by Scott Baron
“Thanks, but it was just a theory.”
“And a damn good one. Then there is the matter of your communications relay idea.”
“That? I was in pain and just spitballing ideas to take my mind off it, Captain. I have no idea if it would even work.”
“Sid and Mal already ran the simulations. It should work as you predicted. They’ve just begun scanning the debris field for a few communications satellites we can salvage and repurpose for the task. Donovan even volunteered to head back out and stay on station until we retrieve one. Daisy, you’ve moved things forward more in one day than anything else has in the past year.”
A sense of dread began to creep into her stomach.
“What are you saying, Captain?”
“What I’m saying is, we need you to complete your mission. You’ve proven repeatedly just how capable you are, and I’m here to ask you to live up to that potential.”
Daisy sat quietly a long while before responding in as respectful a tone as she could manage.
“Captain,” she began, “everyone is dead. My home never existed. There is absolutely nothing for me to go back to because up until a few months ago, I had never even set foot on Earth.”
“But that can change, Daisy.”
“They’re dead, and you all need to learn to let it go. We’re a dozen people and a few AIs stuck way out here on the moon. What good can we possibly do? I’m sorry, but I’m not getting killed for some hopeless cause. It’s not worth it. I won’t sacrifice my life for a dead planet.”
Captain Harkaway wanted to say more, but he restrained himself.
“Very well, Daisy,” he said, rising gingerly and walking to the door. “But I do hope you’ll change your mind. You could do so much good.”
“Goodbye, Captain,” she said.
He took the hint and opened the door, quietly closing it behind him without another word.
Daisy sat back on her bed with a grumbling sigh.
Why won’t they just leave me alone?
In the hallway Captain Harkaway keyed the small comms unit on his lapel.
“You hear all of that?”
“Yes, we did,” Commander Mrazich answered from the conference room, where he, Fatima, and Doctor McClain were gathered.
“This is insane. It’s what she was made for,” Harkaway lamented.
“We know, Captain,” Doctor McClain said, “but Fatima and I agree. You simply can’t force her.”
“I know, but it’s literally what she was made for.” He keyed off the comms and limped off down the hall toward his quarters. “Screw this,” he grumbled. “I need a drink.”
Chapter Thirteen
The swift kick caught Tamara off-guard and sent her tumbling into a storage crate. It seemed Daisy found her anger levels rather elevated after the prior evening’s back-to-back talks with Vince and Harkaway.
Maybe that’s what I’ve needed all along, she mused, launching into another kicking and punching combination.
“No, it isn’t. You’re distracted, Daisy. Pay attention! Look at her feet. She’s ready for you,” Sarah warned.
No, I’ve got this, Daisy replied as her attack flew.
Tamara shifted her stance, absorbing the first two blows, then slipped past a hard left hook, wrapping Daisy in her powerful embrace and lifting her in the air.
Shit! Maybe not, she realized just before being slammed into the ground. She felt her rapidly mending ribs grind from the impact. “Okay, I yield,” she gasped.
Tamara helped her to her feet, an approving look in her eye.
“You did better today. Much better. Whatever got you going, keep it up.”
“Thanks, Tamara.”
“You ready to go again? We’ve still got a couple hours of free-time.”
“Nah,” Daisy replied. “I’m gonna get a few things sorted before my afternoon session.”
“Ah, yes, Fatima. I don’t see what you’re getting out of that yoga, meditation mumbo jumbo, but whatever floats your boat.”
“And Captain Harkaway ordered it.”
“Yeah, that too.,”
Tamara grabbed her gear and went off to do whatever it was former military botanists do, leaving Daisy alone with the voice in her head.
“Too much going on in here right now, Daze. You need to chill out before you blow a gasket.”
“It’s just that shit Vince pulled last night. What the hell was he thinking?”
“You know.”
“And then Harkaway? And now Tamara? Even Gus and Reggie are in on it. Everyone is pressuring me to be something I’m not.”
“So be you.”
“I am, but that’s never enough for them. And then Fatima. All this constant Zen master shit is driving me crazy!”
“So, what are you going to do, Daze? You’re stuck here. You can’t leave.”
“No, but I can get away from it all. At least for a little bit.”
“You thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“You know it,” Daisy replied as she headed for Hangar Three’s airlock. “If I bypass the monitor on my suit, I’ll be invisible for the next couple of hours. No one will be able to find me to add to this ever-growing mountain of bullshit. I just need to clear my head and think.”
“Okay. Shiny. Let’s go, then.”
Daisy suited up, made the necessary adjustments to ensure she’d be off all monitors and scans, and stepped out onto the moon’s low-g surface. The absolute calm and silence put her in a more relaxed frame of mind almost immediately. She started walking with no destination in mind, but twenty minutes later she found herself in front of the hidden door.
“What the hell, might as well,” she said, picking her tools from their hiding spot. Within moments she had the leads attached inside the gap in the wall.
“Guess I can try the panel in parallel,” she decided, hands working on auto-pilot.
