Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  27

  Erik leaned on a storage rack and watched the techs securing the brace to the deck, to keep the deepynine carcass from becoming ‘loose gear’, and a manoeuvring hazard. They hammered and cranked to get the bolts in place, all second-shift crew, though some of first-shift were up and watching, bleary-eyed but intense. The carcass itself was just the forward part that contained the head, indistinct from the rest of the body save that the techs had sawn it clean through to get it out, and back aboard PH-1 in a state that didn’t scare anyone unnecessarily.

  Three eyes this time, Erik thought, sipping coffee and staring at the ruined dark-silver beast. One big eye and two lower at the sides. Irregularly offset, perhaps for depth-perception. A few drops of residual fluid dripped on the deck. The techs said it had gushed out when they’d cut it, like synthetic blood. Scanning had confirmed it contained no nano particles. That was the last thing they needed — a hacksaw nano infestation on the ship.

  Lisbeth arrived at Erik’s side, edging past several watching crew. Erik patted the spare bit of storage shelf beside him, and she came and leaned, also sipping coffee. Like any true Phoenix crewman, she’d come via the kitchen coffee tap first.

  “Wow,” Lisbeth said above the noise. “Surreal, much.”

  Erik nodded. “Makimakala wanted to send people to come and look, but we said no.”

  Lisbeth glanced at him. “Is it serious?”

  “We’re barely on speaking terms at the moment. I’m not quite about to kick them out of the apartment, but they’re definitely sleeping on the couch. How’s Trace?”

  Lisbeth frowned. “You can’t call her Trace. She’s the Major.”

  “I call her Trace all the time in private. All senior officers use first names, we only use ranks where enlisted crew can hear.” Lisbeth made a face. “You could call her Trace too, in private. She’d probably prefer it.”

  “If she’d prefer it, she can tell me.”

  “She’s big on people making personal choices. She won’t tell you to do anything unless you’re in her chain of command.” Lisbeth thought about that, eyes straying to where Romki sat in terse conversation with his display screen beside the drysine queen’s head. That watching red eye, suspended in the nano-fluid, gave her the creeps. “So how is she?”

  “Well you know,” said Lisbeth with a shrug. There wasn’t really much to be said about Major Thakur that wouldn’t be cheapened with words. “Does she have any family?”

  “Kulina don’t see much of their family,” said Erik. “They join young and sever a lot of family ties. Trace was particularly eager to leave her family. I hear her dad was a bastard and her mum was indifferent, they had a tough life in a mining base. Sugauli’s a rough place, it was founded in violence and it’s no garden spot. We glorify and mysticize it, but it’s a traumatised culture to this day. I think for Trace, the Kulina were an escape.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No. She doesn’t talk about it. And I wouldn’t advise asking — she’s not sensitive about much, but Kaspowitz says she won’t talk about it even with him, and they’ve been friends for ages.”

  “Okay,” came Romki’s voice across the noise. “Okay, I’m getting a reading on that spike… could you… is that firm contact?” As the hammering died and techs looked on, while one spacer manoeuvred a slim instrument that Erik did not recognise into a gruesome gap in the deepynine’s armour.

  Erik and Lisbeth flipped down their AR glasses. “You’ve been talking to Romki about the queen’s status?” he asked Lisbeth.

  “Um, yeah,” Lisbeth said nervously.

  “And?”

  “Shouldn’t you, like, get a proper briefing from Stan or Rooke?”

  “I have, but Stan and Rooke talk like machines. I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “Right.” Lisbeth took a deep breath, and tried not to be nervous. It was only her brother. “Well what we’re talking to is certainly not ‘the queen’. I mean, in my opinion anyway.”

  “Don’t qualify everything,” Erik said calmly. “Go on.”

  “Well the construct the tavalai helped create is nearly complex enough to be low-sentience in its own right. Maybe. But it takes more than just complexity to create sentience, or that’s what my college instructor told me… not that humans are allowed to do it, of course. It takes structure too. The surviving portions of the queen’s brain are providing some of that structure, and the construct is drawing on those through the nano-tank.”

