The Cold Steel Mind (19 page)

‘True memory is more than just a collection of facts. There is context, emotional connection. And a mind is more than simply a collection of memories. Without the connections between the entries in the database, and the software to interpret them in the manner that particular mind would, you don’t have the same individual. We have your memories stored for reference, but we could no longer construct another you.’

Aneka laughed. ‘You probably have a better copy than I do. You can’t fill the holes in my memory from that database, can you?’

‘There is no way to integrate the data. You have lived and experienced change since the image was taken. We could give you the database, as a reference so to speak, but if you chose to take a copy of it you should realise that what you will have will be raw facts.’

‘It’d be better than the gaps I have now.’

‘Would it? What if you discover memories of a lover you thought was your perfect mate. You would
know
how you felt about this person, but would no longer have any feeling for them.’

‘Oh. I guess I see your point. I’ll think about it.’

‘I get the feeling there was something else you wished to ask.’

‘Uh, yeah. I got the impression that you thought there would be survivors on Earth. I know the Herosian home world was totally destroyed…’

‘The Warrior caste leaders, even in their zeal, recognised that the Herosians were more responsible for the war than Humanity and the Torem. The Herosian home world was impacted with planetoids large enough to reduce it to rubble. The Torem home world was long gone. Their sun was unstable. Corona discharges incinerated their planet less than a century after the Xinti escaped their solar system. Earth was subjected to a bombardment using mass drivers and nuclear weapons. Orbital facilities were destroyed, communication systems were obliterated. Humanity believed their world entirely lost, and the Warriors considered going back to finish the job an unnecessary step, especially since they believed the Torem were bringing weapons to the front which could be a danger. As things played out, they never got the chance to return so it is possible that people survived there. We don’t know. We’ve never sent probes into that area of space.’

Aneka nodded. ‘If we decide to leave, I’d like to take that database of project sites with me. There’s no location for Earth, but there’s more information there than the Jenlay have.’

‘You’re sure you want to go back there? It won’t be the world you remember.’

‘No, I’m not sure, but I’d like the option to try and I’m pretty sure the Federation would like to see what’s there.’

Evolution nodded. ‘Yes, I’d imagine they would.’

‘There’s one other thing,’ Aneka said, a faint smile playing over her lips. ‘That gun you gave me, it’s great at what it does, but it’s not very precise. What else have you got?’

