by M. D. Cooper
More than once, Nance had debated her sanity. She considered that she had imagined the entire meeting with the Caretaker at Ikoden station, and was simply a crazy person.
The problem with that was that insanity was something Erin would have spotted without issue.
No, the only logical conclusion was that there was a thing living in her mind that was undetectable by any means that humanity or AIs possessed—even those of New Canaan.
Frankly, if Nance allowed herself to think on it for too long, it terrified her.
She often saw the vision of the Caretaker in her dreams. Its body made of light, tall but thin; its long arms reaching almost to its knees.
Her initial belief was that the thing was an alien of some sort. A creature belonging to a species that predated humanity and was—for some unknowable reason—interested in playing with them.
Its conversation with Myrrdan had spawned that line of thought. The Caretaker was responsible for much of what had befallen the Intrepid. It had worked to send the ship to Kapteyn’s Star; it had delayed them at the world until Kapteyn’s Streamer was properly aligned with New Eden, and then it had sent the Intrepid into the future.
The only thing Nance couldn’t figure out—well, to be fair, it wasn’t anywhere close to the only thing—was why the Caretaker had sent the Intrepid into the Streamer and forward in time.
Now that she knew about the core AIs, Nance’s new suspicion was that the Caretaker was one of their ilk. It didn’t explain its alien appearance, but that could have been an affectation made for Myrrdan’s benefit.
If it was a core AI, it would certainly explain its opposition to Airtha. If what Finaeus had said was true, Airtha was intended to be an agent of the core AIs, but had somehow broken free of their grasp.
That, at the very least, gave Nance some hope. She wasn’t as powerful as Airtha, but at least it hinted that escape from the Caretaker’s grasp was possible.
As she mulled over the entity’s provenance, Nance dressed in simple pair of leggings and a halter top. Then she slid her feet into a pair of running shoes and tied her hair back. Though it was third shift, no one was likely to question a lieutenant out for an evening jog.
She stretched for a minute and then palmed her door open and strode out into the hall. She looked up and down the empty corridor and took off at an easy lope, headed toward the maglev platform that would take her to the bay on Ring Ten, where the pico-construction assemblers had been stored, and where the records of their use would be housed.
She made good time out to the ring’s main sweep and reached the maglev platform, slowly jogging in place to keep her blood flowing.
A minute later, a train pulled up, and she walked toward the doors, almost running into a cadet exiting the maglev.
“Oh! Sorry,” Nance exclaimed.
“No pro—Nance! Hi, what are you doing about?”
Nance realized that the cadet—who had been bent over a pad, studying something intently—was Saanvi, one of Tanis’s daughters.
“Saanvi, you’re up late.”
Saanvi smiled. “No rest for the wicked, right? I was just working on a model of the star cluster and its gravitational effects on Project St—uh…shoot, sorry. That’s classified for now. I think.”
Nance smiled. “That’s OK, Saanvi. I know that you’re often working with Earnest Redding on something secret; thick as thieves, you two.”
Saanvi shrugged, and a slight blush rose to her cheeks. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. He likes to tell me what he’s up to and says I have a good ear for listening and asking the right questions. Of course, he leaves me with all this amazing knowledge, and I can’t help but dig in more. I’ve even managed to help him a few times.”
Nance got the distinct impression that the remnant wanted to know more about what Saanvi had discussed with Earnest. She was about to ask more, when Saanvi waved and turned away.
“Sorry, Nance, I have to run. I got permission to be out late to work with Earnest, but I have to be back in the dorms in five.”
Nance waved. “You’d better go then, I don’t want to get you in trouble. But we should go out for lunch sometime soon; let’s not lose touch.”
“You got it, Nance,” Saanvi called over her shoulder. “I’ll see what time works for Cary and hit you up.”
Nance wasn’t surprised that Saanvi had automatically assumed she wanted to meet with Cary. The two girls were inseparable; three, counting Tanis’s other daughter, who now lived within Cary.
The remnant seemed to approve of meeting both girls, so she called out after Saanvi’s retreating form. “Sounds good, see you later.”
The maglev still waited for her; lingering longer, as they did during the third shift—travelling to where people were, rather than using a set schedule.
She boarded the train and passed her desired destination on Ring Nine before taking a seat. The train pulled away from the platform and passed out of the ring, arcing around the station. The window beside her was facing toward Canaan Prime and its plas tinted, blocking out the local star’s brilliant glow.
Nance closed her eyes for a minute, enjoying the brief reprieve before the next phase of her late-night adventure began.
The maglev stopped at Platform 38, near her stated destination: Savannah Park. Nance walked off the platform at a leisurely pace. The stretch of savannah was two kilometers long and threaded its way along the center of the ring, creating a relaxing space for the students, and serving as the site of a variety of exercises.
Nance strolled through its pathways, eventually coming to a stone pillar standing in a field. The pillar was engraved with the names of ISF personnel who had perished in the Battle for Victoria. Nance barely gave them a passing glance as she sent a signal to the pillar, which opened an access hatch at its base.
