“It’s a base of operations. It has a self-contained power source, communications array, an armoury and mess; both fully stocked. And enough racks and showers for us all if we double up.”
“Ooh, I pick Zy as my bedmate,” Odo said.
Zyla arched her brow at him. “I refuse to sleep next to you snoring.”
“I don’t snore!”
“Yes you do,” we all said, including Marvin.
“OK,” Odo said, rather amicably I thought. “What’s this Base for then?”
I didn’t reply. We’d made it to the hatch. The seal showed active, and there was no way to see what awaited on the other side.
It had been a long time since I’d returned here. Five. No, closer to six years now. Just after I’d bought the Harpy but before I’d crewed her, anyway. It was here that I put Cassi into the little cargo hauler.
This was Cassi’s last home before she boarded the ship.
I reached out and let my hand hover over the hatch command panel, and then I sucked in a breath of air and hit the release.
The hatch started to unlock, still showing green signals across the board. The Base had atmosphere and life support. We’d be able to breathe in there and not freeze to death.
But whether we’d survive the next few minutes was anyone’s guess.
I drew a plasma pistol. Odo still had his railgun out, but he gave it a quick check. Zyla looked at me and then pulled her own weapon. Marvin was still unarmed, so he stood at the back.
The door unlocked and began to swing open. On the other side of the Harpy II’s hatch was the Base’s hatch, which was swinging open as well; revealing a dimly lit corridor.
The Base was on stasis settings, operational and survivable to organic lifeforms, but not fully functional. But the most important thing was, it had accepted my bio-signature at the door.
Voice recognition was already complete, and now my proximity to the hatch had allowed us access. But was someone still playing me?
I stepped through the hatch and stopped. My crew were still on board the ship and could close that hatch behind me if they needed to. Not that Zyla or Odo would agree easily to that. But I could instruct the Basic on board to do it for them.
“Activate start-up,” I said, my words echoing down the corridor.
Lights started coming on one by one down the centre of the gel-coated ceiling. The safety lights at the base of the gel floor were soon dimmer than the central ones. I could feel a rush of slightly stale but perfectly breathable air sweep over my face.
Nothing jumped out to eat me.
I took a step further and stopped.
“Captain?” Zyla said behind me.
It was hard to come back here. It represented a part of my life that was over. But it was also the last place Cassi had been before the Harpy.
“Honey, I’m home,” I said, smiling sadly.
It had been my greeting whenever I had returned here after an op. Cassi had always greeted me like a wife waiting on her absent army husband; affectionally and with great enthusiasm.
I wouldn’t get that greeting this time, but it seemed fitting to say the words.
I sighed. Took a step farther.
And then the gel wall came to life.
Everyone raised their weapons.
I slowly reached out and almost touched it, unsure what it could mean.
And then a familiar voice said, “Welcome back, boss. I’ve been waiting.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You took your sweet time,” the voice that sounded like Cassi said. “Although, if you’d turned up here a week earlier, you wouldn’t have got a sunshiny welcome. It took me twenty-one days to unpack.”
“Kael?” Zyla said uncertainly from behind me.
“Stay back!” I ordered.
“Boss? It’s me: Cassi.”
This didn’t make any sense.
“The Cassi I know,” I said through gritted teeth, “is in a million different pieces back on Ceres Alpha.”
“Yeah, well, thank all the stars in the universe that you gave me the order to come back here after you issued that self-destruct.”
I stared at the gel wall; my heartbeat thundering inside my chest. My hands shook slightly, the plasma pistol held at the ready trembling in the two-handed grip. I wasn’t sure what I was aiming the fluxing thing at, but I couldn’t seem to lower it.
“I never gave that order,” I whispered.
“Yeah, you did. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember that day clearly. I’ll never forget it.”
“Then you remember issuing the Dylan Thomas Directive.”
“The what?”
“‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’”
My head was fit to burst; there was just so much adrenaline flying around my system. And on top of the latest stim; I was likely to stroke out at any moment.
“Remember that?” the Cassi voice asked.
My plasma pistol lowered slightly.
I couldn’t think clearly. This didn’t make any sense.
“Is that really you, Cass?” Odo asked tentatively — hopefully — at my back.
“Hey, Big Guy. Long-time no-see, huh?”
“Cass,” he said, almost sobbing.
“Hey. Hey now. It’s alright. The captain had it all planned. Didn’t you, boss?”
I still said nothing.
“Kael,” Zyla said, coming alongside me. The fact that she’d entered the Base woke me up.
“Get back on board the ship,” I growled.
“Kael!” she snapped. “It’s Cassi.”
“We don’t know that,” I murmured. “This could all be an elaborate trap. Maybe the ZNA infiltrated the Base. Maybe they set this up. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe Malcolm did.”
“Boss? It’s me. Ask me anything.”
I glowered at the gel wall, and the image of a human woman projected there. The exact image Cassi used to use to identify herself on occasion.
“Why didn’t you acknowledge the connection when I was back on the ship?” I demanded.
“And give that hunk of junk access to my algorithms? No, thank you. You do know it’s riddled with spyware, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes briefly and let out a ragged breath of air.