The AI laughed. ‘I’m sure there are other options, but for that you’ll need to talk to War.’

~~~

Greatest Heights of Honour, Lowest Depths of Shame appeared as a woman: Aneka was a little surprised. At least she was until she began speaking to the AI in charge of coordinating and controlling weapon design projects. War was a fit, powerful woman, well capable of handling the array of melee weapons that decorated the walls of the lab set aside for their design and construction. Her hair was short and blonde and she wore a short tunic rather than the longer robes many of the others dressed in. A Spartan warrior, that was what War looked like, but she was far from an advocate of the use of weapons.

‘The Warrior caste felt that the blaster you were given was too imprecise,’ War told her. ‘They felt that a lighter weapon would be more surgical, and also more fitting to a member of their caste. However, the anti-proton blaster is a flexible weapon, able to handle a variety of engagements. They agreed that giving you that would be practical.’

Aneka nodded. ‘But surgical is what I need a lot of the time. With the sighting system and targeting software I have I can hit a penny at the distance I can see it, but with that blaster I’d wipe out everything in the neighbourhood. I can’t take out a target among civilians without hurting the civilians. There’s this… intelligence and security person in the Federation who likes to drop me into that kind of situation.’

War nodded. ‘A noble use of weaponry. I find myself approving of this and will assist you. Come this way.’ She headed for a door at the back of the lab which led onto a room which was clearly a test firing range. There were targets at one end backed by a wall of some sort of ceramic material. There were also cabinets set against the nearest wall and from one of these War took a huge rifle and a smaller weapon which looked like a slim machine pistol. ‘These were the weapon of choice of warriors seeking to prove their marksmanship. They are projectile weapons rather than beam generators and so require more skill to use. They are both very precise, but the smaller one has a rate of fire which also makes it useful for suppression.’ She held out the rifle. ‘Try this.’

The gun was lighter than Aneka had expected, given its size, and as soon as she wrapped her hand around the grip the usual heads-up display appeared in-vision. It was loaded and Aneka blinked when the ammo count showed a thousand rounds ready to be fired. She set her feet, sighted through the scope at a target down the range, and squeezed the trigger. There was almost no recoil, but at the far end of the room, two hundred metres away, the centre of the target exploded in a flare of light, smoke issuing from the hole.

‘That’s more precise?!’ Aneka lifted the gun to her shoulder, engaging the safety, and blinked at the AI.

War laughed. ‘The weapon lacks the explosive force of your blaster. It utilises a binary force pulse, something like the mechanism your palm weapon uses. The first evacuates a channel in the air down which the second propels a high-density dart at a reasonable fraction of light speed. Inertial compensation suppresses the resulting recoil. On impact, the dart is converted into plasma generating a super-heated, piercing jet. It has very good armour penetration and obviously causes extensive damage, but there is relatively little chance of hitting someone behind the target. Effective range is some four thousand metres.’ She offered the pistol. ‘Perhaps you would find a lower power weapon of more utility.’

Sure enough, the smaller weapon punched a smaller hole in a second target. It had an auto-fire setting, however, and Aneka switched to that, steadying the gun in both hands and holding it at her hip. There was a burst of fire, a noise like ripping cloth, and the man-shaped target fell into two pieces. The cut surfaces could be seen smouldering from the other end of the room.

A slow smile spread over Aneka’s face. ‘I’ll take both,’ she said.

3.9.524 FSC.

If the shuttle had been of Jenlay design they would have been floating. As it was they were comfortably seated as Drake eased it out of the hangar bay doors and they could easily look around to get their first look at the place they had been living in for the last couple of weeks.

Negral Science Station was huge, a vast, more or less cylindrical construction a little broader in the middle than the ends. It stood upright in its orbit among what appeared to be an almost entirely empty solar system.

‘They used almost the entire system as material for construction,’ Wallace said as the ship swung around the huge, grey station towards where the star should be. ‘There’s one gas giant left out at seven-point-nine AUs.’

‘Speaker told me it’s a graveyard,’ Shannon commented. ‘There are dozens of dead ships orbiting there left over from the refugees who escaped here after the war.’

‘We should try to take the time to go out there,’ Gillian suggested. ‘That could be an invaluable source of genuine Xinti artefacts.’

Aneka laughed. ‘Doc… You’re currently living in a huge artefact and you want more?’

Ella giggled. ‘You’re seriously asking that question?’

‘Okay, fair enough. What do you think, boss?’ Aneka turned towards Bashford. ‘Could we set up an expedition?’

‘I think,’ Bashford replied, ‘that I’d like to know why Abraham brought us out here.’

‘To discuss our future,’ Wallace said. He turned his head towards the pilots’ seats. ‘Captain, would you swing us around towards the system’s star?’

The vessel turned again, swinging to the right and pitching up a little at the nose. ‘Uh, sure,’ Drake said, ‘but I’m dead reckoning. I can’t see… Must be a brown dwarf or something.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Wallace replied, ‘but it is an example of the kind of technology we would be exposing to the world we’ve come from.’

