Starship Relic (Lost Colony Uprising Book 1)

by Darcy Troy Paulin

  Knowing she had another hour before the woman awoke, Brin continued with the examination. She had the most advanced lab in the entire world, and she put it to good use. With the help of her quiet and dedicated shadows, she photographed, magno-scanned, x-rayed, weighed and measured the woman, and capping it all off, took a genetic sample.

  The sample was a new step, which had been added only recently, based on technology coming out of the North of all places. Brin was as skeptical as anyone. More skeptical than most. But the biotech advances from the north were undeniably valid and quite impressive. They had moved on from clever, though purely structural, into the genuinely intellectually intriguing. It was almost embarrassing for Tawnee.

  Chatlow University received a few gifts of valuable, though minor tech, and in scarcely more than a decade they were making major advances in the fields of Biotech. They were previously responsible for the slug grown, structural shell casings, which was what had earned them the gift in the first place. The very same casings that were used everywhere. In naval ship construction, one of Tawnee’s most important uses of the material. And in building construction, allowing some of the most recent towers built in New York to top twenty stories. Even the most highly advanced fighter craft in the secret and hidden Tawnee military had had much of their precious structural metal replaced by engineered shell, allowing the exceptionally rare metal materials to be used elsewhere.

  But now the North had eclipsed all that with Bio computational devices, ‘Bio-Logical’, which were starting to pop up not just in schools and research institutes, but everyday businesses. The ‘Bio-Logical’ computers were for now far, far, inferior, to the heritage tech of the ancestors, the tech Tawnee alone controlled. But how long would Bio-Logical remain inferior?

  Brin could understand the sharing of the theaters and the reason behind it. It would unite Grailliyn in one unified foreign culture. And being foreign to everyone it was threatening to no one. It was truly no more owned by Tawnee than any of the Regions, a shared heritage. But the rest of their technology? If she’d had any inclination towards sharing before, she was cured of it now. Tawnee had let their guard down and Chatlow had leapt upon it.

  Brin was just a Doctor, and not a Governor, but she could predict how the Governors would act, as she would act too. She would do her part to protect and strengthen Tawnee against all that might threaten it. Even those that had initially no conscious intent. This woman of the first people might just be the key.

  Perhaps she knew something of the origin? HOSaS had been working on that puzzle for centuries, and still had nothing to show for it. It seemed unlikely, but this woman might have answers, after-all, the stories of the first people told of a remarkable, though amnesic lot. Still, once she became one of the people, she might do great things for us. If not, she could add to the genetic diversity of Tawnee. Though they were long through and past the dark dangerous time of low genetic diversity, new genes could only make them stronger.

  A quiet cough from Betha, one of Brin’s two assistants, snapped Brin out of her thoughts and back to the task at hand. The other assistant, Brigga, a nick name given by Brin to make them the three B’s, (in an effort to promote team unity) announced that she was finished with her measurements.

  Brin nodded in response. She considered the measurements taken of this woman, who, though she was not a true direct ancestor, should certainly be treated with the same respect and…

  “Should we move her to the recovery room?” Betha asked, interrupting Brin’s thoughts once more.

  “Yes, yes. You are right of course. To the recovery room,” she responded. The three B’s really did make a most excellent team.

  Chapter 38

  Dredich and Harutia had seen her in person. The EffPee! Here, in Town! Jarounin was practically vibrating with excitement as he fixed his hair and readied himself for this evening’s bonus event. D and H would tell them all about the EffPee at the pre-show gathering. Apparently, she was short but, striking. Indeed, she had struck no fewer than three people who’d pressed too close.

  Jarounin could scarcely believe that someone so exotic, and so interesting, would be here, in Town of all places. In New York perhaps, or in the regions more likely, where they had such cultured and colorful lives. He finished with his wig and looked at his reflection. He’d chosen silvery gray for this evening. Everyone else would be wearing yellow tonight, and so he would stand out. When he made his move, his uniqueness would emphasize his words and lend them strength. He tried out the word a few more times.

  “EffPee. EffPee.”

  They had to refer to her in some way. And Jarounin found ‘She of the first people’ to be already tedious without yet having once said it aloud. EffPee would stick. It would spread.

  Chapter 39

  It was, without question, a glorious triumph. The girl, Snow White, had escaped un-killed, from the forest. His peers and counterparts in HOSaS, Mortran and his sycophants, were now toothless. Their plans to kill Max and silence his discovery were for now thwarted. The short walk through town had done the trick. Snow was out of the bag, so to speak, and in her brief exposure had already captured the hearts of the citizenry. Or had at least captured their interest. Time would tell how it played out with those few ridiculous fools who had boldly pinched Snow’s skin to see if the paint would come off. Likely they would be bragging to their friends about their personal, physical contact.

  Freenan accepted the choice of Dr Brin to examine Snow and treat her wounds. She was a peculiar woman but dedicated. And most importantly, she was not, so far as Freenan could determine, a part of the conspiracy.

