Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  “Will it destroy the engines or the shields?” Yeva demanded, making on the fly adjustments to the scanners, tongue stuck out one side of her mouth as she concentrated.

  Deep space scanning was more boring than most people could possibly ever understand, but there were times –such as now- where determining which kind of spatial anomaly you were looking at became more artwork than science.

  The avatars were there to help her, not the other way around and if she was even remotely right …

  They were looking at field promotions through the roof.

  Unless, of course, Command decided to look too deeply into the where, how and why of things, in which case, that lurking court martial would stop lurking and chomp her head right off.

  “Well, no.” Tremax replied uncertainly, wondering just what Yeva thought she had; not a moron by any means, he nevertheless knew enough about spatial analysis to see that what they were looking at wasn't anything relatable to a Quantum Tunnel. “Different systems and all. Completely separate.”

  “Okay, good. Toss that up there. These new avatars are hungry for information.” Yeva fiddled with the switches and dials while Tremax did as he’d been told.

  Between her work and Yorrin’s and stupid whatshisname, they had a beginning, middle and end for the massive spatial disturbance they’d happened upon during routine scanning and while they were technically guilty of not following through with orders, there was a standing command from Command that all serious disturbances be examined with a fine toothed comb as and when they appeared.

  And for common sense reasons, too; not only were uncharted solar storms and the other really weird things space got up to very destructive if left alone, they were in the middle of a war with Trinity soldiers. With Trinityforce efforts not necessarily what you'd call successful, they might've gone with something a little … extravagant, out there in the depths.

  It was really possible, especially with the thing that'd happened on that moon with those dangerous-looking Heavy Elites.

  The readouts were still blobby, but now carried enough identifiable markers for her to be a little more precise than 'skilled hunchwork'.

  Yorrin’s modules eventually slotted themselves into play. Both Yeva and Tremax noticed an immediate downturn in operational efficiency. Where before the avatars running the deep space antennae had been flitting through their paces nearly three times the rate as the system was now running fractionally slower than normal.

  “What do you think we have?” Tremax asked, peering around the rest of the control room. It was funny how everyone else was just doing their jobs, either staring moodily into their Screens or chatting quietly with someone next to them or plotting their escape the moment Homolka nodded off again. The Captain himself was quite plainly accessing a homefeed on his prote, laughing and nodding to himself every few minutes.

  They were completely unwares that at any moment they could all be transformed into radioactive particles traveling the speed of light. What he wouldn’t give for access to the mirrored system! To see with his own eyes how in the blazes what they were doing wasn’t being seen!

  “I think…” Yeva poked and prodded at Yorrin’s recordings and fought with the avatar responsible for corralling data into place until the entire system accepted his modules properly, essentially doubling the virtual workspace she was working with. “I may have found the Quantum Tunnel.”

  Tremax pulled some info from his prote, lips working alongside the simplistic math avatar. “I am relatively certain that our Quantum Tunnel is neither just a hair over three million kilometers in length, nor is it … blob shaped.”

  “Under normal circumstances, lover,” Yeva zoomed in on a particular chunk of blob-shaped blobiness that had her particularly interested, “you would be quite correct. But this chunk here, right here, that is emanating very specific quantum patterns. We were all given a refresher course on what a working Quantum Tunnel looks like to our scanners, just in case Trinity soldiers stole it. Their black hole engines are great, but they can only move one vessel at a time, and can’t come near a planet. With a Tunnel under their command, they could just launch planetbusters at us from the deepest, darkest parts of our solar system and we wouldn’t be the wiser.”

  Tremax licked his lips nervously. “You … you certainly are a ray of sunshine at times.”

  “It’s the nature of the biz, Tremax.” Yeva tapped the blob again. “And as much as it’s supposed to be impossible, this bit right here is emitting Tunnel frequencies. Very low level, very prone to decay in a minute or two. Over here, on Yorrin’s side, there's a cluster of three or four more. If we could get a third data set, the stuff right in the middle, we might even find more. But … that’s not the interesting part.”

  Tremax personally found the idea of bits of quantum-level disturbance floating around in some kind of deep space storm precisely the opposite of ‘interesting’, but then again, he was basically a very overpaid military coder and not really the kind of person who found anything other than code exciting. “Oh?” he asked weakly.

  “We definitely can’t add the third mod… no? Okay, fine.” Yeva shrugged.

  That final piece of the puzzle would really drive things home in a seriously scientific and indisputable way, but she supposed Tremax’s concerns about overheating and destruction of military property were well-founded. She wiggled her fingers here and there, indicating ‘deeper’ sections of blob on both sides of the combined modules.

  “We’re really too far out for even these souped-up avatars to be one hundred percent certain, but what you’re looking at here is kind of a … topographical rendition of space. The Tunnel-like perturbations fluctuate on a positively subterranean level of space, which is why those spots look very faint and thin. They’re really easy to spot because of that, though. If you know what you’re looking for. These other sections are … well, bold. Crass. Heavy dimples. Shifting this way and that. Couldn’t miss them if you tried.”

