“Which still blows me away. They have all this tech, yet they do so little with it.”
Most humans carry around more computing power in their pocket than NASA used to land on the moon, and they use it to send pictures of their food to complete strangers.
“Point taken. Is that it?” I say, pointing at what I think might work.
The control panel is barely noticeable. A darker brown stain on a brown hull. I kneel next to it as Epic scans the section. The light on the HUD flashes green. I place my hand on the panel and our computers talk for a moment. I jump when the hull underneath me opens like an angry maw ready to swallow me. There’s no gravity, though, so I float silently for a second before maneuvering into the hole with the thrusters on my back.
The airlock closes up behind me as I settle onto the deck. Epic indicates where to place my palm to interface. The computers talk again and the internal airlock beeps open.
“You learning their language?”
Every interaction brings us that much closer. These simple doors are essentially ‘open/close’ only. The equivalent of a head nod.
“Okay, open up.”
The internal doors melt away, revealing a circular hallway inside. Harsh red lighting hurts my eyes and I feel a headache coming on. I close my eyes for a second and focus on shifting my faceplate’s molecules to filter out red light. When I open my eyes everything has a yellow tinge to it, but no more red light and the headache I felt starting vanishes.
“Much better,” I murmur. “Okay. Bridge?”
Follow the yellow brick road. Or in this case, the green brick road since you shifted the visible light.
A green path lays out in front of me. “Combat mode,” I tell Epic. The HUD itself shifts to red as my weapon systems, kinetic shields, and power levels all take front and center. “Sword,” I say as the suit reconfigures to give me maximum protection. The blade extends out of my arm, coming to rest with the pommel in my hand. In close quarters nothing beats the Sword of Doom.
The hallways are Th’un size, allowing me to move at a trot. I come around the first corner and run smack dab into one. The big ugly with his flat face and overdeveloped shoulder muscles blinks his eyes several times, trying to comprehend what he sees. I run the sword through the center of his chest. Red blood stains his tunic and the tablet he held drops to the deck with a clatter. I pull the blade out and stab him one more time for good measure.
My breaths come in gulps as my heart races from the surprise. I watch him sink to the floor as the light goes out of his eyes and a shudder of revulsion fills me. I don’t regret doing what I have to do to save my people but… I wish I didn’t have to kill anyone to do it. I’m not a psycho. I acknowledge what I must do but it doesn’t mean I enjoy it.
There isn’t anywhere to put the body, which means any minute they will discover there is an intruder. An idea forms in my head and I turn around.
“Epic, if there were a fire aboard ship, wouldn’t the most expedient way to extinguish the blaze be to vent the atmosphere into space?”
That would be logical, yes. However, I should point out that biological creatures are rarely rational regardless of what they think. Also, it would be highly unlikely those controls would be accessible and without safeguards.
“I guess we’ll find out. Point me toward engineering… or your best guess, Mr. Spock.”
111
I drop the third Th’un since I entered the ship. His large placid eyes close forever from the smoking hole in the center of his head from hyper-accelerated silica.
“You think they would stop throwing themselves at me and find another way to take me down?” Just as I speak, the toxin alarm on the HUD lights up, flashing urgently at me.
Ammonia gas is displacing the air in the compartment. Switching to internals. You have sufficient life support for seven days in this environment. Though, I don’t recommend going seven days without eating or drinking.
“You think? Is this what we’re looking for?” I come to a large door with red warning labels in their half readable language.
Possibly.
“That’s what you said about the last two doors.”
I have yet to decipher the alien language completely. I can tell you those are warning signs, possibly for radiation.
“Sounds promising.” I hit the panel next to the door, sending a power surge through the electronics and overriding them. The door melts aside, revealing a large compartment crammed with glowing panels and dominated by a large cylinder in the middle that is pulsing with white light.
Quantum radiation detected. This is their central reactor core.
Finally. I scan the room for computers and locate what I think are the primary control consoles. They have lots of switches on them, with screens, master keys, and shielded buttons to go with their warning signs.
“Epic, let’s see if we can hack these. Direct connect, run them through the HUD.”
Roger.
I angle myself so I can see the main entrance and place a hand on the console. A jolt of electricity shoots through me like a joy buzzer.
“Whoa, what was that?” It wasn’t unpleasant, just surprising.
Direct Neural Interface engaged.
The code of the console flares to life with a wall of unintelligible symbols in my field of view. The gibberish means nothing to me but at least I can see all the symbols since this doesn’t rely on visual acuity.
Their code appears to be duplex. Each symbol has several meanings depending on the symbols before and after it. I have run all the standard computations back on Earth and neither your mom or I were able to get very far. The best we could do was decode the base six digits. They are this…
Six figures highlight and convert to numbers. Theoretically, this should allow us to decipher all of them, but no such luck. I glance over at the Th’un on the floor; they have ten fingers and toes just like us. Their resemblance to large gorillas is uncanny. I’m sure the biological anthropologists back on Earth are going to be arguing about them for years. However, none of that helps me now.
