The Colony Ship Vanguard: The entire eight book series in one bundle

by John Thornton

  Exiting the elevator Larissa was in the underground and widely unknown parts of E Habitat: the Wilds. There was a zero gravity conduit here as well as a transportation portal. Larissa had received items through the conduit before, but this time the delivery had been more significant than the usual things like handguns or multiceivers.

  The zero gravity conduit had delivered a yellow automacube, and two red automacubes. All shiny and newly created at the Reproduction and Fabrication Zone by the artificial intelligence, TSI-980RF.

  Larissa carefully inspected the three automacubes. They were exactly as she had ordered.

  “SA55 and SA56 we will be departing shortly. Are your munitions full and functional?” Larissa asked the automacubes, but she already knew they were fully loaded.

  “Affirmative,” both replied at once with the same sounding voice.

  “YA1, do you have the locations plotted?” she asked the yellow automacube.

  A button flashed on the display screen on the top of the yellow machine. It read, ‘PROCEED’ and below it was an un-illuminated button which read, ‘HALT’.

  Larissa turned her attention to the display next to the two portal doors. The doors were unusual, as they were much thicker than typical doors, and had a more hatch-like appearance. Larissa had never used them, nor had anyone she had known. The old transport system had been dysfunctional for her entire life. However, the information she had gotten from her multiceiver assured her it was working again.

  She checked the information on the multiceiver for yet another time.

  “TSI-1906, are you functional?” Larissa asked.

  The display lit up. An artificial intelligence system responded. “Yes. I am operating at 52% of capacity which allows me to direct transport vehicles adequately. The lattice has been reconnected and links and couplings established. How may I assist you?”

  “These three automacubes and I are going to External Repair Station V-2210. Take us to the nearest transport portal to that location,” Larissa replied. Trusting an AI was difficult for her, but she did not show that outwardly. The CPO had provided the information, and she knew it was reliable. It had to be. The mere fact that this AI was functional again was proof of the CPO claims.

  The hatch door popped open with a sound of air escaping. The yellow automacube rolled in first, followed by the two red ones, and finally Larissa.

  The vehicle had two rows of seats which lined the sides and faced each other. The automacubes rolled between the seats and toward the other end of the vehicle.

  “So we are going to meet again,” Larissa said as she patted her holstered weapon. “This time will be different.”

  The rear door shut. There were clanging noises and the vehicle uncoupled from the portal. “Proceeding to portal destination F-91SD. That is the nearest operational transport terminal to Exterior Repair Station V-2210.” The AI TSI-1906 activated the display at the front of the vehicle. Larissa watched as the progress of the vehicle was shown. She rubbed her forehead only once while she traveled. It was more than enough to remind her of her motives.

  17fighting

  “The tulips are roasted!” the Roe screamed as it charged. It had once been a female, probably a Free Ranger from the looks of the rags which had once been clothing. Its bright orange eyes were glowing, its hair disheveled. It carried a rod of metal which was barbed at the end. A rat carcass was hanging from the barb. The rat had obviously been partially consumed.

  Gretchen whipped out the Willie pistol and was about to fire when Paul yelled.

  “Is that her mother?”

  Gretchen hesitated just in time. She did not fire, but the Roe continued to advance.

  “That is not my momma!” Zoya cried out. She tried to back away, but the Roe struck her with the barbed rod of metal. Zoya was flung hard against the wall and slid down to the deck.

  Brinley tried to draw her sidearm, but the Roe swung the rod back so quickly that Brinley’s weapon was knocked away from her. Brinley scrambled after it.

  “The tulips are roasted!” the Roe roared. It shoved its shoulders back and let out a piercing cry, its mouth stretched so wide open it looked like its jaws would break. Foul odor came along with the words. “The tulips are roasted!”

  Piff, piff.

  Gretchen fired the pistol. The Roe was struck with those two impacts and its body jerked and twirled away. It kept kicking its legs feebly as it lay shuddering on the deck.

  Paul rushed to Zoya’s side and checked her. She was bruised but nothing was broken.

  Gretchen rushed to the Roe. She was joined by Brinley. Gretchen pulled out the medical kit and attached it to the still kicking Roe.

  A kick caught Gretchen’s arm and knocked it away. She tried again to attach the medical kit, but the confines of the small hallway, and the brutal struggling of the Roe made it nearly impossible to make the connections.

  “The tulips are roasted!” The feeble voice of the Roe said.

  Finally the kicking subsided, and Gretchen was able to attach the medical kit. She had it run an emergency diagnostic. The display read, ‘Prognosis very poor. Massive blood loss. Two extensive entry wounds to the thorax with exit wounds in the posterior lumbar areas. Pulmonary system collapsing due to penetration trauma and multiple shattered bone fragments resulting in flail chest. Pericardial tamponade developing, cardiac arrest imminent.’