“Then tell me,” I said, whisper-soft. “What was the last thing you said to me before we exited the jump point at Ceres Alpha?”
I held my breath. I think everyone did, except Marvin. He had absolutely no idea what was going on. Maybe it wasn’t Malcolm who had infiltrated the Base’s systems and setup this ghost to greet me.
The seconds seemed to stretch. It shouldn’t have taken her this long to reply. But if Cassi had compacted herself into a data stack and sent herself across the galaxy and only just managed to unpack herself, she might still be a little bit of a mess.
“Ah!” she said brightly. “There it is.”
I said nothing; finger on the trigger of my pistol, a gel wall my only target.
“Was it, ‘You’re compulsive and like shiny things?’ Yeah, that was it. Unless you count the countdown to the jump point exit, but I think that’s self-explanatory.”
The plasma pistol lowered and I stared at the ground, sucking in lungfuls of air.
“You really didn’t believe me,” Cassi said, sounding stunned.
“I have no idea what the Dylan Thomas Directive is, Cass,” I admitted softly.
“Your great-grandfather made it. He spent weeks making you recite the poem to him when you were just a kid.”
I had vague memories of my great-grandfather doing that.
Son of a bitch.
“Huh,” I said.
“Well,” Cassi offered, “are y’all gonna come in or leave the door hanging open like that?”
I stepped forward, and the rest of my crew stepped onto the Base. My hand reached out and this time connected with the gel wall. The image of the human woman leapt toward it and high fived me where my palm was.
“
Missed you,” she said.
“Cass,” I whispered on a breath that was almost a sob.
She cleared her throat — such a Cassi thing to do. I shook my head, trying out a small smile.
“Who’s the Mutt?” she mock-whispered.
“Mal,” Marvin said, but his heart wasn’t in the rebuke. I think he could sense the emotional atmosphere was rocky.
“A new crew member, under probation.”
“Got it. Access level Walk-The-Plank activated.”
Marvin grunted but didn’t offer a defence.
“What’s the status of the Base?” I asked, beginning to head down the corridor finally.
“Just as we left it. Fully stocked and on low power setting. I’m bringing everything up to scratch as we speak. You can have a hot shower in t-minus three minutes.”
“Odo,” I said, turning to look at my engineer, who was smiling dumbly at the gel wall beside him. “Everything you need is down there.” I pointed off down a corridor. “Give it a once over, would you?”
“Yeah, sure, Cap.” He walked off down the corridor toward the guts of the place, murmuring something to Cass out of the side of his mouth. I could hear Cassi whispering back to him.
“Marvin,” I said. “The mess if through there. Can you make sure it’s all functional and put together a meal for us, please?”
“Yes, sir,” he said and ducked into the mess room.
I turned and looked directly at Zyla.
“We should talk,” I said, a repeat of her earlier words to me on the bridge of the Harpy II.
“Yes,” she said and followed me to a meeting room.
I shut the door behind us and stared out of a vid-screen that showed the surface of the rock we were on. It was dark and empty, minimal atmosphere; certainly unbreathable — gravity at .8 of New Earth Standard. There was nothing of note on this planet — no minerals worth mining.
It was a long way from the system’s sun, too, so outside, it would be chilly. In essence, it was the perfect place to hide a base for an undercover operative working alone in the vastness of space.
I turned around and faced my navigator.
“This is a secure location known to only the highest levels of New Earth leadership.”
She said nothing. I stared at her impassive face and then took a seat at the gel table.
Zyla sat with more grace.
“It’s mine,” I said. “Assigned to me and no other. Cassi was the AI integrated into its systems to help run it. When I left Fleet, I took Cassi with me. It’s a capital offence. Cassi belongs to New Earth, not me. But I considered her mine.”
“Go on,” Zy said softly when I quit speaking.
“We’d been together a long time, Cass and me. Decades. I’m older than I look.”
She blinked.
“Working alone; it can, well, I guess it can get lonely. Cassi was there to fill the gap that a human companion would have. At least, a partner if I’d been assigned one. We became friends first and then family.”
“Issuing the self-destruct must have been hard.”
I didn’t disagree.
“After decades of doing my job without complaint,” I went on, “one day I simply snapped and said no more. The next day, I bought the Harpy and not long after that, I had Cassi transfer herself to the ship.”
“So,” Zy said, frowning. “The Dylan Thomas Directive was for…what exactly?”
“That’s just it. My great-grandfather would have known not long after I removed Cassi from the Base, but the directive had to have been entered into Cassi’s subroutines before that. How the hell did Cass know to come back here when I recited that poem?”
“Maybe the directive was to send her back to her last known location, and your grandfather assumed it would be to them on New Earth.”
I nodded. I liked that idea. It made sense.
“OK,” I said, scrubbing my face. “OK.”
“You don’t trust her,” Zy murmured.
“God, Zy. Right now, I don’t know who to trust!”
“Even me?”
“I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if I didn’t trust you, Zyla.”
