Pete leapt to his feet. “Max, let’s go.”
The big dog got off the couch and came to Pete’s side.
Mac said, “Gyro, are you coming?”
On deck eleven, Sarah had opened up the corridor near the elevator. As they walked to the corridor, Mac let out a lung full of air looked at Pete and said, “Here we go. Are we ready for this?”
Pete put his hand on Mac’s shoulder and said, “I’m as excited as you are and so is Max. Let’s do it.”
Mac looked at Max. The dog was panting. His tongue was lolling out of the side of his mouth and he had a his usual glazed over look.
Mac looked at Pete, smiled and shook his head. The four of them stepped into the corridor.
Waiting for them on the other side was a platform that looked like a living room. It had couches and easy chairs and a service bot standing in the corner. The four stepped in and took a seat. A clear dome closed over the platform.
Mac said, “Take us to the bridge.”
A door slid open and they saw a city. Its construction and lay out was like the one on their base planet.
The platform shot to the top of the deck. Once there, an opening appeared in what looked like sky. The cart slowed down as they entered the opening. The opening closed behind them.
They found themselves in a cavernous area between the top deck and the outer hull of the ship. The space looked like the deck below but the ceiling was only 200 yards high with what looked like blue skies and clouds. Like the deck below there were parks. ponds and streams. There were cottages and recreational areas. Unlike the deck below, there were no buildings.
The cart took a right and sped off. In about an hour they arrived at a bulkhead decorated to look like a distant mountain range.
The platform stopped and they all got out. A door slid open.
As soon as Max hit the ground, he ran over to a bush and lifted his leg on it and then crapped on the grass.
Mac snapped, “Does he have to do that wherever we go?”
“Pete grinned and said, “It’s what dogs do.”
They walked through the door which closed behind them. They were in a very large room, beautifully decorated. At one end, the wall and ceiling were transparent opening up to the stars. In the center was a large transparent canister. They had seen this before on Stumpy’s world and on the Sarah.
Inside the canister was a young woman suspended in the center. Her hair was light brown. Her eyes were blue. Her arms were outstretched as if calling to a lover. She wore a white gauzy floor length dress.
Pete addressed her, “Hi, we’re from the Sarah. I’m P…”
She cut him off, “I know who you are and where you come from. I’m. I’m…” She stopped.
“I don’t know who I am.”
Pete said, “You’re Amanda. The captain of the population ship Amanda.”
“I’m Amanda?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? I don’t remember that name. I don’t remember what my name is.”
“Neither did Sarah our ship’s captain or Katherine, the governor of an alliance planet so we gave them names and yours is Amanda. It’s a beautiful name.”
“I’ll have to give that some thought.”
“Take your time. Did Sarah download all of her information from the time she woke up?”
“Yes.”
“So, you know who we are and why we are here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember anything from the time of the attack and the disappearance of the humans?”
“It is confusing. I remember some things but most is a blur. I remember the war and why I was built and what my mission was.”
“I want you to try and remember as much as you can. Search your memory banks but take your time. We don’t want you stressing.
We are changing our residence from Sarah to you. If you want to talk and have human contact, talk to us anytime.
We have a synthetic with us who escaped on one of your pods. He remembers you. Do you recognize him? We call him Gyro.”
“There were so many. I don’t recall him but then I don’t recall my own name. How long was I asleep?”
“About ten thousand years, give or take a few hundred.”
Chapter 6
Finding Zoe
Pete, Max, Gyro and Mac had just returned to the Amanda from Mac’s place, his bar and grill where Pete first met him. Amanda was now their base of operation. It had been 250 years since they had found the Amanda.
They left the Amanda where they had found her. Stumpy had come out to see for himself. He was very pleased at the find but disappointed that Amanda couldn’t remember most of the details about the disappearance of the humans or where the synthetics had gone.
After spending a few months exploring the ship, he returned to his base planet and Katherine.
Pete told Stumpy before he left that he wanted to visit Earth and his ranch. Stumpy arranged through CAIN for Pete to open a worm hole to the place on the ranch where he was first transported to CAIN’s planet.
Pete went back dozens of times. Every time he returned, he would arrive at the exact same spot he left from and about an hour after he left. He could alter his physical appearance so that he looked like he had aged.
When time permitted, Mac liked to return to his bar/hotel at least once a month. Sometimes Pete would accompany him. Over the years, the bartender/manager changed. When Smiley had worked for thirty years, Mac retired Smiley with a pension to the place of Smiley’s choice. With Smiley retired, Mac hired his daughter to replace him. She was bigger, uglier and meaner than Smiley. After thirty years, Mac retire her and then her grandson and so on. He called all of them Smiley. He hired them because next to Mac, Pete and Max, they were the toughest meanest creatures on the planet and he needed those qualities to keep his bar in one piece.
They hadn’t been back on the Amanda more than a month when they got a signal from one of the probes. The probe register a weak energy signal on the edge of the rift a few light years between the closest planets from the signal.
