Alpha Contracts

by Chris Kennedy

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t,” he complained. “We found a computer in standby, and just turned it on. Everything else started happening by itself.”

  “How visible will that reactor be?”

  “Not too visible,” Biggs reported. “This thing has serious hull plating down here. If someone is within a few light minutes, maybe. But they’d spot the shuttles’ fusion plants just as far.” Lawrence’s suit beeped, letting him know that it was picking up atmospheric pressure beginning to build. “Oh, and life support is coming on line.”

  “I noticed,” he said. “Just be careful turning anything else on, okay? We don’t want to have this thing deorbit into that asteroid, or start shooting missiles.”

  “Right boss,” Biggs said.

  “Captain!” Kochek yelled. Lawrence spun around to see the CIC’s armored door rotating open.

  “Guns!” Lawrence said, and the four of them scrambled to ready what weapons they had. There was no need; there was nothing alive inside. Dim, greenish light was cast by several monitors. Lawrence gave a low whistle; the CIC was as big as John III Sobieski’s shuttle bay had been! There were at least a dozen duty stations, and the whole thing was at an odd angle. “Why’s it cocked like that?” he wondered aloud.

  “The entire thing is on gimbals,” one of the other men said, and pointed at the space between the inside and outside walls. “They can move it to whatever orientation they want.”

  “Wow,” Lawrence said, realizing he’d been saying that a lot. Together the four of them floated into the combat center to investigate. There were two more of the four-armed humanoids, but in the central chair was another being. Lawrence floated close to examine it. The creature looked like a squirrel, or maybe a monkey. It had a tail and a funny nose. He thought maybe a Flatar or XenSha? He’d seen pictures of both, only this one was a dried out mummy. His suit beeped. Atmosphere was sufficient to breathe, and there was plenty of oxygen.

  He was a little worried with all the dead things that it would smell bad, but when he opened his suit helmet a crack, the air just smelled cold and musty. Kochek must have been right; these creatures had been dead a very long time. Salvage, he thought. He’d read enough Union law to know that this ship, with none of the owners alive, was legal salvage. It was his! Then he laughed at himself. You have to get it home to keep it. What chance would 60-odd Humans have of getting a behemoth like this back to Earth?

  “Captain, it’s Skoval in shuttle #2.”

  “Go ahead,” Lawrence said.

  “We’ve got company.” Lawrence felt a stab of terror.

  “Warships?”

  “No,” the other pilot said, “I think they’re castaways just like us. I have them on frequency 11.” Lawrence looked down at his suit controls and changed frequencies.

  “This is Captain Lawrence Kosmalski of EMS John III Sobieski,” he transmitted. He heard a series of pops and hisses which the translator he had hooked to his suit’s radio translated.

  “Captain, this is engineer Eto from the Tobriea. We are glad to find you. We had thought John III Sobieski destroyed in the battle.”

  “We thought the same of you, Eto. How many are you?”

  “Forty-nine,” the alien said. “Tobriea was cut in half by a battleship. Most of the crew in the other half were killed. We took the engineering launch and abandoned ship.”

  “What of the O’llo?” he asked.

  “Five of our number are from one of the O’llo’s escape craft. They are the only survivors.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “We were drifting through the asteroid belt when we detected the fusion power signature of this derelict you have found. Is it functional?”

  “It appears to be,” he said, “at least we have life support running.”

  “Captain,” Eto said, “I know we were not part of the same merc company, but our life support is severely stressed. We have twice as many in here as the ship is rated for. May we beg safe harbor? We can pay what we have.”

  “You may certainly come aboard,” Lawrence said. “Skoval?”

  “Yes, captain?”

  “Give the Tobriea’s shuttle directions to dock. Come aboard yourself so we have our entire crew. Just in case.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  An hour later the alien shuttle was docked to the derelict, and the hatch opened. Twenty crewman from the former EMS John III Sobieski were waiting as Eto floated through the lock. Eto was from the race known as elSha, lizards almost a meter long and well known for their prowess with machines. As the castaways came aboard, they eyed the Humans warily. Most of them were also elSha, though there were a number of other races as well. Several badger-like Cochkala, a horse-like Equiri, a trio of MinSha, and even a pair of huge purple bears known as Oogar. That explained their life support problem.

