by Mel Keegan
“She made it through to Zunshu space, as we always knew. We found numerous images of the skies around the Zunshu Drift, and many worlds. We think the ship had been several years in Elarne by the time it transited what we’re calling the Zunshu Gate, and as you can see, no surprises are in store for us or for Lai’a when we encounter it. The Zunshu Gate is the same phenomenon exactly as the Orpheus Gate or the Orion Gate, and we can handle it.
“So did the Ebrezjim. Here is a record of the transit of the Zunshu Gate, and it was a smooth exit. Before reaching this space, they had exited Elarne at the Orion Gate and one other, beyond it, which they named the Red Gate, though all further data about this has been corrupted beyond salvage. In fact, we’re translating this as ‘Red.’ They actually named it for blood; we don’t yet know why. The Zunshu Gate was another smooth transit – and they did trade signals with a comm buoy and also an AI vessel as they approached the Zunshu home system.”
His face settled into grave lines. “The Ebrezjim was a science ship. She was never designed to fight. Our ancestors believed that if one ventured abroad with a smile and the open hand of peace, one would be greeted as a friend. In retrospect this might have been appallingly naïve. The truth must have shocked them into bewilderment.”
For some moments he was quiet and Shapiro asked, “I’ve always assumed she was attacked, but does enough data survive to know how, and with what?” He was thinking like a Fleet commander, and they were good questions.
Dario was only pushing his food around now, and took over the commentary as the screen continued to display images of words which were, to Travers’s eyes, mundanely familiar. Planets were simply planets. Very few were remarkable enough to stand out, such as a gas giant like Zeus, a ringed jewel like Saturn, a terrestrial world like Velcastra.
“You’re imagining the Ebrezjim was attacked by a warship, or at least a gunship,” Dario said sourly. “And I’m sure Lai’a would have driven into the Zunshu system with sensors wide open, Aragos interlaced, every cannon we possess powered up, expecting the same. We would have been taken unawares, now, the same way our ancestors were. I’d hope Lai’a would be a couple of jumps ahead of us!
“We uncovered enough to know the Ebrezjim was assaulted from within, by its own AI. The Zunshu overrode it – and before you thump the table and tell us it’s impossible, and there was no way a Zunshu system could handshake with ours, much less take control of it, let me remind you, Lai’a was able to reach deep into the control core of the stasis chamber we opened on Kjorin. It sucked out so much data, it took 20 hours of processing time before it was satisfied.
“There’s an unfortunate but undeniable similarity between Resalq and Zunshu firmware, and probably even the underlying patterns of our AIs. It may be that when firmware reaches a sufficient level of sophistication, it might always be similar at the core, since form follows function – though this is just conjecture. Critically, we must remember that in the last ninety years we’ve taken to pieces several rudimentary Zunshu AIs, such as those in their probes. What we learned there prompted developments in our own AI technology, which in turn has probably made late-generation Resalq AIs more similar to Zunshu AI tech.
“This similarity in structure is the whole reason Lai’a was able to reach into the core of the Kjorin stasis chamber and derive useful data … but it’s not a good thing. This very compatibility places Lai’a at even greater risk than the Ebrezjim’s purely Resalq command core.
“The Zunshu AI did essentially the same thing: reached right into the AI at the heart of the Ebrezjim, paralyzed it, analyzed it. And 17 hours, 42 minutes after it overpowered the Resalq core, it took control … and suddenly the life support was pumping out a toxic gas mix, or possibly huge dosages of a drug. We can’t be sure which, but it’s no matter – and perfectly feasible. All ships have the capacity to generate ‘medical air.’ Billy, you want to add your two bucks’ worth here?”
