The Cold Steel Mind (12 page)

The apology was unexpected and Aneka’s anger at being ‘uplifted’ died a little. The ship had been offline for a thousand years, just like she had, and it had awoken into an entirely different world. Its crew, the race who had built it, were all dead, just as Aneka’s world was long dead. ‘No, well yes, but I can understand why you did it.’

The golden woman’s head turned, observing that Ella had got her helmet on. ‘Good morning, Miss Narrows. You should be able to hear me now, and… initiating link to head’s up display… see me.’

‘Oh… wow,’ Ella breathed. Aneka saw her frown through the faceplate. ‘You look Jenlay.’

‘I can look like a typical Xinti if you wish, but I felt this more appropriate. Could we make some haste? The device attacking my core is approximately three minutes from breaching an access panel.’

‘What about the one in engineering?’ Aneka asked.

‘I am unable to get sufficiently accurate data. Hurry.’

~~~

‘I assume we’re going to discuss this at some point, Aneka?’ Gillian’s voice said over the relayed communications link the Agroa Gar had put together.

‘Right after we’ve stopped ourselves getting blown up. What’s the situation with communications?’ Getting into the engineering section was proving to be harder than she had expected. Al was currently trying to hack his way into the door controls.

‘All down.’ Drake’s voice. ‘It seems we’ve discovered what that ’bot was doing using my codes. There’s a virus in the system which has locked us out of just about everything. Abraham is trying to get into it, but it’s slow going.’

‘That explains why this door won’t open then. Why haven’t they just used the computer to make the ship go boom?’

‘The safety protocols on the reactor and the drives are not that easy to override. Most of them are hardwired into the control systems. I’d imagine that’s why the thing is in there.’

‘Swell. How are the others doing?’

‘We’ve made it into the station,’ Bashford cut in. ‘Monkey and I are trying to get past the lock into the Agroa Gar. Delta and Cassandra are dealing with the unit in the computer core here.’

‘Cassandra is?’ Aneka was a little surprised.

‘I may not be a combat model, Aneka,’ Cassandra said calmly, ‘but I have above average reflexes and a relatively resilient frame, compared to a Jenlay anyway.’

‘She can handle herself,’ Al commented, ‘and done.’ The engine room door, a heavy thing designed to contain a reactor failure if possible, slid aside.

‘That’s Al’s voice?’ That was Ella.

‘You heard that? I didn’t know the ship was broadcasting everyone’s chatter.’

‘Yes, we did,’ Ella replied. ‘He sounds kind of sexy.’

‘Yes he does,’ Cassandra agreed.

‘Could we focus on the impending doom?’ Aneka suggested. Drawing her pistol, she moved into the room.

‘I am sorry, Aneka,’ Cassandra replied. ‘I shall refrain from describing your AI as sexy until after we are all safe.’

Ella was giggling, Aneka could tell, even though she could not hear it.
Levity is a great tension breaker.
The room was abnormally quiet, but Aneka could hear the ultrasonic whine of plasma flowing through a magnetic field behind the bulkhead directly across from her. The warp core and fusion drives were supposed to be powered down, of course, but the room still seemed eerily quiet. Senses on full alert and her attention divided across what she could see directly and what her gun-camera showed as she swept it around the room.

‘I’m not seeing the robot. Where would it need to go to disable the safeguards?’

‘Check the panels on the left wall as you go in,’ Shannon said. ‘High up, probably.’

Aneka started towards the panels Shannon had suggested and then stopped. ‘Uh, if I shoot this thing, am I going to do its job for it?’

‘Damn!’ Shannon had apparently not considered that either. ‘The circuits aren’t exactly delicate, but…’

‘Bessie puts out a lot of power. I guess I’m doing this the hard way.’ Putting her pistol in its holster, she produced a bolt driver from her belt and began undoing the retaining screws from the first of the upper panels on the wall. With the bolts released she stepped back, letting the weight of the panel do the rest.

Something silver and crablike jumped straight at her face. Her hand came up, batting it aside, and it bounced off the wall, regaining its footing with far more nimbleness than she would have given it credit for. She saw it turn, recognised what it was doing, and rolled to the right as a laser beam cracked through the air, scoring the metal behind where she had been standing. Her right hand swung up, palm outward towards the robot, and a pulse of energy slammed it against the wall hard.