  “What are your terms, Captain?” Eto asked. “I was the chief engineer and 4th officer of Tobriea, so I am the ranking surviving officer.”

  “Terms?” he wondered. “Oh, pay? Nothing, Eto. You are welcome on board.” The elSha looked at him skeptically.

  “Why would you do this?”

  “We’re all in this together,” Lawrence explained. “Besides, it’s the Human thing to do.” The aliens looked amazed, but none of them complained. The smell coming out of the lifeboat was several orders of funky rankness. “Are there any engineers?” he asked

  “Yes,” Eto said, “most of these are my engineering staff.” He indicated the Oogar and MinSha. “They were from the O’llo and served as marines.”

  “We too are grateful,” one of the MinSha said. Lawrence bowed slightly to the Oogar and MinSha, then turned back to Eto.

  “If you help us get this tub moving, we’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” Eto glanced around the hallway, glancing with his eye turrets in two directions at once. He floated over and examined a display.

  “This is very old technology,” he pointed out. “I don’t know what we can do.”

  “Still, I’d like you to try. We don’t have many more crew members than you, and we lost more engineers. Would you try, please?” Eto looked at his crew. Those with heads nodded, others made gestures of assent appropriate for their own races. Eto looked around the group, gauging their responses before turning back to Lawrence.

  “We will try, Captain.”

  * * *

  “It’s down to the computer,” Biggs explained, gesturing at the open armored door. Unlike EMS John III Sobieski, this ship had a large dedicated computer section, and it wasn’t anywhere near the CIC. Biggs, along with Eto, had worked for the last week to bring almost every system on the ship to life…except the computers.

  “Explain it again,” Lawrence said.

  “Okay,” Biggs began. “The physical processors are old, at least from what I’ve seen of Union tech. The two computer specialists Eto loaned me agree. They’re like the ancestors of the slates, only smaller and massively networked. The elSha techs explained that modern warships used processor blocks, not these little network banks of processors.”

  “You said they’re not broken, right?”

  “Right,” Biggs agreed, “they’re coming on and showing normal function indicators.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “It’s the OS. There doesn’t seem to be an operating system.”

  “But there has to be one, doesn’t there?”

  “Exactly,” Biggs said. “Every computer we know of has to have at least a BIOS or it can’t run programs. It’s just a computer waiting for something to do, and you can’t tell it what to do if you don’t have a BIOS. Think of it as a toaster with no lever. Or a car without a driver.”

  “So where is the BIOS?” Lawrence asked.

  Biggs shrugged. “We’ve looked everywhere,” he admitted. “There isn’t any storage media we can find that would serve as the BIOS storage.” He shook his head in frustration. “Why would you do that anyway? If the computer goes down, someone has to
run down here and reboot it? Insanity.” Lawrence glanced past him to the long racks of processors, all with glowing power indicators. It looked so straight forward.

  “Were there any corpses in there?”

  “Corpses?” Biggs asked, confused.

  “Yeah, any bodies?” He’d found out the four-armed humanoids were a merc race known as the Lumar, but none of the castaway aliens knew what the little alien in the command chair was. Eto thought it looked a little bit like a Flatar, but found the idea of a Flatar in command of a spaceship ludicrous. In all, they’d cleared over 200 bodies from the ship, all but one a Lumar. Biggs glanced back at the computer room, thinking.

  “No. Wait, kind of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We found a suit of armor in there.”

  “Armor? Show me.”

  Biggs led him to a door a MinSha was just shutting. “All of the gear is in here,” Biggs said. He looked to the MinSha. “Show the captain what we’ve got.”

  The alien swung the door inward to show a storage room full of floating uniforms and various equipment. The MinSha gestured to the room full of spinning, moving, bouncing gear.

  “We stripped all the bodies and threw anything not biological in there,” the marine explained. The other two MinSha came up behind her, grasping the wall of the corridor in various places. “Is that a problem, Captain?”