“Huh, me?” Grant was surprised, but he stood with a stubby bottle in one hand, and addressed the gathering on cue. “Sure, any sophisticated AI can take control of life support if it’s told to, or if the human crew has keeled over, and it needs to. It’s smart enough to take air samples, rad readings, and pump out a concoction of drugs suspended in air that might be oxygen-rich, or maybe even oxygen-poor, given the necessity. It’d make up the balance of the breathing mix with something harmless – xenon, say – and lace the air with drugs, medication, whatever was needed to facilitate healing and bring the crew around …
“And I can see where this is going. Suddenly the AI of the Ebrezjim adjusts the gas mix till the Resalq keel right over. It didn’t even have to be done with a toxin or a drug, guys. It could have been an adjustment, too little O2, with the hazard sensors shut off. God knows, if it happened to us right here, right now, we’d just go to sleep, do the classic face-plant, before we knew what hit us. It’d be the last thing we thought of, because you trust your AI implicitly.” He paused to empty the bottle and set it down, and was frowning at Dario as he asked, “Is this what happened to your people?”
In fact, Mark took up the commentary now as the screen shifted to views of a glorious gold and white gas giant. “Something very much along those lines seems to have happened, Bill, but some of the crew seem to have realized what was happening. They scrambled for the escape pods – which makes sense. The pods operate on their own discrete power and life support, and they’re not under AI control. Each is a bubble of stable environment. If you couldn’t get into armor or find a respirator fast enough to keep yourself alive, you’d jump into the nearest escape pod. And since you didn’t trust the AI, which had just tried to kill you, you’d blow the pod to put distance between it and you.”
“They seem to have raised the alarm in time to haul a large number of people into safety, so they blew all the pods,” Tor went on. “They probably intended to return to the ship and take it back, once they’d recovered from either oxygen starvation or drugging. It never happened.” He turned in his seat, frowning up at the screen, where the gas giant sailed with a flotilla of its moons. “If they could have redocked and gotten even a few people into armor, things might have turned out differently. They might have scrammed the AI, for a start, so it couldn’t do something disgusting with the engines, or flood the ship with a rad spill from the generators.
“Me, I’d have pumped the ship down to zero pressure, so it couldn’t hurt me with an explosive decompression. Then, they’d need to get a couple of transspace pilots into the tanks, or whatever they used for manual flight in transspace. I haven’t had the chance to look into that yet. With flesh and blood pilots online, they could make a run for it. Take off back to the Zunshu Drift, looking for the first big storm to come their way.” His head shook slowly. “According to the last remnants of the surveillance logs, recorded by automatic systems independent of the AI, the escape pods were picked up by a squadron of drones.”
“All of them?” Vaurien asked quietly.
“All of them.” Dario rummaged through a menu and pulled up an image so grainy, the object in it was only just discernible. “This appears to be one of the drones. Look familiar?”
So familiar, Travers’s mouth had dried out to dust. “Looks like one of the aeroshells that shot out of Hellgate, at Oberon. Curtis?”
Marin had leaned forward, the better to see. “Those, I’ll never forget as long as I live. You see ’em close up, with the airlock sealed behind you, and …” He looked down from the screen, at the Resalq. “So the whole crew was taken off?”
“I’m afraid so.” Mark rubbed his palms together thoughtfully. “Now the story gets harder to piece together, because the AI never did come back online after the Zunshu took control of it. In fact, there’s compelling evidence to suggest it was deliberately broken to make sure it wouldn’t, couldn’t wake up. The evidence is not quite conclusive, and I should point out that this generation of machinery is very different from current tech … Tor?”
“Different enoug
h for genuine old Resalq tech to be virtually alien to kids of my age,” Tor finished, “and Mark’s right. If Dario and I wanted to melt down an AI of the Ebrezjim generation, we’d be reduced to guesswork. But it’s a very safe bet, a lot of the damage done to the AI was deliberate; and it was the Resalq themselves who killed it, not the Zunshu.”
“The Zunshu would have controlled it – turned it on them,” Jazinsky said quietly. “How could you ever trust it again? If you wanted to get home, you killed the AI and flew the ship out of there manually.” She was looking along at Vidal, Rabelais, Queneau.
“Transspace pilots,” Travers murmured. His blood had chilled by several degrees. “This, uh, isn’t likely to happen to Lai’a, is it?”
