Aeolus Investigations Set 2: Too Cool To Lose: The Continuing Evolution of Lexi Stevens

by Robert E Colfax

  Geena spoke up. “As a non-Earth human who has spent quite a bit of time on that planet, I have to say I don’t think they are. I would, however, suggest that you never underestimate any of them.”

  Chapter 7

  Investigation

  Shortly after touching down on Sandlin, Seekateeki and his aide departed on their waiting cruiser to return home. The High Admiral, at least, seemed to be overly optimistic about having his biological specimens recovered. Doctor Iki arranged access to the Grebal facilities for Lexi’s team, leaving them with security personnel while he disappeared into his lab. At that point, the job became plain detective work as they interviewed staff members and checked backgrounds. While Ron and Geena were still the experts at that, they had been steadily training Lexi since the Borgol situation. At least she was a fast learner. On top of that, she recently developed the ability to tell when someone was lying to her just like many Ackalonians could. Damn, that was helpful when interviewing potential suspects.

  Urania, now a master hacker, rummaged through the lab’s computers, sifting through enormous amounts of personnel and personal data. She sent anything of interest to Geena and Ron to evaluate. It took them four long days, but eventually, they isolated one employee.

  Helen Jin was a timid woman who knew she made a bad decision. There wasn’t a thing she could do to undo it. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time; it was just conversation over too many drinks and a romantic dinner. She was just telling her lover about an odd email she got at work that afternoon.

  Her boyfriend was a handsome, dashing fellow who made her laugh. He was muscular, not quite to the point she would name him a hunk, with a very dark complexion, short black hair, and almond-shaped yellow eyes. He told her he was an officer on a scientific exploration ship. The couple had been dating for at least a month the evening she made that awful, unforgivable mistake. She let slip to the man the name of the ship that would be transferring the Vankovian biological material.

  After the rumor started circulating that the ship carrying the Vankovian material never reached Vankovia, she fretted over it for five days. She had trouble sleeping. She lost her appetite. Becoming desperate, she discussed it with a girlfriend using the company email. Urania found the email.

  Following up on that lead, Geena reinterviewed Helen. Indiscretion sometimes worked both ways. On that last night Helen spent in her man’s arms, the pirate who seduced her told her where his so-called science vessel would be heading when they left. He promised to come back for her. Whether he meant it or not was anyone’s guess.

  Geena judged the woman’s only crime was stupidity, relaying sensitive information she shouldn’t have been privy to in the first place to the wrong person. There remained the question of why she was the recipient of an email containing that information. She only knew it came from the Grebal Labs’s anonymous security account.

  The team next tracked down Rutger Kanan, who had a recent censure in his personal file for carelessly disbursing sensitive information. Rutger accidentally blind cc’d Doctor Iki’s entire team on a confidential email that was supposed to go only to the doctor himself. When Urania pulled up that deleted email, Kanan had at least attempted to clean up after himself, they found it contained the name of the Vankovian scout, its berth at the starport, and its date and time of departure. Digging into his financial accounts took longer, but eventually Urania came up with a recent, very large deposit to one of his accounts. Helen’s accounts were unexceptional.

  It was a relatively elaborate scheme, with Helen not knowing she was being used and Rutger not knowing who at Grebal would be receiving his information. The three investigators sat together over coffee in Urania’s kitchenette, putting it all together. Ron said, “Amateurs. It’s like this Kanan character came up with this plan on his own. I can see him asking himself, ‘How can I get this information to the pirates who are paying me a fortune for it without being seen meeting with them? I know, I’ll use the company email. Then I’ll go in and delete the email.’ Idiot. A security guy should know emails are never really deleted.”

  Rutger was turned over to the police for industrial espionage, aiding and abetting pirate activity, and depending on why the Vankovian scout ship was missing, possibly accessory to murder.

  Helen, on the other hand, they decided was relatively innocent of wrongdoing. Urania went in and removed all traces of the incriminating email trail. With Urania’s level of access, any email could be removed as though it never existed. Geena was waiting in Helen’s apartment when Helen got home that evening. She let her know that no one else, other than her friend at work, knew of her involvement and that the emails no longer existed. Her last words to the grateful woman were, “You were set up. Yes, you made a mistake. My team doesn’t think you deserve to be punished for it. Try to stay out of trouble, Helen.” It wasn’t their job to determine was arrested and who went free. They made that decision anyway.

  With that information, Urania departed Sandlin following the course most likely taken by the Vankovian scout carrying Doctor Iki’s specimens. After this much time, the trail through hyperspace was largely dissipated, with large stretches where it was gone entirely. Knowing both the scout’s starting point and its probable destination was all that allowed Urania to track it past the gaps. The upgraded sensors designed by Lexi as part of the Ostrieachian effort as well as Urania’s sentience gave her tracking abilities no other ship could match.

  It only took four days to find the end of the trail in a pocket of hyperspace roiling with a degree of turbulence that suggested a battle. Dropping back into n-space they found the wreckage of the Vankovian ship. The lifeless scout bore evidence of a fierce battle, one which it ultimately lost. Rutger would be doing time for being an accessory eight murders. Jumping back into hyper, Urania isolated the single pion trail heading away from the site of the battle.

