“Thank you,” Monica datavised.
The serjeant turned round, and walked back down the road.
“And then there were five,” Renato muttered uneasily round his respirator tube.
Ione wanted to know as soon as possible what the Tyrathca intended. The knowledge would certainly help her plan the kind of tactics needed to keep them away from the team. The two diversion serjeants had busily laid their heat trails, meandering between several of the big machinery chambers on the second level. That was when she found that the map made by the archaeologists was not perfect. Several times, she’d had to use her inertial guidance to work out where she was when corridors didn’t correspond to the indicated layout. It was a factor to consider when she sketched in her possible escape routes. The Tyrathca wouldn’t suffer from such misinformation. Tanjuntic-RI’s exact topology would be known to them; passed down from generation to generation via their chemical program glands.
One of the diversion serjeants was now hanging back from the archway that opened into a hemispherical chamber. It was a big space, occupied by what appeared to be a refinery constructed entirely out of glass. Colonnades, spheres, bulbs, and minarets formed their own miniature city, bound together with a tangled lattice of tubes. Individual containers were full of coloured liquids that had turned to ice. Cracks were visible everywhere. If heat ever did return to this chamber, the whole edifice would probably collapse.
There were three other entrances to the glass refinery, the one opposite the serjeant was where the heat trail from the ramp led. Sensor disks on the corridor wall showed Ione the Tyrathca advancing steadily along it.
Ione waited. She knew her suit’s heat signature would be visible to the Tyrathca as soon as they entered the refinery chamber, shining with the tenacity of a red dwarf star against the arctic corridor.
The first Tyrathca came in. Stopped. Raised the scanner it was holding, pointing it directly at her. Her suit communication block picked up a burst of encrypted data. The whole column of Tyrathca came to a halt.
Then two of them moved up to support the first. They immediately fanned out on either side of the chamber, reducing her target opportunity.
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The serjeant moved out of the shallow alcove which had been masking it.
Ione was ordering the communication block to open a channel on the frequency the Tyrathca were using when both the soldiers fired their maser rifles. The beams struck the serjeant’s armour, almost overloading its energy dissipation web. She jumped, a movement enhanced considerably by low gravity and the suit’s augmentation. At the same time she triggered the EE charges she’d placed above each of the chamber’s entrances. Tonnes of rock descended in four separate avalanches, sealing the three Tyrathca in.
Ione climbed to her feet, and focused the suit sensors back. The jump had sent her soaring fifty metres down the corridor, barely avoiding hitting the roof. Small lumps of rock were spinning and bouncing towards her in lazy motions. The sensor disks in the refinery chamber showed nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, while the others showed the remaining Tyrathca retreating swiftly. They started to split up, vanishing down side corridors where there were no sensors to follow them.
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The control offices were a series of rooms bored into the wall of ring five, fourteen hundred metres from the spiral ramp. Simple open rectangles, plated in aluminium alloy, with the floor covered in composite. Each room was lined by bulky computer terminals, with twin rosette keyboards for Tyrathca fingers. The walls above them were covered by long display screens to project the arkship’s engineering schematics and navigational plot. To all intents and purposes, this was Tanjuntic-RI’s bridge.
According to the archaeology expedition there was less frost and ice inside, which had permitted them to reactivate several of the electronic systems without much trouble. The control offices were on an independent environmental circuit with a much reduced humidity level; and the airlocks were shut prior to the arkship’s final evacuation so there was no contamination from ring five’s damper atmosphere.
The archaeology expedition had known the sealed rooms were important; they’d traced the arkship’s internal communication network, and discovered the principal node was inside. With due respect, they’d installed their own hatches in the Tyrathca airlocks, as they had up in level one. There was no worry about atmospheric contamination any more, not with all the water frozen out. But they wanted to maintain the environmental integrity. This was the first human exploration through an artefact belonging to a sentient xenoc species; ethics was a paramount concern—even though the Tyrathca were indifferent to such matters.
So, Monica and the others discovered, was someone else.
The large titanium rectangles leading to the control offices had been reactivated and opened, swinging back against the chamber wall. Not only that, the safety interlocks had somehow been circumvented, allowing all three to be opened at once. The five suited figures stood in front of the opening, scanning round with their sensors.
“This has got to be it,” Monica datavised. “The human hatches are still here. The archaeologists didn’t install them anywhere else.”
“Has there been another expedition since the first?” Renato asked.
“If there was, then neither Earth, Jupiter, nor Kulu knew anything about it,” Samuel datavised. “I have to say that’s extremely unlikely.”
“In any case, why not just use the archaeology team’s hatches?” Renato asked. “We know they work. It must have taken a lot of effort to get these brutes open again.”