  “Can you help at all?” Paul asked the modified blue automacube.

  There was no reply.

  Gretchen and Brinley sat near the Roe as it died.

  “I was hoping to be able to cure it. That would have been a good test,” Gretchen said. “I am not sure how we will subdue Zoya’s mother when we find her.”

  “Momma will not fight us,” Zoya said through tears. “She will not. She will not!”

  “Come on. We need to move before those infected tagalong animals show up,” Paul said as he helped Zoya to her feet. “You said the place was around the corner?”

  Zoya nodded. There was no other way to go, except past the Roe. The hallway behind them only had the water recycling door and no other passages.

  Brinley and Gretchen pulled the body of the Roe along until they could dump it into a side room. That room was empty except for a crushed stack of boxes. They laid the body there. There was a trail of blood leading from where the Roe had been shot to where they laid the body.

  “Hopefully the tagalongs will just follow the blood and not us,” Brinley said.

  “Yes, let us hope. But how do we now find Zoya’s mother? We are in the general vicinity, right?” Gretchen asked.

  “Not quite yet,” Zoya replied. The External Repair Station is this way, but we moved from there heading for the hanger bay.

  “Doctor 147 was going to use some method to track her mother by DNA, can this automacube do that?” Paul asked.

  “It installed those sensing devices, so I assume it can. It is the same memory vault so Doctor 147 is sort of still there,” Brinley replied. “Honestly, I am just not sure. We only have limited interaction. I could open it up and assess its internal functions. That will take some time, and I do not want to be out here when the tagalongs come.”

  “We could seal ourselves in the External Repair Station. The control chair was functional there, and you could work on the automacube. That way we are sure it is tracking my momma,” Zoya said with passion. “I will show you where it is.”

  Zoya led them around several corners, until they did locate the External Repair Station. Zoya punched in the color pad code, and the door slid to the side. The room was empty, and the two doors in the other walls were closed.

  Brinley came in and the automacube followed. Paul and Gretchen entered the room as well. The large control chair was there in front of the display. There were some lit switches and buttons on both the chair and the display screen.

  Zoya said, “This is where we came in. On the outside hull is where the shuttle crashed. Behind that door is the airlock, and this one is a storage compar
tment.”

  “It will take me a few minutes to check the memory vault and evaluate the re-purposing of the automacube. I am hoping we can set it to track Zoya’s mother.” Brinley squatted down and began working on the modified blue automacube. “If Doctor 147 had not been damaged we would be on the hunt right now.”

  Paul was examining the control chair. It was some of the most sophisticated equipment he had seen yet on the Vanguard. It was still decades behind the technology of Dome 17, but he was able to make some sense of its functioning.

  “It would have saved us a lot of time and effort to find this place when we were in the scout ship,” Paul said. “Then we could have docked here and simply entered through an official air lock rather than having to cut our way inside.”

  “Yes, that would have been much easier,” Gretchen confirmed. “Is there a way to use this technology to find where the scout ship is? Then we would not need to worry about that Klara person we spoke with.”

  “What about my momma?” Zoya asked in an irritated voice.

  “I am working on it,” Brinley said. “Mating the nonphysicality of the medical automacube to the physical status of the engineering model is not the simplest of tasks.”

  “Sorry, but I just feel we are close now. I recall we went up two decks from this station. I imagine momma is still on that level up there.” Zoya’s eyes filled with tears as she spoke. “We were in some kind of machine shop or building center. There were mechanical…. robots, or androids, and lots of strange parts there. I have not seen things like that before.”

  “I have not seen things like you describe,” Brinley said as she worked.

  Zoya changed the subject. “Do Roe wander far? I told momma I would come back for her. She will remember that, right? She will not have gone far, right?”

  Brinley hesitated in answering as she remembered very little from when she was infected and had been a Roe. She had not been infected nearly as long as Zoya’s mother was. Finally she replied, “The automacube will greatly help us to find her. We have come this far, we will not quit now. This is going to take me a bit of time.” Brinley took the cable jack and plugged the automacube into the control chair.

  Gretchen sat down on the control chair, and more of the display lit up. She pressed several buttons on the arm of the chair and saw changes on the display screen. “Old style system, but I think I can access some of it. Its self diagnostic says it is 67% functional now.”

  “When momma and I were here, it was like thirty some percent functional,” Zoya replied.

  “We are in V-2210. If I open some schematics I can see what else is around here and look for Zoya’s machine shop where she saw the mechanical bodies,” Gretchen continued. “Perhaps…. Nope, that is not right.” The display images fluttered and then returned. Gretchen adjusted some of the other controls on the chair’s arm. “There is a transportation terminal, F-91SD, which looks active. That is if I am reading this correctly. There is a hanger bay labeled as F-009 which looks to be two levels up, but there are sections of the deck plans which are blank or have odd colors and markings I do not understand.”