“You mean, could a Zunshu AI override it?” Mark stood and stretched his back. “It’s … possible, and it’s highly likely they’ll try. However, since we’re aware of the strategy, it’s unlikely to be effective. Still, I would recommend every member of this company be in armor before we exit the Zunshu gate. There’s at least one trick they can’t pull on us … and one inestimable service the crew of the Ebrezjim have done us. Richard?”
“Yes. And we’ll take the habitation module to zero pressure – and take engine and generator safety protocols on manual.” Vaurien and Jazinsky shared a sidelong frown, and Richard gestured at the screen, where the grainy image of the Zunshu aeroshell had just been replaced by the gold and white gas giant. “So the entire crew was taken prisoner – but there were sixteen bodies still on the ship when we found her. And she made it out of Zunshu space, Mark.”
“As I said,” Mark said slowly as he went to the ’chef for coffee, “a jigsaw puzzle. We recovered fragments from a log begun after they got out. A small handful of the crew had found their way back aboard, and the first thing they did was to kill the AI, the moment they were in armor. They took the ship out with a Weimann jump directly from orbit – they didn’t bother with any Weimann exclusion threshold, and I dare say if they’d played by the rules they’d never have made it away.
“They jumped directly to Hellgate’s malevolent twin sister, took the first event that was big enough to offer a freefall channel big enough to accommodate the ship, and … fled.” He slipped his hands into the pockets of dark emerald slacks and studied the screen, the giant world, thoughtfully. “All we have to go on is a few half-corrupt, half-garbled journal entries made by people who were almost incoherent, and some surveillance footage from automatic systems that kept on working long after the AI died. Dario?”
He sank back into the recliner and Dario picked up the story as he returned from the ’chef with a tumbler of red wine. “We know they’d been prisoners. They didn’t know for how long – they report being in stasis, not in cells. The same kind of Zunshu tech we saw at Kjorin, where Midani and Emil Kulich were imprisoned for centuries and walked out of there as if a few seconds had passed by.
“The escapees had no idea where the rest of the crew might be, or even if any but themselves were still alive, but according to the fragment we recovered from one report, twenty of them were being moved from their stasis vessel to a lab. Two of them,” he said pointedly, “were pilots. One was an engineer. And that’s enough to take your best shot, if you have half an idea of where your ship is.” He shrugged now. “Not enough information has survived to tell us how they knew where the ship was … for all we can tell, they might have been at a research facility where the ship was also docked – they might have been able to just look out of a viewport and see it.” Dario spread his hands, an expression on cynical frustration. “Pieces are missing from the puzzle, but we know these twenty Resalq took the ship, ignited the main e-space drive right there from the dock – which, incidentally, would have caused mayhem on many levels.
“If they were looking for a little revenge, they got it by tearing the dock apart and deluging half a hemisphere in very nasty fallout. Four people died, presumably killed, in the escape, but the engineer and two pilots were able to get it together, keep it together. They didn’t hit fatal problems till they reached the driftway outside the Ebrezjim Lagoon … and we know the rest from that point on.”
Tor had twisted his chair around and was frowning up at the gold-white globe. “They had bad engine problems – this much we know for sure, because they missed the safe channel through the driftway. The gravity tides around the lagoon caught them, same as the Orpheus was caught, and they were dragged through. Like Mick and Jo, they almost burned out the engines, trying to stay out of there; the drive was jacking around, they probably knew they didn’t have enough power. And once they were through the horizon, like the Orpheus and the Odyssey before it, they drifted for a long, long time.
“We’ve analyzed all the video we captured aboard the Ebrezjim, and – well, it’s still guesswork, but I’ll give you one skinny chance in ten we’ve gotten it wrong. They did some real damage to their engines, and it would’ve taken months to get them up and running, short-handed, one engineer, limited drones. There’s evidence of wide-scale malfunction across the rest of the ship, too, and you’d expect this. The AI was dead. Think about how we rely on AI surveillance and a regiment of drones to keep up a maintenance schedule on a complex ship. You want to try doing it with sixteen hands, only one of whom was an engineer? Good luck.”
“Still,” Mark mused, “they did eventually get the engines back to something like operability, or when Ernst happened along, he’d have found nothing useful. The fact remains, he was able to task the handling drones to undock the engine deck and tether it to the Odyssey … would you like to add to this discussion, Ernst?”
