“That is unfortunate,” Sir Rupert said, his head turning in the direction of Valyr.
She shifted her chair so that she could study him, too. He appeared oblivious to her or his surroundings. No question that something he’d done, or something in how the system had reacted to him, had caused this. But if it was a hostile act, then shouldn’t he be acting hostile? At the moment, she could bash him on the head. Not that she wanted to bash him, but she could. Couldn’t she? Actually, she didn’t know that.
She rose and, with red-shirt caution, moved closer. He didn’t look like he had a force field protecting him, but she knew the Kikk Outpost had protections. Only, you couldn’t see the Kikk force field. It was invisible. She looked around, saw the sack lunch debris and pulled out a wrapper, balled it up and tossed it at him.
It bounced off his shoulder and rolled back her way.
Did that mean the possible force field wasn’t there? Or that it wasn’t afraid of a piece of paper? She grabbed her backpack and extracted a bottle of water. Hefted it. Not lethal, but heavier. She studied Valyr. If she truly wanted to test for a force field that assessed threat levels, then she should probably aim for his head. She looked at Sir Rupert. He blinked and began preening his flight feathers.
Okay then. She calculated trajectory. No wind concerns here. Force was harder to compute. She bit her lip, lifted her arm, aimed, and threw it. Hard. She needed the possible force field to take her seriously—
It hit him hard enough in the back of the head to make his head jerk. One hand left the console and rubbed the spot. Then…
Rachel’s throat dried and her water bottled rolled toward the Urclock.
His head turned slowly in her direction. Siru’s head swiveled toward her, too.
In the glow from his screens—the blue glow—it almost looked like data streams crawled over his visible skin. Blue data streams. Like square blue bugs.
“Sorry,” she said. “It…slipped.” Would he buy that?
He blinked and rubbed the back of his neck again, with a hand covered in blue bugs. Then his lips tipped up in a smile that might have curled her toes inside her Expedition issue boots despite the blue bugs.
“Slipped?” Siru inquired with robotic skepticism.
“I said I was sorry,” she pointed out, without taking her gaze off Valyr. It was a safety thing, she told herself. In case he turned Khan on her.
The little robot backed up, rolled over, and picked up the water bottle. He examined all sides of it, then rolled over to her and held it out.
She took it from him. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome.” He started to turn away, then paused. “No more accidents?”
Rachel shook her head. “Cross my heart.”
He might have snorted before directing his attention once more on Valyr’s screens. Of course, he could have eyes in the back of its head.
She directed her attention on Valyr, summoning a smile for him. It was not as hard as it probably should have been. And it’s not like she had anything else she could do right now. “Are you all right?”
His smile deepened. “I am better.” He hesitated. “I am almost myself again.”
He did look different. Not physically different, but his eyes looked less slammed and more—human. He smelled different, too. The chemical smell was almost gone. Despite the lights running everywhere, his skin looked warmed, the color richer and again, more human. She reached out and touched his arm. A doctor touch, she told herself. One hand covered hers. Both the arm and the hand were warm. Something a bit spicy, maybe a little musky, but definitely male drifted up. She breathed it in and felt her insides relax for some reason. Except her heart sped up. Her smile deepened, the lips parting just a bit.
It was new, but for once her brain didn’t care why or how. Like the rest of her, it was happy just being.
“You do look better. And you are warmer.” She looked down at the hand covering hers. The blue bug tracks seemed less and were moving slower. He followed her gaze. “That’s—”
“It is repairing my memory pathways.”
“Oh. That’s good.” Probably. She hoped.
“It’s protocol.”
He probably thought that was explaining, so she nodded wisely. As a doctor, she had perfected the wise nod.
His grip on her hand tightened. “Look.” He nodded toward the center screen.
Her eyes didn’t want to. Up close, with color and pleasure warming his face and some of her skin touching some of his, she wanted to feel, not look. All they needed was some background music…
“Look,” he said again.
She dragged her orbs off him and looked. The gap between her lips might have widened a bit more.
She leaned forward, trying to understand what she was seeing. “The outposts?” muttered.
“Yes.”
Lightning tracked between this one and then another one, pulsing for a period, then moving on to the next.
“What’s it doing?”
“It is learning. It has been alone for a long time.”
“It’s learning.” She frowned. “Who—”
But she knew, even before he spoke again.
“It is what you said before, like Siru.”
“An…AI?”
He nodded.
“How…” her dry throat couldn’t get the question all the way out.
He shrugged. “It was alone. It had nothing else to do.”
This might be worse than waking up Khan.
“Have you been able to contact the squadron you deployed?” Hel asked a pacing General Halliwell.
She and Hel had transported up to the Doolittle and were now closeted in the General’s ready room. Any personal problems the two men had with each other were back burnered at the moment. Shared problems did that. Though the small room felt a bit like being in the bear cage at the zoo.
Halliwell paused to scowl at him. “Of course, but…”
Like Hel and his single Gadi ship, Halliwell’s ships were back to the slower communications from before the outposts had been activated.