  Brinley closed up the back of the modified blue automacube. She then said, “This will do the DNA tracking, using the pneumatic-exhalation residue sniffers from the white automacube. However, it will not be anywhere nearly as precise as it would have been had Doctor 147 been doing it. I guess that machine is doing it, just using the engineering equipment. I had to reroute some of the couplings in ways that are, well, unorthodox, but it will work.”

  “So we leave now!” Zoya urged.

  “Brinley, what were the mechanical parts called that you said were ruined so there was no external communications?” Gretchen asked as a new set of images came to light on the display.

  “Macroactinide capacitor enhancers? Why?” Brinley asked. “They incorporate more than just mechanical parts. There are…”

  Gretchen interrupted. “This image has a flashing icon and when I activated it, the scroll on the bottom says that,” Gretchen pointed to the large display.

  Across the bottom, scrolling in green letters on a white background was, ‘Macroactinide bulletin: Repulsor projector fields: marginal. Microparticle turret system now at 29%. External tracking 19%’ The message kept repeating.

  Brinley stared at that. “Those systems have never been functional. That is it. That is what did it. That is how the shuttles have been targeted. The ship’s defensive systems are being rebuilt. This is very bad for the Free Rangers.”

  “Can you use this system to find our scout ship?” Paul asked from over Gretchen’s shoulder.

  “Nineteen percent is not a great deal for coverage, but let me see,” Gretchen tried to make the system work, but it kept flipping back to the same display.

  “Let me work it,” Brinley said.

  When Gretchen slid out of the control chair, the display went dark. Paul gasped thinking they had lost all the information.

  “No worries, Paulie,” Brinley said as she sat down and reinitiated the display. “The external trackers are showing an anomaly at one location. It is outside of the Wilds habitat on the cylinder’s hull. I will copy that location to the automacube as well as the site of the hanger bay and transport point Gretchen found.”

  Brinley then hopped down, the display screen darkened. She unplugged the automacube from the control chair, the cable retracting into the machine just above its drive wheels.

  “We need to find my momma,” Zoya said. She pressed the ‘PROCEED’ button on the automacube and it rolled over to the door which opened for it and out into the hallway. The people followed.

  The course the automacube took brought back memories to Zoya and felt familiar. It was the same one she and her mother had taken when leaving the External Repair Station. There were some changes, or perhaps they were things Zoya had overlooked on her first travel, as now they used the fusion pack for lighting. One corner of a room they passed through had a stagnant pond of water sitting in it fed by drips that came down the wall.

  Another room had a deactivated engineering automacube sitting in the shadows of a niche in the wall. Zoya wondered how she and her momma had missed that, but when the beam of light passed it by, it was lost in the shadows.

  “Do you think that anomaly was our scout ship?” Paul asked while they walked.

  “I may be,” Gretchen replied. “If that Klara was telling the truth, someone on the Vanguard knows where it is.”

  “Do you think Tiffany is still functional? I mean, if they are shooting down shuttles, did someone shoot the scout ship?” Paul was seriously concerned.

  The automacube stopped in front of a door which was different than the others. On it was stenciled; ‘Access Ladder’ and it stood propped open with a chunk of metal rammed into its hinges so it was only about a third of the way open.

  “That was momma doing that!” Zoya declared. “She left an invitation to show me which door!”

  By adjusting its drive wheels, and using the mechanical arm, the automacube was nimble enough to climb up the ladder. The ladder shaft was lit by a dull amber glow. They climbed to the next level up. There as Zoya had expected, they found a steel door already open. They had found the hallway which led to the place Zoya had last seen her mother. It was moderately lit, with occasional flickering lights. Large pipes ran along the opposite wall.

  “This is the way!” Zoya declared as she followed the automacube out and past the pressure door which was to their left.

  As Brinley was exiting the ladder the pressure door snapped open, and something struck her hard knocking her back against the others. The air was knocked out of her as she impacted the permalloy ladder. Gretchen lost her footing and fell onto Paul who slipped and fell to the deck below at the bottom of the ladder.

  “Pusillanimous cowardly tomatoes!” a voice cried from the pressure door’s threshold.

  Brinley only got a glimpse of the attacker as she was hit.

  Zoya turned quickly and looked back.
The Roe had once been a stoutly built man with wide shoulders and short frame. The remains of some unidentifiable clothing covered its scarred body. With both its gnarled hands, it held a long bone which had only a few scraps of flesh left on it. The Roe’s orange eyes blazed hatred at Zoya. It swung the long bone again, slamming into the rusty ladder compartment door and sending it shut with a grinding slam. It swung the bone yet again and the door pushed inward even more.

  “Pusillanimous cowardly tomatoes!”

  Zoya backed up, and watched as the Roe approached.

  Brinley had regained herself and tried to shove open the door so she and the others could aid Zoya. The door was jammed in its frame and felt as solid as the permalloy walls around it.