Oski stepped forward gingerly, using a hand-held sensor pad to scan around the airlock rim. “I can’t pick up any electrical impulses. But this was opened very recently. There’s still some very faint thermal traces in the surrounding structure. They probably had to warm the airlocks back up to their operating temperature to get them to function again.”
Monica resisted the instinct to whirl round and check the streets of the necropolis behind. Her suit’s micro radar was scanning constantly for any sign of local movement. But the arkship’s chill had somehow managed to stroke her skin through the armour. “How recent?” she asked.
“Within the last five days.”
“And not human,” Renato datavised.
“Why do you say that?”
“Obvious. If it was our species, they would have used the hatches the archaeologists installed. Whoever it was, they were too big to fit through them.”
“It has to be the Kiint,” Samuel datavised. “After all, they are partly the reason we’re here. Ione and Kelly were right, Lieria was interested in the Sleeping God. And this is the obvious place where information on it would be stored. They must have teleported in here not long after they left Tranquillity. And simply opening the original airlock is the kind of elegance I’d expect from them. We’ve seen what the Tyrathca do to doors that won’t budge for them.”
“Why not just teleport directly inside the control offices?” Monica asked.
“They’re extremely small on a cosmic scale. I’m guessing such an action wou
ld require impossible accuracy, especially over three hundred light years from Jobis.”
“Could be. Do you think they’re still here?”
Oski pointed her sensor pad along the short airlock tunnel. “It’s inert as far as I can tell.”
“And our time is running out,” Monica datavised. “Let’s get in there.”
The control offices were noticeably warmer. Suit sensors detected thermal concentrations around three of the computer terminals in the second room.
“This is the astrogation centre,” Oski datavised. “One of our information targets. If we’re to get a fix on the Sleeping God’s location, we ought to find it stored in here.”
“Get started,” Monica datavised. The sensor disks were showing her the Tyrathca moving through the second level chamber with the biological reactor. They’d slowed their advance slightly since the diversion serjeant’s attempted entrapment, treating each chamber with suspicion, never allowing more than three soldiers inside together. Even so, they’d be at the spiral ramp leading to ring five in another fifteen minutes.
Oski and Renato knelt down beside one of the terminals, and spread out their equipment. Monica, Samuel, and the last serjeant quickly searched the remaining rooms, then went back out into ring five.
“We should backtrack a bit and lay some false heat trails,” Monica datavised. “That will give us a few minutes more.”
“I don’t think it will,” Samuel replied. “By the time they get here, it will be obvious to them that we came for the control offices. Diversions won’t work. We shall have to defend our position.”
“Shit, I hope not, because this is a tactical lost cause. They can come at us from all sides, and we don’t have a way out.”
“But we do have superior weaponry. Let’s just hope we don’t have to use it.”
“Fine. And now we’ve actually reached the mission target, why don’t we start thinking of a way out of here.”
The second diversion serjeant had rigged a hundred-and-fifty-metre length of corridor. A simple enough entrapment: wait until the lead Tyrathca reached the EE charge, then trigger both of them. The length of corridor should trap all twelve of the pursuing xenocs between the rockfalls. But when the lead Tyrathca approached the first EE charge, it slowed, and the others stopped. Ione cursed as it moved forwards carefully, waving its scanner round. She must have left an abnormal thermal trace in the corridor when she was placing the EE charges.
The Tyrathca consulted the scanner display a final time, and pointed its maser rifle at the corridor roof. If the beam did wash over the EE charge’s trigger electronics, the radiation would destroy them.
Annoyed, Ione set off the EE charge, bringing down a five metre section of roof. It didn’t harm any of the Tyrathca. They cantered back down the corridor and split up, presumably to bypass the blockage and pick up the diversion serjeant’s heat trail again. Although without any sensor disk coverage, she couldn’t be sure where they were. She started to move again, heading deeper into the arkship’s interior, certain they weren’t ahead of her, at least.
Oski was in her element. Worry about her physical predicament had vanished completely as she and Renato removed the computer terminal panels, exposing the circuitry inside. Tyrathca electronics lagged behind current human systems by several generations—if not centuries. She hadn’t dealt with anything this crude since her compulsory History of Electronics semester while she was studying for her degree.
Renato followed her datavised instructions efficiently, tracing the terminal’s main power cable and splicing in one of the energy matrices they’d brought with them. Small coloured symbols ringing the rosette keyboard lit up.
“Thank heavens they don’t have any imagination,” Oski datavised. “I’d hate to try and do this kind of thing on nonstandard systems in the timescale we’ve got. But that’s a null concept for the Tyrathca.”
“Which I still think is a paradox,” Renato datavised. “Imagination is the root cause of all fresh ideas. You can’t design a starship without it. It’s the Siamese twin of curiosity.”
“Which they also don’t seem to have much of.”