  Urania was adept at tracking other ships through hyperspace. The pion trail and the resulting perturbations generated by a hyperdrive as it pushed a ship through the flux were unique to each ship and as such, could be traced. When the pirate diverged from the standard routes, she picked up the weeks-old telltales and altered her course accordingly. The ship, somewhat surprisingly, looked to be headed in the direction Helen’s lover told her.

  While tracking it through hyper, they held a small, restrained party to celebrate Lexi’s twenty-seventh birthday. She took the opportunity to point out that she was the same age Ron was when they met. That meant he was thirty, and really old. She said as much as she appreciated the thought, she wasn’t sure she wanted to do this every year, especially since the Samues, both natives of Cardin’s Paradise, didn’t celebrate birthdays. They made up for it by celebrating any number of other holidays if and when they were planet-side. Other than their New Year’s celebration, they didn’t bother when they were in space.

  Urania was a much faster ship than the pirate, although it was still weeks ahead of her. They didn’t expect to catch up to it but were hoping to trace it through to its destination. The trail ended when they came upon the ship they were tracking, dead in hyperspace, in close proximity to two other dead ships. They moved in closer, an extremely tricky proposition using the hyperdrive, but the n-space drive was totally useless with the hyper-generator on. Lexi added development of a refinement to the hyperdrive to allow precision navigation in hyperspace to her to do list. It should be possible. Gravity beams? Maybe. So much to do. She smiled. And it still doesn’t keep me out trouble.

  The smallest of the dead ships was based on standard Accord designs. It was a type usually owned by the relatively wealthy for personal use. Those usually had a crew of four to eight people. The other small ship was a Unity Raider, a type of ship they had encountered on more than one occasion. A Raider would have a crew complement of from eight to fifteen individuals.

  The Raider on their three-dimensional viewscreen was beyond any doubt the pirate whose trail they had been following. The huge green derelict, however,
was just as clearly alien, its type unknown. Based on its size, unless it was highly automated, it could carry a crew of thousands. The newly designed sensors could pick up life-signs on other ships when Urania was close enough. Lexi freely admitted that some of her ideas came from TV and movies she watched before she left Earth with Ron and Geena. Sometimes Lexi felt as though she didn’t really need to think up anything original, she could just invent what the Star Trek writers had already come up with. In the case of the lifeform sensors, she first noticed them used by spaceport customs checking for contraband animals in luggage.

  Chapter 8

  Super Genius

  Urania attempted to investigate the green ship by hacking into its command-comp. It was a technique she used before, one that worked so well when she saved all of their lives by taking control of a pirate ship in the middle of a space battle. This time, it didn’t work nearly as well, leaving them in their current circumstance, gathered in the simulated control room on their simulated ship, drinking simulated coffee while discussing their options. At least they had simulated gravity.

  Geena said, “Lexi, we’ve never quite discussed this as a group, although Ron and I have between ourselves. On Earth, when we were looking for the Rose, Ron told me that he believed you to be the smartest person he had ever met. And that was then. Your intelligence is off the scale, darling. You know it. We know it. Your knowledge spans multiple disciplines, each at a depth that would take anyone else half a lifetime to acquire.”

  Geena gave a small laugh. “You cheated, of course. No one else can tolerate the Wraixain educator the way you do. But the point I really want to make is that we trust you, darling.”

  Her expression completely serious, she continued, “I know we’ve had conversations similar to this in the past. We trusted you not to blow us up when you were developing the Zappers. We trusted you not to vaporize us working on the gravity pads. We trusted you not to kill us when we let you screw around with our DNA. And we trusted you not to burn out your mind or Urania’s mind experimenting with the Wraixain educator technology. We trust you to know what you’re doing and when you’re guessing, to be careful about it.”

  Lexi said, her voice small, “Thank you.”

  Geena nodded. “You’re welcome, love. You’ve become a super genius. Maybe you always were. We love you and understand that you need your personal space to come up with the marvels you produce. We’ve got a lot out of it, of course. We’re now flying around in a surprisingly well-armed ship, doing what we have always loved doing. Having even the limited gravity in hyperspace provided by your invention of gravity pads is a dream come true. And you’ve damn near made us immortal with your alterations to the anti-geriatric meds.”

  She paused a moment before continuing. “You stepped up to be the leader of our team. As such, you’ve chosen jobs for us that I never would have even considered but which have already made us wealthier than we have ever been. Hell, Lexi, you’ve been with us less than three years and heads of state are now asking for us by name. Without you, Ron and I would both, by this time, be working boring jobs on Cardin. Urania would have been sold off. Instead, now Urania is our friend and sitting here with us.” She laughed, adding, “In a bathrobe no less. That’s kind of different, isn’t it?” More seriously, she continued, “We owe you big time. And all of this because you had the hots for my son and had the guts to board and stowaway on an alien starship.”

