by Mel Keegan
“I’d buy that,” Travers agreed. “But then … what? They ran out of time? Got sick? Perhaps their life support went on the fritz, like Ernst’s. Have we looked at that, Mark?”
“We have,” Mark told him, “but there’s no way to infer useful data. The system has bled completely away and instrumentation is quite literally frozen. The AI might know more, if we can coax it online, and if no irreparable damage has been sustained during ten centuries of dormancy and neglect.” He shook his head slowly. “The very real truth is, we might never know the answer to the mystery. And this isn’t what troubles me.”
Travers thought he knew what Mark was thinking. “Either those escape pods blew for a good reason,” he said quietly, “or they blew due to a rogue power spike – and it does happen. If they blew for a reason, they’d have been loaded with the crew … but where, why? Not inside Elarne. If they blew in a power surge, they’d have been empty.”
“If they were loaded, where in hell are those people?” Marin said bitterly. “And if they blew out empty, the question’s the same – where are two hundred Resalq, less the sixteen we found dead?”
Ghosts shadowed Mark’s face. He looked away from the threedee. “Work it out, Curtis. Go through the equation, one variable at a time. Only madmen would eject into Elarne, so – assume the crew blew out in normal space, far indeed from Hellgate. The next station on the gravity express is Orion 359. They might have ejected there – who knows why? Or at a previous gate. Or,” he added quietly, “in Zunshu space.”
For a long moment the lab was silent. The loudest sound was a shush of cooling fans. At last Marin said, “If they ejected at Orion 359, we could find them.”
“If anyone survived.” Mark’s tone was bleak. “The odds are incredibly long on survival, without a support ship, over a millennium. Even finding a habitable world within reach of the escape pods is a massive longshot. Resalq scientists would have known this.”
“They could also have known the location of a decent planet ahead of time,” Travers speculated. “The Ebrezjim was on her way home. Being a science crew, they might have done some surveying around the exit gates on their way out.”
“I believe they did,” Mark agreed. “True, information from this era is scarce, incomplete and untrustworthy, but stories have come down to us about messages transmitted back … habitable worlds.” His shoulders lifted in a deep, expressive shrug. “We can look.” His eyes flickered from Marin to Travers and back. “But worlds favorable to thin-skinned, endothermic oxygen breathers are fairly rare. I wouldn't expect one to fall so close to the skirts of Orion 359 as to be reachable by escape pod. The far greater probability is, those pods either blew due to system malfunction, or the crew ejected in Zunshu space. In enemy territory, at least they’d be in reach of rescue.”
Rescue? The word was ashen in Travers’s mouth. “If your people were picked up by Zunshu, they’d be prisoners. Maybe the Ebrezjim tried to get out. There was trouble when they made their run, so they blew the pods, were salvaged. It’s … possible. But it adds up to incarceration.”
“Or execution,” Mark said softly. “Or vivisection, the way both human and Resalq xenobiologists have always been inclined to study alien species ... including each other.” He shook his head slowly. “If the crew fell into Zunshu hands, there’s no pleasant resolution. And we,” he added, pushing up to his feet, “won’t know anything more until the Ebrezjim’s AI comes back online – if it ever does. We should be able to get data out of it, even if the synthetic mind itself is dead.” He looked at his chrono. “They’ll be lifting it right now. It’ll be on board in an hour or so, and then I believe we’re departing. In which case, I must give some thought to the memorial Midani suggested. He’s quite right. The ship is a crypt, and these people have waited a long time for chelemlal to be said over them.” He dropped a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “I’ll be in the Ops room, if you need me.”
“So will I,” Travers growled. “I was on my way there. Joss said Dario and Tor want me to wrangle drones – apparently neither it nor Lai’a can do the job?”
“They’ll be glad to illuminate you – it gives them a chance to grumble.” Mark gestured sharply in the direction of the stern of Lai’a, above which the hyper-Weimann core blazed, naked and malevolent. “It’s all about interference off the drive … comm has been dropping out, intermittently and increasingly.”
“And we can’t afford any mistakes with the Ebrezjim AI.” Marin was a pace behind Travers. “I’ll give you a hand, Neil. You might need it, if comm is squireling around.”
