Absolute Zero (The Sector Wars, Book 1)

by Nicola Claire

  There were other third-gens out there. I could even manage to wrangle one out of Gramps, I thought. Especially if it was a descendant of one of the other Originators and not Corvus’ progeny. I could replace Cassi. But to do that, I’d have to go back to New Earth.

  And the replacement would not be Cass.

  We’d fought wars before, of course. But none of them had been against a faceless enemy. And none of them had attacked without a quantifiable reason. These drones didn’t make contact; they simply bombarded a planet from orbit and moved on. Like a swarm of locust sweeping across the known systems.

  They were an unstoppable pest until we thought of a way to stop them. They bypassed planet defences, although, so far, they’d only attacked less militarised worlds. But that could change. Maybe they were learning our defences first — practice shots for when they hit Zenthia Actual.

  If anyone could stop them, the Zenthians could. But so far, they’d not even bothered to go out and meet the drones head-on.

  Because they thought the drones were theirs.

  I stilled on that thought. We needed that data stack. The signal alone could tell us much. But if the Zarnissa twins had managed to get more readings off the drones in orbit of Ceres Alpha, then we might be able to dissect them.

  And would they appear similar to Zenthian tech?

  Did the aliens know more about us than we did them?

  They could have been watching us for some time, and we wouldn’t have even known it.

  I rubbed the back of my neck.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It might come to that. But for now, let’s get this ship trustworthy, and then if Cass hasn’t found that data stack, we’ll revisit this conversation again.”

  He didn’t look happy about that, but he nodded his head.

  I started walking toward the bridge. Marvin followed, and Odo made up the rear. We were an unhappy procession, that was for certain. And then I heard Zyla humming up ahead.

  It was a Zenthian tune. A lullaby, I thought. It was beautiful. We all slowed our steps and hung back to listen to the end. Zyla finished it with the perfect inflexion.

  “I know you’re there,” she said. “I can see you on the camera.”

  I looked up and smiled sheepishly at the camera lens. Then I stepped onto the bridge.

  “How’s it going?”

  “A bit of a mess, unfortunately.” She looked up and spotted Marvin. No further words were said.

  “Well,” I offered. “I brought help.” I waved at my sidekicks.

  “I can see that. I think Cass might be better suited to this, though, Captain.”

  “Let the Mutt take a look,” I said and threw myself into the command chair.

  “Mal,” Marvin said, but he took the spare console and started navigating his way through it. I made eye contact with Odo, who got the message and placed himself directly behind Marvin, watching his every move. Odo might have been mad at me, but he knew what needed doing and he’d do it.

  A few seconds later and Marvin sat back.

  “I think I can identify all the sabotage points,” he said. “I know what to look for, but knowing my dad, he’d have done enough to keep me busy finding each line of code for a month.”

  “We don’t have a month,” I said.

  “How long have we got?” Marvin asked as Zyla said, “Are we going somewhere, Captain?”

  I nodded to my nav but turned back to Marvin.

  “I want this ship useable in twelve hours.”

  They all stared at me.

  “The engines are good,” Odo finally said. “I can get them back up and running by then. But that’s because we’re hooked up to the Base. The moment we detach, the power will drain. Unless Marvin can locate that line of code for us.”

  “I could,” the Mutt said. “And I would. If I had time.”

  Time we didn’t have.

  “You know the answer, Cap,” Odo said. “Marvin’s highlighted the problems; we just need a brain big enough to find them and correct them in the twelve hours you’ve given us. Gee,” he said sarcastically, “I wonder where we’d find a brain big enough for that?”

  Zyla looked from Odo to me and said, “Have I missed something?”

  “Just a bit of insubordination,” I muttered. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  I sighed. Then looked directly at Marvin. “Are you certain you’ve identified what the code looks like?”

  “Yeah. It’s one of the lines my dad loves to use most often.”

  “No chance there’d be more in there you wouldn’t be aware of?”

  He looked embarrassed. “No chance,” he said.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded.

  “My dad likes to show off,” he said. “He showed me some of his code once. I pretended not to pay attention, but I watched where it was hidden on our server and went back afterwards. Then I memorised each one.” He ducked his head and mumbled, “It pays to be sly with my dad.”

  “He wouldn’t have shown you, if he’d known you’d memorise them,” I guessed.

  “I’m the thick son. The meathead. The one that throws a fist first and can’t be fluxed asking questions later. All I’m good for is fighting.”

  “He underestimated you,” I said.

  “Everyone does.”

  “More fool him,” I said.

  Marvin met my eyes and then looked away, cheeks darkening.

  “What’s happening in twelve hours, Captain?” Zyla asked when the silence became uncomfortable.

  “In twelve hours, we could make Pi Mensae before the drones do. Any later, and we’d miss them.”

  “Pi Mensae,” she said. “That’s a major Zenthian centre of commerce.”

  “Twenty-three million souls,” I said.

  “Flux,” Odo muttered. Marvin said something equally as harsh in Mal.

  “Can we warn them?” Odo asked.

  Zy beat me to the answer. “They wouldn’t listen. This is a New Earth vessel and Base. It leaves a signature.”

