She follows me as I circle the towering starship and gantry.
“When I was chasing Jaelle Tekala though Tir-a-Mar, it was you hacking into the systems, frustrating everything I did,” Olivia says. “But for you, I would have gotten her. It was you I was battling all the while.”
“A battle of wits then,” I reply, looking up at the ship, “as I had no intention of harming you.”
“I read your file,” she says, keeping pace with me. “There’s not much there and it’s hard to credit what I did see. You’re 50,000 years old?”
“50,132 to be reasonably precise,” I say.
“Well, by all means let’s be precise. An AI, product of a species that vanished so long ago we know nothing about them. Wrik found you on an asteroid that you attacked during a war.”
“Yes, my side was driven off after I and two other units subdued the base.”
“I’ve never seen or even imagined a machine like you, an artificial intelligence so advanced as to mimic real life—”
“I mimic nothing. I live. I think. In my own fashion, I feel.”
Olivia stared at me. “I didn’t intend to offend you. It just did not occur to me that it could be an issue.”
“Then perhaps, biological woman, you are not as aware of feelings as you should be.”
Olivia laughs in evident surprise. “Touché’— a hit I do confess it. Sensitivity is not one of my strong suits and I’m only now learning how to interact with you.”
“It is perhaps less difficult than you anticipate.”
“Certainly Wrik, interacts with you very well. He’s even rather touchy about you.”
“If by that you mean that he will not hear me insulted, then you are correct.”
“You’re very close.”
“We are friends.”
“More than that.”
“You are correct in that ours is not a casual friendship. It is something defining to us both. If you imply something else, while I think of myself as female in an innate sense, my gender characteristics are both a matter of choice and mostly of appearance.”
“So you say,” she replied. “Anyway, on to other matters. We may have to fight side by side and I don’t know enough about what sort of abilities you have.”
I consider. Her request is a reasonable one. “I am a direct combat model though I am optimized for cyber-attack as a system infiltrator…” I go into some of my more obvious and known combat capabilities. Croyzer is after all part of Candace’s operation and I no more trust her than I do Candace. Olivia’s original eye widens at my descriptions.
“Quite the little death-dealer, aren’t you?”
“Less than you think. For example I have already located and deactivated or reprogrammed the spying devices that Candace either gave or planted on you. She probably anticipated that I would, but nonetheless took the chance in the hope of getting more information on me. I won’t bother asking you if you knew.”
A spasm of anger flashes over Olivia’s face. I suspect that she did not know.
“She knows I no longer destroy biological life casually, so there was little risk to you,” I add. “My philosophy is to never kill unless I must. The corollary is I never fail to kill when I need to.”
“A sensible sentiment I also subscribe to,” Olivia says, her mouth a grim line.
“That would give us a basis for understanding each other,” I reply.
She nods. We finish our circle and head back up in the gantry elevator.
For Olivia’s benefit, I speak aloud as I broadcast to Wrik on the bridge. “All is secure outside. We are coming in.”
“Ok, let me know when you’re in. I’ll have them roll back the gantry. T-minus twenty.”
“We are at the hatch. You can have them roll it back now.”
“Roger that,” Wrik said, slipping back into ship-speak and sounding cheerful. He is always happiest at the controls of a ship.
We make our way up to the bridge. I strap into the seat next to Wrik. Dusko is already in his accustomed seat.
Olivia looks at hers. “Why is there a hole in the center? Oh right, Jaelle has a tail.”
I am chagrinned. I have not thought about this. “We will modify it after we are under way.”
The gantry reaches its lock down. I help Wrik finish his checklist. London Control gave us a very detailed exit plan. We input it into the ship’s AI. Wrik would prefer to fly her himself, but Gatwick does not allow any but automatic launches.
The impellers build up power and Stardust lifts, slowly at first but accelerating smoothly and quickly. We join the march of ships slipping Earth’s gravity and into the freedom of space. The sky above brightens as we lift above the clouds of London and the early morning sunlight. The ports then show the dark-blue of high atmosphere and finally the blackness of star-studded space.
As we reach orbit we head for the commercial accelerator. We pass through the rings of the accelerator with our AG field set on maximum as the accelerator flings us up to a high percentage of light speed. With money as no object, we will hit the Mars accelerator which is eighty five minutes away, it will greatly facilitate our flight to the outer edge of the system where the stardrive can operate free of the system’s gravity well.
I excuse myself and retire to the engine compartment of Stardust and plug into a special receptacle I had built into the reactor for this purpose. I top off, filling reserves and battery power.
Now that we are in space and away from the interference of a planet’s gravity well and EMG field, I can begin the detailed examination of the samples I have tucked into my body. This work requires precision and isolation. The shielded engine compartment blocks many emanations both from the outside and from the engines, which otherwise would kill the crew in short order. I add to that my personal EMG field and the fact I am designed to be radiation proof and I become an iso-lab. I sit on the deck, setting my motion dampers to keep me still on a nearly atomic level.
