The Silver Ships

by S. H. Jucha

  With air present to transmit sound waves, a pleasant male voice came over the bridge speakers. “Hello, Captain. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.”

  “Julien?” Alex asked tentatively.

  “Yes, Captain. May I know your full name?”

  “It’s Alexander Racine. Black space! I don’t know where to start. I have so many questions.”

  “As do I, Captain Racine, but I must ask you to wait. There are emergency repairs that must be made to restore minimal functionality to the ship.”

  When Alex failed to respond, Julien perceived an important facet of the young Captain’s personality—he would help, but he wouldn’t be directed. “What questions may I answer for you, Captain?”

  Alex understood the AI would have his own agenda, but he couldn’t continue without at least some answers to the questions swirling in his head. He decided it would be best to compromise and save most of his curiosity for later. “Two questions, for now, Julien. Are your people human or something else?”

  “They are human, descendants of an Earth colony ship as I imagine your people are also. And your second question, Captain?”

  Humans, Alex thought. Well, at least I probably won’t get eaten. “Is there anyone else alive on this ship?”

  “And that’s my greatest concern, Captain. Due to our damage, I have little access to most of the ship, so I don’t know. If they are alive, they are in stasis and as much in need of power as was I.”

  “You should have said that in the first place! What do I need to do first? I haven’t a clue about your technology. You’ll have to show me what to do.” Alex blurted out.

  Despite the calamitous circumstances, Julien found himself amused by the Captain’s exuberance. “I will be pleased to guide you, Captain.”

  Alex admitted he was definitely willing to be guided. He couldn’t wait to learn more about the ship’s technical marvels. “If I could but discover this world’s wonders…” he murmured, quoting an early colonist’s poem.

  “Is that an affirmative, Captain?” Julien asked, unsure of his response.

  “Yes,” Alex laughed, breaking the tension, “Yes, it is.”

  “And your efforts are much appreciated, Captain.”

  A light blinked on a small cabinet door and Alex walked over to it without prompting. It opened to reveal a set of tiny devices stored in slots.

  “Captain, these are comm devices. Please take the one next to the blinking light and place the contact end to the inside of your ear.”

  Alex picked up the device, which looked like a short, dark, thin stick attached to a piece of sealant. Intuiting which end was the contact end, Alex pressed the daub of sealant into his right ear. It was cool to the touch but warmed instantly and suddenly the little mass of sealant flowed into his ear. “Whoa,” he yelped as he tugged the comm device out of his ear. “What just happened?”

  “My apologies, Captain,” said Julien, realizing he would have to give more consideration to the technological gap going forward, “the contact end is a small patch of audio-integrator nanotech that conforms to your inner ear on contact with your skin. When you wish to release it you only need to pull gently on it.”

  Alex eyed the sealant end dubiously, but then pressed it back into his ear, allowing the daub of material to warm and flow into his inner ear.

  “How does it feel, Captain?”

  “Fine…as if you’re speaking inside my head. Will this allow us to communicate when I’m on board my ship?”

  “Once the repairs are further along and a ship-link has been strung, it will be possible. While on the bridge, I may respond via the bridge speakers or comm, depending on your preference. When you are off the bridge or your EVA helmet is sealed, we must depend on the ear comm.”

  “What about recharging?” Alex asked.

  “Your body heat charges the nanites.”

  “Of course…,” Alex mumbled quietly, “alien miracle technology.”

  Julien decided it would be better not to explain all the ear comm’s functions. The fact that he could monitor Alex’s blood pressure, pulse rate, and other physiological parameters through his inner ear might be more than the young human was prepared to handle.

  -3-

  Alex worked for many more hours on bridge repairs before deciding to call it a day. “Julien, I’m tired and hungry. If your conditions are stable, I need to recharge,” he said, chuckling at his own joke.

  “I’ll be well until your return, Captain. Your efforts have been greatly appreciated…more than you know.”

  “Will the people in stasis be alright for now?” Alex asked, concerned that he might be deserting them.

  “My people have been in stasis for a long while, Captain. If they still live, another day or two will not make any difference. Your well-being is important too.”

  “One more question. If your power supply had been exhausted before I could help you, couldn’t you have just been rebooted?”

  “No, Captain, I’m not a computer. I’m a self-aware entity that has been created…born, you might say. While I have the ability to minimize my processes and applications, I would cease to exist if I lost all power. I’d be dead.”

  Many more questions occurred to Alex, but he was too tired to think straight, so he said good night and retraced his steps back to his own ship. Out of the thirty-hour New Terran day, he had logged more than fourteen hours in his EVA suit. He paused in the galley for food, this time deciding on three synth-meals, and carried them to the bridge to check messages.

  As he expected, his message board was brimming. Several vid messages were from Colonel Stearns. He skipped to the latest one and the Colonel’s rather stern face appeared on screen. “Captain Racine, Tracking Control has confirmed that the Outward Bound is tractored to the unidentified vessel. This unknown vessel is now under the auspices of the Ministry of Space Exploration, which has ordered it quarantined. Continue on course for New Terra and remain in your ship.”