“You’ve run it through all the standard programming right?”
What do I look like to you?”
“I used to picture my favorite action star, now I just think of you as a glowing ball with a voice,” I say with a grin.
Regardless, I have run every permutation known to mankind and nothing has decoded it past these six digits. It is almost as if they have multiple languages running and… Epic pauses.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?”
Possibly. One second.
Epic overlays the six digits we do know with hundreds of other languages and all of the sudden a pattern emerges.
This would go faster if we weren’t limiting our neural connection.
“Brain fried,” I remind him. “No thanks.”
There. I think I have it.
The code shifts and I can read it. Thousands of numbers appear on the screen, and embedded within each number is another number.
“Dual coding algorithm using squared numbers? What is this, base one million?”
More like base point zero three. I have no idea how they code like this. The density of their layers far exceeds anything we have. Nothing short of me could possibly decode it. You would need a hundred quantum computers running day-in and day-out for a hundred years to brute force this. It is actually quite surprising given the tech level of everything else. If not for their computers, alloys, and ZPFM, they would never have left their planet.
“This is awesome. Copy as much of this as you can. If we could use this technique to recode you… wow.”
I am not sure that is possible. However, we could certainly use it for any future creations. Accessing emergency controls.
“We want to open all the outer airlocks on the ship. Find the master bypass and… oh,” I say as I realize it won’t work.
Yes. Oh. We cannot.
“Maybe,” I say. The ship is designed around preventing
this very thing. Section by section can be opened but not until a fire has been confirmed and verified. Then the computer asks the bridge for permission. Opening them all at once isn’t possible even in case of fire because it requires independent confirmation from a bridge officer.
“What if we trick the ship into thinking it’s in dry dock? Open all air and passageways for maintenance and then pop the external hatches?”
Scanning. There is a path for this. Do not move.
The main door melts away and two Th’un with shoulder slung rifles larger than my arm spin in to kneel side by side, scanning the room for targets. I have a half second before they see me.
On instinct I fire off the particle beam, aiming for the large pack that connects to a rifle. The blue beam burns through the hardened exterior, igniting the condensed gas inside. The Th’un screams as his body is engulfed in white-hot flames that melt the skin off his flesh. The other one leaps back out of the way of his dying companion. He growls, triggering the weapon and holding it steady as it burps white-hot fire at me. I drop to the floor and the superheated gas passes above me.
My HUD screams at me as the temp warning pings two thousand degrees for a second. Epic activated the magnetic lock on my hand a half second before I fell, leaving my hand attached to the console we’re trying to hack.
I fire off the particle beam in a continuous strafe, running the beam back and forth over the door in a desperate attempt to make him retreat.
It works for a second. Heat builds up around us as the delicate components of engineering burst into flame.
“How close are we,” I say without taking my eyes off the jammed open door.
Ten seconds. Don’t die.
“I don’t know,” I say letting off another volley. “It seems like such a good time to go out in a blaze of glory.”
The Th’un leaps through the door and over the flame in a fantastic display of agility for an eight-foot-tall monster. I fire off the particle beam, trying to burn a hole in him as he dodges behind a large rack of components.
Got it! Locking the suit.
I feel the alloy stick to the floor with a click as klaxon’s roar overhead. The Th’un jumps out, bringing the flamethrower to bear on me… then the airlocks open. Explosive decompression is explosive. One second there is air and atmosphere, the next second there is not. Every molecule of gas and particle of dust, along with anything not nailed down, is sucked out into space in less time than a blink of an eye. No slow drawn out evacuation of air as people claw for handholds—they are blown out the airlock from everywhere on the ship in a half second. Including my friend with the flamethrower—and his buddy’s body.
An eerie silence falls over the ship. I don’t feel anything different as my suit is vacuum sealed, but the silence is a little unnerving. I slap a hand back onto the control panel. Vibrations from the ship flow up through my hand but there is no atmosphere to transmit the sound.
A thump transmits through the console. Air hisses in and the HUD registers atmosphere in the room.
“Now we just need to find our way to the bridge, decode the helm, and activate a drive we have no idea how to use.”
Yes, we are home free now.
112
I shake my head. “No way. This is the bridge?”
I believe it is.
The door melts closed behind me after I step through. A massive, panoramic ‘window’ dominates the forward one-hundred and eighty degrees of the bridge, giving me unrestricted visibility to the space in front of the ship. There are six workstations, two of them in front of the doorway I just entered. The walls have the same brown color, and the only variation between the wall, deck, and ceiling is where the light comes from.
The stations themselves look more like chairs on full recline, with monitors and control panels connected to arms that keep them ninety degrees to the chair regardless of position.
“This is an interesting way to do things?” I say as I step down. My foot catches on the lip of the deck I didn’t see and I lunge forward, stopping myself on the main chair in the center of the bridge.