  Listening to Yeva talk about space this way was one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. To someone untrained, space was just … space. Boring. Empty. Eternal. But to Yeva, it was a boundless treasure trove of new adventure. “What is it? They? What?”

  “Black hole dents. Or something. Definitely not black holes themselves because then this whole area would be lit up like an Indra Sahari concert. Our systems would be freaking out right now if they were detecting real and true black holes. One would trigger all the alarms and buzzers this ship has got. But definitely black hole spawned gravitic disturbances.” Yeva pulled up a nice, neat little timeslice of about fifteen seconds’ worth of pictures and played them out for Tremax, pointing to the swirling bits of quantum ether and how they reacted to the much heavier, but weirdly transient surges of gravity. “Whatever happened here was intense, Tremax, a singular event beyond anything ever recorded. Something powerful enough to keep all the theoretical energy from a Quantum Tunnel’s opening in check and powerful enough to have gravity doing … this. Watch … right here … something like a black hole rises, wobbles around, then dissipates, replaced here by another one.”

  “And that’s bad?” Tremax tried making it sound like a bold statement and hated himself for having it come out like a question.

  “Remember before how you were concerned the check-me avatar was going to turn this ship into a radiated pile of dust because we were going to get caught?” Yeva looked into her lover’s eyes. “This is like that, only possibly with the whole solar system.”

  “Really now! I must protest.” Captain Homolka’s voice rang through the control room, in precisely the same tones as an unhappy school teacher. Both Yeva and Tremax straightened up in their chairs and turned to face their accuser. “You two have had about enough time with your heads together. I require an explanation as to what is going on here. None of the other Tech Specialists are acting this way.”

  Tremax opened his mouth and tried to stammer out an explanation but failed bef
ore the first proper word could get out. As a top-tier Code Specialist, he didn’t exactly have to worry about anything the Captain might put into his records, but his real superiors would frown pretty heavily if he got bounced from this deployment… Things like that made the entire cadre look bad, and that was the last thing they wanted.

  Yeva put a hand briefly on Tremax’s trembling leg and hastened to explain. “Tech Tremax and I were working on a new slew of avatars, Captain, ones designed to make heads or tails of the disturbance that was reported to you earlier. The … blobby bit of space?”

  Homolka looked up Yeva’s work logs on his prote. “Ah, yes. The three of you working on that station made mention of it. Strange goings on or something. We sent the last round of data sets to be processed twenty-four hours ago. We should be getting the refreshed images in another day or so.”

  Yeva risked a look through her peripheral vision at Tremax. The man was calm as a breeze now the initial bit of the lie had been broached. That wonderful mind of his was no doubt working on his side of things should the Captain reorient for another broadside.

  “Too long, Captain, too long. We’re in a war, here, and, well … if the Trinity invaders did somehow manage to steal our Quantum Tunnel from underneath our very noses … we’ve all seen the same scenarios. So Tremax and I …”

  “We worked on a series of ultra-complicated avatars, sir.” Tremax knew he needed to get backup data verifying these bold lies –and in short order, too- should the Captain require proof of their collusion before the fact. If his superiors demanded the same, well, in all likelihood he’d be … dealt with … in an entirely different manner, but for now, it was just the Captain’s ire he needed to dampen.

  “Designed to run the array and the rest of the avatars past max capacity and into the critical zones. Very dangerous. I … we … I didn’t mention anything about it, sir, because I was well aware that what we were doing could cause tremendous damage to the systems.”

  Captain Homolka stepped forward, eyes trained on Yeva’s Screens. He didn’t know much about space other than it was big and wide and you usually wound up dying if you found yourself in it without a spacesuit, but the images being played over and over again looked like the sort of thing that they were out here in space to locate. “Then why do it at all, if you understood the risks? Both to our vessel and to your careers?”

  “It’s as Yeva said, sir.” Tremax cleared his throat, ever aware of the piercing eyes of the Captain and the other Specialists on the deck. “Too great a risk to the Latelian people. If we’re court-martialed or worse because of what we did, well, so be it. That’s the kind of risk we were willing to take. As you can see, the avatars I developed did their job without causing damage to either the ship, the array, the internal ‘LINKs or anything else. The array will most likely need to be brought in for servicing sooner rather than later, but it’s fully functional.”

  “And what is it,” Homolka demanded, now standing right behind Yeva, eyes glued to the Screens, “that you think you found?”

  “I think maybe we found our Quantum Tunnel, sir.” Yeva flashed the pertinent data already culled by the revamped scanner array to the Captain’s prote for his perusal. “Or rather, it's remnants.”

  Homolka ignored the fact that –quite suddenly- every Screen in the control room began mirroring Yeva and Tremax’s work. In light of the fact, he wanted every single eye looking over the information being pulled from the girl’s array and wanted their professional input. As he listened to his specialists jabber back and forth in their highly technical jargon, he waited for his prote –more advanced than any save perhaps Tremax’s, though in different directions- to finish breaking down Yeva’s preliminary data sets into something more understandable.

  A polite blip had the Captain reading the output on his prote a minute or so later. ‘LINKed to the more powerful processing systems located deeper in the ship –the same systems, he understood, that ran both the black hole engines and the tremendously powerful shields that allowed them to travel across their solar system in very nearly the blink of an eye- the prote had decoded Yeva’s complex intelligence into several easily digestible concepts.

