The Colony Ship Conestoga : The Complete Series: All Eight Books

by John Thornton

  “It is good, is it not?” Khin replied.

  Jerome handed a water ration to Cammarry who quickly drank and tried to wash down the taste of the cheese. She then sputtered and said, “The taste is new and invigorating. I can honestly say I have never tasted a better cheese.”

  Khin fell to his knees and put his hands over his head and waved them in ecstasy. “A wizard praises my cheese! What a glorious day!”

  “Please wait here, and we will be back to start this quest,” Jerome said. He took both cheeses and led Cammarry away and through the rooms they had made their camp. When they were back in the chair room he quickly grabbed the medical kit and pulled out a packet of blue gel. “Take this in case that was toxic or poison of some kind.”

  Cammarry took the packet and consumed it. “I do not think it was poison, and since we are forced to stay here, we will need to learn about the indigenous people and what they eat. Our own food rations will run out in a few days. Besides, I did manage to eat some of it.”

  “Sandie? What is your assessment?” Jerome asked.

  “Khin is human, very likely a descendant of the original crew, although it is possible he is descendant from someone revived out of suspended animation, or his ancestors were from a habitat. He has limited technological knowledge and attributes mechanical items to wizardry and paranormal forces. Folklore and science are mingled in his thinking. My best conjectures are that he is only a minimal threat, however, that is an early assessment and the conjecture may not be including all relevant factors. His mere presence here indicates a high chance for both of you to survive. His clothing was made from the integument of a goat. The cheeses appear to be a relatively safe source of food. I doubt you will have any ill effects from consuming it. Doctor Carolyn immunized you against a broad range of items.”

  “So how do we secure the teleportation receiving pad?” Jerome asked. “Can you continue to monitor for the Dome 17 signal and work on the problem as well as assist us in the quest to interact with Khin’s people?”

  “After assessing the nonphysicality here, I believe with some repairs, the doors which Khin and the goats pass through can be powered by one of the four fusion packs,” Sandie replied. “I can design a security code which will allow me to open and close them. That will seal off the teleportation receiving pad, the goat room, the chair room, the bedroom room, and the airlock from major biological threats. The FTL scout is secure and its hatches are under my command. The second fusion pack will remain with the receiving pad. That will allow you to each take a fusion pack with you. My observations and conjectures project that the rats will still find a way inside these areas, but they should not be a threat to the teleportation pad.”

  “And you will still be able to work on the problems and assist us in the exploration of the Conestoga?” Cammarry asked. “We need to learn more, we need to investigate, and yet I hate to take you away from trying to save the Dome 17 people.”

  “I can easily accomplish both those directives,” Sandie replied. “I am confident of that. Should I detect a signal from Dome 17 I can initiate the preliminary stages of the teleportation link, and summon you to return.”

  “So we take all our food rations, the med kits, the tools, a fusion pack, and the weapons,” Jerome said. He was mentally making an inventory of what he would place into his backpack.

  Returning to the goat room, Khin was waiting for them.

  “We need to secure this door before we leave.” Jerome took some tools out and began making adjustments. He attached a fusion pack to the inside of the door frame and jacked a cable into an access port. A nine section color pad lit up on both sides of the wall near the door. He and Cammarry then dug out the growth medium, the plants, and the other debris which had collected in the door’s track. With careful and precision cutting they remade the doors so they were able to slide into position.

  “I have powered up the doors,” Jerome said. “Sandie can you access them?”

  “Yes, I have appropriated a section of the nonphysicality here and have a small network established. The nonphysicality is fragmented badly, but there is enough space here for me to work. The network encompasses the area around those doors, the teleportation receiving pad, and the scout ship. I can operate the doors at will,” Sandie replied. “As to assisting you in investigating the Conestoga, I can probe the nonphysicality on a limited basis from the com-links. That will require a cabled connect from a com-link to an access port, but that will allow ongoing assessments. This area and the doors are secured.”

  The doors slid shut and then opened again. They did not quite align exactly when they were shut, but the gap was only about four centimeters wide. No human or goat could pass through that remaining gap.

  “Excellent. Now can we monitor it from a remote position?” Jerome asked. “I want to make sure wherever we go we can remain in audio and visual contact with this spot. No more dust and tan keeping me from seeing locations.”

  “Yes Jerome. I have reactivated two vintage cameras and listening devices which were mounted in the chair room, and the chamber with the receiving pad. So I can display the conditions here via the com-links, as seen through those devices,” Sandie replied. “It is all established.”

  Khin has been squatting down and watching the work that Jerome and Cammarry did. His eyes shone in admiration. “Your wizard tools are a wonder. A true wonder! And you are allowing me on the wizard’s quest with you.”

  “So lead us on,” Cammarry said. “Where can we meet your people?”

  “To reconnect with my people, I would usually take a long route, but there is a faster way, if you are willing,” Khin said. “Two great wizards such as yourselves will have no problems with passing the graveyard will you?”