  “So the construct can access some of her memories, com functions and other stuff,” Erik reasoned.

  “Right.”

  “But it can’t actually think using that original brain, because the Major blew that part away.”

  “Sure,” Lisbeth agreed. “Basically. But then, the Major’s pretty sure the queen’s a lot smarter than she lets on. Stan says some of those surviving brain portions might be doing a lot more than their original designation. He says they’re a lot more active than you’d expect, and that some of the old Dobruta literature says hacksaws use outerlying brain segments to store primary information…”

  “Like making a backup of the mainframe,” Erik interrupted.

  Lisbeth nodded. “Exactly. So if the construct is really accessing the backup of her main CPU… then we might be talking to something far closer to the real thing.”

  “In your opinion,” said Erik. “Is it sentient right now? Or just a set of automated responses?”

  “I…” Lisbeth trailed off as she thought about it. “I think that’s a very outmoded concept of AI consciousness. I mean, the automated/reasoned divide. Most of what the human brain does is automated, we don’t pay conscious thought to most of it. Just because most of the queen's responses are automatic doesn’t mean it’s not aware of what it’s doing.”

  “There!” Rooke interrupted, peering at his screens as techs manoeuvred the spikes into the deepynine’s neural clusters. “There that’s got it, it’s downloading data.” It certainly was. Erik could see the data levels shooting upward, filling out a 3D data construct.

  Adequate, spelt out the cursor on AR glasses and data screens.

  “Is that enough?” Romki pressed. “Are you getting enough data?” No reply. Possibly it didn’t like pointless questions, Lisbeth thought. “What can you tell us about it?”

  Deepynine. Command function. Designation uncertain.

  “You’ve never encountered this designation before?” Romki asked.

  “Maybe she never had much combat experience in the war,” said Rooke.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Romki. “AI memories are collective, she doesn’t need to have been there herself.”

  “She might not be very old,” Rooke protested. “She might have been made after the war, we don’t know what replication technologies survived — there were none sufficient in the rock at Argitori, but she hadn’t been there for the full twenty five thousand years.”

  It gave Lisbeth an idea. “This designation is unfamiliar,” she said loudly enough to cut through the men’s conversation. “Is this designation more or less advanced than familiar designations?”

  More, said the text.

  Everyone looked at Lisbeth. “This deepynine was made after the war,” Lisbeth explained. “Possibly a lot later. That’s why she doesn’t recognise it.”

  “Well hang on,” Rooke protested. “There’s too many variables to…”

  Yes, said the text. She is correct. Rooke abandoned his protest, and Lisbeth gave him a ‘so there’ look. Deepynine command unit. Advanced.

  “What level of technological sophistication is required to build something like this?” Romki pressed. “Could you make this deepynine unit in a small base or outpost? Or would it require a large civilisation? Big space stations, a large economy?”

  Large, the queen admitted. And Romki slumped in his seat, staring at his screen. Confirmation of his theory, Erik thought, with a cold chill. Deepynines were still out there. In production, on a large scale.
>
  “Alo,” Romki breathed. “It has to be the alo.”

  Deepynine unit memory corrupted. Unable to access data.

  “Well what can you tell us?” Erik asked.

  Memory corruption intentional. A security measure. Security measure is high deepynine command-level. Alien to sard.

  “Wait,” Rooke said eagerly. “Does that mean only another AI could have written the code that caused the memory to corrupt under examination?”

  Only the highest deepynine command-level.

  “How high?” asked Romki.

  The highest.

  “A queen!” Lisbeth breathed. “The sard have a deepynine queen! Erik, she’s probably at this shipbuilding base we’re looking for. She’s probably running the whole show… who else would know how to reprogram those drysine drones that attacked Joma Station? The sard don’t know how, but she would.”

  Further data, scrolled the text, not disagreeing. Deepynine unit has unique optical and radiation settings. Suggest unique solar environment. Combination matches datapoint memory.

  “Oh no way!” gasped Second Lieutenant Rooke, sounding more like the whiz kid he’d once been than the Fleet officer he’d become. “She’s found the base!”

