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

by John Thornton

  Rubbing her eyes again, she blinked them repeatedly and then focused. She saw the gruesome situation around her, and her training kicked in.

  “Disaster alert! Alert!” She called out, without even thinking of the words.

  There were no auditory responses. She blinked again, thinking perhaps it was all a visual illusion, or hallucination. When it looked the same, she leapt off the platform bed, calling commands.

  “Disaster alert! Alert!”

  Her bare feet sank into the growth medium and fungal plants coating the floor. Immediately she lifted her feet up and looked at them, astonished at the squished plants stuck to her brown soles and toes. Then she noted it was not only plants and growth medium. Several of the liquefied bodies had splashed around the base of her own suspended animation cocoon.

  “Oh no!” Eris screamed and turned to the controls on the side of her platform bed. She tapped in an access code. “Major malfunction in Suspended Animation Repository 217K! Response teams report to Suspended Animation Repository 217K immediately. Casualties have happened!”

  Whirling about she shook with the realization that only she was standing. She trembled as she saw the bodies which were melting away, their shinny frost-covered faces looking up in silent rigor. Some cocoons were sealed shut, but she could see through the clear permalloy tops that those people were dead as well. Her eyes darted from dried out body, or pools of muck, to the frozen corpses.

  “Officer of the Watch!” Eris cried out. “I have gotten negative replies from Artificial Intelligence system Van Winkle. I am activating secondary system. Come to Suspended Animation Repository 217K immediately!”

  Eris crossed the room, quickly, but gingerly, stepping past the splayed and dried out bodies, and avoiding the pools of fluids she did not ever want to identify. In the back of her mind she acknowledged that she personally knew everyone in the repository, some were even close friends, and two were her parents, yet her training dictated her actions. She reached the display nearest to her.

  “Must get help.” She placed her palm against it. It responded to her implanted engineering identification device. “Oh God, what is happening?” she prayed.

  A green glow surrounded her palm. Eris barked a command. “Artificial Intelligence Yankee Morgan report. You will assume oversight of Suspended Animation Repository 217K. Report!”

  There was no response.

  “Artificial Intelligence Yankee Morgan report immediately?”

  Still there was no response.

  Eris tapped at the display. The screen shifted and that action opened up sequences into the nonphysicality. She ran emergency searches, and system diagnostics.

  “No, no, no! All the AIs down? It cannot be.” She took several deep breaths and then tapped in a series of commands. “Must have been a local disaster. An inflight impact with a meteorite, or something.” The display responded slowly. Then it showed several images which all had red flashing lines through them. “No. It cannot be ship-wide. Impossible! The secondary systems have to take over when the AIs are in knocked out status.”

  She placed her palm against the display, green light surrounded it again and pleasant response tones were heard. She commanded, “Any Synthetic Brain, of any kind, in any location, report! This is Junior Engineer Lorelei Eris Concordia. There has been a major malfunction. Report!”

  There was no response.

  Eris’ lips trembled as she failed to locate any artificial intelligence system or any of the secondary synthetic brains. “There are quadruple redundancies! Tertiary systems activate now!”

  A few more images appeared on her display screen, but then the monitor flickered and went black. It blinked on again after a fraction of time, but showed only the original display she had seen when she first touched it.

  “They have to respond to this, and if the Captain calls me to account, so be it!” She prayed silently as she entered the highest disaster code she knew. It had been harped into her at every training session, every drill, and every practice crisis. It was only to be used in the most extreme and dire situations, but Eris knew this was one that qualified. “Captain Level Disaster Alert…” She hesitated only a brief moment before keying in the last button. She pressed that last code of the sequence. “Now it all begins! Let the flight crew scream and holler at me all they want.”

  The display shifted colors and read out, ‘Unable to comply with request,’ in dull lettering.

  “What? That cannot happen. Come on, you must work! It cannot fail!”

  The display sputtered and faded to a dull and lifeless gray color. Eris turned and sprinted through the muck, leaping over disgusting objects which had once been her friends, to reach another display which was still illuminated. As she passed the multitude of carcasses, she was thankful for the dim illumination.

  “That monitor has botched the input is all. Failure at that display, not system-wide. I will initiate it here.” She tapped in codes for the Captain Level Disaster Alert and did not hesitate this time at all.

  ‘Unable to comply with request.’ The words scrolled across the display. That was all the monitor did.

  “No, you cannot fail me!” Eris stated with determination. She entered the sequence again, but got the same message. She rerouted commands and made other inquiries on different channels.

  No response.

  She stopped for a moment, took some deep breaths, and the tried again. The Captain’s Level Disaster Alert failed to initiate once more. She closed her eyes and concentrated. “Not top down, but bottom up.” She pushed harder as her palm pressed against the display. She then tapped in a routine and general command code with her other hand.