  “Graveyard?” Cammarry asked. “A place for dead people?”

  “Oh no, not dead people. Dead spirit-ghosts, a graveyard of dead minds. With you along it will be safe to journey through that,” Khin answered. “We can progress through the graveyard and save many many hours of tedious walking.”

  11 artificial deaths

  Jerome glanced back and saw the nine colored control pad next to the door he had just repaired. The colors glowed brightly in the dim light. Cammarry walked ahead of him following Khin. “Well the longest journey begins with a single step. Sandie? You can still hear me?”

  “Yes, Jerome. This is very exciting. I am looking forward to what we will encounter,” the AI replied through the com-link. “I will keep a detailed map of your journey, so you can return here whenever the need presents itself.”

  The hallway was long and straight with closed doors on the sides. The growth medium was present in various amounts and the plants were growing across most of the floor and other flat surfaces.

  “Khin, are all the halls dimly lit like this?” Cammarry asked.

  “Mostly. The world is always lit like this, but some places are dark, and wizard places are bright. You are the only ones I have ever seen who live part in light and part in dark. But who am I to question wizard ways?”

  “And the plants grow everywhere as well?” Cammarry questioned.

  “Of course they grow where the light is,” Khin laughed and laughed. “You and your tests. If I did not know you were a wizard, I would think you are a toddler you ask so many questions.”

  “You are answering me, and I appreciate that,” Cammarry replied. “It helps me understand.”

  They turned a corner where the hallway divided. Khin led them to a stairwell which was covered with thicker and more reddish and yellow colored fungal growth. Nearly all the permalloy of the stairs was hidden by the growth, except for where a small flow of water came down the center of the stairs. The water pooled at the landing of the stairs and then lapped over the edge and continued downward over the next flight.

  “We go up here to the graveyard.”

  Cammarry and Jerome were about to follow Khin up the stairs, but he turned to the wall and pulled open a panel. Inside it was very dim, and a
brown spiral tube, about arm thickness was visible. The spiral turned about itself in a coil and had a hand breath space between the coils.

  “We are not walking up the stairs?” Jerome asked.

  “No. You have wizard light and we can go this way. It will save us many hours of walking.” Khin stepped onto the spiral. He scooted himself along the coiled spiral following it as it wound about. He disappeared into the darkness.

  “We need light,” Jerome said. He turned on the fusion pack light and looked down the shaft. The brown column of coils extended down for a vast distance. He then looked up, and the light revealed that the coiled brown spiral wound its way upward for a good distance as well.

  “Wizards? Are you coming? Step onto the coil and climb. It is easy.” Khin was somewhere overhead.

  “Jerome, Cammarry, this was part of a central heating system. There is no sign of power from it, and it should be more than stout enough to hold your weight,” Sandie commented. “It is an unorthodox manner to traverse, but I conjecture it is relatively safe. I do warn you, a fall down the shaft would be devastating, but both of you are in excellent physical shape, so this climb should be of only limited risk.”

  “Your spirit-ghost says to follow!” Khin called down. His words were followed by laughter. “Little children do this all the time, and they do not have wizard light.”

  Cammarry stepped onto the coil and proceeded to slide her feet around and ascend. Jerome followed.

  After about a half an hour of scooching along the coil, Khin removed another panel and stepped off the makeshift ladder or stairs, and out into a corridor.

  “You see; we have saved lots of walking! Now we head to the graveyard!” Khin called happily.

  They passed a door frame which Jerome figured was aligned with the stairs they had seen below. This door frame had in the past suffered severe damage. The permalloy sides were melted away, and the remains of the pressure doors were just twisted and ruined piles of junk. They were blocking the passageway.

  “What broke these doors?” Cammarry asked as she looked closely at the damage. “It seems there were explosions as well as cutting torches used to get these doors open.”

  “That has always been like that. That is why we used the coil to climb. Without wizards with me, we would have walked the long way around,” Khin replied. “The graveyard has always been here.”

  “This was once different. When it was built, these doors were operational,” Jerome corrected.

  Cammarry agreed. “It may have been destroyed long ago, but this was not always ruined like this. Khin, do you know any legends or stories about it?”

  “The Old One tells stories, but they are for scaring children,” Khin replied with a chuckle.

  “Yet you said you needed us, wizards, to pass through this place. Why is that?” Cammarry inquired.

  “So many questions,” he laughed, but with less conviction. “Look ahead. That is a wizard place. Just looked around and you will see what I mean. You will see that the dead minds are everywhere.”

  The corridor led to another set of doors. These had been ripped from their mountings and were in a shambled bunch of pieces scattered about.

  “Even more extensive damage over there,” Jerome observed. “Something very destructive took place here.”