  “Show us,” Erik commanded. A starchart visual appeared on his AR glasses, holographic projection and finely detailed. It rotated as strange, alien lines appeared between glowing centres of highlighted activity — huge long strings of them, criss-crossed with jump-lanes like freeways, long since adjusted for solar motions as space-time expanded. Hacksaw civilisation in the time of the drysine-deepynine war. Erik stared, mouth open. Amidst the profusion, one system highlighted and blinked. Letters appeared — Gsi-81T. “Are you familiar with this system?”

  It is on charts. Production base, primary class. No record exists of its destruction. Likely survivor of deepynine-drysine wars.

  “Show us what you know.”

  The holographic visual upon the glasses changed, and something new appeared. It was a sphere, made up of an open, skeletal structure in two distinct hemispheres about a central core. It looked a bit like the skeleton of some dead sea urchin washed up on a beach. Erik squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw. Then the image zoomed upon a small speck to one side… and his mouth dropped open again. The speck was a warship. A big one, to judge by the ratio of engines to crew cylinder… and next to this big, open structure, it was a small dot in space.

  “Oh good fucking god,” Romki muttered. Many of the techs gasped or swore as well, as they grasped the scale of it.

  Drysine mid-orbital industrial complex, fifty-first iteration of preliminary design, scrolled the text. One hundred and twenty of your kilometres in diameter. Lithium fusion core, inner storage modules are for powerplant manufacture, inner rims for neural processing, basic mining and alloy refinery on the outer rims. Capable of producing one priority-class warship approximately per one human week, indefinitely, materials allowing, with a production timeline of half-a-year per ship.

  “Twenty-five at a time,” Lisbeth breathed. “Fifty per year. Dozens of similar facilities.” It made current human capabilities look tiny. And this was just one section of drysine-controlled space.

  No wonder the organics unfortunate enough to be around in the Machine Age had never stood a chance, Erik thought. Production capabilities like this were unknown in all the galaxy today. Unless the alo had something similar, and had only been committing a tiny fraction of what they could produce to the Triumvirate War. The possibility turned his blood cold. He had to get in there and see what the sard had done with this thing. And who had helped them set it up.

  “What are its defensive systems?” Erik asked.

  A second flood of text followed, as though the queen were losing her inhibitions. Numerous, but subject to alteration if currently under deepynine control. My data will be obsolete and dangerously misleading. Presence of sard/deepynine vessel at TK55 suggests they are aware of the threat. Direct assault with combined force of Phoenix, Makimakala and Rai Jang appears to have negligible chance of success. Recommend the accumulation of greater forces.

  Everyone in the room was looking at Erik. It was his call, Erik knew. Lieutenant Commander or not, this was his ship to command, and he was supposed to be the guy with the answers.

  He exhaled hard. “She’s not wrong,” he admitted. “Problem is, right now we appear to be short of friends.”

  “All hands, take hold!” came Second Lieutenant Abacha’s call from the bridge. “Jump contact, combat V, Phoenix is red alert!”

  Everyone ran, like animals at the waterhole scattering when a predator attacks. Erik grabbed Lisbeth and joined them, ship schematic immediately flashing on his glasses as it did in manoeuvre emergencies, indicating unoccupied acceleration slings. He pushed Lisbeth into one of the slings that burst from their emergency seals on the G-wall, then ignored a spacer indicating he should take another and ran for the bridge. There were no slings in the trunk corridor, any passage running fore-to-aft was prone to being hit at killing velocities by anything breaking loose at high-thrust further up, and if snapped would become killing projectiles themselves along with their occupants.

  Spacers running about him darted into side-corridors, and sling-icons on his glasses were quickly occupied, like the craziest game of musical chairs. Then the ten-second countdown started, and Erik realised that he wasn’t going to make it anywhere close to the bridge. He took the next left, past two occupied slings then into an unoccupied one at five seconds. A quick turn to orient himself with his back to the G-wall, pulling the synthetic mesh up around his shoulders. Zero seconds, and thrust kicked him clean off his feet and back into the sling hard, as rotational G eased, then faded completely. His back nearly touched the G-wall as thrust increased, then with a whine the net motors pulled the sling tighter as the sides enfolded around him, and he managed with effort to zip himself in from the inside, then clip his harness to the inner clips.