Ops was busy. Vaurien and Jazinsky were absent, but Alexis Rusch was still looking at the Orion 359 data. Dario, Tor and Midani Kulich were working ten drones between them, while Tonio Teniko looked on, sullen, dull-eyed, rebellious, and Vidal sat watching the tank in company with Hubler. Both were eating, and from the ’chef came the scents of nachos and grilled chicken. Vidal had just had his shots; Grant was still repacking a light bag, and before he left he aimed a scanner at Teniko. Travers was right behind him, and peered at the results. Grant looked up and back, and turned the screen to give him a clearer look.
Toxic, Travers observed. The cocktail of drugs in Teniko’s blood would have anesthetized a camel, and the real mystery was how the man was staying on his feet, lucid enough to work two hours out of six. His useful window was approaching right now. In ten minutes he would be in the dark little lab on the far side of Jazinsky’s, alone with a battery of computers and two handling drones – doing what, Travers did not know, and would not have understood if Teniko had explained it to him.
“Neil, thank gods.” Dario beckoned him right to the two workstations where he, Tor and Midani were so focused on the interwoven displays, they barely had the time to look up.
Four meters away, Alexis Rusch and Leon Sherratt were still busy with the Orion 359 data, but Rusch was watching as Travers appeared and Tor observed,
“You’re damn’ good with drones, Neil – see what you can do with these.”
“Ten years in Fleet – I ought to know drones.” Travers gave Marin a glance and pulled up a chair. “What’s going on? Mark mentioned something about comm on the fritz.”
“This.” Tor zoomed swiftly on the quadrant of one screen where he was monitoring comm around Lai’a. “This is the command frequency for the drones, and it’s – there! See that flatline? Their comm band keeps dropping right out, blitzed by a burst of interference from the drive. The drones glaze over till their tiny little brains come back online. This happens when they’re maneuvering the old AI core, they can slam it right into something. At these temperatures metals are so brittle, all we’re going to salvage is a few bins of trash.”
“Change the command frequency,” Travers suggested.
“Tried that.” Tor gave him a reproachful look. “The interference is coming from Lai’a. All applicable frequencies are susceptible.”
“Wasn’t a problem six hours ago,” Marin mused.
“Yeah – and we’ve been sitting here for those six hours, with a naked transspace core right up there.” Dario gestured upward, and slightly aft. “The Ebrezjim is starting to sizzle, enough to make comm go screwy. And yes, before you ask, we knew this had to happen – it just happened a hell of a lot faster than we’d hoped. Caught us napping. We’re off somewhere in the forecast calculations – don’t have anywhere near the time we thought we had. Sue us.”
“So tell Lai’a to stand off, put some distance between us and it, and put a decontamination crew on the wreck,” Travers suggested slowly. “Get the radiotoxicity back down to manageable levels, and the drones should come properly back online.”
“We can do that,” Tor agreed, “but it adds up to a full-on job, hundreds of drones, weeks of work, because the wreck’s wide open to space. Gotta decontaminate the inside as well as the outside, yes? And inside, she’s delicate as a handful of snowflakes. You can’t just go in and hammer on her, like you can on the hull of Lai’a.”
�
��Well … shoot,” Travers said lucidly, out of ideas. He lifted a brow at Dario and Tor, waiting.
“Or,” Tor said, rising to the challenge, “we can override the drones. Deactivate their pea-sized brains, take ’em on good, old fashioned remote control, wrangle ’em by hand via telepresence – with a few klicks of cable, if necessary! Take the old AI aboard, and get the hell out.”
“The job’s actually halfway done, damnit,” Dario growled. “The core is actually out. The drones didn’t go loopy till they were lifting the whole hunk of matrix out through the deck. And the answer to the question you ought to be asking, Neil, is yes, any decontamination process will wreak havoc with it. We need to get this done fast. Every minute we stand around talking about it, we’re ramping up the contamination.”
“O…kay.” Travers flexed his fingers, eyes skimming the displays.