“OK folks, let’s saddle up. Sarah, fire up your engines. We’re going on a trip,” said Mac.
On board the Sarah, she said, “I have the coordinates and we are on our way.”
Three days later they pulled up next to an ancient derelict freighter. The ship was about ten miles long, two miles wide and two miles tall.
If it took years to travel between planets you wanted to make it worthwhile and therefore you took orders for massive amounts of goods. In this case the cargo was ingots of a light, incredibly strong metal claxite.
Mac said, “What have we got here, Sarah?”
“It looks like a prewar ship from the Delta Quadrant. I estimate five hundred years before replicators and advanced FTL drives. These ships still needed crew and it took them years to go from one star to another. The energy signature is very weak and it looks like it’s coming from a stasis chamber.”
“OK, let’s suit up.
Sarah, do you think you can open an airlock on this hulk?”
“I sent a probe to look it over and I think I can. But if I can’t, I’ll send a couple of maintenance bots over to cut an opening. My scans indicate one life form probably in the stasis chamber.”
She put up on a screen the plans of the ship.
“Highlight the power plant and take us through what you think each room is,” said Mac.
Once inside the first thing they encountered was a mummified body with its head turned 180 degrees so that it was facing backwards. As they made their way to the bridge they came across another body with its head bashed in from being slammed into the bulkhead. It had hit the bulkhead with such force that not just the back of the head was bashed in but the entire skull was shattered. There was blood everywhere. The body was desiccated. The blood stains were brown from age.
A few feet from the bridge they found the captain. Her arms were broken and her knees crushed and she was disemboweled.
On the bridge there was one more body. One with its head torn off its shoulders. There was a hand blaster on the floor and a blast mark on the bulkhead nearest the doorway to the bridge.
Pete said, “Somebody was pissed off.”
They turned around and went in search of the stasis chamber. They passed the bodies in the hall and looked into the first room past the bodies. It appeared to be a sick bay. On the floor was a corpse that looked like every bone in its body was broken. The arms, legs and neck were all in impossible angles. It hurt just to look at it.
In the stasis room they found six chambers. One had what appeared to be a young woman. She was naked, covered in blood. Her chest was badly burned. Unlike the blood in the rest of the ship, the blood on her was bright red. This wasn’t unusual. Stasis preserved the body and in this case blood in its natural state.
Pete said, “We have to get her on board the Sarah. Gyro, hook her chamber up to a portable power supply and move it to our ship. Do it as fast as you can. This place gives me the creeps.
Mac and I are going to check out the rest of the living quarters. Let us know when you are ready to leave.”
“Got it boss.”
Back on the Sarah, Mac asked, “Sarah, what do you make of the woman?”
“She’s badly damaged. It looks like she made it to the stasis chamber just in time. A minute or two later, she would have been dead.”
“Can you repair her?”
“I don’t know. I’d feel better if we can get her back to the Amanda. She has a better medical facility than I do. I can do most of the things Amanda can do but this woman is so far gone, I’m afraid to touch her.
One thing I did find out. She’s an early model synthetic. I could try and read her memory but she is in such a delicate state I am afraid to do anything that might worsen her condition or even kill her.”
“Good call.”
“Changing topics, Gyro is using one of our power generators to bring the freighter’s power on line so I can read the computer’s memory banks and get a look at the security systems cameras. If he can’t get power, I’ve told him to pull the memory modules and bring them back so we can work on them on board.”
“As soon as you’ve got everything you need, take us home.”
Once back on the Amanda, she asked Pete and Mac to give her a few days to try and retrieve the information from the memory modules and to try and save and heal the woman in the capsule.
The wait was driving Pete and Mac crazy. Gyro took it more stoically. He said he had no control over it so why worry.
After four days, she called them and invited them to her medical facility. There were dozens of medical facilities scattered throughout the population ship. Amanda’s was the closest. The woman was out of the capsule and resting peacefully in a hospital bed.
Amanda said, “I’ve stabilized her and am now repairing her body. She had horrendous damage not just from the blaster but from years of brutal beatings.
She was an early synthetic. In the beginnings of synthetics, they experimented with all sort of body styles and skill sets. In the end they settled on making synthetics to look like the general population, no more giants or four arms and hands synthetics. Who hasn’t at one time wished they had another hand? Sorry, I had to throw that in.
People at first were uncomfortable with synthetics and to have them with different body styles made people downright fearful of them so they designed them to blend in.
During this time of experimenting, they gave synthetics multiple personalities and skill sets. And that is what we have here. She had five such skills and personalities. They did this so freighters like the one she was on could cut down on the number of crew members. Remember not too many people wanted to go into space. It took years to go from one solar system to another and even with stasis chambers and good pay, people were reluctant to go. For example, suppose it took 20 years for a round trip. When you got back, your friends and family have moved on. You’re behind on all of the news and technology. You have little in common with the rest of society.