  Just as hard as it had begun, G eased. They weren’t running, Erik realised with relief — that would mean abandoning their people on TK55. They were headed to TK55, much faster than a shuttle could, to intercept the shuttle already on standby there, and save several minutes on their retrieval time. The away-crew would be racing now, getting into those big transit passages in the base and jetting up to impressive speeds to reach the shuttle.

  Erik accessed command feed without having to ask, and bridge scan feed appeared on his glasses — scan with inbound ships, three so far, two-minutes-light and closing fast. Erik did fast calculations and wondered if he’d have the time to get up to the bridge. They were closing on TK55 but not too fast, there was no need to arrive before their crew was ready to be picked up. Lieutenant Alomaim was in command over there, with Ensign Hale, Erik’s old friend from when he’d been third-shift commander. And he realised that it would only be worth getting up to bridge if his entire first-shift bridge crew could get up there with him. Bridge crews were a team, and putting himself at the head of a team more accustomed to Draper could conceivably lead to worse outcomes than if he stayed in his sling.

  “Lieutenant Draper, I’m reading active tracking!” came Abacha again from Scan. “It’s close range. I think one of those mines just went active, it’s tracking us.”

  “Query Makimakala,” Draper said calmly. “Nav, I want that escape trajectory.”

  “Aye Lieutenant,” came Lieutenant De Marchi’s reply. “I have three possibles on best escape track. We going with or without Makimakala?”

  “Depends what they say about that mine,” Draper said reasonably.

  “This is away team,” came Lieutenant Alomaim’s voice, crackling with interference. “ETA two minutes fifty. PH-3 confirm position?”

  “This is PH-3, do not decelerate upon leaving the transit tunnel. Maintain velocity, PH-3 will rendezvous with you. Away team respond.”

  “Away team copies PH-3, make it a good catch.”

  They were going to come flying out of that tra
nsit tunnel at over a hundred kph accumulated velocity, and PH-3 was going to chase and intercept to save time. Heck of a thing with Engineering department spacers along who didn’t practise emergency retrieval intercepts as often as marines did. Shit, Erik thought as the bridge chatter continued, fast and professional. If Draper screwed this up they could not only lose lives, they could ruin whatever relations were left with Makimakala, possibly even end up shooting at them. He had to get up there… only he couldn’t, he needed a clear window of at least a minute with no possible manoeuvring to change bridge crews.

  If that mine hadn’t locked on he might have got that minute, but if tavalai mines started chasing them, possibly attracted by the sudden manoeuvres in their midst, there was the real chance that Phoenix would have to push hard enough to make red smears of anyone moving unsecured in the ship. Draper would do it too, even if it was the LC unsecured. The first thing they drummed into you in the Academy when you sat the command chair was that it didn’t matter who was loose on the ship when a ship-killing scenario came racing at you — you moved, or everyone died. It was of course the reason why they didn’t allow family to serve together on warships, and strongly discouraged anyone who sat the chair from having intimate relations with crew. In the wrong situation, you had to be prepared to kill your own crew to save the ship. Erik thought of Lisbeth. He knew Phoenix crew had made common agreement with each other that getting Lisbeth into an acceleration sling was number one priority in any trouble. They did it not from chivalry, but from the real fear that their LC might not hit thrust when he had to, and would get them all killed from his concern for his sister.

  “Incoming transmission!” came Lieutenant Lassa on Coms. “Signal registers as Fleet, light delay one minute forty-six.”

  “Hello UFS Phoenix. This is UFS Mercury, Captain Ritish commanding. By order of Fleet Command, you will surrender your ship and accept Fleet terms of pardon, as previously stipulated by marine Colonel Khola. Failing this you will be declared outlaw from all humanity, and hunted to destruction at the ends of the galaxy if necessary. Mercury out, awaiting your reply.”