One quadrant of one flatscreen showed him a visual. Marin was at his shoulder and they pored over it together. The drones had cut a cylinder out of the matrix of the ship’s cubic material, around three meters in diameter, and they had already trimmed it to five meters long. The AI core was in the middle of this mass, while four pocket-sized drones had clamped on, two at either end of the cylinder, and were holding it safe, right in the middle of Ebrezjim Ops. The mass would fit through the fissure in the hull with fifty centimetres on either side, and the consequences of a collision on the way through were dire.
“Can we widen out the hull opening?” Marin asked as he reviewed the same data.
“Oh, we’d love to,” Tor agreed, “but we looked at the numbers. No matter if we try to torch it open or just push it open with Arago jacks, we’ll feed in so much energy, the inside of the wreck will start warming up fast. It’ll get so unstable, the compartments’ll be full of a mess of drifting ice plus maybe ten tonnes of debris that’ll shatter off the structures inside the hull, where we’re trying to cut her open. We dump a lot of cartwheeling debris in there, and we stand a first-class chance of losing the AI core. All this has been for nothing.”
“So we looked at putting the core back into the deck,” Dario muttered, “then torching open the hull, then putting a gang of drones inside and cleaning out the compartments.” He looked up with a disgusted expression. “We’re back to the time budget. In the days it’d take to go that route, we’d just irradiate the wreck to the point where we’d have to decontaminate it before we could move the core again. Like Tor said, weeks of work. You want to sit here for weeks, while the Zunshu hit the Deep Sky?”
“Damn.” Travers looked up at Curtis and Mark. Beyond them, Vidal and Hubler were listening, and Ernst Rabelais had just stepped in. “Exactly how bad’s the radiation?” Travers asked thoughtfully.
“Bad enough.” Dario studied him with a frown.
“Too much for industrial armor to handle?” Alexis Rusch wondered. She had turned away from the Orion 359 data and was watching the other display; and she was thinking along the same lines as Travers.
Dario’s tonguetip flicked over his lips as he looked from Travers to Rusch and back again. “You guys want to do this, uh, manually?”
“With the drones jacking around, there’s no absolute guarantee of getting the AI core out of there without critical damage,” Travers said reasonably, “even if we wrangle them on remote, by cable. One cable snags, breaks – it’s over. You know all this, we all do. How important is this data you’re looking for?”
“Invaluable.” Mark folded both arms on the breast of a dark gold tunic. “This ship has been in Zunshu space. The AI has seen it, navigated it … it’s seen the Zunshu face to face. It has hard data about them, their worlds, their space –”
“Their defenses, weapons systems, their home fleet,” Vidal added in acid tones. “How important is it to get this data? What’s locked in the core could raise our chance of forcing an armistice and getting back out of Zunshu space to maybe eighty percent.”
“Seventy,” Mark corrected.
“Seventy’s one hell of a lot better than fifty.” Travers splayed his right hand over the pad and zoomed on the radiation parameters. He whistled softly. “It’s getting hot out there.”
Marin leaned on his shoulder. “Too hot?”
“Depends –” Travers skimmed data, visuals, charts, looking for exactly the angles of view he wanted “– how long you’d need be out there in the badlands. I’m figuring an excursion time of about 30 minutes, tops, before somebody’s going to be laid up in the Infirmary, going through the fun and games Bill put Mick through.”
“Well … shit,” Vidal whispered. “I was going to put my hand up and volunteer.”
“Michael, for heaven’s sake,” Rusch began.
“Not a bloody chance in hellfire,” Bill Grant said loudly, cutting right across her with the voice of medical authority. “And not you either, Neil, nor you, Curtis. Not after what happened to the pair of you on the campus in Hydralis. There’s only so much of this crap the human body can take – or the Resalq, come to that. This kind of shit busts you up right at the chromosome level. You’ll pay a high price for it, in ten years, or twenty. It’s somebody else’s turn – there’s a few other jocks on this ship!”
“Well, now.” Roark Hubler swung his weight onto his feet, balanced on the awkward, uncomfortable biocyber legs. “Sounds like somebody punched my number.”
“Or ours,” Tor said doubtfully.