  Now, with that examination complete, Snow was being cleared for access to the Core as a special researcher under his direction. He had high hopes, but he was not deluding himself. History told them the First People were, every one, without memories. But those that came before, did not have the Core. All rhyming aside, Freenan thought her memories might find themselves triggered. Triggered by information in the core. Triggered to remember something, anything about what came before.

  Chapter 40

  By now the terminal enclosure was familiar. She’d spent a day working at the computer, searching for and retrieving information that could be useful. She had been informed that no one had accessed these particular files. Ever. Well, not since the Tawnee found the terminal more than two centuries ago. It had simply been waiting for a password. A password that Snow knew, or rather her fingers knew. And it wasn’t really a password. It was a name. Warda Starborn.

  She entered the name in immediately, by instinct. Apart from Doozer she was alone. She’d insisted upon it as part of their bargain. Even with that precaution she’d assumed someone might see what she typed and what came up on the screen. She was careful to conceal her fingers while typing and equally careful to logout afterwards. Max’s life might depend upon it.

  When Eric, Cynthia, Draven, the three B’s or anyone else checked in on her, she pretended to take notes. She forwent the act when Freenan came to visit. She was truthful in regard to her bargain with him and she believed he had thus far been truthful with her.

  But while she still felt he was being generally honest with her, she could not yet fully trust him. He’d left Max in the forest, though he now swore he was doing his best to track Max down and ferry him safely to Snow.

  She believed that too. But only because she knew that he wanted what she had to trade. And she was pretty sure that he believed her when she said if Max didn’t return, that she would take that info to the grave. Though her notes were fake, her login info alone was all they really needed from her.

  Freenan’s other plan, the one to free her memories through exposure to data in the Core? That plan was having an effect as well. Though the effect was so far only minor, and hazy too. Consisting of tiny glimpses from a life before. It was the computer use mostly. She somehow knew that she had not only used a computer like this before, but that she’d used it a whole lot. She was reminded of the drea
m she’d had on the boat. The dream with the star-filled night sky. She thought she might have been able to see that sky from the computer.

  It wasn’t just the computer though. Other parts of the Core triggered memories as well. While most of the complex was formed by the ubiquitous white shell she had seen through her travels on Grailliyn, the center column that was the backbone of the structure was made of metal. It wasn’t steel. Perhaps aluminum or titanium? It was only then, when she considered the material construction of the core, that she realized the pure absence of metal objects anywhere else she’d been in the world till now.

  She had placed her hand on the structure’s metal backbone and felt its coolness. That sense of temperature combined with the familiar shape of the column, which had ‘ribs’ poking out from it every few feet, triggered a strong sense that she had been here before. The rest of the complex seemed unfamiliar. Over time however, some of the layout seemed to hold true to her very hazy memory. As though the walls had been replaced, but that the structure’s original layout had been largely maintained.

  That had been days ago. Since then she had gone through countless files and logs and manuals, mostly regarding maintenance of equipment she knew nothing about. There were thousands of parts and items in hundreds of lists. Tiny little parts that some great machine needed to operate. Only one other piece of equipment triggered any sort of familiarity. The ‘trainer’. The name alone, and not the hundreds of files and manuals, had caused the flash of distant memories. It made her think of dozens and dozens of places and scenarios, none of them solid or detailed, and it all slipped away as quickly as she’d remembered, like waking from a dream. But it was enough to keep her looking.

  It was when she was ready to give up that she encountered something real and solid in the file system. Not the trigger of a faint memory. But one word from this very real world. Icarus.

  Chapter 41

  Just hold still for one second you scary little weirdo…

  The yigrit skittered back and forth, and side to side, but remained within the perimeter of the scent trap. The little monster continued to move, never standing still, not even for Max’s requested one-second. The yigrit would spin and charge and side shuffle, all within the trap. But it always returned to the center, staying away from the worrying smell of the lancer corpse that Max had spread in a circle to form the trap. The yigrit looked frantically everywhere but up and so it was unaware of the man in the branches above it, watching and waiting with a spear in hand. It was also unaware of the stinky sock at the end of said spear or the gray tape sticking to the sock. And so long as it remained unaware of these things, Max’s carefully planned and thus far carefully executed scheme still had a chance of success.

  He needed to place the sock at the back of the yigrit’s head, just behind the chona. The chona was an olfactory sense organ, utilized for social bonding rather than sensing odors in the environment. Crabs had proper stereoscopic nostrils, for sniffing out prey, and each other, placed at the front of their heads where nostrils belonged.

  So, the chona was Max’s route to crab social bond and friendship. If the yigrit would just hold still, for a second, then Max would see if this plan had been worth all the time and effort he’d spent on it.

  Normally at this point in the crab training process, Max would have assistance. He and a partner could control the situation, hold the crab from above, place the scent swab, and that would be that.

  But Max was alone, and the yigrit had those un-crab-like razor sharp claws. If Max was slashed by one of those long blades, it would be more than an embarrassing story, it would be a missing finger or arm or head. And an embarrassing story. Of course, under those circumstances the story would most likely remain untold.

  But Max’s time and patience paid off when a small noise distracted the yigrit. It spun in the direction of the noise and, just for a moment, froze in position.