“Daisy? What do you really think about Vince?” Sarah asked.
“You know what I think. He’s a nice guy, but it just won’t work.”
“Then why does your heart rate go up every time he comes around?”
“Muscle memory, simple as that,” she answered, more than a little distracted by the line of questioning.
“You know that’s a load of shit, Daze.”
“Look, I used to love the guy, okay? And then my life got turned upside down. For chrissake, Sarah, I found out my boyfriend was a cyborg, my home was a lie, and that I’d be spending the rest of my life trapped in a tiny moon base, all in a single week. It was a shitty time.”
“All right, all right,” Sarah said. “But for the record, he’s not a cyborg.”
“Enhanced human. Whatever. He’s got that thing in his head, and––”
The thick door in front of her released a thin puff of inert gas, then silently slid open.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t know. Your stupid grilling got me so pissed off, I wasn’t really paying attention.”
“Remind me to piss you off more often.”
Daisy looked into the darkened space. A faint red glow barely illuminated what was apparently an airlock. Daisy collected her tools and stepped inside.
“What if the door seals us in?”
“Then we’re royally screwed,” Daisy replied as the door cycled shut behind her. She stood there in the dimly lit chamber, waiting. Nothing happened. “Maybe if I just try this––” She hit the big red button on the far wall.
“You don’t know what that might––”
She felt her ears pop as the room suddenly pressurized. A second later the light brightened and the interior door slid open. Her suit’s environmental monitors registered a breathable atmosphere just past the threshold, and beyond it lay a wonder to behold.
Entering the airlock had caused the hidden facility to power on, and judging by the cavernous chamber’s vast number of machines, processors, and assembly lines, it was no wonder the place had drained the battery reserves to zero when
its independent energy supply was severed. Daisy just hoped the repairs she had made that accidentally powered it back on would support the load.
I really need to re-route an entire solar array just for this place, she realized.
The ceilings were a good thirty meters high—taller than many buildings—and the floor appeared to be capable of lowering and raising as needed to accommodate whatever project was being worked on.
Because it was hidden safely under what was essentially a small stone mountain on the surface, there was almost no limit to how large the facility could have been constructed, depending on requirements. At nearly a football field long and half a field wide, they certainly didn’t skimp. One look at the beautiful ship resting in front of her, and Daisy knew why.
The vessel was sleek, a matte black hull with seams that appeared to blend into one another. Twenty-five meters long, fifteen wide, and roughly fifteen tall, it appeared to be a mid-sized assault ship, only it was plainly something far different. For one, its configuration matched nothing in Daisy’s vast mental storehouse of ship designs. On top of that, the material it was made of was something she had never seen before.
“Daisy, I think this is a stealth ship.”
Daisy had already come to that conclusion, though she didn’t know exactly how she knew it. Something in her gut just told her it was.
She pulled a small laser cutter from her pouch and aimed it at an unassembled piece. She powered it on.
Nothing happened to the material.
“I think you’re right. Look how it absorbs and disperses the focused light beam. I bet this stuff does the same with other types of energies and scans, other than the optical kind.”
She circled the magnificent craft, taking her time, studying every bit of it. The ship was obviously nowhere near finished when the attack happened, and once humanity was destroyed, it was never completed.
“Look at this,” she said. “This place has its own molecular components fabricator. Two of them, actually. It looks like they are tied into a mine running deep underneath the facility. I wonder what kind of raw ore they were accessing in addition to all those containers of base compounds.”
She continued touring around the ship, looking closely at the interior through the gaping holes where it was incomplete. It appeared to be based on the pod/component system of the Váli and similar ships, but as a one-of-a-kind vessel, it would never have spare parts to swap out.
“Holy shit,” she marveled. “Check out that massive computer system,” she said as she walked through the unfinished corridors of the ship.
Toward the front, but below the command pod, she found herself looking at rack upon rack of backup processing units safely ensconced in the center of the heavily reinforced pod. They were tied together with high-tensile linkages and appeared to be designed to massively boost AI processing speed and power, but also to protect the core AI in case of a hull breach.
It was only because this most vital part of the ship was not yet completed that she was even afforded a clear view of its innermost workings. While the fabrication tables just outside the hull held a wealth of components with which to construct a super-advanced artificial mind, the AI dock at the center of the ship’s connections, she noted, was empty.
“Looks like they never got a chance to fire this bad boy up before the invasion. I wonder if it would have made a difference, though.”
Daisy climbed back to the hangar floor and walked around the craft. It appeared an immense array of bleeding-edge pulse weaponry was in the process of being installed when things went dark.
“Impressive. But one small ship against an entire alien fleet? Probably not.”
“Yeah, probably not. I wonder if they have the specs on this thing in here. Fatima said the base was purged when its AI melted down, but maybe this facility was firewalled or something.”
“Can’t hurt to look, right? I mean, since you’re already in here, what harm can there be in poking around? Not like there’s anyone still alive to object anyway.”