  “Finally! Found the lattice of compeers. This section of the ship must have been smashed worse than I can imagine. That is all. Just a major failure in this section. Horrible, sure it is, but not catastrophic. I will just go in the back door. Relink from the bottom up, and let the crew know I am here. They probably sealed off this repository. They did not know anyone survived in here. Then they come, yes, that will explain everything.” She spoke as she punched the display with her fingers. “Got you! Now, there it is. Just display ship status!”

  A generalized schematic lit up, flickered a bit, and then rolled sideways. Eris’ golden-brown eyes studied the readout. It did not straighten, but its horizontal and vertical holds were skewed. Eris felt around the bottom of the display, slipped a finger into a slot, and pulled out an auxiliary manual command console. She twisted the dials and knobs which adjusted the display images and activated a switch. That stabilized the images and charts. “Now I am getting somewhere!” A microphone icon appeared.

  “Initiate Captain’s Level Disaster Alert!” Eris commanded.

  The screen glimmered, and a series of negative function tones came from it. “No, it has to work. Oh God, help me!” She keyed in another sequence. Then a readout of systems snapped into place on the screen. Eris let out a sigh of relief and studied it.

  “In orbit, check. Wait a nanosecond! That is not Tlalocan. What planet is that?” Eris exclaimed as she watched a small sub-screen show an image of an odd greenish world surrounding a red star. “No time for that, but how weird? Habitats jettisoned, but out of order, strange. Here it is. Flight crew status report! Officer of the Watch respond!”

  ‘Unknown. Unable to comply with inquiry,’ scrolled across the display.

  “What? Unknown? How can that be? The Officer of the Watch cannot be unknown!” Her fingers flew across the display and rearranged the graphics. “Access flight crew roster, now!”

  ‘‘Unknown. Unable to comply with inquiry,’ scrolled across the display again.

  Eris dropped to her knees on the plant filled growth medium. She brushed it away with a violent swipe of her hand. “Mom? Dad?” She murmured. She prayed as she thought of her parents.

  Standing back up, she oriented herself to the positioning of the cocoons. She knew exactly where she was headed as she walked purposefully toward cocoons 217K-4 and
217K-5. This time she did not care what her bare feet stepped in, or on, as she walked to those two cocoons.

  When she reached 217K-5, her fingers gently touched the name stenciled on the unopened cap, ‘Raahil Calhoun Concordia: Master Grade Civil Engineer.’ The clear permalloy showed a dark interior filled with a body which had been decomposing in its hermetically sealed chamber for a long while.

  Eris patted the name again, and stepped to 217K-4. The end of this one was labeled, ‘Jagati Olivia Concordia: Advanced Senior Chemical Astrophysicist,’ but part of that was covered by long term dripping of water from somewhere overhead.

  “Mother?” Eris said in a still small voice, a quiver shaking her lips.

  The end cap of this cocoon was slightly open, and the platform bed had not extended out. No more needed to be exposed for Eris to know she was now an orphan.

  Tears clouding her golden-brown eyes, Eris raced down the aisle toward the bulkhead door at the end of Suspended Animation Repository 217K. There she found a nine section color control pad. Without thinking about it, Eris raised her palm, and the control pad cycled its colors. The bulkhead doors slid back into their pockets and Eris walked away from the horrendous and appalling situation in which she had awoke.

  The bulkhead doors shut with a grind and snap. The color control pad cycled and the bulkhead sealed itself again.

  The two furry, brownish-gray adventurers observed for a few moments. They had remained hidden beneath the energy conduit. From that vantage point they had perceived, without much understanding, the things that Eris was doing. They were fearful of the human female who had awaken, as all the rats on the needle ship portion of the Colony Ship Conestoga knew humans hunted them as food. When she left, the rats came emerging out into a wonderland of new smells, sights, and tastes.

  Their hunger would be abated, and now there were many new things to gnaw upon.

  2 At the hub of activity

  “The Goat People were more pleasant to trade with than I expected,” Cammarry stated as she moved a strand of her long, straight, dark hair back over her ear. Her oval face broke into a smile while her narrow brown eyes looked at Jerome. “Nonetheless, it is good to return, here, to as you called it, our home.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” Jerome smiled back. He liked looking at Cammarry, and even in the dim light of the needle ship, he admired her beauty. Her complexion was still pale from her time confined in the Special Care Unit, which contrasted with his own tanned skin. He was somewhat surprised that being under the sky tube of Habitat Beta had tanned his fair skin as much as it had. “It was good to go together. After all we have been through, there was no way either of us was going to do trading at the grand hall alone. Not after what happened with that Shadow implant.”

  “Agreed,” Cammarry replied. She too liked looking at Jerome, and appreciated his happy eyes, tanned complexion, and the short, but curly dark brown hair on his head. Looking into his hazel eyes, she rejoiced that they were back together again. Each was wearing a utilitarian and well-fitting set of clothing made from radiation absorbing materials. They always wore their RAM clothing when leaving their home base. It was a place they, not so jokingly, called the Goat Room. Sometimes goats still wandered by in the corridors.

  “Sandie? We have returned, please unlock the doors.”

  “Welcome back,” the artificial intelligence system Sandie responded as the doors clicked and then slid open. “I see you have the meat you desired. Was your journey successful in other ways?”