The level of detail of my exam will be well below the atomic level, down to elementary particles. I focus the full power of my quantum brain to begin an analysis that is far more detailed than any Confederate AI is capable of. Even still, it requires hours of real time to peel back the variables created by the handling of the artifacts and their relocation across space. Had I been present when they were found, I would have had much greater prospects of isolating the sector of space they were originally from.
What eludes me at the moment is how the lifeboat could have been so far from its launch point, even given that it might have been launched a hundred or more years ago. The lifeboat simply has no significant range, being designed for use within a few million miles of a planet. Confed ships discovered no habitable planet in the nearby system.
Either the lifeboat was launched from New Hope, or some other starship after a hyperspace jump, or some new form of technology not resident in the boat was used. Yet the boat itself showed no sign of modification.
Calculations that would have taken Confederate computers years, if they could have made them at all, unravel for me. The information in them is mostly negative but eliminates some areas of space from consideration. Elements and particles in the bodies indicate that they have not come from near the galactic core, nor from the outer edges, some combinations of particles suggest Hyades star cluster, which is congruent with what little we know of the technology and star-charting available to the original refugees. There are many other possibilities, but this is the highest probability, for all that it ranks little higher than random guesswork in an area parsecs wide.
We are on our way to the last system where Maximillian’s expeditions was seen, Eta Cassiopeiae. Perhaps I can find additional information there that will refine the variables further. I can do no more for now, but I have found the beginnings of a trail.
Chapter 10
We came out of hype
rdrive in Eta Cassiopeiae almost twenty light years from Earth. I shook off the effects of the jump easily; the transit had been direct and quick. The others were getting up from their seats and, except for Maauro, sipping restorative drinks.
“Welcome to Eta Cassiopeiae,” I said, “G5 star, four major planets, only one habitable and that one not very pleasant.”
“Is that why humans didn’t colonize it?” Dusko asked. “It’s a bit odd to have a system so close to your home-system by hyperdrive, occupied by another species.”
“Eta’s hyperdrive shunt from Sol,” Maauro began, “eluded detection due to an anomaly in Sol System. The hyperdrive entrance was masked by a gravitational effect caused by an immense chunk of space debris, possibly a dark planet, wandering through the outer part of the system. The dark object prevented the opening from being detected until it wandered out of Sol System.
“This direct route has only been known for forty-two years. Prior to that, it took 9.723 elapsed years of hyperdrive travel through many interchanges to reach Eta.”
“Then why think New Hope would have used it?” Dusko demanded, stretching.
“Because the object was not close enough to obscure the jump point entrance during the time New Hope fled. They may have feared being caught by whatever power would triumph in Earth’s wars and fled away from the nearer G-class stars.”
I nodded. “Unfortunately there’s always been a good hyperdrive path from Solari space to here. By the time humans bothered with the system, there was a small Frokossi colony there. It failed. Then the Solari moved in to squat in its ruins.”
“Earth,” Olivia added, “took a dim view of Solari this close to Homeworld and made sure the colony didn’t prosper. The Solari only held on here to annoy us. After they became Confed members, we had to drop the embargoes, but nothing much in trade has developed. It seems to be the hiding hole for a fallen Solari dynasty, so they don’t get much help from their own kind either.”
Maauro nodded. “Bexlaw had no way of knowing how powerful New Hope’s stardrive was, it had been an alien make, only possible for them to get their hands on in a world falling apart in war. Odds favored it not being as powerful as modern ones. It may have resulted in them being ‘out’ of the universe for far longer than we are in transit, decades, possibly centuries. There were seven G class stars within twenty lights of Sol. No sign of Lost Colony has been discovered on any of the other six, but Eta is special case. It’s never been properly surveyed.”
“So here we are,” Dusko said, looking like someone who had lost interest in his own question. “I’ll go check hydroponics.”
“I’ll check the drive units,” Maauro said. “I want to hit my power tap.”
Olivia grimaced. “My turn in the galley.”
I sighed internally. We’d discovered on the transit out of Sol that Olivia was a worse cook than me, which was saying something. That meant soup and sandwiches if we were lucky.
Maauro perhaps read something in my face. “No need, Olivia. I will do it after I check the drives.”
That drew a rare Olivia smile.
The others trooped off the bridge. I looked at the glowing star on the ship’s screens. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I had now left Jaelle behind not only in distance, but in time. She would have left for Star Central not long after we did, a longer trip in reverse than outward time-wise due to the hyperspace currents. So for a while we had been out of the universe together and indeed she would still be out for a month or longer. But there was no way to tell how much time would elapse between our voyages and hers. No way to tell how long our actual time apart would be until we see each other.
I charted a course for Eta IV. Humans hadn’t bothered to name it and if the Solari had, they hadn’t told anyone. It was a world a little larger than Mars and also with two small, close moons. It was cold and arid, with more CO2 then was healthful, conditions Solari tolerated better than humans.
