James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01

by Meridian

  “Status update, Specialist Flash,” hissed the voice in the emergency Comm Unit. Emergency Technical Services was networking them through the Comm-System of an Aves. That must have been an interesting assignment. His was far more basic.

  “All drainpoints are in place on the auxiliary BrainCore and calibrated along your specifications.” The weirdest specifications he had ever seen he might have added, but he was an engineer.

  “And the interface with the primary?”

  “I’ve raised the gain so that total interface and overwrite will be virtually simultaneous.”

  “How virtually?”

  “point-oh-oh-oh-nine seconds delay.”

  There was a brief silence. “I think that will be sufficient. I am going to initiate the download,” hissed the voice, which identified itself only as “Q.” He didn’t know of anyone named “Q” in the engineering core.

  “When the new program in the auxiliary BrainCore attempts to overwrite the primary braincore, the program in the primary may attempt to override the interface link. I can not allow that to happen if the plan is to be successful.”

  “What can I do?” Flash asked.

  “I want you to reconfigure the interlink between the primary and secondary braincores so that it is one-way, duh.”

  “Right,” whoever Q was, Flash didn’t care much for his attitude. Superior, condescending, like it only tolerated him for its own convenience. “Interlink is set for one way flow only.”

  “Stand by.”

  Pegasus — Keeler’s Quarters

  Queequeg moved away from his workstation and jumped on top of the Dead Guy’s casket, which was now surrounded by twenty drainpoints hard-linked via the ship’s otherwise inoperative optical-data-network to the twenty other drainpoints Flash had installed in the BrainCore. Earlier, he had downloaded a protocol, a kind of map that Lexington Keeler’s duplicate consciousness could use to re-assemble itself in the secondary BrainCore.

  “Are you ready in there, Grandpaw?” he asked out loud, scratching on the lid

  “Shut up, you fur-bearing critter,” Lexington Keeler answered in a voice that made Queequeg want to leap out of his skin. “I been ready for this for hours, ever since that alien bitch took over my ship.”

  “Whose ship?” Commander Keeler interjected.

  “This should be virtually instantaneous,” Queequeg said. He leaped back to his workstation, landing exactly where he wanted to on the touchpad. Almost instantaneously, a message displayed on his monitor.

  “Transfer Complete.”

  “Restructure Protocol Engaged”

  “Restructure Protocol Complete”

  “Interface Engaged.

  Then, a series of numbers that only a tech-head could make sense of flew up the monitor. When they suddenly stopped, eleven seconds later, Queequeg jumped from his workstation and ran for the Primary Braincore deck as fast as his four legs would carry him.

  Pegasus –- BrainCore

  When Keeler entered the Braincore Control Center; the first thing he saw was his cat sitting on the floor, ears flat against his head, staring at the Duty Specialist who was head of the watch. “Queequeg, what’s going on?”

  “This high-strung bitch won’t let me near the monitor panels,” Queequeg hissed.

  Keeler looked up at the woman. “Lieutenant…”

  “Technical Specialist Newport.”

  “Technical Specialist Newport, step aside and let my cat look at your screen.”

  “I can tell you…”

  “I know you can. Queequeg…”

  Queequeg jumped up on the panel. His big green eyes looked between the BrainCore schematic, and the panel readings.

  “What’s up?” Keeler asked.

  “The Primary Braincore is inactive and empty,” Queequeg reported.

  “What do you mean empty? Is Caliph gone?”

  “She’s gone… but she took all the resident programming with her.”

  “Resident programming?”

  “The resident programming in the BrainCore, the instructions for running the ship.”

  “So, we’re dead in space?”

  Queequeg now brought up the technical schematics for the Secondary Braincore. “We could try reinitializing with the Auxiliary, but that is also empty.”

  Keeler’s mouth hung open. “You mean … the other program gone as well?” Queequeg flipped back and forth. “They are both completely purged. If we can get the Comm System up, most of the ship’s functions can be run by Federated Systems… the only problem is there is no Braincore to coordinate them, so, certain key systems will be unusable.”

