Earth Song: Etude to War (27 page)

“It is so weird watching you do that,” Aaron spoke next to her ear. “What does it feel like?”

“Ants crawling across my brain, running me by remote control. It’s not even conscious.” She’d explained it to them all before. But she didn’t complain; it was even weirder being the one doing it.

The holographic controls locked the code in and the warning script disappeared as the doors beeped and started to slide into the wall. She was just about to wonder aloud how her father could have gotten through the doors when Kal’at got her attention. He’d been rummaging around the trash piles and was holding up a circuit board.

“Unless I am mistaken, this is indigenous human technology.”

“Sure is,” Cherise said and took the offered board. “This is from a code-breaker we used to use years ago. I’ve seen a couple in stores, don’t think the old guys can bring themselves to get rid of them. Funny enough, Pip wrote a tablet application to make them redundant about a month after he joined the Chosen.”

“So it’s something my dad would have had?”

“Before he went missing? Sure.”

Minu stepped closer and Cherise handed her the component. It was human-made on Bellatrix, without a doubt; you could even see the corporate logo for the contractor that had built it. The device was electronic, unlike Concordian technology which was based on optical light driven mechanisms, or photronic. Worthless garbage to any other species.

“Left here on purpose,” Minu said and handed it back to Cherise. “Can you make it work?”

“Why, they must have dumped it after it broke.”

Aaron was shaking his head. “Scouts never dump recognizable gear. Against our SOP. Especially anything made by us on Bellatrix. You’re thinking it was left here on purpose?”

“Has to be,” Minu agreed.

Cherise cocked her head but pulled out a tool kit. “We don’t usually carry the stuff to work on these old things anymore,” she spoke as she worked, “but I threw this gear into my bag because we were heading down memory lane. Guess that was a good move on the whole.”

It only took her capable hands a few minutes to attach an EPC and interface the device with her diagnostic tablet. “Yep, busted. Looks like it was overloaded. There’s a code stuck in the data buffer.”

“Can you display the code?” Minu asked her. The woman’s tablet obediently showed a line of Concordian script, but in the more modern type the Tog preferred. “Bingo.”

“What is it?” Cherise asked.

“I guess you could say its Concordia lockbreaking for dummies.”

“Huh?” everyone replied, even Kal’at.

Minu smiled and explained. “I was wondering how my dad could get through some of the doors he must have gotten through over the years. I even started to think maybe he’d gotten his own Weaver code upgrade like me. Well, what you have here is the master lock code in my brain, only in modern Concordian script. It isn’t identical to the one I know in my head, but there are analogues for all the code scripts from ancient Concordia in modern Concordia.”

“The old bastard broke the code?” Aaron laughed, not really a question.

“Evil genius seems to run in the family,” Cherise agreed.

“I do not consider Minu Groves evil,” Kal’at complained, snapping his jaws for emphasis.

Chapter 25

April 14th, 534 AE

Abandoned City, Planet Atlantis, Galactic Frontier

Lilith floated in the dark space, most of her brain asleep while small parts of her consciousness watched all ships systems, monitored the sensor arrays, and remained alert for any update from the link she had with her mother. Nothing had changed in the six hours since they’d gained entrance to the high security industrial complex on Atlantis, and since she had not ‘slept’ in forty hours, she decided to use the lull for just that purpose. The only problem was that her subconscious was not cooperating.

She’d discounted Pip’s suggestion of allowing him full access to her database as ludicrous. Pip was far too dangerous with what little access he had already. He constantly tested her defenses, pushed the boundaries, asked questions she couldn't answer. The last part was of course the most frustrating.

She raised the light level slightly and removed her jumpsuit. She’d long set up the CIC so she didn’t have to ever leave if she didn’t want to. Forcefields could be used to create just about anything you wanted, if you were creative. Fields formed and water flowed from a valve.

In a minute there was a perfectly formed ball of warm water, four hundred liters to be precise. Naked, she pushed off another forcefield and swam into the water making ripples rebound across its surface, bouncing back and forth in intricate reforming patterns.

The water system was there mainly as a combat contingency. Should the ship be severely damaged and the gravitic compensators compromised, she could flood the chamber with water and operate from inside. It was not perfect, but surviving fifty-G maneuvers any other way was impossible, even for a human who was born living in gravity.

She’d long since began to improve her muscle tone and bone density with carefully planned exercises. But no matter how hard she worked, she’d never have the body a human female got from just walking to work every day.

The bath was relaxing, even having to stick her head outside the water every couple minutes for a slow breath didn’t interrupt the relaxing feelings it gave her. The thoughts of her database again came to mind, and her mother's desire to understand better.