  Max lunged. The small clipping of dirty-smelly-sock hit its mark and the tape stuck firmly to the yigrit’s carapace head. Unfortunately, Max had followed too far through with his spear throw. He slipped from the branch and approached the yigrit quickly from above.

  The idea had come to him in the morning, after a miserable and terrifying True Night. A creature, he suspected it to be a yigrit, visited him over and over throughout the long darkness of night. Sniffing and huffing and screeching and clacking. Despite all the frightful noise, it didn’t attack, and in the morning Max was surprised to find the creature, a yigrit as he’d suspected, was resting no more than ten feet from where Max had been sleeping.

  Max had never seen a yigrit so close before. Though related to Doozer’s species and all the other crabs across Grailliyn, it was a distant relation. The yigrit had very little fur, and that which they did have was short, brown, and bristly. Many crabs had short hair, and some had brown hair but as a rule, they all had soft hair, never coarse or truly bristly. After all, they were the source of crab hair hats and crab hair rugs.

  Their claws too were different. Crabs had a wide variety of claws. Large, blunt, powerful claws were common. As were those of the stilt crabs, which had been re-purposed as part time snow or mud shoes. But Max had never seen or heard of any other crab with claws like a yigrit. Theirs were sharp like broken glass, and the paired blades slid across each other when closed like a ceramic scissor shear.

  An even bigger difference was their body shape. Crabs looked a lot like crabs. Movie crabs. Earth crabs. They varied some but they each started with a sphere for a body, sometimes squashed and disk like. Here again yigrit were different. They had distinctly separate lower bodies, upper bodies, and heads. Like an insect, but far larger.

  The yigrit’s head looked like a crab unto itself but was much smaller than that of a typical crab and consequently its mouth was much smaller. But what had really caught Max’s attention was a small depression, just back of center on the yigrit’s head, with a small hole and a nodule sticking slightly up out of it. A chona. Just like a crab. A trainable crab. He wondered then if perhaps he didn’t have to be alone after all.

  This morning, when the yigrit noticed him, it had beat a quick retreat. But it reacted differently this time. When Max fell from the tree, almost directly on top of the beast, the yigrit instinctively slashed at the movement, hitting Max in the shoulder. Max rolled away and scrambled to his feet.

  The yigrit charged straight at him, but Max held his ground, keeping his back towards the tree’s trunk that lay just outside of the scent trap, and resisting the strong urge to run. He knew better than to flee from a crab. If you ran, the crab would follow your lead, and give chase. They assumed that you were correct to run from them because you were probably tasty.

  Max also resisted the urge to cover his vulnerable belly and other parts important to him. He instead raised his arms high and wide, spreading his fingers and swayed, slowly, side to side.

  “Big Crab,” he said with a loud voice, as steady as he could keep it, “I’m a biiig, big crab.”

  When the yigrit retreated, leaping backwards over the ring of lancer remains that had kept it trapped until now, he realized the assumption he had made. It wasn’t a crab he was dealing with, not really. And if he kept assuming he knew how the yigrit would act, he might end up regretting it. And owning an untold embarrassing story.

  With the immediate danger having passed, Max remembered his shoulder. It didn’t hurt much despite having taken a direct hit from the yigrit. Max was afraid what he might see if he looked, so he reached his hand over and felt for the wound. His hand came away dry.

  He looked at his shoulder. It was whole and his brown jacket was undamaged. He smiled in relief. He hadn’t considered that the yigrit might attack with a closed claw. What was it saving the blade for?

  “You are a strange one,” said a man’s voice from behind him.

  Max stiffened, then slowly he turned towards the voice. It had a thick South Grailliyn accent, though Max was unsure exactly which of the many southern regions i
t came from. The South was the gateway to whole of the rest of the world. But there were more important questions. How had the killer survived? And how had he found Max?

  “Yes, slow is good,” said the voice, “but I request you put arms up.”

  Max slowly raised his arms.

  “Yes. Like crab. Biiig, big crab.”

  Max finished turning and stood with his arms up. Though not like a big crab. He didn’t want to be too fearsome as it might spook the man with the rifle.

  The man in question was indeed the killer from the lock and presumably the same killer that had been on his tail all the way from the True North. He was wearing the same long black jacket he’d had on when he failed to die most recently in the canal. The jacket was more of a brown now, caked with dust and dirt. As dirty as Max’s own clothes. In addition, he wore a crab shell top hat, and that too was covered in dirt and dust. On his long face (also dirty) he wore a thin casual smile. It was not as disarming as the owner might have hoped.

  "You always doing something that confuse me. You make smart moves, then, stupid moves," the killer said, "or perhaps they are smart moves, but only look stupid. Is your plan… confuse me, with these crazy things you do?" It seemed to be a genuine question.

  "I hadn't given you any thought. You were dead," Max said.

  "Ah. With the heavy box, yes?"

  Max didn't respond, and the killer took that as yes.

  "You see, heavy boxes, are not so deadly when dropped on people in water," he said. "You are in water and you look and—oh no! Box is coming. Box look heavy." The killer looked up at an imaginary box and pointed with his left hand.

  Max noted the rifle still pointed at him, and the killer’s right-hand finger on the trigger.