The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  The energy field on the Midnight Oil created false gravity on the outer hull so Kale was able to easily walk up and over and to the rear of his craft. Here he punched a code into a small round hatch. Once the code was accepted the hatch began so spin inwards until it slid back behind the hull. Kale reached inside and pulled out a very thin spindly cable. He tugged at it until he pulled out a few feet, and then wrapped it around the belt that was keeping his suit onto his waist.

  “Ok, give me that beacon on my helmet.”

  Inside the ship, Gheno typed a command and the information that was being displayed in the pilot’s cabin was sent to Kale’s helmet. Kale looked around to the front of his ship. He saw the beacon pulsating faintly with a small distance counter displayed in the corner. He began walking towards the front of the ship while pulling the power cable with him. When he reached the pilots cabin he looked inside and saw Gheno sitting in the pilot’s seat, smiling up at him. Ayia sat behind him with her usual look of concern. Kale then waved, turned, and jumped towards the direction of the nearest piece of structure he saw. The jump was made in a controlled gravity field but as soon as he was off the ship he was weightless and floating toward the Magyo.

  He reached out, grabbed a piece of the ship, and drew himself towards it. He looked around to try and see if he could locate any hallways or passages. He noticed a few. He reached into a small pouch on his belt and pulled out a small disc. He rotated an inner ring within the disc and it began to light up the edges of the device in blue. He pointed one flat side of it towards the direction he wanted to go and let it go, trying his hardest not to push it. It floated and began feeding data into his helmet. It was bouncing radar down into the section in front of him. He would need all the help he could get in that maze of strewn metal.

  “How long can you stay in the suit?” Gheno asked over the intercom.

  “I think there's like twenty hours of air. It recycles really well.”

  “What happens if you have to, you know, go?”

  “That’s such a kid question,” Kale launched himself at the opening nearest to him to get a reading there, “But if you must, it’ll collect it and recycle it if I need to.”

  “Ok, but what if you have to…” Gheno started.

  “Nope, not answering that one,” Kale could hear Ayia’s laughter in the background. It was good to hear her laugh. The one benefit of this extraordinary circumstance they were in was that the horrible events of her father’s death were overshadowed by their current predicament.

  Kale reached the first passageway and it was far too small and narrow. It was likely just part of the ships internal structure. After launching himself just above it he activated the disc and had the images displayed on his helmet. This appeared to be more human-sized and went down in the direction of the beacon. He turned back and waved at the ship.

  “Here I go.”

  “Bring back a souvenir,” Ayia piped in over the intercom. Kale turned, tested the power cable, and began walking down the hallway.

  He turned on two lamps that were built into the top of his helmet. They became two beams cutting through the darkness the ship had laid in for over twenty years. There was no debris floating around. Kale had cut into a small freighter once. He had found it adrift just outside one of the nav points in Gylegga. Something had gone wrong and the life support had malfunctioned while most of the crew slept. The chaos that ensued left a mess. When the gravity finally failed everything just floated around: dust, food, bits and pieces of things that fall and are usually ignored. They were all floating in this face. Here though, whatever had struck this giant mammoth of space hit it so quickly that everyone would have been sucked out into the vacuum. Any crew onboard would not have stood a chance.

  He remembered a day as a young boy, with his mother, on the Dominion slave colony of Urt. They brought everyone out, thousands of slaves, including the children, and put everyone in front of large screens where the image of the Dominar was displayed. His discourse alluded to the greater duty of the Dominion, that even the smallest member, or slave, had their part to play. He then went on to boast about the Magyo and its many victories. It was a cold day, dusty as it always was, but he remembered his mother being in a good mood. As the Dominar exulted his pride over the construction of the extraordinary vessel he continued, with fake tears they all said, to announce the disappearance of the great ship. There was a positive feeling among the poor souls of Urt. It was very likely that metals mined on Urt were used to make the ship. Not a single human there shed a tear for its demise.

  And yet, here he was, walking into the hull of his greatest enemy’s magnificent accomplishment. He had sworn to make life for the Dominion as difficult as he could while he lived. He did have to trade with them from time to time, but against the Dominar and his noble families Kale stoked a hot hatred. He blamed them for everything, for all of his losses. He knew he could get an incredible amount of money if he did find the captains body but he had no plans to sell it to the Dominion.

  He followed the hallway down. There were no doors as he walked on, or nothing this hallway connected to. It was very likely that for a ship this large a vast portion of it was connected by long hallways with nothing in between. He looked at the measured distance toward the beacon in his helmet display and it continued counting down. He was certainly headed in the right direction. There was surprisingly little damage within the ship. He reached a point where the beacon was just twenty five feet in front of him, but directly through a wall. A quick pulse of the disc floating outside showed him that the hallway he was in continued on straight for some time but the energy they had detected was just on the other side of the wall. He took off his backpack, reached in, and brought out his cutting torch. He hoped not to need it but he wasn’t about to keep on walking.