Gillian peered out through the front window of the shuttle towards the barely visible orb around which the station and gas giant were orbiting. ‘Abraham, you’re being obtuse,’ she commented.

‘That,’ Wallace said, ‘is a strange star.’

‘I’m going to assume,’ Aneka said, ‘that that isn’t a comment on it being weird. From here it looks pretty weird.’

‘Oh, I think weird is almost a valid description. A strange star is a quark star containing strange matter.’ He held up a hand to forestall the obvious question. ‘Strange quarks are found in hadrons, some hadrons. Up and down quarks are more common. Strange stars are composed of degenerate matter made from all three, and they generally form from neutron stars which collapse further under their own gravity.’

‘But this one didn’t?’ Gillian guessed.

‘It used to be a brown dwarf. They took apart the solar system so that they could trap as much of its energy as possible, and they used that energy to enhance the star’s gravity to the point of collapse. The Xinti here, and the AIs who took over from them, have the technology to do engineering
on stars!
’

‘Could that be weaponised?’ Drake asked. He had settled the ship into a slow drift and turned his seat around to face into the passenger compartment.

Wallace shook his head. ‘It takes vast amounts of energy. The stellar trap was the only way and that takes years to construct.’

‘But they have other things as big,’ Aneka said. She wanted them all to leave Negral, but keeping what she had found out from War from them seemed wrong. ‘War has a theoretical study showing how a wormhole can be used to create a nova. They have the plans for star-killer gamma-ray weapons. That’s the big stuff, but the smaller weapons are almost as scary. They have beams that, uh, act on the strong and weak nuclear force?’

‘Essentially disintegrators,’ Wallace supplied.

‘Uh-huh. There’s a cannon that fires some particle that passes right through solid matter and then decays into energetic particles. Armour is useless against it. It rips the target apart from the inside. They have force warheads, the plasma bombs like the ones the robots used to kill themselves,
implosion
weapons that crush everything in range into a dust particle. Half of this stuff has never even been built, but War was absolutely sure they would work. She seemed almost as horrified as I was by what some of the things they’ve invented can do.’

‘What you’re saying then,’ Drake said, ‘is that we can’t leave. It’s far too unsafe to let this stuff get into the hands of anyone who might use it.’

‘I don’t think we can call it just on that,’ Gillian replied. ‘They have medical equipment we could only dream of. Tissue regenerators that make our own nanotech solutions seem like children’s toys. Their nanotechnology could make everyone entirely immune to disease. We were injected with those before they put us in the arboretum. They were worried about the effects of some of the plants on our systems. Their surgical robots can perform operations at the cellular level. I would be dead right now without that. We did not manage to traverse the wormhole entirely undamaged. You’ve all seen how much better their control of gravity is. That same disintegrator technology can be used to stabilise atoms. Nuclear weapons can be rendered inoperable at range. Force screens can block even those particle beams Aneka mentioned.’

‘They have an amazing understanding of the mind,’ Ella put in, ‘both at an individual level and on a larger scale. We wouldn’t be going back unarmed when it came to stopping misuse of the technology.’

‘If that wormhole tech can be made to work in other places it could revolutionise space travel,’ Shannon said.

‘And communications,’ Wallace agreed. ‘Real-time, lag-free links between star systems. That would be possible using far less energy than that required to move something the size of a spaceship.’

‘This isn’t going to be simple is it?’ Aneka commented.

Silence descended on the cabin as the team considered their situation. It was Monkey who broke it.

‘You know… I can’t help thinking that…’ He stopped and everyone looked at him. ‘Well, we’re the only ones who know this place exists. And if we go back, we’ll be the only people who know where it is.’

‘They’ll want to know where we’ve been, David,’ Gillian said.

‘Oh, I wasn’t saying we keep it a secret, but we
can
control how the research gets handed out. The AIs can be the gatekeepers. Give out information that will help and keep the dangerous stuff behind locked doors. Talking to them is going to be a pretty big political problem as it is. The Administration would want to take it slowly.’

‘Your son appears to have inherited his father’s pragmatism and strategic thinking, Gillian,’ Wallace said after a second.

Gillian gave her son the sort of smile only a proud mother can give her child. ‘I think that’s all David.’ She sobered. ‘We are going to need to plan this very carefully and have everything agreed with our hosts before we leave.’

Drake shrugged. ‘Even with the engineering skills this place has it’s going to be almost a month before the Hyde is ready to leave. We’ve got plenty of time to plot.’

6.9.524 FSC.

The feeling of tension which had been hanging over everyone on the station had turned into nervous excitement. With the decision made, it had become apparent that even the AIs had been tense about the choice the Jenlay would eventually make. There had been a small ceremony, of sorts, in the Forum where Aneka had officially countermanded the order to stay hidden and stated that they should use their own discretion regarding how they should behave in future. With that over it had been like someone had lifted a blanket off the station’s populace;
everyone,
man, woman, robot, and alien, had suddenly seemed happier.