Battlecruiser Alamo: Aces High

by Richard Tongue

   “Cratos ana Kemelom. Ego kei ana, deiko dhoubnom.”

   “Susan?”

   “Give me time, give me time.”

   The figure dissolved, turning into a starmap, oddly distorted. One of the stars, near the middle, glowed, then seemed to shatter into pieces, the objects racing away, scattered across the map.

   “A hologram,” Carpenter said, shaking her head. “After all these centuries.”

   “Hard to believe, but whoever built this place did it to last.”

   “Do you recognize the stars?”

   “Frankly, no, but I’m sure Race will be able to make something of it.”

   The figure reappeared, a smile beaming across his face, before changing into a Neander, and then one of the smaller creatures, standing on his toes. He pointed at Carpenter, then at Orlova, then behind him, his head turning to face the wall.

   “Gnotis galnos.”

   “Knowledge,” Carpenter said, “and power.”

   “Let me try something,” Orlova said, and she threw another switch on the front of her suit, setting it to broadcast. “I am Senior Lieutenant Orlova of the Triplanetary Confederation. Who are you?”

   “You don’t think…”

   The room lit up again, and everything went dark, her suit filters snapping on. A trio of red lights began to glow in the side of her helmet, and then the light faded, everything returning to normal.

   “My suit computer just crashed,” Orlova said.

   “Mine too. Reading an Error 932.”

   “Too much data. Our suits had to restore to factory settings.”

   The figure, a Neander once again, shook his head, his face dropping into despair, and said, “Bhidhos alpos.”

   “Susan?”

   “Factory default, remember,” she said. “I don’t have my translation programs any more. We won’t know until we get back up to Alamo.”

   “Something we do know, though. There’s a working computer system here. Nothing else could have lasted for all this time, and that it is still operational is incredible.” Shaking her head, she said, “Once we get a proper look at this, we’ll have a few revolutions in computer design, I suspect.”

   “Maggie, this is the biggest discovery we’ve made yet. We need to get a full research team here, right away. A major effort. For the last three years, since we first discovered the scattered human races, we’ve been working on scraps of information, meager ones at that. Look around you,” she said, waving her hands. “This is a feast, and it could take us decades to uncover its secrets.”

   “There’s an alien ship in orbit.”

   “And now we know what they are after, don’t we!”

   With a sigh, Orlova said, “Empires and Confederations are rarely commanded by archaeologists, Susan. Would you start a war for this place?” Smiling, she added, “Don’t answer that. I’ve a feeling I’d be afraid of the reply.”

   “Gnotis galnos,” the figure said, nodding.

   “Do you think it is talking to you?” Carpenter said.

   “It didn’t respond when I spoke to it before. Damn it, I should have tried a translation program. That is proto-indo, isn’t it?”

   “Basically,” she replied. “I’m not conversationally fluent, Maggie. It’s a language dead ten thousand years, that we thought was spoken by a few nomads in Asia. That something very much like it is out here among the stars…”

   “Is one of many amazing things you are to discover,” a new voice said, seeming to step out of nowhere, a weapon covering them both. “Though perhaps I must refer to your race instead of to you, personally.”

   “This planet is the territory of the Triplanetary Confederation,” Orlova began, but the figure shook his head.

   “I beg to differ. This planet was the territory of our ancestors, many thousands of years ago, and we are here to take back what is ours. Specifically, we are looking for the crystal. It would save us much trouble if you were to simply hand it over now, or arrange for its transportation to our ship.”

   “What crystal?” Susan asked.

   “Do not trouble to feign ignorance,” he replied. “Or perhaps you are unimportant enough that your commanders have not seen fit to brief you. Though I understood that Senior Lieutenant was a key rank in the hierarchy of one of your ships.”

   “You seem to have us at a disadvantage,” Orlova said.

   “Excellent. So it will remain. Now if you would come with me, perhaps we can have a fuller discussion. I would promise you more comfortable surroundings, but I do not think you will find them so.”

  Chapter 22

   Salazar looked at the cumbersome apparatus that Bartlett had rigged up, almost filling the geology lab, then across at the expression running across the face of Fox, who was shaking her head with apparent disbelief.

   “We’re going to need a lot of the station’s power,” Bartlett said.

   “How much?”

   “Let’s go ahead and say all of it,” he replied. “Just switch out life support and other critical systems. Oh, and you’d better make sure all of the firewalls are up and running. I don’t know what sort of data we’re about to try and access.”

   “Should we be doing this at all?” Cook asked. “Sir, this is something we ought to get permission for. In my belief there is a serious potential risk to the safety of the station.”

   “Noted,” Salazar replied, “but in my belief there is a greater risk to not attempting this. We need to know what is on that crystal.” With a smile, he said, “Think about it this way. If it turns out that the data isn’t valuable, we can turn it over to the enemy and perhaps bring all of this to an end.”

   “I think you’re being optimistic,” she replied. “What was that projection of the storage capacity again?”