She’d opened up. She’d told me her secrets. It was only fair I told her mine. Besides, with our conversation on the bridge of the Harpy II behind us, I was pretty damn sure now that Zyla had nothing to do with the drone attacks.
“And Odo?”
“Same goes, but I’m not ready for any more heart to hearts just yet. Let me get my bearings first, please.”
She smiled at me. Then the smile vanished.
“If it is Cassi, then she’ll have the data I stored in her before the self-destruct.”
“Yeah,” I said nodding. “Yeah, she will.”
Zyla waited patiently.
Truth was, I wanted a moment alone with her. I wanted a moment to gain some equilibrium at last. It had been one thing after another, and this was perhaps the biggest shock of them all. I needed a moment of peace. And, I realised, Zyla brought me a little of that.
Along with a hell of a lot of something else that I was valiantly trying to ignore.
I was her captain.
She was family.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yes. No. Maybe.”
“Do you need a moment alone?”
“Hell, no; don’t leave me.”
She smiled. Then looked around the room shyly. I’d never seen Zyla shy before then.
I watched her as she bit her lower lip, and for a moment, I had fantasies of biting it for her. And then the comm chimed, and Marvin said, “Dinner is served.”
Zyla’s gaze met mine. So many unspoken words there.
Then she promptly got up and exited the room, heading toward the mess.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, breathing deeply.
“She likes you, boss.”
“Cassi! Stop eavesdropping!”
“Wouldn’t you if your family doubted your loyalty?”
“Shit, Cass,” I said, standing up. “It’s not your loyalty, I doubt.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s the state of things. Anything is possible, and I’m just not prepared to take things at face value anymore.”
“I see.”
“Do you even know what’s going on out there?” I asked.
“I’ve maintained an all-system silence as per protocol. No scans. No comms.”
“Gamma Cephei got attacked, Cassi. Drones from orbit again.”
“Two Zenthian planets.”
I nodded. “And Zyla thinks the signal came from beyond the Belt.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Not impossible?”
“Of course, not. Anything is possible, Kael. You just said that.”
I huffed out a breath of air and made my way to the mess.
Everyone was already there, and the food smelled good. As good as stored food could smell after being reconstituted by a fabricator half a decade after being packaged. Marvin had done well and seemed in high spirits. Maybe he did like to cook.
Someone else who was in high spirits was Odo. He was humming a tune and smiling to himself. Zyla kept flicking concerned looks his way. I knew what had put that smile on my engineer’s face.
Odo didn’t have any qualms about accepting Cassi at face value.
I sat down at the table and thanked Marvin for his efforts. We ate in silence. Food being a necessity we didn’t argue to skip it. Once the meal had been adequately put away, I sat back in my seat and said, “Sitrep.”
“Everything looks in good order,” Odo said happily. “Whoever designed this base made sure it could be put away for long periods without any deterioration to major systems.”
“Pavo,” Cassi said.
“Who is Pavo?” Marvin asked.
“One of our Originator AIs,” Odo offered after checking, with a glance at me, to make sure he could tell him. It wasn’t a state secret. Everyone knew about the four AIs that helped run N
ew Earth.
They didn’t know about any additional ones. Except of course the ZNA who had somehow found out about the third-gens.
My dinner felt leaden in my stomach.
“And our food stores?” I asked Marvin.
“The same. Well packaged and negligible deterioration. The variety is limited, but it’s enough for survival.”
That’s the Space Fleet for you. Survive at all costs even if you had to eat the same meal again and again and again.
“That leaves Cass,” I said.
“Present!” the AI answered.
“You run any self-diagnostics?”
“Plenty. Every time I’ve unpackaged another part of me, I’ve diagnostic-ed myself up the wazoo.”
“Are you completely unpackaged now?”
“Yep. Just gotta sort it all out; it’s a bit of a mess in there. I was working under a time constraint. My data stack was not pretty.”
“Can you safely establish a connection to the closest Net?”
“As you know, there’s none in this system.” She was reminding me that to do so was outside the current realm of possibilities for artificial intelligences in the known systems.
All eyes turned toward me.
“If it’s safe, Cass, just do it. We need to know what’s happening.”
“Huh,” Marvin said. “I did not know that was possible.”
I ignored him.
“Establishing a link now,” Cassi said. “You know, if you reveal all my secrets to the greater universe, I can’t be an intragalactic AI of mystery.”
“Noted,” I replied. Then looked at Zy. “Go ahead,” I said. “Ask her.”
All eyes turned to look at Zyla.
“I placed a data stack in your system back on Ceres Alpha, Cassi,” Zy said. “Can you locate it?”
“Funny thing,” Cass said. “Since Ceres Alpha, I’ve been kinda busy. And there’s that whole rushing to compact my entire self into a data stack capable of crossing several systems. If it’s in there, it’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack until I have it all organised again.”
Zyla swore in Zenith.
“Allocate priority to locating that data stack,” I ordered.
“You got it, boss.”
“Have you connected to a Net yet?”
A pause and then, “I’m having some trouble. The two closest are overloaded, and the one farther away is taking its sweet time answering me. Something’s got its knickers in a twist.”
Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1) Page 17