  The quantum patterns in that portion of space did match that of a fully functional Tunnel, but since there was no dissipation, the evidence had to be faulty. According to the avatars, written by men much smarter than Yeva, the most likely reason behind this odd fluctuation of energy was due to a malfunctioning Q-Tunnel spilling it's payload into space. Just the sort of thing that might happen when using extreme methods of transporting something so very large and fragile.

  Though there was no way to tell for certain who'd done the moving -Latelian pirates or Trinityforce soldiers- it was apparent that someone had used brand-new black hole engine vessels to pull the Tunnel from point A to point B.

  Avatars were suggesting a very predictable chain of events. Pirates or soldiers -didn't matter which- had figured out how to bypass the overprotective AI minds inside the Tunnel long enough to steal it. The Tunnel minds overrode their reconditioning at the other end, and retaliated. The thieves were destroyed, their black hole engines spilled their deadly payloads into space, which in turn affected the Tunnel.

  Everything goes critical…

  Homolka tapped his lip thoughtfully. The avatars were suggesting a closer look, something the Captain was of a mind to do, simply because they didn't have anything else on their plate.

  Probably never would, given how this bloody war was ticking over so slowly.

  He nodded crisply to both Yeva and Tremax, flickering a brief smile when the two of them deflated almost immediately from the stress of realizing how foolish they’d been in taking such risks without first asking permission.

  “Well done, the two of you. Looks as though we’re going for a little jaunt. But, ah, before you both decide to hold yourselves a little celebration, the array, the avatars, everything needs to be scoured clean and freshly rebooted, yes? While the rest of us get to relax while our engines charge, you two shall be here, working diligently to ensure that your array isn’t going to erupt while we’re in transit?”

  Yeva exchanged glances with Tremax, who widened his eyes just slightly enough to confirm her suspicions that he wasn’t entirely certain that the Captain’s request was going to be doable. “Absolutely, sir. Wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.”

  “And Yertzi shall remain behind to … for security purposes.” Homolka turned to the rest of the crew on deck, who were still busy gabbling at each other. He raised his voice to give a command, then thought better of it; he instead synced his prote to the vessel’s loudspeaker system and made an official announcement. “Crew, this is Captain Homolka speaking. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Specialists Yeva and Tremax, we may have located our missing Tunnel. We will be making a black hole jump four hours from now. Would Navigators Essex and Wensholm make their way to the engine rooms to begin pre-leap checks and to program a safe journey to the coordinates currently being posted to your proteii? Everyone else, make certain all loose items are stowed properly. Just because everyone says these new engines don’t cause any kind of turbulence doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and I will not be filling out any paperwork because one or more of you got your heads bashed in by a coffee mug.”

  Homolka watched all of the on deck crew filter out, looking quite happy at the unexpected downtime before turning back to Tremax and Yeva. “Every single iota, cleaned, refreshed, brand new, yes? My report will reflect that I decided to take a look at this … blobby bit of space because of reasons.”

  Tremax quirked an eyebrow. “What about the data?”

  Homolka flashed the Code Specialist a smile. “Well, Specialist Tremax, since you asked, nothing is ever official until I sign off on it, including data in the prote and in the systems. It won’t be precisely … lost, simply not attached to the reports I’ll be filing. Captain’s discretion, you see? And I am certain you and yours can do something similar on your end, yes?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, News4You is running a special on Indra Sahari’s disappearance, and I simply must see it live. Thank you for the opportunity.”

  Yeva and Tremax watched Homolka leave, each heaving a huge sigh of relief. Yertzi thankfully stayed right where she was, leaving the conversation they were about to have with the illusion of privacy.

  “Do you think you can undo what’s been done?” Yeva whispered nervously.

  Tremax shrugged. “Dunno. We really should be dead by now. The mirrored station has to have seen what’s really going on before now. It’s almost as if the revamped code is running two different iterations of itself, one for what’s really happening, and another for the station back on Hospitalis. Only … that kind of processing power should’ve burned this array into cinders. And I know for a fact that it didn’t inhabit any of the other ‘LINKed arrays or mains because that would’ve set off all the alarms for certain. That corrupted check-me was only configured for your avatars.”

  “Well, shit.” Yeva looked over her shoulder at Yertzi. The giant Goddie was talking to herself, no doubt coordinating with the other two God soldiers on the Honor Your Offer. “Let’s get this started, Tremax. I’d like to have some downtime before we go lurching through space at the speed of light, wouldn’t you?”

  “Most definitely.” Tremax started running the most powerful diagnostic tools he had on his prote. “Can you open up your original avatar codes? Pristine ones. I’m going to see if I can just insert each individual process into the overall system, one at a time. Maybe that’ll just jostle the check-me out of orbit. Then I can delete it.”

  “Copy that.” Yeva went to work.

  ***

  Yertzi watched the two Specialists work in silence a second longer before whispering across Harmony to her commanding officer, Nalanata. “We found the Tunnel. Maybe. I believe there was … influence aboard this ship.”