   “Are you ready, Ben?” Salazar asked, turning back to Bartlett.

   “Just about. I’ve tied in everything I can dare, and we’re ready to activate the laser on your command.”

   “One minute.” He pulled out his communicator, and said, “Grogan, are you and the others still standing by on the shuttle?”

   “Ready to go, but I’m not a pilot. Pre-flight looks fine.”

   “Just let the autopilot do its thing. I’m sure you’ll be good.”

   “I thought we’d ruled out escaping on the shuttle.”

   “Spaceman, if the shuttle is heading out with you on it, I can guarantee that the enemy ship will be far too distracted to care.”

   “Based on what?”

   “The destruction of this station.” He looked at the others, and said, “Time to go.”

   “Wait a minute,” Bartlett said. “You don’t know the first thing about how this works.”

   “All I have to do is switch it on, and you can talk me through everything over the communicator if necessary. Cook, I want you to monitor station functions on the shuttle. Get a telemetry feed. I’ll give you three minutes.”

   Shaking his head, Bartlett said, “I go through hell putting this thing together, and I don’t even get to know whether or not it works?”

   Salazar replied, “If it doesn’t, you’ll be the first to know.”

   “Sir, we could set this up for remote activation,” Cook said.

   “That would take time, and we’re running out of it.”

   “What do you base that on?”

   “Instinct. And the impatience of youth. And growing jitters that someone on that ship will decide to break the stalemate and pay us a visit.”

   “That sounds like a comprehensive list.”

   “I’m rather proud of it. Now get going.”

   Nodding, Cook left the room, Bartlett pausing at the exit, saying, “You can get to the shuttle in thirty seconds. If something starts to go wrong, run for it.”

   “Don’t wait for me, Ben. You can get a hell of a long way in thirty seconds. Get going.”
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br />    Glancing back for a second, he raced down the corridor, leaving Salazar alone in the room. He took a seat in front of the laser, admiring the craftsmanship. Bartlett had done a great job in a very few hours, even if it did look like a tangle of cables and wires wrapped around a long, glowing tube. The most important line led to an airlock, and on the other side an improvised radiator was ready. This was going to give off a lot of heat.

   He glanced down at his watch, counting the seconds. By now the others would be on the shuttle, the hatch closed, ready to take off at the first sign of trouble, assuming they didn’t try and do something foolish. As he held his hand over the controls, ready to throw the switch, the irony of that thought made him smile. Then, at the correct second, he tapped the button.

   It didn’t look very impressive, at least, not at first. A thin beam of ruby-red laser light, a faint mist sprayed along the length of the beam to make sure that an inadvertent hand didn’t get in the way, raced down to hit the crystal, following the pattern that the late commander of this station had laid out. Presumably he had known what he was doing.

   Then some of the terminals began to wink out, flickering on and off, and the lights in the room died, leaving him in darkness. His communicator began to urgently beep, and he pulled it out of his pocket, tapping the control.

   “What’s happening?” Cook asked. “We’re getting critical computer failures all across the station, and something’s smashing the hell out of our firewalls.”

   “Bail out,” he replied.

   “Negative. Nothing’s wrong with the structural integrity.”

   Looking up at the displays, the only source of light in the room, he could see a series of strange hieroglyphics flickering across the screen, moving too quickly for him to read them even if he could make any sense of them, before they all died, one after another.

   “What the hell!” Cook said. “Power surge, and a big one! The whole network just went dead.”

   The laser had died with the displays, all flickering out. He threw the control switch, rendering it safe, then tried the manual overrides. Nothing was working, even the door stuck at half-open, only held in position by the thick cables blocking it from moving.

   “Sir, what’s your status?”

   “Everything’s dead,” he replied, reaching for a nearby torch. “I’ve got no power at all. What does your telemetry show?”

   “The same as yours. Sir, you’ve got plenty of time to make for the shuttle.”

   “There must be a way to bring it back,” he replied.

   “Pavel,” Bartlett said, “That enemy ship will know that we’re dead. If they’re going to launch their attack, this is the time. We’ve got to go.”

   “I agree. Launch, and talk me through the startup sequence.” He stepped through the door, shining his torch down the corridor, and started to make his way along it. “I’m heading for Operations.”

   “You should be able to activate the emergency overrides from there,” Cook said. “Based on the last few readings, my guess is that the computer crashed, catastrophically.”

   “That doesn’t sound particularly promising.”

   “It should have restarted by itself. Something must have stopped it. It could be a simple malfunction, something that can be fixed by throwing a switch, or it might be something more fundamental.”

   He increased his pace, sprinting down the corridor, and replied, “Can you get anything from the enemy ship?”

   “Not for another minute. We’re on the wrong side of the station, and exterior sensors are all off-line. We'll have to wait for the rotation.”

   “Great.”

   The door to Operations was closed, locked down, but the manual override worked. He pumped the lever up and down, cranking the door open just enough that he could slide through into the empty room beyond, almost tripping over something on the floor as he stepped in. There was no light at all, just the torch in his hand, and he struggled to find his way around the unfamiliar room, feeling his way around.