  Cutting through the wall wasn’t hard at all, nothing like he expected. He punched out a hole large enough to crawl though and shined his light in once he packed the torch away. Inside was a large room with several sizeable cylinders and what appeared to be terminals, or he thought they were because they had screens above them. He crawled in and pulled the cable in with him and reached toward one of the consoles. In this room there was a layer of dust over all of the equipment, which he brushed aside. He watched the dust float off slowly and then turned back to the console. He got down on one knee and opened up a small panel. He looked inside and saw a mess of wires and connections.

  “Ok, take a look at this, see if your AI recognizes anything I can plug into,” he requested.

  The image fed back to the ship and the AI began scanning on Gheno’s typed command. It pinpointed two locations and Gheno described them back to Kale. He reached into his belt, pulled out an attachment for the cable, and plugged it in. Instantly, lights began to blink in the circuitry in front of him.

  “That’s a good sign. Ok kid, let me know if you can read anything.”

  Gheno waited for the feedback from the monitors. His eyes opened wide when he read the results.

  “You're not going to believe this. Its copper,” he reported back to Kale.

  “I told you, very old tech. They make ‘em big, but not well.”

  “Going to start running some test echoes just to see where we can reach. You might as well come back, this will take a few hours at best.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kale began to follow the cable back out of the small room. He ducked under and through the hole he made and back into the hallway.

  “Good so far. Good response. Copper is ancient and slow, but very reliable.”

  Gheno watched the screen and the maze of data cables began to take shape with every echo. It branched out from multiple locations and kept going. Then the screen went black.

  “Oh wait. Something happened,” Gheno said.

  Kale stopped. “What?”

  In the ship, the screen came back to life but with a far larger section of the maze completed.

  “Oh, well, nothing. I think,” Gheno replied.

/>   “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, a glitch maybe? From my end probably.”

  Kale started walking again.

  The data kept flowing, small packets of ones and zeroes bouncing off each other through copper wires, transmitting from their initial departure and returning with updated information. As the stream of data fed back into the Midnight Oil, Gheno began making note of hubs and nodes which appeared to be important: servers, data and storage areas. Had those been working, he could have hacked into them. At that moment they were all down.

  But as the scan continued, Gheno began to see a pattern where data was not communicated back from one region of the ship. This lack of transmission was indicative of an active firewall.

  “I think I found something.”

  Kale reappeared outside of the hallway on the Magyo. He grabbed the radar disc and was floating over to the ship when he got the message.

  “Good,” Kale was confident this would all work, “Let me get back inside.”

  Kale crowded behind Gheno at the pilot’s seat, nearly sitting in Ayia’s lap, to see what Gheno was attempting to display. The main screen was a mess of interconnecting lines Kale couldn’t understand, although he understood the concept. It was a visual representation of data echoes flowing through the copper, along with terms like ping and latency, pull and flow. The lines didn’t make any sense to him, but he knew they did to Gheno. Numbers were rapidly flowing from the top to the bottom of the small screen that Gheno was reading from. Once again Kale was clueless but was content on waiting for the results he needed, the location of the bridge.

  Gheno kept pointing out clusters of numbers and mentioning terms like nodes and hubs, but Kale only needed to hear one word.

  “Bridge?”

  “No, not yet. It’s a huge ship. The program is trying to identify all hubs and nodes to see where everything is channeled. There are a lot of dead ends, most likely just broken wires and cables. See here?” Gheno pointed at a series of lines on the big screen that seemed to fade out, “These are most likely breaches in the ship itself. There is no echo back from that end.”

  “Can this make us a map of the ship?” Ayia was attempting to visualize the lines.

  “Can’t use those lines to make anything we can recognize. All we can do is measure the distance and make an educated guess. I'm really hoping to find storage drives, anything I can use to read off actual data to find the bridge.”

  “And?” Kale asked.

  “Nothing. It’s one thing to send packets through copper wires. It’s another to actually find something in there that still works. I have a feeling if we found something, I’d have to send you in there to actually pull the drive out and bring it back.”

  “Yeah, why not,” Kale responded. He did not truly hear what Gheno said.

  Kale studied the lines on the screen.

  “What’s this right here? It all seems to be leading there but the lines don’t fade. It’s like a solid line, blocking all other information traffic?”

  Gheno pursed his lips. “Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what that might be. At first I thought it was the bridge but it just seems like, well, I'm not sure.”

  Kale heard the magic word. “Bridge?”

  “I don’t think so. See, on a ship this big there wouldn’t be just one mass of data cables combining in one place. In fact, I think the bridge would have one central line going into it and then going out to all the hubs throughout the vessel. But this mass, it’s like so many of the cables pour into it, but not through a central line. I'm really not sure I’ve seen anything like it. And to top that off I can’t find out what’s on the other side of this mess because there is something there clearly stopping the pings.”

  “But it could be the bridge?” Kale was insistent.

  “If it is it’s the worst designed network I’ve seen on a manmade system.”

  “It’s the Dominion. They’re models are more grandiose than efficient,” Ayia pointed out.

  “That’s entirely possible.”

  “Do you have anything else that looks remotely like it could be the bridge?” Kale asked.

  “Honestly, no, nothing else at all,” Gheno submitted.