She slipped in and sealed the hatch before checking her monitoring taps.
So far, so good.
The hatch led into a service tunnel that Nance followed until she came to an intersection. Turning left, she crept along quietly until she came to an auxiliary comm routing system.
Nance opened the service panel and pulled out the canister of stealth flow armor. She had secured it from Sabrina’s allotment when she had last been on the ship, and it was her ticket to getting wherever she wanted on The Palisades.
She stripped out of her clothing, which she stowed behind the panel before applying the armor. Once the armor covered her entire body, she deployed a small batch of remote nano to determine if the armor was working properly.
The probes couldn’t see her at all, and Nance nodded with satisfaction. She was glad to see that her alteration to remove the IFF signal—which broadcast her location to friendlies on a random frequency—had held during the reapplication process.
Unless someone with some very specialized scanning equipment was looking for her, she was completely invisible.
Nance sealed the service panel back up and continued down the tunnel until she reached an exit hatch. She passed nano probes around the edge of the hatch, confirming that it was clear before opening the hatch and climbing onto the deck.
It took Nance thirty minutes to walk back to the station’s hub. She slipped into a lift along with a major and a commander. She tucked herself into a corner, ready for the lift to descend, when the major stuck his hand out to hold the door open, and a lieutenant rushed in.
“Thanks,” the lieutenant said as she moved to the side of the lift car, brushing against Nance’s shoulder. “Huh?” she muttered softly and reached toward Nance, who quickly slipped to the side, tucking herself into another corner.
The lieutenant’s hand met with empty air, and she shook her head as the doors closed.
Nance took long, slow breaths, and when the lift reached level 172, she disembarked and rushed down the connecting arm to Ring Ten. The bay she was seeking lay a kilometer around the ring, and half an hour after she had changed into her stealth suit, she finally arrived.
; There was no longer any picotech stored in the bay, but it was locked down nonetheless. The security didn’t worry Nance; the remnant had blessed her with the ability to break through any encryption she had encountered thus far. It had come in very handy while lost in the Perseus Arm of the galaxy, and now it was proving useful once more.
Erin had initially wondered about her proficiency with encryption, and Nance had spent many weeks studying advanced cracking methodologies, and honing her skills so that no one would be surprised when she was able to bypass almost any security she met.
A side-benefit was that Nance was almost as good at getting through security systems on her own as the remnant had made her. Some day, she would find out if she was indeed good enough on her own.
Nance walked to the access panel beside the bay and threaded a filament of nano into the unit, passing a series of codes that would convince the door it was not opening. The log event of the door opening would append to the entry of its last use. Unless someone specifically examined this door’s logs for addenda—which was an unlikely occurrence—no one would ever know she’d been here.
On command, the bay door slid open just a crack, and Nance slipped past into the darkened interior.
Crates filled with equipment lay within, stacked in neat rows, ready for transport to the next station on the list of those to be constructed.
There was probably all manner of amazing technology in those crates. Nance felt like she could spend a lifetime studying everything the colonists had brought with them from the forty second century. She had to admit that she was intensely jealous of Saanvi and her access to Earnest Redding.
I could probably meet with him; he has expressed interest in many of the things the crew of Sabrina has learned.
But Nance feared that Earnest may somehow be able to discern what lay inside her. Feared and hoped. It was complicated.
She put all the fabulous toys that lay within arm’s reach out of her mind, and looked for the system that contained the usage and security monitoring data for the pico assemblers.
While the control systems for the picotech had never been connected to the station’s network, the shipping manifest for the crates was. Nance surreptitiously tapped into it and found that the data was restricted beyond the levels she had currently accessed.
No problem. It took a few minutes, but the remnant guided her through bypassing the systems. She couldn’t brute-force her way through; even with her augmented abilities, Odin would spot something like that.
Once she had the number of the crate containing the systems she was looking for, Nance pulled up its location and worked her way through the bay until she found it.
When she finally did, the first thing she discovered was that the logs weren’t stored in a crate at all; they were within a mobile NSAI pod. The pod was a four meter cube containing a powerful NSAI node that would be a lot harder to get past than the shipping manifest security.
It was also shutdown.
Nance considered her options. The NSAI pod should contain its own power source, which she hoped would have enough charge to turn on.
She pulled open the pod’s control panel and slid a nano filament into it. She bypassed the system’s startup security and triggered an emergency power-on. The emergency power-on would assume that something bad had happened to the pod, and it would write its data and current state into crystal. Nance would then intercept that data write and access the information she needed.
She worked quickly as the pod came on and began its emergency procedures, getting her tap in place a second before the pod began to stream data from its standard memory systems, and filtering through it for the information she desired.
The data write was a quarter of the way done when a klaxon sounded and an alert went out on the bay’s local network, informing any personnel to clear out, as the shipment was about to be picked up.