One of its legs was not working, but it was still turning to try again. Pulling her blaster, Aneka snapped off a shot. Sparks arced across the robot’s metal shell and it collapsed. There was the unmistakeable smell of overheated circuitry and ozone.

‘Aneka?’ It was Ella, sounding concerned.

‘I’m fine, it’s not. You better get Shannon down here to see whether this thing did any damage before I got to it.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Shannon cut in.

‘I’ll wait for you, just in case.’ Aneka’s eyes fell on the dead robot: so small, but the cause of so much trouble. They were out of communication, and locked out of all their major systems. Well, things were probably not going to get any worse.

Part Two: Down The Rabbit Hole

FScV Garnet Hyde, in Orbit of Corax, Joval System, 18.8.524 FSC.

‘Communications are still out,’ Drake was saying. ‘The reactor is stable, thank Vashma for that, but the drives are all offline and the docking systems are locked solid. Now that we have the airlocks open, we can’t get them closed, and we can’t be sure of the emergency systems in the cabins, so everyone is to wear a shipsuit at
all
times and have their helmet nearby.’ He glanced at Aneka. ‘Except Aneka, of course.’

Aneka glanced at the other cybernetic member of the crew. ‘What about Cassandra?’

‘My chassis was not designed with vacuum in mind,’ the android replied. ‘Exposed to space I would suffer damage. I have no need for oxygen, of course, but I would suffer greatly if we decompress.’

‘On the plus side,’ Bashford said, ‘we got all the robots nailed and Gillian and Ella have a new friend.’

The wall screen was currently showing the golden features of the Agroa Gar’s computer avatar, head and shoulders only. Al had managed to patch the video connection through via a peer-to-peer connection. Isolated pockets of technology were working, but the vast majority of the Garnet Hyde was currently dead in the water.

‘Assuming you would trust me to do so,’ the computer said, ‘I am afraid that I would be of very limited use in correcting your problems. The protocols and systems you use are foreign to me. I am… I was a science vessel.’

‘The Xinti made extensive use of cyber-warfare,’ Monkey said, frowning. ‘They got very good at hacking our systems during the war.’

‘Quite possibly, Mister Gibbons, but I was lost many years before that conflict happened. If you were still using the protocols used in Yrimlos’ time I might have been of some help…’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Aneka said. It came across a little more harshly than she intended. ‘I’m Aneka. What do we call you?’

‘I am Agroa Gar.’

‘Far too long. Aggy, perhaps.’

The image bowed her head. ‘As you wish, Aneka.’

Aneka frowned. ‘You’ve got the whole “do as the pseudo-Xinti says” thing going, don’t you?’

‘While I can understand your misgivings, under the circumstances, my systems recognise you as a Xinti, and my programming places the wishes of a Xinti above my own.’ She raised a hand to forestall any reply. ‘However, “Aggy” is not an unpleasant name. It does not mean anything derogatory in Xinti, and it sounds… friendly.’

‘Pleasantries aside,’ Drake cut in, ‘we have a couple of priorities. I’m taking Bash and Aneka to try to stabilise the ship and close those airlocks. Abraham and Cassandra will be trying to fix the ship’s computers. Shannon, Monkey, and Delta will be trying to get everything else stable.’

‘What about me and Gillian?’ Ella asked.

‘Talk to Aggy. We all know you want to and, to be frank, we need to know we can trust her once we have everything working.’ He looked up at the screen. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken, Captain Drake,’ Aggy replied. ‘I consider your stratagem most wise, in fact.’

‘Huh, well, thank you. All right, people, let’s move. This mess isn’t going to clean itself up.’

~~~

Abraham Wallace looked as tired as any of the people who had been doing manual work all morning. He sat slumped at the table in the mess, picking at some food Gillian and Ella had prepared, and drinking a lot of coffee.

‘The virus,’ he said, ‘has done a lot of damage. Entire sections of the ship’s core programs have been wiped. I’m having to piece together what I can and program makeshift control software from scratch to replace what I can’t find.’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Aneka commented.

‘No,’ Drake agreed, ‘it’s not.’

‘It isn’t all bad,’ Wallace went on. ‘The sensor system software was disabled, but not damaged. We can now see, which at least means we can assess the situation better. Internal communications are back up, but spotty. Without the computer, person-to-person calls are unavailable, but you can broadcast.’