“A little morbid, but I like the way you think.”
Daisy spent the next half hour working to get the secret fabrication plant’s design and control systems back online, slowly rebooting every system she came across until most of the facility was quietly humming with power.
“I think I found the door controls,” Daisy commented as she attempted to access a locked power-control unit. “Makes sense they’d keep it on lockdown, given this place was making stealth craft, but man, they really went nuts on this.”
The multiple panels locking her out finally gave way after several minutes of bypassing and jury-rigging, revealing a simple series of power buttons.
“Okay, so this should do it,” she said, flipping all three switches at once. A low hum vibrated momentarily, then the chamber once more fell silent.
Daisy walked to the airlock door, put her helmet back on, just in case, and tapped the keypad.
“Shit, I’m still locked out of the system. That must not have been it.”
She took her helmet off and went back to work, trying to track down the door control unit. After following a hunch, she finally found what she hoped was the right terminal.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” she said as she opened the panel to access the entry screen. It came free with minimal resistance. “Huh, that was much easier than the last one. I guess the door systems didn’t warrant as much security as I thought.”
She pulled up a root menu, and with a few override commands, accessed the core entry control systems.
“There’s the problem. At least, I think it is,” she said as she typed a series of commands into the machine. “Looks like rebooting this place after the backup power went out was what caused everything to go into total security lockdown, but if I did this right, I should have keyed the entry controls to my new command settings. I guess we’ll find out for sure when we go outside, but for now, a quick test.”
She put her helmet on and once again keyed the panel beside the door. This time the light turned green and the door opened.
“Sweet!” she said, closing it back up. “Looks like we’ve got a winner, and I’ve still got a good twenty minutes before I need to get back to the base. What do you say we see what else is in here?”
“Do you even need to ask?” Sarah replied.
Daisy quickly tracked the various comms links and power feeds supporting the facility, and true to her suspicions, every system was partitioned and air-gapped from the base itself.
The fabrication plant was its own separate unit, completely self-sustained and detached from Dark Side. Not a shared sensor, not a networked communications link. Nothing tied the two together.
“No wonder Sid didn’t know about this place,” she said. “If the base’s files were wiped before he was installed, there’s no way he could have.”
“So, this is truly hidden,” Sarah said, giddy at the revelation. “Oh my God, Daisy, it’s like a secret clubhouse! Or a tree fort!”
“Yeah, and one that just happens to house a massive stealth ship and a whole bunch of cutting-edge machinery,” she replied. “But not a tree fort. No trees on the moon, Sis.”
“Ha-ha, funny girl.” Sarah laughed. “But it’s so peaceful here, Daze. One truly private place on the entire base.”
“I know. I suppose eventually I’ll need to tell the others about it, but for the time being I––”
A garbled noise barked out from beneath a large static-canceling drop cloth.
What could that be? she wondered. It looks like it has Faraday protection woven into the material itself. This is incredibly high-tech for a drop cloth.
Daisy crossed the workspace to the technician’s station where the noise had originated.
“Careful, Daze.”
A faint hum, almost inaudible to even the most sensitive ear, touched her senses like cool water flowing across a raw nerve.
Something is here, she realized, moving closer to the worktable. Cau
tiously, Daisy reached out and drew back the drop cloth.
A pristine AI unit sat glistening under the bright lights. The experimental brain appeared to be far more advanced than anything she’d ever seen. Daisy looked at the three power feeds running to its portable base. They led back to the panel she’d spent so much time fighting to open.
To the three switches she’d so nonchalantly flipped on.
“Oh shit. What did I do?”
At the sound of her voice, one of the AI’s built-in external sensors aimed its visual array at her and paused. Finally, after a long moment, a young, genderless voice spoke to her.
“Are you my mummy?”
Chapter Fourteen
The next day, Daisy was swamped with training and tasks, and found herself only able to sneak into the hidden fabrication hangar for the briefest of visits before having to race back to the airlock.
She almost felt bad keeping Fatima in the dark, but for now, her discovery was hers alone, and while she couldn’t go back that evening without being noticed, she did have a few plans to put in motion. One she could even do over dinner.
Finn’s mechanical fingers whizzed across the cutting board as he deftly wielded his knives, making small things even smaller. It was a passion of his, and his knifework was second to none.
There was no need for a mandoline to slice and dice, though, really, the food replicator could probably make a pretty nice julienne. But having food hand-made by someone with a love for it made every meal taste better, somehow.
“I still don’t know why you don’t just have the whole hand replaced. You already have one cybernetic arm, after all,” Shelly said, gesturing at the metal fingers on his remaining flesh hand. “I mean, for the tensile strength alone it would be worth it.” She picked up a handful of hard, dried beans in her metal hand and easily crushed them to dust.
“You’ve got your shiny bits, and I’ve got mine,” he replied with a chuckle. “Thing is, no matter how fine-tuned those internal servos and sensors are, there’s still no beating good old-fashioned touch when it comes to cooking.”