  “Like?”

  “Primary drive engines, navigation, defense…”

  Keeler shook his head. “That’s it. You’re fired!”

  “So, where did they go?”

  “Caliph might have reacted to …”

  “Eh! Eh! Eh! Neps! Neps!” Keeler cut him off.

  “… might have reacted to the presence of the other program and interpreted it as a virus. Caliph would have begun destroying the other program. The other program was set to either override or destroy the Caliph program. They might have destroyed each other.”

  “How long were they in contact?”

  “0.054 seconds,” Queequeg answered. “I don’t think they destroyed each other, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, according to these readings, both cores have been wiped clean. If they were destroying each other, at some point, their programs should have been too damaged to continue. Besides, Caliph was too smart for that. She would have dumped to another system, but she couldn’t have done it that fast.” His tail flicked. “Or, could she…?”

  “Damb,” said a Technician. “That is one smart cat.”

  “He could be a bit more discreet,” Keeler said. “Do you mean to say Caliph could have dumped to another system on the ship? She could be hiding somewhere?”

  “The only system with enough memory storage to hold the entire braincore is the secondary braincore,” Queequeg said. He jumped down from the chair. “There is one other possibility.” Queequeg ran out the door. Keeler turned to the rest of the people in the control room. “Thank you all, I guess we’ll be going. Carry on.”

  Keeler caught Queequeg in the hall and picked him up. “What is the other possibility, Kitty Cat?”

  “Maybe the old man….”

  “Try to be discreet about that. The knowledge that one of the Dead Guys is on the ship is privileged. If you can’t keep your pointy-toothed mouth shut, we might as well put a big yellow sign on the back of the ship reading ‘Dead Guy on Board.’”

  “Yellow sign?”

  “I don’t know why I thought of that.”

  “Why does is have to be yellow?”

  “Focus!”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, you know how there used to be 144 of them, and now there’s only 42?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, some people have speculated that the Dead Guys have come up with a fast-acting virus that they used to wipe out other intelligences.” They reached the commander’s transport pod and climbed in.

  “Why would they do that?” Keeler asked, settling into his seat.

  Cats can’t shrug, lacking the correct structure to the shoulders, but if Queequeg could have shrugged, he would have then. “Who can know? The Dead Guys have never been exactly forthcoming about what it’s like to exist as non-corporeal intelligence, sustained within a computer matrix. Maybe somebody just takes up more than his share of the memory cache one day. Maybe someone forgets to reconfigure the pseudo-synaptic fiber-links after a trans-matrix interface. The point is, something happened to 102 of the intelligences that were entered into the matrix. Maybe they have figured out a way to kill an unwanted intelligence. The old man would know, but he probably won’t tell us.” Keeler watched the inside of the ship flash by. “So, now what do we do?”

  “Start putting the pieces of the ship’s system together.”

>   “How long will that take?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Before Keeler could say that it didn’t, the Emergency Alarms began sounding again. “Well, at least they keep those working,” Keeler said.

  Pegasus – Main Bridge/Primary Command

  Keeler jumped off the transport pod at the Bridge, and sent the cat back to his quarters to work on his mutual destruction hypothesis. He had a bad feeling, though, that Caliph, parts of her anyway, were still around. He looked at the alarms and was sure of it.

  “Sir, we’re showing activity in the Missile Hatcheries,” Change reported.

  Keeler crossed to a nearby station and activated. “Show me.” Two hatches above the missile hatcheries slid open rapidly. In less time than it takes to tell, a pair of Nemesis missiles, one from each of the open spaces, rose above the ship’s forward plane. There was a kick transmitted along the length of Pegasus as the ion-rockets fired, carrying the missiles on a trajectory toward Meridian.

  “Caliph is gone. Why are the missiles launching?” Keeler whispered.

  Specialist American reported emotionlessly. “Apparently, Caliph left behind a fail-safe program that was activated when we shut her down.”