“Just yesterday you were talking about how you wanted kids,” Travers said pointedly. “You do this, Tor, and you can walk away just as sterile as me and Curtis and Mick.”
“And me,” Hubler said with a self-mocking chuckle. “I been sterile as a mule since I tangled with a hot-core generator that took a shell fragment and steamed its guts out into the body of a gunship, ten years ago.” He stomped over to the workstations between Dario and Rusch and glared at the displays. “Goddamn, that’s gonna be tighter than a virgin at an old prude’s convention.”
“Doable, though,” Travers said thoughtfully. “You just need to be quick, Roark. Maybe … wrap the cylinder in a thermal air blanket, at ambient temperature. Zip it shut and inflate it till you got a hand’s span on both sides as it goes through the fissure, right? One guy on top, one on the bottom – put a couple of gloves between it and the hull as it goes through, give it a punt, slow and steady from the bottom. She’ll cruise on through. Catch her on Aragos, come right back to Lai’a on suit thrusters. I wouldn’t even bother with a sled – takes time you won’t have.”
Hubler frowned down at him. “You’ve done this before.”
“Something similar,” Travers confessed. “It’s doable, Roark, you just need a second pair of fast, strong hands.”
“I, me, am always having fast, strongly hands,” Midani Kulich offered. “I was worked on ships like Ebrezjim when was just not twenty years aged.”
But Mark was doubtful. “It shouldn’t be you, Midani. You’re one of very, very few ancestrals with the pure genes. We don’t want to run any risks with those genes. If a human becomes sterile, it’s an inconvenience. If an ancestral Resalq were to be sterile –”
“What is this thing, this ‘sturull?’” Midani’s brow creased.
“Bowcushe,” Mark told him gravely. “Sem cushenlal.”
“Me alike to Major Hubler, but,” Kulich said. He shrugged, spread his hands. “Engine tech, me, whole life. Was inside engine housing for working doing, and … no words.” He huffed an impatient sigh and switched into the Resalq.
Mark listened, and his brows rose. He gave Hubler a sidelong look. “He was working in the reaction chamber on a freighter. It was supposed to be safe enough to work without armor but, in his words, a ‘sludgebrain’ decided to test the igniters, which primed the system with raw fuel, with four live techs in the chamber. It cost them two days in decontamination, a year of medical nano, sterility.”
“It’s always been common among engine technicians as well as line crews, pilots and troops,” Rusch allowed.
“Accidents,” Hubl
er added, “happen way too often when we get pitched into crap like this. Somebody’s got to get their hands dirty, guys – drones are dandy only up to a point, and you passed that point two hours ago.” He tilted his head at Kulich. “You reckon you can do the job?”
“I can do,” Kulich insisted. To Mark he added, “Got own armor, be inside, faster than Major Hubler.”
“He’ll do me,” Hubler decided. “And call me Roark, kid. I quit Fleet, you know. Technically, I’m on the Harlequin right now … speaking of which, don’t nobody say word one to Asako. She’s sound asleep. With a bit of luck she’ll still be asleep by the time Midani and me get home.”
“All right.” Travers sat back and regarded him with a frown. “You’re going to catch hell for this?”
“I … might.” Hubler only shrugged. “I’ve done this sort of crap before. That price Billy Grant talked about paying, down the line? It’s my price to pay, and I’ll pay it. Fact is, I’m the one that can get this done. Mick?” Vidal was nodding, but Hubler added, “Asako says I’m a moron.”
“Jesus, we’re all morons,” Grant muttered, “or we wouldn’t be here.”
“Or heroes,” Rusch suggested.
“And frequently,” Mark said quietly, “there’s an indiscernibly fine line between foolishness and courage.” He beckoned Hubler and Kulich aft. “We’ll have you back before you’re in the red zone, Roark. Trust me. Michael, Ernst, come and help me get them suited up and get the equipment together. Every minute we sit here looking at the job –”
He did not have to say it. Every minute, the Ebrezjim was soaking up more fallout. Travers stood back from the workstations and asked pointedly, “Is it worth asking Lai’a to put some distance between us and the wreck?”