“I have transmitted orders for them to proceed to Central Outpost at best speed.” His stone face hardened some more. “Because of the lag time in our communications, both going and coming, we have not seen the course change yet.”
And they would probably be out of range of the Doolittle’s scanners when they did. They’d all gotten used to the increased range in both scanning and communication that the outpost network provided. It was a reminder not to get too dependent on a technology that you didn’t fully control. And to make sure you did fully control all your technology. They’d made assumptions about the Key DNA and what it did. They’d delayed sending teams to all the outposts because it used a lot of manpower and because the General didn’t want anyone to get too far out without more support. He’d been both right and wrong about the plan to take it slow.
She’d learned something else. The general belief among the expedition was that outposts—other than scanning and communications boosting capabilities—were offline until someone with the proper DNA activated them. And that all the good stuff was here on Kikk. Except the bogey wasn’t headed here. Was that because this outpost was occupied or because there was better stuff on Central Outpost? To answer either question, they needed contact with Dr. Frank. And they needed to get the doc and Sir Rupert back on this outpost. The hindsight post mortem would have to wait.
“So Carey and his men are on their own,” Doc murmured.
“If the bogey is inclined to bump heads with them, yes,” Halliwell admitted with extreme reluctance. “I also gave the Colonel latitude to act independently if he comes under fire.”
Doc liked Carey a lot, but he was not the guy she’d have sent on a diplomatic mission. The General who liked and trusted Carey enough to make him the CAG also knew this. Diplomats made lousy fighter pilots. But it was what it was.
“What happened?” the General asked.
It was Doc’s turn
to pace away from him. She stared at his “window,” a view screen of the outside of the ship. Right now it was showing images from the outpost side. The Kikk moon partially blocked the smaller of the two moons. What had happened on Central Outpost?
The probe hadn’t impacted yet, so they couldn’t blame it. Had Dr. Frank pushed the wrong button? Or had the unknown man done something? She considered what she’d seen just before the blackout. Dr. Frank had been working on a console, and her last view of the guy was him at a console.
Then it all went poof.
“It could be a couple of things,” she said, even as her thoughts circled and tested her theories. “Dr. Frank could have triggered the shut down by trying to open a booby-trapped area. Or one that had a higher level of protection.”
“Leaving aside any questions about how she got there, for now, what is her skill level? To even be considered for this expedition—”
The implication being, she should be smart enough not to push the wrong buttons, trigger booby traps, or open the wrong files.
“We are working in an alien system in another galaxy, sir,” Doc pointed out, not happy she had to defend someone whose skill level looked like it was better than her file indicated. She should not have been able to hack into that outpost that quickly. Was she someone who’d managed to get past screening? Or someone like Doc, who didn’t like strangers knowing her business? “She was tasked with seeking out cryo-research. We still haven’t been able to find where she was when she, um, left the building. She was logged into the medical center by the guard on duty, around nine Zulu time and after that, nothing. No one was there, so no one saw where they were working.”
The General had asked her to keep an eye on the bird, so she had. A side benefit had been watching Frank break out in a sweat. Right now, the fact that she seemed to scare easy was not comforting. Or was she faking that, too?
“Can we get some people from here to there?” Hel asked.
It was a good question. The nanites did not provide a good answer.
No.
She shook her head. “Transport between all the outposts is offline, too.” Luckily Hel’s reboot of this outpost had brought back up their ability to move around this outpost’s on-site transport system. Good thing, too, since nothing was really that close when one had to walk anywhere.
“Our bogey didn’t do this, did it?” Halliwell asked.
“I don’t see how, sir. It’s limited by the same distances we are and the probe hadn’t reached the outpost when we went offline.”
Halliwell looked at Hel. “If they had the right DNA, could they have done it remotely?”
“They would need to have been in the system,” Hel said. “It’s not magic. There must be physical contact to initiate it, then the—” he looked at Doc.
“Wireless connection kicks in.”
“They were in the system at that border outpost,” the general pointed out, a bit grimly. “Looked like they had physical contact to me.”
I should have thought of that. Doc felt chagrin. “Yes, sir, but there were no signs of a Key activation.”
He nodded grimly, but still looked dubious.
“Let me see if I can find anything in the data we collected before things went dark.” If something had happened, it would be either from the probe or, as the general pointed out, that direct contact with the robot soldiers. Could they have or use DNA? It might be possible, she reluctantly decided. When that thing punched through the console, it could have happened then. With the nanites’ help, she began to sift through the data.
“I’m not seeing much, sir,” Doc said slowly, as she parsed what she could see. “They weren’t in there long—”
She could be wrong, she realized. If their bogey was a canny ghost, so was their intrusion data program. The nanites might have turned green, and it just might be a thing of beauty in programming. She could see the damage they’d done, but she couldn’t “see” the actual data that had performed the extraction.