  “No,” Lawrence said. He was a little nervous this close to the MinSha. Their race had destroyed Iran in retribution for the UN bombing last year. “We just need the suit of armor which was taken from the computer room.”

  “Armor,” the MinSha said, her mouth parts moving to make the rasping sounds of her language. Her huge, multifaceted eyes regarded Lawrence. “There was a strange suit of combat armor which one of the Oogar took.” Lawrence perked up. “I believe they took it to their temporary quarters.”

  Biggs and Lawrence arrived on the deck where the Oogar were making their home. The ship was comprised of 32 decks from bow to stern, all arrayed so that up faced the bow. The ship was obviously meant to spend a lot of time under acceleration. There were two elevators on either side of the ship to access the decks, and ramps on alternate sides so you could walk or float between decks, depending on what conditions the ship was under. As the Oogar were so large, they’d settled in a largely open area on Deck 30, near the stern but forward of engineering.

  “Yes, Captain?” an Oogar asked when Lawrence floated in. The other alien wasn’t present.

  “I understand you have a suit of armor that was found elsewhere on the ship?” The marine nodded. “Can we see it please?”

  “We had hoped to salvage some of the protective plates,” the alien said, snatching the suit from a storage locker and floating over to Lawrence. “However none of it is suitable. It was a strange kind of powered armor, or EVA suit. You may have it, if you wish.”

  “Thank you,” Lawrence said. “Since you claimed it, I will pay you for if, if you wish?”

  “That is not necessary,” the Oogar said with a dismissive gesture. “You saved our lives. You may have whatever it is you wish.” Lawrence and Biggs caught the strange armor and began examining it while the Oogar watched. The giant purple ursoid’s earthy/musky smell mixed with the still somewhat stale odor of the ship.

  “It’s got four arms,” Biggs noted immediately.

  “So it’s for the Lumar,” Lawrence said. However the armor had been modified in numerous ways. The helmet was replaced with a sealing ring, the life-support pack had been extensively altered, and there were magnetic grapples in several places, not just at the feet and hands.

  “What the hell?” Biggs wondered at the basic design. “Changed for some weird race?”

  “How’s the interior?”

  “Very strange,” the Oogar said. Biggs looked at him then the suit. With a shrug, he began breaking open the back, where a being would climb inside. When they got the panel open, it revealed a network of computer linkages, servos, and power supplies. There was no room for even a small child. “See? Is it not indeed strange?”

  “It’s like a robot,” Biggs agreed. “Only an improvised one.”

  Lawrence was looking at the backpack, now floating nearby. A single white light was pulsing on its side. He pulled it closer to him and examined it. There were no markings of any sort, or any text. Whoever built it hadn’t left any indications for what it was or how to use it. Just like the suit, it appeared built from scratch.

  “Biggs, did we ever identify that power signal coming from this ship?”

  “No,” he said, “we got distracted when we boarded. Then when the power plants came up, there was too much stray EM around.”

  Lawrence turned the pack over to show the other man what he’d found. “Huh,” Biggs said and fished a detection device from the equipment he always wore. It came alive and data scrolled on the detector’s screen. “I bet this is it,” he said after a minute.

  “What kind of power is it using?”

  “Based on the little bit of neutron radiation it’s giving off, I’d say it’s a radio-isotopic thermoelectric generator. Pretty sophisticated. Can I crack it open?”

  “How long would something like that last?”

  “It could last thousands of years, depending on the isotope.”

  Lawrence chewed his lip and looked around at the ancient ship, then back at the backpack. “Does this have any computer connections?”

  “It’s just a life-support pack,” Biggs said.

  “Humor me?” Biggs sighed and began examining the pack. He found several small data links that connected to other parts of the suit, then a pair of wide-bus connectors.

  “What in the hell?” he muttered, examining them. They linked with data connectors in the suit, which he traced to other connectors on two of the lower hands. He looked at Lawrence, confused. “Why would the suit have those kinds of connectors? You only use them to move massive amounts of data.”

  “How massive?”