  Alex spied a vid message from The Honorable William Drake, Minister of Space Exploration. The Minister’s face, which was very familiar to Alex, also carried a stern expression. “I seem to be upsetting a lot of people lately, Tara.”

  The Minister began, “We were copied on your original message, Captain Racine. You are to refrain from boarding the alien ship. Send detailed images of its exterior and remain on course for New Terra. My tech advisors estimate you will be low on reaction mass, and a tanker has been dispatched to assist you. Once refueled, you will settle the vessel into an orbit 250K km from New Terra. Under no circumstances are you to bring the ship closer than this distance.”

  Alex played the message again and considered his reply. “Tara, send the following message to Minister William Drake, New Terra. ‘Sir, before any messages were received requiring me to remain in my ship, I was granted ingress to the vessel by the ship’s artificial intelligence called Julien. There is extensive damage to the ship, especially to the stern, and the ship’s engines are offline. At his request, I’ve provided a temporary power source to the vessel’s bridge to keep him alive. Your advisor’s estimate of my reaction mass is correct. I’m at eighteen percent capacity now and will shut down engines when I reach five percent. One last thought for you, Minister Drake. I’d deem my actions a rescue. Will you grant that Julien has the rights to this ship?’” He tapped off the recording and hit send.

  Brevity appeared to be his best defense. The government had drawn a hard line and he’d already crossed it. The less he communicated; the less he exposed himself.

  * * *

  The double bridge doors were cycled for him the next morning, allowing the bridge to maintain air. As he entered, he heard, “Careful of your step, Captain.” Before he could puzzle out Julien’s meaning, he stumbled forward but managed to regain his footing. It took a moment to register that he was standing upright, with no hint of the decel force. “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  “My power reserves are still minimal, but I thought it would
help you, Captain, if I balanced the inertia of your ship’s propulsion. This will only be in effect on the bridge until my power reserves grow.”

  Balanced the inertia—just how in black space do you do that? Alex wondered.

  The next two days passed in a blur of repair work for Alex. He put in as many hours as he could until he was hungry or exhausted or both and returned to his ship for recharging. Always, in the back of his mind, he worried that he wouldn’t complete the repairs in time to be of help to the people still in stasis. Each time he asked if there was a way to speed up the process, Julien counseled patience.

  Alex knew he wasn’t making much of a dent in the ship’s repairs—one person working alone couldn’t hope to restore a multi-decked vessel of this size. At one point, after some effusive praise from Julien, Alex told him to stop cheerleading, a term Julien tagged for future research once his entire functionality was restored.

  After completing as much bridge repair work as possible, Alex, under Julien’s direction, proceeded aft. He would seal a corridor’s or compartment’s bulkheads then attempt to restore power, comm, and environmental services to the area.

  The repair process continually fascinated him. He questioned Julien about their technology, learning along the way that they called themselves Méridiens. They employed microscopic machines called nanites in a variety of processes, including seamlessly repairing damaged ship components in moments—repairs that New Terrans would take hours to duplicate as they cut out damaged sections and welded or spliced in new components.

  To fix a severed power cable, he squeezed a thick, viscous material from a tube on to one end and slowly drew the loop of nanites to the other end of the cable then watched in wonder as the dangling loop of nanites, warmed by his torch, tightened into a straight line, reconnecting the cable.

  At one point, Alex repaired a hole in the overhead of the top deck, the same deck as the bridge. The matching exit hole was in the compartment’s bulkhead wall. Alex laid his tools and repair plates down and followed the hole to the deck below. An opening in a corridor was matched to one through a nearby storage compartment. He descended the next two decks, following the holes, until one cut through the hull.

  His thoughts tumbled over one another. An asteroid might pass through both sides of the relatively slender bridge, but it couldn’t possibly do this—passing through multiple decks of a ship as if the walls were nothing more than foil. He’d seen what meteor strikes did to a ship. They left messy damage, a ragged collision of ice, ore, and metal. This was something else, something man-made. That meant there had been a fight, which begged the question: which side was he helping?

  It was obvious the Méridien ship was a luxury passenger liner, which had placated his concern that he was restoring a fighting ship. But he didn’t know what trouble had found these people, or, if it followed them here, how his technologically inferior planet could hope to defend itself.

  Near the end of his third day on board, he heard from Julien that there were sufficient reserves in his power-crystals to activate the grav-plating and inertia systems in the repaired sections. Alex seated himself at a table in a cabin he had recently restored and waited out the transition. As the plates were slowly activated, he watched the loose materials in the room, layered against the forward bulkhead, slowly sink to the deck.

  “Captain, are you all right?” came Julien’s concerned voice.

  “Fine, Julien.”

  “Is the gravity level comfortable?” Julien asked.

  Alex chuckled. “Is this normal gravity for your people?”

  “Yes, Captain, it is.”

  “It’s about eighty percent of our New Terra gravity,” Alex replied as he stood up and tested his weight. “So your colonists found a world with slightly less gravity than Earth?”