Considering their massive size and weight, I think having the crew lie down to work is reasonably smart. Less strain on their backs over the months being aboard ship.
I shrug and put my awe away for now. I can gawk later. Right now we need to figure out how to fly this thing and pick up Luke.
“Epic, scan their interfaces… you think this one is the captain’s?” I point toward the chair in the middle. He flashes a bunch of schematics on the screen before each station flashes in turn, as he labels them for me.
Yes.
The big chair—like Luke’s truck big—isn’t easy to climb into. I manage to pull myself up and slide my legs around and settle myself on the rock-hard cushions. The controls are a mix of switches, touch screens, and shielded buttons. I’m going to assume the shielded buttons are dangerous. I place my hand on the center console directly in front of me. A dozen buttons have flip-up shields preventing accidental activation.
Scanning the interface now. They all have security passcodes that require physical key cards to bypass. Hacking.
“Show me the code.”
A thousand symbols flash on the HUD as they translate. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code scroll by faster than I can track. I do pick up lines here and there I can understand.
I have bypassed their safety locks. We have access to the ship’s systems. That does not mean we can control them.
“Right,” I say. “Can I breathe this crap they call atmosphere?”
Certainly.
I mentally remove my helmet. The alloy retracts into the suit, leaving me in a skin-tight full body suit that ends at my throat.
“Much better. It was getting stuffy in there. Okay. Show me the command trees. Let’s isolate systems one by one. Once we know what they all are, it will be easier to take control of them.”
Hours roll by and my back aches from the hard chair. I don’t know why I thought this would be easy. The tricky part is waiting for Epic to translate each symbol, then verify we translated it correctly. Sure, we can read their code, if not their language, and Epic can manipulate that code, but there is an order of magnitude of difference between telling one console to do the thing it is designed to do, and controlling the ship. There are literally trillions of lines of code here. It doesn’t help that I can’t see all of their written language because of the difference in our vision.
The timer flashes on the four-hour mark since we came on board. Optimistically I can’t hope for much more time before the rest of the Th’un fleet show up to see why their ship hasn’t been making reports.
This would be so much easier if the ship's computers were in…
“Epic? I have a crazy idea.”
I quiver in anticipation.
“What if we wiped the ship’s computers and replaced them with our own code? Bear with me, I know you’re going to say we can’t—”
You are correct, we cannot.
“There’s no and there’s no… am I right?”
Okay. Yes, we could wipe the ship's computers, but we could not replace the code. How could we write code to tell an alien machine to do what we wanted it to do? Amelia, it is simply not possible. Machines are designed to receive instructions from computers in a specific way. It would require knowledge of these functions we simply do not have.
I can’t help but feel deflated. It was a cool idea. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. In that case, I need a break. Keep trying to process the data, I’m going to stretch my legs.”
I take a moment to stretch and really look around the bridge. The lighting gives me a bit of a headache but the room is well constructed. The panoramic view of space is impressive. I stroll over to the first console, only half looking at it as I keep an eye on the open space in front of us. The crew certainly kept the place clean. Part of being such a militaristic society.
A flashing light captures my attention. I reach over and touch the conso
le, which flares to life at my presence. A large circle with a green dot in the middle resolves. I can see a three-dimensional representation of the system, all the planets, the star, asteroids, other ships…
Two red dots flash nearby, coming toward us. “Epic, there’s a red thingy coming toward the green thingy. I think we’re the green thingy.”
Two Th’un corvettes are closing in on us. It would appear our time is up. Classifying them Sierra-two and three. What do you want to do?
Static fills my ears as the speakers on the bridge flair to life. A rough alien voice barks commands to a nonexistent crew.
They appear to be hailing us.
“Translate?”
Essentially? They want to know why we’re off course and why we haven’t responded to hails.
“This is the helm, right?”
Affirmative.
I slide in, letting the chair roll back until I’m facing up. The controls are enormous, but not unfamiliar. How many control schemes could bi-pedals have? I reach out and place my hands on them. Epic attaches a name to each. The controls themselves are like large knobs. Circular and made for a much larger hand, but capable of three hundred and sixty degrees of movement. I push the one on the left and the ship shakes.
We are experiencing lateral thrust. Push it to the right.
I do. The shaking intensifies.
Adjusting labels.
The knob on the left controls lateral thrusters along with roll. Turning the knob rolls the ship left or right. Pushing the knob in any direction engages thrusters.
Which means… I push the knob on the right forward. The counter for the ship’s acceleration increases. The right controls the main drive.
“I guess we’re running for it.”
They know something is up, I am detecting an energy surge. Evasive maneuvers.
I push hard left on the thrusters and jam the right knob full forward. The ship shudders as its engines go for maximum burn.
“Any luck on taking over the ship’s computers so we don’t have to do everything by hand?”
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 61