  Jerome tapped the com-link which was over his ear. “Your presence accompanied us the whole time, I should be asking you how you did while we were gone.”

  “Jerome, you know Sandie had to conceal her presence from the Goat People. Not everyone is as understanding as Khin,” Cammarry teased him. “They already wondered about where our spirit-ghost was, and they made up many stories about us since our last visit there. Some of those stories are quite fantastical. No purpose to be gained by giving them more legendary or mythological seeds to grow more stories.”

  “And you loved hearing all those exploits, even though you knew they were not true. But yes, they need fewer seeds for stories,” Jerome replied, “If you can gaze into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and prosper and which will not, then tell me now, lest I complain and grow weary.”

  “Me thinketh you protest too much!” Cammarry laughed as they walked into the large room where the main teleportation system and the two secondary ones were set up.

  “Well, Sandie can now fulfill some of my reading requirements. When I was alone in Beta I had to do without leisure reading, and that was almost an excessively difficult burden,” Jerome joked.

  “My time was at a luxury resort like the opulence before the Great Event,” Cammarry retorted with a smile. “Yes, pure please there.”

  “I know it was very hard for you.” He then blinked his eyes against the much brighter light of their home base. “I almost forgot what natural lighting felt like, and we were only gone a couple days. This is far better than sitting around hearing the monster stories from the Goat People.”

  “Well, I do love listening to people tell tales. After all, we are legendary figures them, as we shook the world, and we did travel past their realm to the territories of the Chicken People and the Fruit People on our previous, ‘Wizard’s Quest’. It was natural for the Goat People to construct some narrative to explain what we did, but indeed, it is good to be back,” Cammarry answered. “A couple days in the needle ship corridors felt much longer, but not as long as that nirvana time in the Special Care Unit. Now it is daytime at home.”

  “Yes, welcome back,” Sandie’s disembodied mechanical voice stated. “I have had the automacube finished scraping the deck of this room free from the growth medium and the bushes and plants have all been successfully transplanted to nearby rooms. TA-242 is just completing those moves.”

  The yellow automacube, a box shaped, six wheeled machine, marked with TA-242 on its front side, was using its manipulation appendage to carry some items from the Goat Room into a back corridor. The Goat Room was much better illuminated than the dim hallways and corridors of the rest of the needle ship. The other passages which accessed to the Goat Room were also illuminated now by competent overhead lighting. Sandie even regulated it for a day and night circadian cycle.

  Jerome walked over and hugged Cammarry. He had heard what she said about her confinement. “Cammarry, I regret not getting to you sooner,” Jerome said in all seriousness. “I am glad we are together again, but did you mean ‘nirvana time’ or ‘purgatory time’? Nirvana was some kind of afterlife paradise or heaven-like place.”

  Cammarry returned the embrace and kissed him lightly. “You missed my subtle sarcasm, sorry. Actually it was neither heaven nor hell, but just an unending boredom of isolation. I was sedated for much of that time with those old medications. They gave me strange foods, but what else is new for the Conestoga? I guess being unable to talk about Shadow,” Cammarry gulped as she said the name, “was a kind of living torment.”

  “That implant is one of the enduring mysteries of the Conestoga,” Jerome replied. “Sandie, any progress on that issue?”

  The AI Sandie answered, “I wish I had more details to work with in the analysis. I have some very rudimentary conjectures, but nothing concrete to report. There is good news from Habitat Alpha’s Reproduction and Fabrication. The new automacube will be completed shortly. After that it will be teleported here.”

  “I thought that would be done days ago,” Jerome stated with some surprise.

  “Yes, that was the original plan. However, Synthetic Brain Bodowa, overseeing the Reproduction and Fabrication facility has encountered unforeseen obstacles. The human government in Wolf City has increased patrols through Reproduction and Fabrication.”

  “Those slave traders are relentless,” Cammarry observed.

  “Indeed, they have shown a stubborn tenacity which was unexpected,” Sandie agreed. �
�I have to do a reconnaissance of the immediate area around Alpha’s Reproduction and Fabrication facility every time prior to running the equipment, and especially before use of the teleporters. SB Bodowa and SB Sherman are assisting, but our surveying capability in Habitat Alpha is limited. These recently added human patrols have greatly hindered production of the items we have ordered. I am being very careful to not reveal the location of the sending and receiving teleporter pads in Alpha. Those are too valuable to risk, and replacing them would be an arduous undertaking, especially in light of our limited access to working shuttles.”

  “If we lost that Alpha teleporter system we lose our ability to fabricate items,” Jerome said. “That would be very bad for us all.”

  Sandie replied, “I am making diligent efforts to keep the teleporters concealed in both Beta and Alpha. Right now, we still have access to Reproduction and Fabrication, and the new automacube, designated S-1DT is completed and will be coming here through the teleporter in Alpha when it is safe to transmit. From here it will dispatched to Beta to make its way to defend the Special Care Unit in Beta.”