  “Yes, by eleven percent, Captain.”

  “Has it affected your people, the way our heavier gravity has affected us over the centuries?”

  Julien compared Alex’s stature to his people. The difference was considerable—more than considerable, if Alex was the norm. “I would say, yes, to a degree, Captain, it has.”

  At the end of the day, Alex climbed back into his bridge chair aboard the Outward Bound. “No grav-plates here,” he groused to himself as he strapped in. Tara had shut down the main engines when the five percent reaction mass reserve had been reached. The remaining fuel was needed to continue powering his ship, the tractor beams, and the derelict. Aboard his ship, Alex would have to work and live in zero gravity until he was refueled.

  Each evening, he had found his message queue filled, and tonight was no different. The critical ones got responses. The others received auto responses or were deleted.

  Minister Drake’s response to Alex’s discovery of Julien had been that he would discuss the subject further with his advisors. In the meantime, advisors and scientists alike had flooded him with questions—the great AI debate had been resurrected. The scientists wanted to know how he knew for certain it was an artificial intelligence. What could it do that a smart computer couldn’t? Then there was the greater question. What were the rights of an artificial intelligence?

  Alex paid particular attention to the comms of the Honorable Darryl Jaya. As Minister of Technology, his questions were more pointed. Alex enjoyed sending back short, succinct answers to the Minister’s perceptive questions about the composition of Julien’s memory components, his ability to relocate or even co-locate, and his responsibilities aboard the ship.

  The good news…Colonel Stearns’ strident messages had ended when Minister Drake assumed control of communication. Alex was fairly sure that he hadn’t made a friend of the Colonel. Not a good thing for an explorer-tug captain who depended on the last outpost for support and, if he was unfortunate, for rescue.

  One vid message caught his eye. He tapped his comm board quickly, anxious to hear from his professor, Dr. Mallard. “Your old friend, Minister Drake,” she said, “has invited me to his office to discuss, of all things, you. Since the two of you have such a pleasant history—” she laughed, “—he must be after something specific, but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out what that might be. I’ll be sure to keep you apprised. Alex, I always believed you would do great things. I just didn’t think that would extend to snatching alien ships flying through our system.” She laughed again—that wonderful, rich sound he loved. “I’m proud of you. Please take care of yourself. Comm me when you reach orbit.” Then her expression had changed to that of his lecturing professor. “And you will make orbit…hear me?”

  He’d played the message several times. Tara’s voice synthesis was a pale imitation of the real thing.

  -4-

  Julien had guided Alex to restore power, bridge control, and environmental systems to the stasis suite located near the ship’s bow, all while keeping Alex out of the suite. He couldn’t risk the safety of his charges to a stranger, no matter how appealing he found the young Captain, who had exerted himself for days in an effort to save people he had never met. It was Julien’s hope that the suite itself wasn’t damaged, which would necessitate Alex entering it.

  During their third morning together, Alex’s repairs finally allowed Julien to communicate with the stasis suite’s controller, the highly sophisticated sub-station responsible for monitoring the stasis pods. He was devastated to discover only eighteen pods remained viable. The suite could have accommodated over three hundred. It meant most of the passengers and crew hadn’t been able to reach this inner sanctum and secure themselves before their surroundings were holed to space or their inertia compensation was lost.

  Anyone who had safely reached a pod would have had to wait for the crew to revive them. But, the crew and passengers, who hadn’t made the pods, were lost, and Julien’s access to the suite had been cut off.

  Each pod had its own power-crystals and operating system to ensure maximum stability. However, when the pods developed faults, there was no one available to respond to the controller’s ma
intenance requests. Viewed through their crystal covers, the faces in the failed pods were peaceful. Eighteen occupied pods still functioned, so Julien triggered their resuscitation routines.

  * * *

  When the eighteen were completely restored, the crystal covers of the pods unlatched and slid open. With no one available to assist them, the occupants fended for themselves, climbing from their pods, naked, shaking, and disoriented. Two males, in better condition than most, prepared injections of nanites, electrolytes, and nutrients to restore the survivors from the effects of such a long, unintended sleep. After a couple of hours of rest, they took turns standing in front of a fabricator, which scanned them to assemble wraps and ship suits.

  At the same time that Alex’s repair had supplied power to the stasis suite, the food tanks were activated. While the ship had drifted, the stock had been preserved by the absolute cold of the surrounding vacuum. As the tanks warmed, the heat activated the nanites, which maintained the viability of the food stocks.

  Julien monitored the survivors via their implants, the tiny electronic device embedded in the cerebral cortex of each Méridien. The implants were capable of transmitting comms, recorded memories, thoughts, and physiological data. In the adroit user, software applications, mathematical research, and engineering formulas could be manipulated without an external electronic device. However, their most common use was for communication, enabling private conversations even in a crowd.

  Renée de Guirnon finished her hot thé and slowly sat the empty cup down. All eyes swept to her. she sent via her implant on open comm, so that all of her people could monitor the exchange.