  Keeler felt a hot flare of some intense emotion rise up his back to his neck. He was speechless.

  Lexington Keeler, or, at least, the thousand years of his intellect, had failed to dissuade Caliph from launching her attack, and had failed pretty quickly, and miserably. Caliph would have her vengeance.

  Every living thing on Meridian was about to be incinerated, including his landing party.

  chapter thirteen

  10 122 Pegasi System, Deep Space

  The Aves Basil and Desmond were bearing down on Meridian at a nifty fraction of the speed of light.

  “Captain Jordan,” said Specialist Ericsson Molto, blond, rather bland-looking, with thick, pink babyish skin. Molto was the C3¤ officer, and occupied the seat behind Basil’s pilot. “I’ve intercepted a signal from the Landing Party.”

  “Relay to me, Specialist Molto,” the pilot of the Basil answered. Halo Jordan was the Flight Captain of Flight Group Beta, the Burning Skies, a woman whom most men could not describe without falling back on the words “angel,” “goddess,” or “I would drink her bathwater.” Golden hair, tawny skin, magnificent proportions, Jordan had them all, and the loneliness that went with being beyond the realm of mortals.

  But when the communication came on, showing Tyro Commander Redfire, she had to catch her breath.

  “This is Tactical Tyro Commander Philip John Miller Redfire of the Aves Prudence. Ident code: brave-shadow-omega-nought-nought-nought-nought.”

  “Code confirmed,” Molto said.

  “We are on the surface of Meridian, where we have been attacked by organized hostile forces numbering … unknown in number. They appear to be not human, repeat, not human. A certain number of our party, including Ex-Tyro-Cmdr Lear, have been taken captive. Our position is as follows.”

  “We will proceed to reconnoiter the environment and hopefully locate the others. We have no way of knowing if they are in imminent danger or not. I will leave a locator beacon active on delta range frequency 1221. This message will repeat at hourly intervals until we regain the ship. Approach the planet with extreme caution. We may require armed assistance. I will transmit additional data when we have more. Redfire out.”

  Jordan frowned. “Better check on our passengers.”

  Molto activated an internal monitor that showed their twelve Warfighter passengers, recumbent, but twitching occasionally, with masks over their faces. Tactical data from the probes was feeding directly into their brains, allowing them to know the planet and the landscape before they landed. “They’re in battlefield visualization mode,” Molto reported. “Self-programming for possible conflict.”

  “Estimated time to orbit?”

  “Real-time, fourteen hours, nine minutes. At our present speed, 1 hour 47 minutes, relativistic time.”

  “Engage holoflage shields,” Jordan ordered. The commander of Desmond did the same.

  Outside, an array of hologram-emitters and energy deflectors came on line. The two ships shimmered within shields of displaced light, becoming translucent ghost ships in the night sky.

  Meridian — Outside the Tower

  Redfire, Driver, and Roebuck made their way down and across the side of the tower, picking across a landscape that assaulted every common notion of scale and perspective. The chunks of rubble were gargantuan, as though some giant creature had been playing with stone building blocks, thrown them down in a tantrum, kicked them around and set them on fire. The 30° cant added to the perception of being in the midst of something fallen and decaying. The outside of the tower was overbuilt with structures, like buildings rising up a mountain, except that the mountain was also a building.

  They picked their way through the landscape as the last light of the Meridian sun trickled into the sickly glow of the twilight city. From time to time, they found their way insurmountably blocked with rubble and had to double back. They detected Merids in some of the structures they passed; sleeping, if the readings were to be trusted.

  Night fell rapidly, and the brightest stars showed through the hazy green sky. They found an empty Quonset structure, inspected it, and, after Redfire declared it defensible, they made their camp.

  “Are you going to eat that, beauty?” Roebuck asked Driver, who had been toying with a piece of survival ration sandwich.

  Driver shook his head and handed it to Eddie. He watched as Eddie shoved half of it into his mouth.