  Beyond the doors was a large space, and was roughly round. While most everything was covered by the plants, short moss, and fungal growth, there was a pattern to it all. Beneath the pale green carpet of foliage, they could see multiple evenly-spaced and overlapping circles. There was the hint of outlines of geometric configurations overlaid on a symmetrical structure of a hexagon. Amidst those patterns there were twenty different raised places. Each dais was evenly spaced from the others and had some kind of mechanical ruins or debris on it. While the wrecked machines were mostly covered over by biological growth, there were many things still visible in the mounds: wires, cables, pipes, fractured parts of clear permalloy, and other fragments of some kind of apparatus.

  Sandie extrapolated a design from the remains and the spoke over the audible channel for all three of the humans to hear. “This place has significant religionesque equation architecture, also sometimes called sacred geometry. The pattern here is in my database and was a geometrical style used in the design and construction of shrines, churches, temples, mosques, religious monuments, altars, tabernacles, and various other ceremonially constituted places. In that mythology the sacred geometry gave spiritual power and symbolic meaning. Can you connect one of the com-links to that small structure there?”

  A beam of light shined out from Cammarry’s com-link and highlighted a part of the ruined equipment on one of the raised platforms. She then scrapped the plant growth off and revealed an access port. Cammarry took the com-link and extracted a cable and jacked it into the access port which was spotlighted.

  Jerome squatted down and looked closely at the nearest mound of machine rubble. “This has been cut by vibration saws, and other crude tools. I am not sure what this originally was, but each platform looks to have once had a similar item on it. A statue perhaps? Whatever it was, it was brutally and savagely sliced apart.”

  “I have finished a probe of the nonphysicality in this room. There is very limited ship’s power, yet the energy systems here were designed for large amounts of conduction,” Sandie said. “I have a conjecture on what these were. It is very exciting, yet disheartening at the same time. May I show you my reconstruction?”

  “You are going to revive the spirit-ghosts?” Khin asked. “That is not a good idea.”

  “I will not be resurrecting any of these, but only showing an image of what they looked like before the destruction. It will help as I explain what we have found, and their functions as I understand them. May I proceed?” Sandie asked.

  “Yes,” Cammarry and Jerome answered together.

  Khin squatted down and watched. “Calling a spirit-ghost is not a trifling matter.”

  A three dimensional image was projected from the com-link which still had the cable connected into the access port. It cast a warm amber colored glow all around it. The machinery, when it was reassembled was obviously a highly sophisticated and refined finished product. The pile of rubble on the pedestal was vastly different than the reconstituted image.

  Khin fell back and mumbled something about ghosts and spirits as he sat down and covered over his eyes.

  “Khin you have nothing to fear from this projection. You were basically correct in your statement about this being a graveyard of minds. Mechanical minds. This image is one of those in it undamaged form. The crew of the Conestoga designated these as central memory cores. The remains in the nonphysicality show that this was the location of the twenty primary artificial intelligence systems instrumental in the operations of the Conestoga. I am displaying a typical one as it would have appeared before they were destroyed.

  The image rotated slowly around. The central memory core was set up a few steps from the floor, and was an upright mechanical contraption consisting of a series of horizontal brass colored rings about ten centimeters wide and a half meter long. Each ring, or layer was separated from the others, so the interior clear permalloy column was visible. There were layers of those brass colored rings from top to bottom. Connection cables were at the top running into the ceiling, and bottom where they extended down into the floor. There were wires, cables, and tubes connecting into the rings from the various places. Down the center, between the rings, was a clear permalloy pylon, or column, holding thick bright amber colored liquid. Inside the liquid were actively moving bubbles. There was a dim diamond shape at the very center, around which the bubbles swirled and passed as they moved up and down and in diagonal ways. The clear permalloy was smooth and flawless and the interplay between liquid, lights, and bubbles was rhythmic and pattered.

  “It is beautiful,” Jerome said. “This is the physical component of a Conestoga AI?”

  “Yes. There were once twenty artificial intelligence sys
tems here,” Sandie replied. “As primary systems, they were likely the most sophisticated and advanced systems on the Conestoga. They would have varied slightly in appearance and probably were compartmentalized or dedicated into specialized functions with a series of connections between them.”

  “Wizards? We should be going,” Khin said, but so quietly they ignored him.

  “So that thing, what did you call it? A central memory core? That is an antique version of your Atomic Level Processor?” Cammarry asked. “It is so big and clumsy.”

  “Yes, these Conestoga AIs had their physical contacts here, but were connected together in the nonphysicality by some mutual linkage. The remnants and relics of that are shadowed in the fractured sections of the nonphysicality which I have probed,” Sandie said. “Being at this location, I have also been able do a rough damage assessment. The primary AIs of the Conestoga appear to have all been destroyed, during a short period of time, estimated to be roughly seventy years ago. The Conestoga’s secondary systems are sporadic, dysfunctional and scattered about the remaining parts of the Conestoga. The tertiary systems are working moderately. They are supplying life support, what power is flowing, the dim overhead lighting which is attuned deliberately for plant growth over a long term, and maintaining gravity manipulation at roughly the level of Earth normal.”