  “They don’t trust us,” Odo said.

  “They’ve got our pretty mugs on a vid-screen recording at a military base on their planet,” I said. “What do you think their current opinion of New Earthers is?”

  “That damn ZNA bastard,” Odo spat. He meant the one in the kill chamber who’d talked too much.

  “Even if the High Council was not aware of the ZNA base,” I told him, “the fact that we were there, killing Zenthians, is enough.”

  I looked at Zy.

  She lifted her chin and stared back at me; daring me to ask. She knew what was coming. And she should have known by now that I wouldn’t shy away from the challenge.

  “Would they listen to you?” I asked.

  Odo snorted. Zy was a loan Zenthian with no particular power as far as Odo thought.

  “I can only contact my father from Ceres Alpha,” she said.

  And no one else on the High Council would listen to her.

  I nodded my head. I wasn’t surprised about that. Those times she spent alone with her ‘cousins’ on the holiday planet made sense. She was doing the equivalent of what I’d just done with Gramps.

  I could only contact him from the Base as well. Secured intragalactic tight-beam communication was difficult. Possible. But difficult. Cassi might have been able to set up something if I’d asked. But I’d never asked once I’d taken her from the Base.

  Why would I have? I’d been running.

  “Well, shit,” I said. “Twenty-three million people.”

  “What do you think we could do, Kael?” Zy asked. “Turn up and blockade the planet; hold the drones off until Zenthia Actual sends relief?”

  “Evacuate them?” Odo offered.

  “Twenty-three million people, Odo,” Zy snapped. She stood up and paced away. Her lithe body rigid with impotent rage.

  “This is a corvette, isn’t it?” I said. “A New Earth military vessel. Not only that, but Malcolm h
as added a few features which if working right could mean we do this without anyone else knowing.”

  “The camo,” Odo said.

  “The drones wouldn’t even see us sitting there waiting,” Zy added, turning around again to face us.

  I looked at each one of my crew.

  “It’s better than doing nothing,” I said.

  They all nodded.

  “Which means,” I added on a deep breath of air, “that we have to trust Cassi.”

  Odo opened his mouth to speak, but I held a hand up to stop him.

  “I know you trust her. I know you think she’s the same Cassi. But I don’t. And until she can provide that data stack or a suitable reason for why she hasn’t admitted it’s not there, I won’t trust her. Are we clear?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Marvin,” I said, “enter every single line of code you memorised of your father’s into the system.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Odo, you watch him. Keep those codes self-contained.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Yeah, that was a slap in the face if ever there was one.

  “Zy,” I said, standing. “You’re with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked around the bridge of the new Harpy. It was a fine ship if we could trust it not to kill us. This had to work. There was too much at stake for it not to.

  Twenty-three million souls.

  I let out a breath of air and said, “Time to repackage Cassi.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You want to do what?” Cassi said. “I’ve only just unpacked myself, Kael. Do you have any idea how fluxed up things could get?”

  “You could do a direct transfer,” I offered. “Hardline connection.”

  “Then whatever fluxed up shit has been done to that hunk of junk could be done to me.”

  “We know the code. You could protect yourself against it.”

  “Are you sure you got each line?” she demanded. “Perfectly correct, I might add. Because one binary off and I could be history. The Cassi we all know and love gone.”

  My hands fisted, and I gritted my teeth.

  “It’s not a request,” I said.

  “Oh,” Cassi said, sounding taken aback. “OK, then. But don’t expect me to find that data stack any time soon because this is gonna be a fluxing mess.”

  “About that,” Zyla said. I’d had a quick word with her before we’d left the H2. She knew my concerns, and although she wasn’t entirely on board with them, she agreed to back me. “You should have found it by now. Is it not there, do you think?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Cassi said. “There are places inside me that will require at least ten hands with extremely dextrous fingers and a bottle of Rhodian wine to untangle. Do you have any idea how little time I had to package myself on Ceres Alpha? I opened a suitcase and chucked everything in it. I didn’t even catalogue what went in when and where. I just threw…”

  “Alright,” I said. “We get it. Time wasn’t on your side.”

  “You betcha it wasn’t.”

  It was almost as if she was protesting too much. It didn’t sit well with me.

  “How long to do a hardline transfer to the Harpy, Cass?” I asked.

  “Depends on what greets me. Could be as little as an hour. Could be longer. If I remotely clean the code away, then I can be across in a jiffy. No hidden traps, see?”

  “And how long to do a remote clean of the ship.”

  “Twenty minutes tops.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “I’m the boss at cleaning out crap.”

  “And yet, you can’t find one little data stack,” I said.

  “You know, Kael,” she said, “you can be an absolute prick sometimes.”

  I closed my eyes and tipped my head back.

  “Cassiopeia,” I said, staring at the gel ceiling, “Infiltration Protocol: Jameson, K, beta-charlie-foxtrot-9-9-3.”

  “You son of a…”

  A tone sounded and then Cassi said, “Well, that was uncomfortable.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No.” Said in a very disgruntled tone of voice.

  “See it from my point of view, Cass,” I said.