Shit. The alert included the warning that atmosphere would be vented and gravity disabled so that the auto-loaders could operate with ease. Normally the bay wouldn’t do this with people inside, but its monitoring systems were unable to detect her with the stealthed flow armor on.
She still hadn’t found the data on who had accessed the pico assembler that had lost its payload of bots. Based on the current rate, it would take another three minutes for all the data to pass by.
C’monnnnn, Nance danced impatiently as the atmosphere in the bay began to thin. Though the flow armor would maintain pressure against the decompression, it wouldn’t help with the pesky need to breathe.
Next time, I bring the rebreather pack….
Over the course of half a minute, the bay completely depressurized, and Nance directed the flow armor to seal up her nose.
Then she turned to leave; the information wasn’t worth dying for.
Only she couldn’t leave. The remnant wouldn’t let her move.
Stay, it instructed.
Nance felt a wave of panic slam into her, but willed herself to calm down. Now that the bay was in vacuum, her nano could move quickly, and she sent a passel to the bay’s inner doors. She cycled the small airlock open beside the main doors, reasoning that when she finally did find the information she needed, she didn’t want to have to wait for the airlock to cycle open.
She checked the time since she’d last drawn breath: fifty seconds. Nance knew she could do four minutes—though being able to think coherently after three was well nigh impossible.
Then she spotted it. The assembler in question, and its access logs. Nance syphoned them all off without any examination and then tried to move again.
The remnant finally allowed it.
She dashed down the row and turned the corner toward the airlock, just as the a-grav systems cut out.
Nance lost her footing and sailed into the bulkhead, grunting into her sealed mouth as the armor locked up to protect her from the impact.
Frantically, Nance clawed at the bulkhead, pulling herself toward the airlock as the bay began to spin around her, and her vision faded around the edges.
I’m not going to make it! She shrieked in her mind. You stupid thing! You’ve killed us both, and now the information is useless.
Then she was there, at the airlock. She pulled herself in and hit the cycle command before collapsing to the deck as the lock’s a-grav systems came on.
Then everything went dark.
* * * * *
When Nance came to, there were voices coming from somewhere nearby. She carefully opened her eyes and saw two men entering the airlock.
“System cycled this lock over for some reason; logs show it was activated from inside the bay.”
“So?” the other voice asked.
“So, locks aren’t supposed to cycle on their own. Especially when the external bay door is open. Kind of a security and safety issue.”
Nance realized that the two people speaking were technicians who had entered the airlock. They weren’t wearing EV suits, so she assumed the bay had been aired up once again. Problem was, they’d already cycled the airlock back to the bay side. Since they were inspecting its control mechanisms, she couldn’t very well activate it to get back to the station side.
By the time the technicians had inspected the lock—where they found nothing wrong—and Nance was able to get back to the maintenance passages under Savannah Park, two hours had passed. She changed quickly and returned to her quarters, where she fell onto her bed and let out a long sigh.
It was one hour ‘til breakfast and, from the prodding in her mind, the remnant wanted her to review the data she’d pulled from the NSAI in the bay.
“Stars, this sucks,” Nance muttered.
AFTERMATH
STELLAR DATE: 08.07.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Keren Station
REGION: Khardine System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
“I guess the Grey Division heard you talking smack about them,” Finaeus said as the group sat in the TSF garrison’s officers’ mess. Everyone else had fin
ished eating, but Finaeus still had a plate of food in front of him. “Doesn’t surprise me; those bastards have ears everywhere.”
“I think they must have planned this a little more than thirty minutes in advance,” Krissy said.
Tanis could see in the admiral’s eyes that she held herself responsible for the attack. Securing the Khardine System, and Keren Station in particular, had been her task. Thus far there was no evidence that she had been involved, and her attitude cemented Tanis’s belief in her innocence.
“Using the Galadrial just adds insult to injury,” Admiral Greer said. He had arrived on scene with a platoon of soldiers not long after Flaherty showed up, and was more than a little furious about the attack.
Thinking of Flaherty caused Tanis to wonder where he’d gone. She looked around and saw the quiet man leaning against a bulkhead on the far side of the room. His railgun was propped up beside him, and a deep scowl creased his face.
Tanis had expressed doubt when Sera insisted that Flaherty would beat them to Khardine. Last they knew, he had been on Airtha, or somewhere in the Huygens system. He had a family to secure, and a two thousand light year journey to Khardine; all of which he’d done in a few months’ time.
Nevertheless, Flaherty had shown up just when he was needed.
“Death toll is estimated at fourteen hundred and eleven,” Sera was saying. “All just to drive us back and capture us.”
“They didn’t have a big enough team for that,” Krissy countered. “Though maybe they thought seventy was enough.”
“Then they’re poor studies,” Tanis replied. “Or they didn’t expect us to have such a large escort.”
Finaeus shook his head. “I’m far more interested in the mini jump gate they had. That’s new. Seems like the Grey Division actually is doing some R&D.”