Mars. They then transferred into the shuttle and began to make the transit down to the planet’s surface.
“Four minutes,” Miranda called out from the cockpit. “You want to come up here, Luca? You’ll get a better view.”
Luca did. She had very much wanted to see this famous city ever since she left Earth. That seemed like a thousand years ago now—so much had happened, so much had changed. She unfastened her seat harness and mounted the companionway steps to the cockpit, where Cyrus had moved over to allow her access. Outside, through the wide forward window of the shuttle, she could see the eastern rim of Jezero Crater coming into view.
“I’ll bring the shuttle up a bit so you can take it all in.” Miranda nudged the controls and the craft responded, rising up high over the jagged crater’s edge.
The entire area inside the fifty-kilometer-wide crater was covered in a sea of interconnected domes in a multitude of sizes, shapes, and colors. Many had translucent outer membranes through which Luca could see blurry shadows of complex structures within. Everywhere she looked seemed to heave and pulse with life. It was like some strange aquatic sponge had grown across the ground and was now slowly digesting the crater’s surface.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” said Scott, who had come up the steps and stood behind her. “Wait until you see it at night. With all the illumination…it’s amazing.”
Luca was mesmerized by the sheer organic beauty of it all. It was everything she had imagined and more. She couldn’t wait to see inside.
“I have to swing back out now. They get a bit tetchy if you fly too close to the city.” Miranda nudged the controls again and the shuttle banked left, away from the city and out to the primary spaceport.
They touched down on a designated landing pad, and once the engines were shut down and the craft made safe, the pad began to descend, ingesting the craft into the bowels of the spaceport. There followed a balletic series of maneuvers, adjustments, and decontamination procedures, until finally they found themselves inside a pressurized hangar.
Scott opened the hatch on the side of the craft and lowered the steps. Outside, walking toward them was an official delegation: four people with one android robot leading the way.
“Greetings.” The android raised a hand. “I am the avatar of Aria. Welcome to Jezero City. I am very happy that you arrived safely.”
“Glad to be here, Aria.” Cyrus replied cheerly. “And thanks for getting us out of New Wold One, although there was a moment or two during the voyage where I didn’t think we’d make it.”
“But you are here now, safe under my protection.” The android gestured to its associates, introducing them one by one. Hands were shaken as the android continued with the introductions. Luca stood at the back of the group, mesmerized by all the pomp and ceremony on display. She realized then that the old crew of the Hermes were regarded by the QIs as important people, and as such required due deference, lest their contribution to the establishment of the QI hegemony and the subsequent peace and harmony of the system be forgotten.
“And this must be Luca.” The android came forward and studied her for a moment. She felt the neural lace tingle as if it were making a connection, but her mind remained inert to any oncoming data.
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you,” it said, breaking its inquisitive gaze. The android swung around. “Good. Now I am sure you are all exhausted by your trip, so let us get you to where you can rest and revitalize.”
It moved off. The others followed in its wake.
They were housed in a villa complex on the outskirts of Jezero City. It consisted of a series of bright, translucent domes all interconnected around a central courtyard, complete with tropical plants and a large mosaic-tiled pool in a faux-Moroccan style.
“Would you look at this place,” said Steph as they entered. “I may not go home after all.”
“Wow, this is amazing.” Luca gazed into the pond and spotted several large, tropical fish swimming around.
After several minutes of open-mouthed investigation of the complex, Luca felt herself overcome by an overwhelming fatigue. It seemed that the stresses of the journey were now washing away, leaving behind a depleted husk—and she was not the only one. All of them soon found a bed somewhere and began to get some long-overdue rest.
Luca drifted into a deep, cathartic sleep, punctuated by fragmentary memories of past horrors—the white noise of dying minds. But even these troubled dreams were not enough to counter her body’s need for rest and regeneration. That was until she perceived a strange voice calling her name. It had a vague feeling of otherness about it. Was it in her mind, or ema
nating from some external source?
She opened her eyes to semi-darkness. Dim light filtered in through the open doors to the courtyard, a thin net curtain wafting gently in the draft from the air-filtration systems. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She sat up a little and looked around.
For a moment, she thought she must be dreaming because a strange figure sat in a seat not far from the end of her bed, partially hidden in the shadows. She studied the figure, trying to ascertain if it was really there or some figment of her imagination.
It raised a hand, a gesture of greeting, and a voice sounded in her head. “Hello, Luca. I am Xenon Hybrid. It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Luca’s body reacted instantly by pulling herself upright in the bed and dragging the sheet around her. But her mind was slower; it was having trouble rationalizing this mirage. She simply stared at it.
“Please, do not be afraid. I apologize for the nature of this intrusion, but it is best that my presence here goes undetected,” said the voice in her head.
This was accompanied by a multitude of questions that were now bubbling up in her mind. The most pertinent of these being, What the hell is going on?
“I appreciate that you have a great many questions,” said the voice. “And I will try and answer as many as I can in the limited time available.”
“How…are you doing that?” Luca finally regained the ability to speak.
Xenon did not reply immediately. Instead he rose slowly from the seat, walked over to the open doors, and gazed out across the dimly lit courtyard. He stood there for a moment, just thinking.
Luca now had a better view of him. He was tall with long white hair, dressed in a long, flowing robe that covered his entire body. He looked old, very old, yet his movements were fluid and sure, belying his great age.
“Long time ago,” he finally spoke out loud, his voice low, yet deep and sonorous, “myself and my brethren possessed the ability to communicate by thought alone. But sadly, all have passed away many centuries ago.” He lowered his head as if contemplating the memory of those that had passed. “It is so long since I have communicated in such a way that I had almost forgotten the skill.”
Exodus: Sci-Fi Thriller (The Belt Book 5) Page 7