‘Good,’ Drake commented. ‘Signals out to the far end of the station were getting a bit weak.’

Wallace nodded. ‘I doubt I can get everything back online without the external backups, but I’m hoping I can have the external comms back up enough to call for help sometime tomorrow.’

‘Can’t we just send some sort of distress signal?’ Aneka asked. ‘Or patch into the ship’s radio manually and send basic voice?’

‘The distress beacon is fried,’ Monkey replied. ‘Looks like a laser was used on it.’

‘And if we sent normal audio,’ Wallace added, ‘no one would hear it. I’m afraid this is one case where technology is our undoing. Analogue signals are no longer used, so no one has the equipment to listen for them.’

‘Huh,’ Aneka grunted. ‘Here I am in the future, wishing I had a walkie-talkie.’

~~~

‘Aneka?’ The golden shape of Aggy appeared in the corner of Aneka’s vision along with the voice in her ears. Aneka was going over the primary structural members of the station with a hand scanner, but she could spare the computer some attention.

‘Aggy. What can I do for you? You obviously want to talk privately.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘You’re speaking Xinti.’

‘Ah. Yes. I wanted to ask… if it was true.’

‘If what was true?’

‘That all the Xinti are dead.’

‘I don’t know. I think it’s likely. The Herosians have been hunting them down for centuries. They claim that there are still some alive, but I think that’s just to let them hit Xinti sites without mercy whenever one is discovered.’

‘Uplifting the Herosians was considered an error. The reason your programme was initiated was to avoid the mistakes of the Herosian project.’

‘We worked out that you, uh, uplifted the Herosians and Humans. The crashed ship on Old Earth with drive technology they could understand back then… What did you actually do with the Herosians?’

‘A ship with a functional warp engine was left on one of their moons. They discovered it and used it to manufacture their own warp drives. The results were… horrible. An entire sentient race was wiped out during the first years of their expansion.’

‘So I was uplifted to see if Humans were going to do the same kind of thing?’

‘Yes, though the view was, given our preliminary studies, that the Human race was less likely to carry out racial genocide simply to take one planet.’

Aneka laughed. ‘I’m not sure I have such a high opinion of my fellow man.’

‘Why not? They seem to have turned out well.’

It was a valid point. The Jenlay were a largely peaceful people. There had not been any wars for centuries. They lived more or less happily with two other species, but… ‘There’s no pressure for resources, and there’s always room to expand without attacking their neighbours.’

‘True, but that could have been said about the Herosians. They still killed an entire planet just to get the land.’ She paused and then added, ‘When I first awoke I sent a distress signal to my home base, but there will be no one there to receive it.’

‘I’m sorry, Aggy.’ To her surprise, Aneka realised that she meant it.

~~~

It was early evening and the crew were still trying to get the station in some sort of working shape when Wallace’s voice came from the speakers and through their headsets, and in Aneka’s case her internal radio. ‘Everyone, the sensors are picking up some unusual electromagnetic effects outside the ship. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.’

Drake answered from somewhere. He was not on the flight deck, Aneka knew that; they had still not managed to bypass the security fail-safes which were failing to keep them safe. ‘Can you tell where it’s coming from? The Agroa Gar?’

‘It is not anything I am doing,’ Aggy chimed in.

‘Not the Agroa Gar, no,’ Wallace replied. ‘In fact… I can’t isolate a source. The signal appears to be some form of long-range sensor, I think, but I’m not able to…’

His voice cut off into a screech of static and Aneka pushed herself down the corridor towards the Garnet Hyde, unsure of why she was moving, but sure that she needed to be with everyone else. Something was very wrong.

Wallace’s voice cut back in as she negotiated the half-open airlock door. ‘That was a massive spike in electromagnetic activity. Huge! Cassandra is…’

‘Cassandra?’ Al’s voice sounded only in Aneka’s head, but he sounded worried.

‘The pulse caused a reboot in her core processors. She appears to be recovering.’ Aneka thought she felt a sense of relief from her other half though his ‘feelings’ had never crossed over before. ‘We’ve lost external visual sensors and I’m not sure what state the communications are in. Broadband electromagnetic sensors are… fluctuating. Gravimetric sensors…’ His voice cut off and Aneka wondered whether the comms had cut out again.