  “Good enough for me. I'm more than ready to reap some DNA,” Kale rubbed his hands together, “Can you pinpoint where that is on the ship?”

  “Did you really just rub your hands together like some greedy old man?” Ayia asked. Kale grimaced at her as she shook her head.

  “I can give you a rough estimate from here. Just give me a few more hours running the program to get a solid set of numbers.”

  Kale waved his hands as he was exiting the pilot’s cabin. Gheno looked pleadingly to Ayia who shrugged her shoulder and followed off after Kale. She found him in the ‘Hall’ digging into the food stores looking for something. He reached in, pulled out a box and ripped it open. Inside he pulled out individually wrapped cookies and tore into one. He devoured it whole and then noticed Ayia staring at him.

  “What? This calls for a treat.”

  “Do you think you're pushing him too hard?” Ayia asked.

  Kale stopped chewing for a moment and gave Ayia a confused look. Cookie crumbs fell from the edge of his mouth.

  “Huh?” he spat some of the crumbs.

  Ayia just kept looking at him. Her eyes strayed to the crumbs now on the table. Kale began picking at each little crumb to eat them.

  “The kid’s fine. He’s smarter than the both of us put together. He lives for this stuff,” Kale stated reassuringly.

  “And he’s still a kid, just days from leaving everything behind.”

  Kale took a deep breath. As he exhaled, he reached into the box while maintaining eye contact with Ayia. He took out two of the cookies, closed the box and set it on the table. He then turned and went towards the pilot cabin again, stopping only a moment to glance back at Ayia. She followed him back into the pilot’s cabin. Kale walked up to Gheno, still stooped over the small of the screen he was operating.

  “Hey kid,” Kale started, still looking at Ayia, “cookie?”

  Gheno looked up at Kale, then at the cookie in his hand. He smiled and grabbed it, tearing off the plastic wrapper.

  “Yeah,” he clamored, “thanks.”

  The cookie disappeared, leaving only a small trace of brown crumbs behind. Kale maintained his gaze on Ayia who began shaking her head.

  “Cookies solve everything,” Kale said, laughingly, as he walked past her, “Don’t forget, we are just a couple of guys.”

  Kale piloted the Midnight Oil back out of the Magyo and began flying her towards the location Gheno theorized that the mass of cables led to. It was nearly seven miles down the length of the ship. They flew in and around the twisted metal, the entire mass slowly orbiting the gas giant. As they entered the light of the sun, Gheno pointed down towards the ship itself again.

  “There.”

  The AI began sending radar readings into the ship to try to locate an entry. Unfortunately, for nearly a half mile there was no access. As the radar mapped into the ship, they began to build tunnels and corridors on their screen to try to locate one that led from an opening in the hull into the general vicinity where the bridge might be. They continued flying in a wide circle around the area, continually mapping. It took nearly four hours of flying in the small area before one path suddenly lit up green as a possible connection. They found the tear in the hull at the very edge of the radius they were flying around and landed next to it. The tear itself was far too small to land the ship inside, as they had before. They docked the vessel and clamped magnetically to the ship’s hull. Kale would once again traverse into the belly of the beast.

  Kale unwound his power cable. He had no intention of plugging it into anything this time, but in case he needed to, he could. What he did plan to use it for was as a marker, so as to prevent getting lost in the impossible maze of wreckage inside. Gheno thought that he could use the ship’s radar to make his way back out but Kale insisted tha
t he felt more comfortable with a visual reminder for an escape.

  Kale linked up the radar display. The green path they had mapped out was now observable in his helmet. He then lowered himself into the hole and entered the hull. The last sight Kale saw was that of the green and orange swirling hues in the large gas giant just above the ship’s horizon.

  The inside of the ship at their new location was far more destroyed than the first hallway Kale had followed.

  “You guys seeing this?” Kale was transmitting video back to the Midnight Oil.

  He began walking down the hallway. It was crooked and not level. Just a few dozen yards in Kale realized the entire hall had twisted, he was walking upside down. It was disconcerting when he realized what happened. Conversely, the change was so gradual he did not feel it. The lack of gravity on the Magyo did not help. As Kale continued on, he could sense that the hallway warped in several directions.

  Kale crossed a section where the walls in the corridor came to an end and the hallway turned into a path through a chasm. He looked down and could see out of the ship, more than several miles down. There was a gaping hole on the other side of the craft. Through the hole Kale could see the melded colors of the gas giant that he, the Magyo, its wreck and the Midnight Oil, were orbiting. From his point of view there was no evidence of marked explosions, burn marks, or piercing to the hull. Instead, it looked like a hot knife had just cut into the structure as if through soft butter and spread it apart with ease.

  Kale had a difficult time imagining the scales of both the Magyo and the object that caused such extensive damage to the monstrous vessel.

  The opportunity of Dominion DNA existed and could make him a considerable amount of money. However, deep down, Kale just kept thinking he didn’t want to stick around this graveyard any longer than he had to. He missed FEI. The old beta software had developed a great deal and adapted to him as an individual. Now his favorite companion was gone and he had to travel with humans. Since Gheno joined the crew, Kale was finding himself exhausted from all the interacting he had to do.