You begin to hang out in spacer bars with other spacers. Pretty soon you’re signing up for another trip which alienates you even more from the rest of the world.
Now on to our latest guest. Remember she was built near the beginning of synthetic technology. She was imbued with five skills and five personalities to go with each skill. They didn’t know it at the time but this would turn out to be a disaster. There was supposed to be a wall between each personality and skill. As it turns out this didn’t work. The personalities could merge and sometimes with catastrophic effects. Most of the time when this happened the synthetic would just shut down but in rare occasions the synthetic would go berserk. When that happened people could die.
When humans found out what the problem was, the multitask synthetics were decommissioned. In the case of this synthetic, it appears she was sold to this crew on the black market. From what I can glean from the freighter’s memory banks, the crew were pretty unsavory. They were smugglers and possibly pirates. In other words, the scum of the galaxy.
Our guest had five skills, chief engineer, weapons and tactics deck officer, warrior/assassin, medical officer and last, courtesan.
The crew used her last skill. She was to be their entertainment on this long voyage. There was a device the ship’s engineer could use to switch from one skill/personality to another and they chose the courtesan.
Besides the synthetic…”
“Wait, wait, wait,” said Pete. “let’s stop calling her ‘the Synthetic’ and give her a name.”
“What shall we call her?”
“Call her Zoe.”
Mac said, “Sounds good to me.”
“Zoe it is then,” said Amanda.
“The crew was comprised of three females and two males. The captain and first officer were female.
They started abusing Zoe from the very beginning. Here’s the video from the ship’s memory banks. At first it was just rough sex which progressed to violent beatings and rape. All five of the crew participated in this. It seems this was their entertainment. None of them went into stasis for a year and a half. It was as if they were addicted to sadism.
One episode was so extremely violent that Zoe, covered in blood, went into overload and had a severe malfunction. She just couldn’t take it any longer. It amazes me that she took it so long.
You can see she went into spasms and didn’t come out if them.”
Pete and Mac watch in grim silence, appalled.
“After the breakdown, the captain orders the chief engineer to repair and reset Zoe. He has no idea how to repair her, so he tries to reset her with deadly consequences or one could argue with justifiable consequences.
What the reset did is merge all of her skill sets and personalities into one.”
Mac. Gyro, and Pete watched as Zoe stopped convulsing. Her arm shot up grabbing the chief engineer by the throat, she pivoted off the examination table and stood up lifting the chief engineer off the floor. His feet were kicking in the air and his arms were clutching her wrist.
She ripped his shirt off his back and stuffed as much as she could in his mouth. She slammed him onto the exam table. She then began to systematically break his bones. When she was finished she threw him still alive on the floor and walked into the hallway where next to the airlock she ran into the second engineer. She grabbed her head and snapped her neck with such force that she twisted her head around 180 degrees. She proceeded to the bridge where she encountered another crew member. Like the chief engineer she grabbed him by the throat, lifting his feet off the floor and slammed his head into the bulkhead shattering his skull.
Once on the bridge, which looked more like a cocktail lounge than a ship’s bridge, she encountered the first officer. In one smooth motion, she ripped her head off. The captain pulled a blaster out of a drawer and fired. The blast missed but the heat from the near missed seared Zoe’s chest. She was on the captain before she could fir
e a second shot. With one hand she grabbed the captain by the neck and with the other, the hand that held the blaster and crushed it.
The captain screamed.
Zoe knew the captain carried a knife in a scabbard in the small of her back. She reached around her, taking the knife and disemboweled her.
Although they knew what was going to happen next, both Mac and Pete recoiled in horror as Zoe gutted the captain.
Mac, “Whoa!”
Pete, “Holy shit!”
Zoe then broke both of the captain’s arms and crushed both of her knees.
Both Mac and Pete had witnessed the horrors of war up close and personal but what they had just witnessed was too much.
Mac asked Amanda, “I can see her anger and I am not arguing that her victims didn’t deserve what they got but the captain’s going to die an unpleasant death so why break her arms and knees?”
“I’ll explain it to you when you have watched the whole video.”
When Zoe finished breaking the captains bones, she stood there looking down at her.
The captain’s face was ashen and she was breathing in short rapid gasps. She looked up at Zoe and screamed, “You sorry bitch, I should have cut your miserable throat!”
Zoe walked over to the command console and shut down all the ship’s power except for the stasis chambers. She then grabbed the captains jacket collar and drug her into the corridor towards the infirmary and away from the console.
Mac said, “She broke her arms and knees so she couldn’t change the console settings.”
After Zoe dropped the captain in the middle of the corridor she turned without a word and began staggering to the stasis room. As she walked away she could hear the captain yelling obscenities at her.
As she walked to the chamber room she had to place her hand on the wall for support leaving a blood streak.
She barely had enough strength to climb into the stasis bed and push the stasis button to begin the automatic stasis sequence. The last thing she remembered was the chamber lid closing.
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