  “Like exabytes. You see them inside large computers connecting sub-processors. The Union’s narrow-bus connectors are more like our USB, but on steroids. Think of a USB as a two-lane highway and the narrow-bus connectors as a 10-lane interstate.”

  “Then what’s a wide-bus connector?” Lawrence asked. “Several interstates?”

  “More like every interstate in a large country.”

  “Come on,” Lawrence said, grabbing the pack, “and bring the rest of the suit.”

  “Where are we going?” he called after the captain, who was already gone. With a curse, he took the rest of the suit in tow and followed. He caught up to Lawrence two decks below the CIC, where the main computer room was located. Biggs floated inside, watching his captain looking around frantically. The other man looked more than a little disturbed, almost maniacal.

  “Sir, what are we doing back here?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Lawrence asked as he searched. “This is the key.”

  “No I don’t. The key to what? What are you looking for?”

  “An interface to the mainframe here.”

  “There’s no OS, remember?”

  Lawrence spun around and glared at him. Biggs sighed and went over to the processor rack and pulled out a cable. Lawrence snatched the cable from Biggs’ hand, found a connector on the backpack, and snapped it into place. A tiny light on the cable indicated a good connection. He flipped the pack over and saw the little white light was now blue. After a second, it started to blink.

  “Yes,” Lawrence hissed and released the backpack to float tethered to the mainframe.

  “Now can you tell me what you’re doing?”

  “My specialty is software,” Lawrence explained. Biggs nodded. As an original member of the crew, he’d known that Lawrence was responsible for getting John III Sobieski’s operating system operational. “Well, when we saw this old suit and the backpack with the super-long life battery, it all came together.” Biggs waited patiently. “If I’m right, any secon
d now we’ll see.” There was a flash of light as every processor in the computer room flashed white status lights and then all turned blue. The light on the backpack went out. “This is a computer lifeboat,” he said, indicating the suit and backpack. “For some reason they offloaded the computer’s memory into this. Maybe as a backup, maybe for safekeeping, I don’t know. But I remembered that the bigger holographic memory units the Union sometimes uses takes power.”

  “Yeah, but not much,” Biggs said, pointing at the backpack. “Those generators make a lot more than it would need.”

  “But if you use less power, they last longer, right?” Biggs first shrugged, then thought and slowly nodded. “This was a long-term lifeboat, an off-site backup for the computer. And whoever set it up designed it to last a very long time.”

  Along one wall were a series of slate-style displays. None had ever shown so much as a status light. Now one came alive and began scrolling alien script. Biggs floated over to it and interfaced his slate, which translated. “DES Sk’lana – Main Computer Standing By.”

  “The name Sk’lana has a tag in the GalNet,” Biggs said and followed it. An image of an alien, half horse, half eagle, appeared on the display.

  “Looks like a—” Lawrence said.

  “Captain!” his radio transmitted an urgent call.

  “Go ahead.”

  “This is Wisniewski in CIC, everything just came alive down here. And I mean everything!”

  “We have helm control,” Kochek also transmitted. “Do you want me to stabilize?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just go easy.” They felt their orientation shift slightly, and both men grabbed at handholds as the slow spin of the ship stopped.

  “We’re stable, Captain. Orders?”

  “Meeting in 10 minutes,” he said. “Everyone in the hanger bay on Deck 21.” He turned and grinned at Biggs.

  “How did you know?”

  “I have no idea,” Lawrence admitted. His eyes lingered on the now apparently dead backpack for a long moment. “We can figure it out later. For now, let’s go consider our options.”

  * * *

  “Let’s summarize,” Lawrence said to the crew. They were all assembled in the ship’s central hangar deck. There were two on either side of the ship, with elevators leading to the deck below, where they’d found half a dozen shuttles and dozens of combat drones. The space was big enough for five times the 116 Humans and aliens, even taking in to account the two huge purple Oogar. “The ship is in pretty good shape, considering it’s been sitting here for probably thousands of years. Biggs and I got the computer running 20 minutes ago.” Biggs gave him a sideways look, but Lawrence had sworn him to secrecy about how they’d done it. He wanted to know more first. “So, let’s hear by department how we are doing.” He pointed at Eto first.