“But probing your environment is a basic survival trait. You have to know if there’s any kind of threat out there if you want to keep on living. Then you have to work out how to overcome it.”
“I’m not arguing. Let’s just save it for another time, okay?” Oski began attaching the processor blocks she’d brought to the databuses inside the terminus; unspooling long ribbons of fibre optic cable with custom built interface plugs on the end. The Laymil project had the specifications of known Tyrathca electronic systems on file in Tranquillity, of course; but she’d referenced the archaeology expedition’s records to be sure.
Tanjuntic-RI’s systems were identical to those used today, even down to the size and configuration of the sockets. Fifteen thousand years of standardisation! Renato was right: that wasn’t merely odd, it was downright eerie.
The interface plugs clicked smoothly into their sockets, and the block datavised that the high density photonic link had been established. Which was ridiculous. She’d been waiting to apply a chemical spray that would have eased the plugs into place. It had been invented by her division to clean up optical contacts that had been exposed to the vacuum, dust, and general degradation of the Ruin Ring; they used a lot of it on the scant remnants of Laymil electronics they acquired.
She put the spray canister down and picked up a micro scanner. “I can accept that their electronics are in a much better condition than the Laymil modules we have,” she datavised. “The environment here is so much more benign, and they haven’t been abandoned as long. But this lucky is absolutely impossible.” The blocks finished assembling an iconographic display of the terminal’s architecture. “The entire terminal is on-line, there isn’t a single element not functioning. The Kiint didn’t just access this, they repaired the damn thing to full operational status. Some of these components are brand new, for heaven’s sake.”
“How much of it is new?”
“According to my scanner, it’s just processors and some support circuitry. The memory crystals are original. Which makes sense. They want the data stored inside them, just like us.”
“Can you get it?”
“No problem.” They already knew the Tyrathca program language, and there was certainly no such thing as security protocols or codes to guard against unauthorised access. Before leaving Tranquillity, the division’s software experts had written customised questors that could examine all the information contained within Tyrathca memory crystals. Oski datavised the first batch of pre-formatted programs into the terminus architecture.
Some of them were hunting for distinct references, while the others were classifying the information according to file type. The pair of them accessed the questor results as they returned.
“Well, it would have been too much to expect a direct reference to the Sleeping God,” Renato datavised.
“No mention of an unusual cosmological event, either,” Oski observed. She studied the file index, seeing what kind of database they’d activated, and shaping the next batch of questors accordingly. “We have plenty of navigational fixes.”
“I’m going to see if the questors can find a list of star fixes they used to align their communication laser during the flight. At least that’ll give us an idea of their contact protocol with the other arkships.”
“Good idea. I’ll see if any other arkship flight paths are stored in here. That should tell us what kind of spatial volume we’re dealing with.”
The questors revealed several tens of thousands of star fixes performed to align the interstellar communication laser. Eighty-five per cent of them were performed during the first six thousand years of the flight, after that the number of communiqués transmitted and received by the arkship dropped off considerably. During the latter stages of the flight, the star fixes were performed almost exclusively to align the laser on the five colony planets which T
anjuntic-RI had established.
With the fixes established, Oski began to search for associated files.
“The messages aren’t stored in here,” she datavised eventually. “I keep getting a link code with all the laser alignment files. But it’s to a different system altogether.”
“Do you know where it is?” Renato asked.
“Not yet.” She composed a new batch of questors, and sent them probing through the terminal’s basic management routines. “How are you doing?”
“Unpleasantly successful. The Tyrathca built over a thousand arkships.”
“Good god.”
“Yeah, quite. If they all travelled as far as this one, that gives us a phenomenal area to search through for their Sleeping God. We’re talking about a percentage of the entire galaxy. Small, admittedly. But everything is relative. Parker and Kempster will love this.”
The questors started to display their answers to Oski. “Ah, here we go. The files we want are stored in some kind of principal archive. I’ve got the identification code.”
“But it could be anywhere. We can’t access anything from here.”
“Yes. Come on. We want the office which dealt with the arkship’s general systems. We’ll see if we can activate one of the terminals in there, and call up a general schematic.”
The maser beam caught the diversion serjeant on its thigh as it was crossing one of the hemispherical chambers. Ione’s response was automatic, a fast powered dive behind a huge clump of machinery. The beam cut off as she fell behind it. Her armour’s electronic warfare block had pinpointed the origin. The Tyrathca was shooting from just inside one of the corridors.
She loaded the coordinate into her weapons hardware. A homing grenade shot out of her belt dispenser, curving over the top of the sheltering machinery. An EE explosion obliterated the corridor entrance. Another maser slashed across the serjeant’s armour. Ione rolled quickly, swinging the launcher round. A second homing grenade eliminated the corridor the Tyrathca soldier was charging out of.
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