After another check of instruments, I engaged the autopilot. Stardust’s AI was a minor version of Maauro herself, truncated to fit into the ship’s vastly more limited computers. To my surprise, she’d never invested it with a personality, any more than she had the crab-robots. The ship’s voice remained neutral on the rare occasions we used the audio. Perhaps Maauro felt the need to make clear the separation between her and the lesser mechanisms.
I killed time with the others as we cruised inward. We had the momentum from the accelerators back in Sol System and I was saving fuel. We’d loop around Eta IV and gravity brake, though we didn’t intend to land on the planet itself. We gathered on the bridge the next day, as I put us into a braking orbit around a world that was a larger duplicate of the now terraformed Mars, with its small seas and limited belts of green around the equator.
“Unlovely place,” Olivia said. “Any contact from below?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t like it. I sent the Confed mail transmission through. There wasn’t a lot of it. They acknowledged receipt and made payment, but nothing came back. Otherwise they are studiously ignoring us.”
Dusko shrugged. “Not that unusual. We haven’t filed a flight plan for a landing. No trade opportunity.”
Maauro turned from her contemplation of the screen. “Wrik, do you have any recommendations?”
I grinned mirthlessly at her. “Because I would have the best perspective on being a hunted human refugee, living in terror?”
She nodded slowly.
I gave it some thought. “These people didn’t know the galaxy like we do. Everything would have been new and unknown. If they came this way, they were the first humans not only to be here, but to leave our solar system. They had no way of knowing how many habitable worlds are out here. Some of them would have been roused from cold sleep by automatics. They would have looked this place over well, but I doubt they would have risked a landing on Eta IV. The moons, on the other hand provided a place to scavenge some minerals and to study the planet from a safe and stable orbit. They would have landed on the planet-facing side of the inner moon.”
“Agreed,” Maauro said.
I oriented us for a landing on the inner moon. My charts said there were no Solari installations there. The Frokossi had put small bases on both the inner and outer moon, but as far as we knew, the Solari hadn’t used either. The barren, airless moon grew in our view screens. It was as uninteresting a rock as I have ever seen, pitted and scarred with the usual meteorite damage. I placed Stardust in as low an orbit as was prudent.
“Your turn,” I said to Maauro.
She nodded and headed for the airlock. Olivia’s eyes widened as she simply walked in sans spacesuit. Next, we saw her walking outside to sit on the prow of the Stardust. She ran her hands through her silky black hair which splayed out. The hair began to wiggle, thinning and extending to form a huge nimbus around her head.
“A sensor array!” Olivia said.
“She’s vastly more sensitive than any instrumentation we have,” I said. “If there’s something below, she’ll find it. We can always check the outer moon later if I’m wrong.”
We circled the moonlet for the hours until Maauro’s voice sounded over the speakers. “Wrik, there’s some disturbed ground below. Look on the screen. It may be a landing site.”
Maauro transmitted to the screen, but the screen’s resolution was insufficient for us to see what she did. I marked the coordinates on my board. “We’ll land nearby on our next pass. I don’t want to use the fuel for a hard brake on this pass. I’ll allow enough distance so our set-down won’t disturb the area you detected.”
“Agreed,” she said. “That will give me time to spin my hair back in.”
“You don’t hear that every day,” Olivia observed.
“We say that a lot around Maauro,” Dusko replied.
Maauro returned as I lined us up for a landing. We came in well short of the site.
“All of us?” Dusko asked with obvious reluctance.
“You need not go if you do not wish to,” Maauro said.
“Then I pass. I’d rather be in my hydroponic garden with living things.”
“Olivia?” she asked.
“Count me in. I like EVAs.”
We headed for the lower airlock and an idea struck me. “Maauro, put a suit on. I don’t know if anyone on the ground has instruments that could let them look up at us, but there’s no need to advertise your presence and capability.”
She nodded. “Excellent thinking.”
Minutes later and all in suits, we walked toward the area Maauro indicated. Gravity was about a tenth of standard, so we moved carefully over the surface, each bound covered meters.
“You were right, Maauro,” Olivia said pointing. “The area shows a clear set down from a ship, burn marks and a depression.
“Two ships,” Maauro said. “Those are blast prints from two landings. Someone was not as cautious as we were in landing. The zones overlap.”
We moved forward.
“There are indications of archeological style digging here as well,” Maauro added
“Could this be it?” I asked, excitement bubbling up in me. “Could New Hope have landed here followed by Bexlaw’s ship?”
“Difficult to say,” Maauro began. “All we know is two ships landed. The fact that I see trenches is suggestive of an archeological dig. Unfortunately they would likely have removed any evidence.”
“You mean other than that shiny object on the mound over there,” Olivia said. We had just rounded a boulder and she was pointing at the back of it facing the landing site.
“What is it?” I said.
“A plaque,” she said.
We loped over to the boulder. On it was a golden metal plaque sat. “Landing place of the SS New Hope, circa 2076CE,” I read, “discovered by Bexlaw expedition 2880CE Galactic reckoning. From here they passed into the void.”
The Lost (The Maauro Chronicles Book 3) Page 9