“It could have been them,” she conceded with a sigh. “They’ve managed to cover their data tracks in a way I’ve never seen before.” Whoever was in control of that ship, they were good. What did that mean for Carey? He out gunned them in space on paper. If they landed? They’d seen six robots. The Marines would call that an opportunity to excel. She hoped it would be if there were a firefight. Mostly she hoped there wouldn’t be one. They did not need more enemies.
“You have another theory, Doctor, other than aliens or Doctor Frank broke something?”
She did, but she didn’t want to share it. He showed no signs of having noticed the addition to Dr. Frank’s team. He’d be pissed he wasn’t briefed on it, even though everything broke fast and he had eyes in his head. Not that she planned to point that out to him.
She exchanged a look with Hel. The General saw it and his gaze narrowed to a knifepoint.
“There is the unknown male,” Hel said, gallantly putting himself in the line of fire.
“Male?” The General’s gaze tracked between them like a missile.
Doc went to his controls. “May I?” She got a sharp nod from him and pulled up the last picture they had of Dr. Frank. She zoomed in. “We were trying to figure out where he came from when it all went boom,” she admitted.
The General stared at the figure for so long, Doc actually started to get nervous. Was this how people felt around her? Maybe they weren’t wimps. She didn’t like it, so she shifted focus.
Can you get us back into the whole network? It might be the biggest job she’d ever asked of the nanites.
We are trying.
I’ll help. She’d been smart before the nanites came to live in her head. Crazy, but smart. Speaking of crazy smart…
Robert-oh-my-darling and his nanites would be helpful.
Doc’s eye twitched. Emily called Robert this, just because their last name was Clementyne. Somehow the nanites had picked it up.
“We need to get back down there—” Doc said. The nanites felt as if they froze, which made her brain feel that way, too. What’s wrong?
We sense another…sentient…being.
Like you?
No. Not a nanite or nanites. It is a system.
It? You mean the actual Central Outpost system? She felt their assent and almost sighed. The computer did it?
It was rare that CabeX entered any of the crew’s private spaces, other than his own, of course. When they had been slaves, they had not had quarters. CabeX had taken over the human captain’s space, adapting it to better suit his non-human needs. Some of his crew had adapted their workspace into a personal private space, others had taken over non-essential areas. They did not need to go into each others’ spaces to communicate. He had not needed to visit anyone, since he could see most places on the ship, either through the systems or the link that connected them. He had not, until this moment, ventured near Kraye’s quarters, had not seen them since he dumped him in there all those years ago.
He pressed the call button. There was a pause, then the door slid open. Kraye stood in the opening, a look of surprise on his face.
“Captain.” He blinked several times, then stood back, with a gesture that meant enter. He followed this up with, “Please come in, sir.”
CabeX contracted his body so that his cranium would clear the hatch and then, once he was inside, extended it again. He looked slowly around, noting how different it was from his quarters. It looked…a dim memory flickered in his processor…like home. He continued to turn, trying to understand how his First achieved this feat in what was a metal box.
Colors. Brown and green. Fabrics had been added to the bed and the single chair. The light was lower, but he’d dimmed the lighting on the bridge without this effect. There were shades of some sort over the lamps. Scattered about were items, taken from the places they’d visited, he noted. Even before, they had not had quarters like this. It puzzled him that objects could change the feel of a space. But the overall effect was optimal. He noticed
a small tray with the food half eaten.
“I am interrupting your sustenance consumption,” he said. “Please finish.”
“I am done, sir.” Kraye glanced around, then gestured at the single chair. “Would you like—”
“It is not necessary for me to be seated,” CabeX pointed out.
“No, sir, but,” he hesitated, then continued, “it is a gesture of my respect for you.”
CabeX considered this and nodded slowly. “I thank you for the gesture.” He moved toward the chair and lowered himself until he was almost seated. He was not sure it would hold him, so he did not test its integrity. Kraye went to his bed and sat. He did not look comfortable.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Kraye could not help materially. What he’d come for was his human view. His instinct.
“RaptorZ is experiencing difficulty accessing the outpost.”
Kraye nodded but did not speak.
“He says the resistance is not…typical.”
“Does he have a theory for why?”
CabeX hesitated, reluctant to say the words for reasons he did not fully understand. “He wonders if the system on this outpost is…sentient.”
Kraye straightened with a jerk. “Sentient?” He frowned, considering. “What about the heat signature we detected? It couldn’t be that?”
CabeX shook his cranium. “The reactions to his actions are too swift for a human, though he does not discount the human presence as a factor.” He wouldn’t. They never discounted anything.
Kraye rubbed his chin. “This…changes…things.”
It was half query, half statement. CabeX nodded. “Yes.”
A possibly independent sentient system on the planet changed…everything. In his processor, he could see the outposts, could see the outpost. His crew was humming with the possibilities, the pros, and cons being passed back and forth. At the core was one idea.
Staying. That this might be the haven they’d been seeking. It might not be as optimal for Kraye, but there were humans in this system. That wasn’t the concern that exercised his processors out of sight of the others. The one thing that could threaten their safety anywhere. It was time to tell them about the messages.
Lost Valyr: Project Enterprise 7 Page 13