   “Where am I heading?”

   “Monitor One, by the far wall,” Bartlett replied.

   “Ben? Where’s…,” he paused, then said, “How long?”

   “She left about thirty seconds ago, muttering under her breath. I’ve still got everything ready for launch, just in case.”

   Finally, his fingers reached across the required station, and he positioned himself in front of it. placing the torch to light most of the controls. The first control he tried was ‘manual restart’, but nothing happened.

   “Ideas, please,” he said.

   “You need to reboot the system. From scratch.”

   “No, no,” Grogan said. “That takes too long. Go for the default backup.”

   “He’ll lose all the data!”

   “To hell with that, there won’t be any data to read if the station is blown up.”

   “Grogan,” Salazar asked. “What am I doing?”

   “Flip over a panel on the end of the third row of switches, and depress all three buttons at the same time. Then wait for twenty seconds, and you’ll have to enter in your command code.”

   Nodding, he turned over the panel, exposing the controls, red writing cautioning him not to touch them except in absolute emergency. Looking around the darkened control room, he figured that if anything counted, this did, and jammed his fingers on the buttons.

   “Give me a twenty-second countdown from now. I can’t see my watch.”

   “On it,” Grogan said. “Five seconds and running. Anything happening yet?”

   As she spoke, a series of green lights began to wink on at the top of the panel, running from one system to the next as the check programs began their work.

   “Ten seconds. Things should be working by now.”

   “Some activity on the board. Looks pretty random.”

   “It will be. Everything’s switching over to the original settings from when they first brought the station on-line.”

   “How much data are we going to lose?”

   “Everything not in the protected storage.”

   “Grogan, that area was ripped to shreds, remember.”

   There was a pause, and she said, “Fifteen seconds. Would it help if I told you we were passed the point of no return now?”

   “Not really,” he replied.

   “Twenty seconds.”

   On the central panel, a request to enter his access code flashed onto the screen, green-on-black text in the crudest font he had ever seen, likely some programmer having a joke at his expense. He entered his code, and waited.

   “Maybe you should think about this, Dave,” appeared on the screen. Definitely a programmer having a joke.

   Then, as one, the emergency lighting flashed on, and all the consoles erupted into life, displaying test patterns and fault tracking, as Fox ran into the room, grabbing on to Monitor Two.

   “Hang on!” she yelled.

   “Why?” he asked, but he instantly had the answer as he started to drift away from the ground, his hands just snatching the console in time.

   “Damn it!” Grogan yelled. “We almost got thrown from the station! What the hell happened!”

   “Original default,” Fox said, shaking her head. “Which means no rotational gravity. The first thing the system did was stop our spin.”

   “Get it started again,” he ordered, “and then get me some sort of status report. Grogan, you and the others stay on the shuttle until I give the order.”

   “On it, sir,” Fox replied, pushing herself across the room, reaching up to tip herself towards a station on the far wall. “Thirty seconds.”

   Salazar pushed off towards the sensor station, still running through test programs. Ignoring several safety warnings, he overrode the start-up sequence and wildly threw switches, bringing the external sensors on-line. As though disapproving, the monitors took a few seco
nds before they co-operated, manufacturer’s warnings still recommending that he should follow the proper procedure.

   “It’s dead!” he yelled. “The enemy ship is off its rotation, moving away from station-keeping.”

   “What?” Fox said, turning to look at him.

   “They must have been monitoring our computer traffic. Whatever hit us, hit them just as hard!” Looking at the next console, he said, “Damn it, the communications station is still wasting its time.”

   Bartlett drifted into the room, and said, “That’s my cue.”

   “I told you to stay on the shuttle!”

   “Technically, my interpretation was that you told Grogan to stay on the shuttle. Besides, you need me, don’t you?”

   “Get me a message laser to Alamo, right now!”

   “If you are interested, I found out what happened,” Fox said. “Didn’t take long.”

   “What hit us? Some sort of virus?”

   “Data.”

   “Data?”

   “That crystal was sending out information about a billion times faster than any data crystal I’ve ever seen. In less than a second it had filled every bit of unused capacity.”

   Bartlett whistled, “No wonder all the control systems failed.”

   “If it’s any consolation, I doubt we’d have had any choice other than a reboot in any case. The databanks would have been scrambled to hell and gone.”

   “So we still have no idea what’s on it,” Bartlett said. “Message laser coming online, I just need to swing it around at Alamo.”

   “We don’t know what’s on it, but we know we can’t give it up. Right, Fox?”

   “Storage capacity like that would provide a revolution in computer design. Every starship could have its own quantum computer-equivalent, maybe every missile. A tactical edge that we don’t dare give up.” She looked across at him, and said, “I understand why you wanted that destruct sequence now.”

   “I’m glad you didn’t ask whether or not I would have used it.” He looked back at his monitor, and said, “They’re still struggling.”