Reluctant, thoughtful, Rabelais got to his feet. “Don’t know what else I can tell you,” he admitted. “She was a frozen, dead hulk when I arrived and I didn’t poke around much. I saw some bodies, of course … never did manage to work out how they died, but from what we know now, I’d guess it was inevitable. Cold and hunger and despair’ll always get you in the end.”
But Tor’s head was shaking. “They were doing reasonably well, right up till the moment the hull was ripped open. From the analysis of the fissure, the Ebrezjim was gouged open from the outside in one mother of a collision with something much bigger, much tougher. Something we didn’t see in the lagoon – and we wouldn’t expect to. At the rate of drift bodies in there maintain, the other party in this head-on smash could be anywhere in a void that has the diameter of the heliopause of the Velcastra system!” He shook his head slowly. “In the end, entropy got the sixteen crew and what the real heartbreaker is, they had the transspace drive back online when they were hit.”
“Our best guess is,” Dario said gravely, “they were working on the ship-wide malfunctions, trying to get enough back up to speed to make a run for home. They were recycling everything, waste, water air, and bleeding power off the transspace drive to keep the ship warm. They weren’t going anywhere till they were sure the ship would hold herself together on the gravity express, but they could have survived for a long time. Quite long enough to get the work done and leave.”
It was Vaurien who asked shrewdly, “So, they didn’t just fire up the drive and avoid the collision?”
Now the Resalq could only shrug and Mark said, “Ignition failure, maybe active scanning wasn’t back online, fatigue, blind panic. We won’t know till a science crew gets back aboard the Ebrezjim and makes an intense study. Or,” he added, “we might pull the hulk right out of Elarne, take her to Saraine and go over her with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. And that is another project for another time. But at this moment, we can say we’ve learned many things.
“One: the Zunshu will more than likely try to take control of Lai’a. Two: the Zunshu are not infallible – prisoners could, and did, escape. And Three: their homeworld is one of the most beautiful gas giants we’ve ever charted, with an incredibly varied atmosphere.”
Travers gave a small start. “This planet you keep showing – this is it? This is the Zunshu homeworld?”
“Accordin
g to the Ebrezjim database,” Mark agreed.
“But … surely, you mean a moon orbiting it?” Marin protested. “Nobody can live on a gas giant – there isn’t a surface!”
Mark, Jazinsky and Rusch shared a glance now, and Jazinsky said with a certain dark glee, “You wanted to go exploring, Richard? Now you know for sure you’re off the map! Dario tells me he and Tor literally ripped the database apart, looking for viable data, and nothing they found references any moon. There’s plenty of allusions to the planet, but the only off-world objects mentioned are orbital platforms. The planet does have a family of around 30 moons, all of them arid, icy, sulphurous, whatever. Now, I’m not saying life can’t arise in improbable places. It can. Since the first survey cruises, planetologists and xenologists have been cataloging creatures breathing everything from methane to hydrogen and living at temperatures so cold, they swim in ammonia oceans, and you could mine water like a mineral! But if the data referencing exactly where the Zunshu are, on or around that gas giant, was in the Ebrezjim archive, it’s not viable now.”
“There’s just a few snippets,” Dario said, “throwaway remarks made in journal reports that are more like … babble. In one fragment, someone speculates that the rest of the crew are being held for research.”
“Research?” Vidal echoed. “You mean, vivisection?”
“Probably.” Dario rubbed his palms together. “And you’d have to expect this. We must be very different from the Zunshu. They’d literally take us apart to figure out how we function. Not a pleasant thought, but entirely predictable. The planet itself is about the size of Saturn in the Earth system, or Guanyu … not quite as massive as Jupiter or Zeus, but quite large enough to be a formidable world. It’s very hot, down deep, with a complex core, a mother lode of liquid metallic hydrogen. Higher in the atmosphere, we’re seeing accessible pockets of everything from fluorine to oxygen, nitrogen, you name it. The planet’s one big chemical engine.