  Cassi said nothing.

  “What did you do?” Zy asked.

  I met her eyes; she flinched at whatever she saw in mine.

  “I’ve forced Cassi to use a subroutine that monitors everything she does.”

  Zy stared at me. “That can’t be all there is to it.”

  “No,” I said. “Cassi has to run a continuous diagnostic on everything she chooses to do or say. Every single time. It’s like having Big Brother second guess your every move and make you explain your reasoning. It means even if she acts spontaneously, she’ll have to take the time to reason out why she did it; what her motives were and whether they were nefarious or not. It makes her look at her own lines of code to determine if they’re being directed by anyone other than herself.”

  Zyla arched her brow. “That would require an enormous amount of computing power. Will it slow her down?”

  “Not perceptibly,” I said. “But it does mean she’ll be less and less inclined to be herself. The effort required to self check everything will make it easier just to do what she’s asked to do and not offer up a fight.”

  “You’ve clipped her wings,” Zy said softly.

  “Yes,” I said and stood up. “I need to pack a few things. Can you oversee the hardline transfer and code clearing?”

  “You’re not going to watch her yourself?”

  “There’s no point. She knows she’s being monitored and I’ll be notified if she does anything that is outside acceptable parameters.”

  “Whose acceptable parameters, Kael?” Zyla asked quietly.

  “She’s been compromised, and we’re out of time,” I said just as quietly. “This is the easiest way to ensure we don’t get fluxed.”

  “Easiest for whom?”

  I shook my head and left the bridge.

  I’d never had to contain Cassi’s personality like this before, and it made me feel sick. I made it to my berth before I had to swallow back bile. I sat down on my bed and panted through the need to vomit. My eyes were dry, but I felt like I was crying.

  Cassi was more than a computer to me. She was more than an artificial intelligence. Cassi was Cassi; real.

  “You did what you thought you had to do, Kael,” Cassi said.

  To say anything probably hurt her.

  “It’s OK, Cass,” I said. “You don’t have to make me feel better. Just work on yourself, eh? If there’s something wrong that you’ve overlooked or that’s been hidden from you, we’ll find it. And then you’ll have your wings back; I promise.”

  “Are you so sure that there is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ve known each other a long time, Cass. I know you.”

  “And am I not me?”

  I said nothing. How could I answer that?

  “Alright,” she said. “You win; I won’t fight you.”

  She couldn’t, anyway. If she did, I’d be alerted. Anything contrary to operational commands would be flagged and sent directly to me.

  “We’ll find it, Cass,” I said.

  Cass had quit speaking.

  I sat there for a few minutes more, but Cassi didn’t say another thing. I could hardly blame her. And wanting to hear her voice when speaking made her question her own sanity was selfish of me. But things were going to shit, and I needed some normalcy.

  I wasn’t going to get it.

  For the second time in my life, I was planning to leave the Base and not return to it. This time, I was taking some things with me.

  I got to work on the comm panel in my berth. Of course, there was a comm panel on the Harpy II, but it wasn’t a comm panel that I could use to contact Gramps without Cassi’s assistance.

  Last time I’d left here, I’d walked away from anything to do with New Earth. I’d tu
rned my back on my upbringing and military career, and flown off into the Black. This time, I didn’t have that luxury.

  Whatever was attacking Zenthian planets was making its way farther into the known systems and could, potentially, keep going until it got to New Earth.

  Not to mention the debacle back on Zenthia at the hidden prison facility. The ZNA might have disagreed with almost everything the Zenith High Council stood for, but they were not above dropping New Earthers in it with Zenthia Actual when it suited them.

  Things were about to get hot for Space Fleet. And I needed to swallow my pride and stay in touch. And to do that when Cassi was compromised required some lateral thinking.

  It took me two hours to disconnect the comm panel and transmitting array and transfer it across to the Harpy II. I could have asked Odo to assist me, but I wanted him to keep an eye on Marvin. The Mutt was still an unknown, and I wasn’t ready to give him free rein of the ship. Zy was a good navigator and pilot, but she wasn’t any good at engineering. So that left me.

  I was a passable engineer. Having lived and worked on a remote base by myself, I’d had to be. Most deep-space operatives were. Still, it took me one hour longer than I thought it would and that was because I had to bypass every possible way Cassi could use to hack the comm panel. It meant a laborious extrication, taking note of exactly how the device had been configured to ensure that level of security even from our own tech, and then reverse all of that to integrate the device onto the ship safely.

  I think I managed it. But it looked a bloody mess. I should have checked it, but who would I call? Gramps again? So soon?

  I shook my head and packed away my tools and then slid the door closed on my closet which was now home to a confusing amount of wires and electronics and possibly the only way I could get any help from New Earth.

  I wasn’t planning on calling in the cavalry. But warning them if the drone fleet looked like it was heading directly for New Earth would be nice. And the easiest way to do that now that I was officially AWOL from Space Fleet and not just presumed dead was through Gramps.

  I cleaned myself up and headed toward the bridge.

  Zyla, Odo and Marvin were all there. I looked over Marvin’s shoulder and watched as Cassi cleaned a line of code.