She’d had been given the power to control a Kaatan class ship-of-the-line. She exulted in all that power whenever she fully linked with the ship and its myriad of systems. And that was a gift she was only now beginning to understand. But why was she given that gift?

She knew the idea to created her suggested in part by a communication with a central command node somewhere out in the vast expanses of the galaxy. She'd tried more than once to link with the node for instructions. It never answered.

Lilith finished her bath, letting the ship dry her and remove the water before donning a clean uniform. The quest her mother had undertaken may well lead to places where she could solve some of her own mysteries. Regardless, it was her duty to serve the ship's commander. It was what a combat intelligence did.

* * *

The interior of the industrial complex was a complicating series of structures. There were docks, storage bays, massive silos of chemicals and raw materials, and towering machines of unknown function. Amid it all was a dizzying diversity of control structures and computer automation. Minu noticed the two most surprising things right away. Others had been here recently, and no-one had attempted to steal/salvage a single thing.

“Why would anyone go to the trouble of getting in here without helping themselves?” Aaron wanted to know, gesturing at a line of chemical processing machines that would bring fortunes on the Concordia salvage market. He knew for a fact that they were impossible to find new, and nearly so used.

“You could finance our planet for a year just with this one room,” Cherise agreed.

“My dad for one,” Minu pointed out. But I think the reason he left well enough alone was because he noticed that others were in here as well, and they’d left it alone.

“This equipment has been recently serviced,” Kal’at pointed out, examining a manifold. The pipes and their connections all looked the same, but when you leaned close you could see carefully performed micro-welds where a section had been repaired. The dualloy fittings would last many hundred thousand years, or more. Whatever had caused the failure was either a design flaw, or evidence that the apparatus was still in use.

“Must be the bots,” said Cherise as she glanced around.

“Haven’t seen one since we got here,” Minu told them.

She’d even been on the outlook for the little crystal squares in the wall like on the Kaatan. The People had mastered making bots from living crystal, extruding them as needed only to reabsorb them after the task was completed. Pip called it ‘piezoelectric crystals on steroids’. It just looked like magic to her. “Maybe this manufacturing process was ‘not friendly’ to bots.”

“Can you imagine anything that bots couldn’t handle that we could?” Aaron asked skeptically.

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

The team moved aimlessly through the complex looking for clues. It was as pristine as the rest of the city so Minu had ruled out a typical scout trick of a conspicuous pile of trash, or scratches in a wall. Chriso would have needed to be more obtuse in this case. Whoever, or whatever was keeping the place in such pristine condition would probably have removed his cache marker shortly after it was put into place.

“Maybe we should split into two teams,” Kal’at finally suggested after they’d just finished searching a large room full of quiet conveyors. The whole place had them on edge. It felt like the machines could suddenly leap into action without warning. It was a profound enough of a sensation that they’d all been avoiding touching or stepping on obviously movable parts.

“I don’t know…” Minu mumbled as she unconsciously bit her lower lip.

Where would her father have left something in this sort of situation? There were literally thousands of machines that could have been opened to stash something as tiny as a computer chip. A needle in a haystack was simply not of enough scope to compare. More like a grain of sand in a solar system.

Maybe I’m not thinking about this logically
, she considered.
I’m here for data, not a cache.

The fact that the last clues had been left with a stash of dragonfly-bots was just out of expedience on his part, not necessity. So where in this place could he have stashed data? “Where’s the central control room?” she asked the group.

Kal’at stepped to a nearby panel and touched it. The display came instantly to life. As she’d noted earlier, a lot of the symbols from ancient Concordia were similar to that currently in use. ‘Map’ was one of those ubiquitous words that translated perfectly. He was about to reach for his translator when Minu pointed, the symbols instantly converted in her uploaded memories.

“There.” Kal’at glanced from the icon to his computer with one eye then shrugged. He was becoming as human as his brother.

It looked like any of a hundred other small buildings in the complex. Minu decided they probably would have looked in eventually, and probably moved on quickly. A dozen workstations were arrayed along one circular wall, each supporting a several configurable screens and a single seat.

She did a double take when she looked at the chair. The back section had the same hole as the ones the Kaatan originally provided, right where a human’s tailbone sat. The few times they’d seen one of The People, they’d looked rather like lemur monkeys to her, only taller and with more expressive faces. Their tales were long and dexterous as well, likely serving as an extra hand. If she had a tail like that, she wouldn’t want to sit on it either.

“The facility was made by the same friends who built our ship.”