  His cheeks bulged and then the bulge was at his throat. There were certain reptiles and insects that ate like that. Driver had seen them in the course of zoological studies in primary school, but he had never seen a human eat in such a manner

  “What are you looking at?” Roebuck demanded.

  Driver shook his head.

  “What?” Roebuck demanded again, then consumed the other half of the sandwich the same way.

  “I just don’t care for that kind of food.”

  Roebuck shook his head. “In real life, I wouldn’t otherwise eat slag like this on a dare, but, it’s one of those, every-meal-could-be-our-last situations, so, this is how I am.” Driver nodded, not because he understood or agreed, but mainly because he hoped he would not have to watch Roebuck eat again. Just then came a great flash, like lightning, but a sickly green color. Driver looked up at the top of the Arcology, where two towering metal frames discharged torrents of bright energy into the sky. He wondered what its purpose was.

  Redfire had climbed to the top of the shelter and was looking out over the city. He turned down toward his companions. “Driver,” he shouted.

  Driver looked up. “Aye, sir?”

  “Come up here.”

  Driver mounted the wall. It was a short climb, four and a half meters just about, and the surface of the wall was generous with handholds. Redfire gave him a hand and pulled him up to the top. Driver found his footing with a little steadying from Redfire. “Thank you, sir.” Redfire nodded. “We’ll rest here for the night and move up before dawn. I’ll take the first watch.” Driver nodded once. It was his way, combination acknowledgment and agreement in a wordless economical gesture.

  “Driver, what do you suppose they’re doing on Pegasus right now?” Redfire asked.

  “By now, they’ve received our distress call and probably sent in a rescue team. They should make orbit in another twenty-one hours.”

  “If we haven’t made contact with the others by then, we should be prepared for evacuation,” Redfire said.

  “Aye, sir.”

  “How did you know to hide yourself inside the Aves before the Merids attacked?” Driver shrugged. “I don’t really remember. I think I was half-asleep when they attacked the ship. I might have picked them up on the external monitor and then hid myself before I was fully awake.” Redfire shook his head. If Driver had seen them coming, his trained response wou
ld not have been to hide himself. “You also knew the Merids were going to ambush us from behind, so you activated the weapons on the Aves to hold them off.”

  “Nay… that was just a standard tactical response.”

  “If you say so.”

  “What is your next plan, Tyro Commander?” Driver asked before Redfire could pursue the subject further.

  “I want to move straight up this tower, get to the level where Lear and the others are, blow a few holes in the side, and connect with them. If your time estimates are right, we should be getting there about the time we can expect reinforcements from Pegasus. ”

  “What if the reinforcements don’t arrive?”

  “Then we recover the others, if we can. If we can’t, we get back to the ship and …,” Redfire’s face tightened. “Pegasus will come.”

  “I hope so.” Driver was looking off toward the horizon, light glittering in his dark eyes. “Impressive civilization, don’t you think?”

  “At one time, maybe it was.”

  “At one time?”

  “This civilization has seen better centuries. They built this tower, this city, but now it’s falling apart.

  That could be what they want with us; a fresh injection of technology to revive a dying culture.”

  “But we would share our technology with them,” Driver said, sounding as though shocked that anyone would expect otherwise. “They need only to ask.”

  “I’m willing to bet that Ex-Commander Lear is making them an offer even as we speak.” Driver licked his lips and looked up the side of the tower.

  “I’ll relieve you in four hours,” he told Redfire, and moved back down into the camp.

  Slumping against the back wall, Driver took out a datapad and ran a remote systems check on Prudence. All systems were in standby mode. External scanners showed the Merids had established a cautious perimeter some 500 meters away. They had shot at his ship, but her shields had deflected them.

  Prudence was safe and secure. He put the datapad into his pack.

  Roebuck was snoring. Driver looked at him lying on the ground, his head pillowed by his landing pack. Was Eliza really a part of this man’s life? What could she see in him?