  Before she could continue, Ron protested, “Hey, Mom, that’s all true, but not fair. It was mutual. I was as attracted to her as she was to me. I was just too stupid to make it happen for us.”

  Geena shook her head, amused. “Later, Ron.” Then, clearly returning to her topic, said, “Except in the most general terms, and I’m sure I speak for the real Ron and Geena when I say this, we do not expect updates on how your pet projects are going. Despite that, you do a good job of keeping us in the loop, sharing your triumphs as well as your challenges. This is not about wanting you to change. But even if Ron and I are only simulations, it’s time for you to discuss everything you know about the educator and everything you have done to it. We both knew you were experimenting with it. How could that be dangerous? Right? We are apparently way out of the loop on that one. And when we get you guys back to the real world,” she added with a smile, “you can tell us again.”

  “Yes, Lexi, she’s right,” Ron said. “I mentioned this in the med-bay. Once we realized something was wrong, you grabbed the headset and said you were going in after Urania. I have to assume you have made significant modifications to the Wraixain technology, which you still haven’t admitted to even understanding.”

  Lexi nodded, her expression contrite. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Let me step in here,” Urania requested. “Lexi and I were working on this together. We had to because it’s not just the educator; it involves my interface circuitry. We were carefully experimenting with small incremental modifications that could easily be reversed. Let’s face it, if we managed to break the thing there is literally nowhere we could take it to be repaired. No one even comes close to the knowledge we have about it.”

  She watched her friends nodding, marveling about how different this was than watching through the cabin’s sensor bulb. For one thing, in this form, she only saw their surfaces. The sensor node picked up brain waves, heartbeats, heat signatures, and other medically related data. “The educator is alien technology and, as far as we know, no one has ever figured out how it works. We were proceeding slowly so as not to risk damage to either of us. Neither of us is at the point where we can claim to fully understand that tech.”

  She smiled. She liked smiling. It felt good. Who knew, right? She always thought it looked like it should be slightly painful. “We’ve known since the E’Kret job that I get a backwash of knowledge when people use the educator. We were trying to determine why that is. We know there’s not a pressing need, but we think that if we, or Lexi at least, understand it better, we can make it safer for you guys and others to use.”

  Lexi spoke up. “For what it’s worth, we’re convinced that the people who installed the educator in the first place didn’t understand what they were doing.”

  Urania nodded. “True. Lexi and I believed the most recent modification would enhance the backwash effect. Then we got interrupted before we could thoroughly test it by encountering Meat over there,” she said, tilting her head toward the drifting ship on the monitor. She was slightly amused by how easily human mannerisms came to her. They were fun to make. If it wasn’t for the fact that an insane computer sentience wanted them dead, and stood a good chance of arranging for that, this whole episode would have been fun. Of course, her healing chest still hurt, which was a bit of a bummer. Since it had settled down and was no longer agonizing, she was at least finding the sensation of pain interesting in a way.

  Lexi said, “I expected to find myself in whatever space Urania’s sentience lives in. I want to figure that out someday, too, by the way, honey. Anyway, I was sure I could get in there with her through the modified educator. After all, she monitors our minds when she runs the educational rubrics. I believed our latest modification created a true two-way interface. Based on all this,” she managed to indicate both their ship and the alien ship on the viewscreen while still sitting, “it seems likely it did. I expected I would be writing root-level machine-code, shoring up firewalls, and defending against the derelict’s attack all at the speed at which Urania thinks. I wasn’t expecting to encounter another sentient computer and I certainly never imagined anything like this.”

  She sighed. “The more I study the educator, the less I know about it. In a fashion I don’t understand, the educator seems to circumvent some of the laws of physics. Admittedly, it probably doesn’t, but at this point I can’t even guess how it does what it does. One thing I have learned for sure is that those Xeas technicians who attached it to this ship’s then non-sentient computer had only the vaguest clue as to what they were doing. Frankly, I’m b
eginning to think that they hooked it up backward. I no longer think the device was intended to force knowledge into human brains. They were lucky it worked at all.”

  She paused. “At this point, I believe there is a better than fifty/fifty chance that the device was not designed for people, Wraixain or otherwise. I’m starting to think that its true purpose is to force sentience in sufficiently advanced AIs and that the Wraixain, or in Urania’s case, humans, are merely an organic component in the circuit.”

  She looked at each of her friends in turn, her expression hard. “It fits what we know. It explains Urania’s transformation. Remember after the first time I used it, Ron, you said it wasn’t designed for my brain; that it was dangerous. I believe it is likely that it was just as dangerous for the Wraixain. Think about it. No matter how small the circuitry, no matter how advanced the design, no one we know of has ever achieved true machine sentience. Yet we now know of two such. What if the Wraix figured out how to do it, and this is what they came up with? What if the Wraix are the common factor here and what we’re looking at is a Wraixain warship?”

  Urania was nodding. “Toad-man, or would you rather continue calling him ‘Meat,’ is certainly sentient. He chose the form of one of the Wraix for his avatar. Did you know that, Lexi?”