Minu smiled at Aaron’s quick thinking. She might be more of a scientific mind than he, but not by much. She’d fallen for his good looks and muscles originally. Luckily for both of them both he was much more than just that.

“All this industry and they lost a war?” Cherise wondered as she walked along the line of work station. Adjacent to the control room was a meeting room and what looked like a small break room. Everything had the same ‘just left for lunch’ as the rest of the facility.

“What’s running?” she asked Cherise who was examining the work stations.

“I’m far from as good as even Kal’at in this crusty old Concordian script, but I can read a technical phrase or two. Each workstation has one program running, looks like something like a sleep mode minder or something like that. Except this station has two? I can’t read the damn thing, it looks like something about ‘selection’.”

“Like choosing?” Minu asked and came closer.

“That could be it,” she replied, cocking her head to look at the display.

Minu leaned in and read the script. It was a subsystem, a mineral selection program. Selecting was another word for choosing, or Chosen.

It made no sense for the program to be running; all the hoppers and mineral silos were empty. It was like having a lawnmower idling in the middle of winter. She slid into the seat and let he possessed fingers start working. There was a small file stored in the program buffer. It only took a second to send it to her tablet, and unlock another of the main file encryptions. Four more to go.

“That’s it?” Aaron asked as she replaced the tablet in its holster.

“Yeah,” she admitted, “kinda unspectacular. But that’s my dad for you.”

While she was in the system she poked around a little. Kal’at’s assessment that the facility was still in use was indeed accurate. She linked through to other workstations and started checking logs until she found what she was looking for.

“Look, one of the material handling systems is working right now!”

“The facility is not processing anything,” said Kal’at, gesturing to the dozens of stations with blank screens, “what could it be handling?”

Minu looked closer at the display she’d called up. “It is moving quantities of a material called korovite. She glanced up at Kal’at and he just stared back, no sign of understanding. She clicked the gem in her ear and spoke.

“Yes mother?”

“What does your database say about a material called ‘korovite’?”

“Korovite, an isotopic alloy of selenium, yttrium, and palladium, it is a vital element in channeling gravitic force waves.”

“So gravitic impellers and such?”

“No, gravitic impellers use a low level gravity induction field. Gravitic channeling is necessary in the gravitic lens drives of starships and a few other limited technological uses of ultra-powerful gravity fields.”

“Come on,” she told the team and jumped towards the door, “I have an idea.” 

The map of the complex held firmly in her mind, it only took them a handful of minutes to reach the area Minu was running for. Shortly before reaching the door they could hear the low hum of operating machinery. It wasn’t the only time they’d heard similar sounds, the city was full of functioning support mechanisms and other apparatus needed to keep a facility working kilometers beneath an ocean surface.

But this was the first time any of the structures were in operation. Warning lights flashed over reinforced pipes and areas near other machinery sported pulsating floor blazons warning against getting too close. And finally they came to the end.

A gravitic powered conveyor was moving small, half meter on a side cases out from a machine, one every few minutes. As the cases emerged robotic arms took them and stacked them neatly into one of the nearly ubiquitous Concordian shipping crates. The crate was nearly full. The team approached cautiously, but there was no-one around the nearly deserted shipping area.

Minu moved to lean over the crate just after a case was deposited. The script on the side said ‘caution, gravitic sensitive material – korovite’.

“Now what?” Cherise asked as she glanced inside as well. The arms swung and delivered another case. There was room for maybe ten more.

“Why don’t we find a quiet place and see who comes to claim this?”

“What if it is just some automated function?” Aaron asked.

“It isn’t,” she assured him, “someone told the system to produce this material and prepare it for shipping. And I think I know who it was.” The team all hid behind a bank of robots and waited. Fifteen minutes later the last case was stowed in the crate which automatically sealed itself. Momentarily, the ancient facility began to fall silent once more.

“Who knows how old this place is,” Aaron whispered in her ear, sending a shiver unexpectedly up her spine, “and you just flip a switch and it starts working. There are factory worlds all over the galaxy just like this. We call them junkpiles, but it looks more like they’re mothballed.”

“Right,” she agreed, “my father said the same thing. He says it’s like the Concordia just decided to stop building stuff and go on strike. But what—”

She cut off suddenly as a doorway no the far side of the dock opened, and in walked the pair of Squeen they’d ran into earlier. “Bingo,” she said with a predatory smirk, “time to get some answers.”

Minu stood up and walked out from behind the robot she’d been stooping before. “Hello,” she said and held up a hand in greeting, “I’m a friend of Quick Finder—”