Wallace nodded. ‘Technically it’s possible, but practically a point of weakness in the containment field develops, a hotspot is formed, the plasma burns out through that weak point, and the pressure is let off in other areas. One entire side of this reactor has been split open.’
Aneka was seeing what Wallace was seeing now as she got used to viewing the rotating, line-art image. ‘That looks less like a breach and more like an explosion.’
‘Yes,’ Wallace agreed, ‘though I did say more analysis was needed. I’d like some ultra-high-def scans made of the reactor itself when we’re done checking over the room.’
‘That shouldn’t take long,’ Gillian commented. ‘The room itself was trashed and then exposed to hard vacuum for over a millennium. There’s little there to examine.’
‘Quite. Computer, display the sub-light drive room.’ The image changed to show another room containing another, vaguely spherical machine which, again, looked badly damaged. ‘Unfortunately, this drive was hit by the plasma backwash fairly badly. I doubt there’s much salvageable, and there may be very little we can learn from it.’
‘That looks like it exploded as well,’ Aneka commented.
‘It possibly did. You may have noticed that the vessel has no obvious exhaust port exterior to the hull? Xinti vessels frequently used some form of reactionless drive technology. We’ve never got to the bottom of how they worked, but we suspect some form of exotic matter. It’s possible that containment of that matter failed when the reactor exploded. We don’t know. A chemical analysis of the materials in the room may give us more information. Can we have the warp drive chamber, please?’
The next display looked like it was going to be more promising. The warp drive itself, a cylindrical device occupying much of the room, seemed intact. Wallace sounded a lot more enthusiastic when he spoke. ‘This is more like it. The warp drive is intact, the room itself undamaged. We’ve never had what could be a functional Xinti warp drive to study, at least not since the one which came down on Old Earth all those years ago. In Aneka’s time, in fact.’
‘A little after my time,’ Aneka replied.
Wallace acknowledged the correction with a slight shrug. ‘So, the plan is for Bash to assist Cassandra and myself in going over the damaged rooms and then move on to the undamaged drive. While that is happening, Monkey and Delta will be rigging additional power lines into the ship so that we can get power to the sensor systems and computer.’
‘I’m quite keen to get the computer’s storage systems online,’ Gillian put in. ‘There could be a lot of very interesting information in there.’
‘Powering up the computer?’ Aneka said. ‘Isn’t that… risky?’
‘It probably won’t be functional,’ Wallace replied. ‘It may take a lot of effort to reconstruct its memory once we have it powered up and I doubt the actual operating software is complete enough to function. Even if it is, there’s little it can do. The ship has no weapons. Its sub-light drive is destroyed and while the warp drive is largely intact, there is significant damage to the power conduits leading into it.’
‘Okay,’ Aneka said, though she could not help thinking it was still a bad idea. ‘What am I doing?’
‘You’ll be shadowing me and Ella,’ Gillian replied. ‘We’ll be going through the other rooms checking for anything useful. That medical bay you found is a priority. We want to gather up any chemicals, drugs, whatever, for analysis back at the university.’
‘And we’ll be keeping an eye on you all from the station,’ Drake said. ‘Not as interesting as our usual tasks, but more relaxing.’
‘Hopefully more relaxing than Alpha Mensae,’ Shannon said. ‘We’re quite sure there aren’t any hidden Xinti robots aboard that thing?’
‘No,’ Gillian said, ‘which is why Aneka is going to be packing her… Bessie is it?’
Aneka grinned. She had named the handgun the Xinti had provided her with ‘Bessie.’ ‘Yeah, Bessie will be along to introduce herself if something nasty crawls out of a corner. Let’s hope not because she’s about as subtle as an anti-tank rocket.’
5.8.524 FSC.
‘That’s Bessie?’ Delta asked, nodding at the pistol strapped to Aneka’s right thigh. It was big, chunky, with an over-sized barrel wrapped in a very solid shell.
‘That’s her,’ Aneka replied, patting the gun’s butt where the power cell was. ‘A Xinti anti-matter blaster. Basically she launches a few anti-protons down a channel evacuated by a laser. It causes a small nuclear explosion at the point it hits. Like I said, not subtle.’
‘Uh, no.’ Delta came to a stop beside the hatch leading to the machine shop in the station. ‘Well, wish me luck. A day of working with Monkey laying power cables.’
Aneka smiled and pushed off towards the bridge to the Agroa Gar. ‘You’ll be fine. Monkey’s a great guy once you get to know him.’ She got only a grunt and the sound of the hatch being opened in reply.
Gillian and Ella were waiting outside the engineering rooms. Beyond them, Aneka could see Wallace and Bashford hard at work removing the outer shielding of the warp drive while Cassandra apparently just watched. In practice she was recording the process, her eyes being a perfectly good, stereoscopic video camera. Aneka would be doing the same thing for Gillian and Ella with the added benefit that she could record in a far wider frequency range.
‘Delta all ready to spend the day with Monkey?’ Ella asked as Aneka approached.
‘What possessed you to put our two shy people in a room together, Gillian?’ Aneka asked in reply.
‘There was only one cabin left.’ Gillian gave a slight shrug. ‘He likes her. He’s gone all quiet around her.’
Aneka grinned. ‘I recognise the symptoms. Shall we proceed?’
‘By all means. Lead the way, Facilitator First Rank Jansen.’
Aneka pushed back the way she had come, towards the port side rooms which had not been surveyed when the ship had been initially discovered. ‘I love it when you go all formal, Doctor Gilroy. Next thing you know we’ll be spanking Ella.’
‘Work first, play later.’
There were two of the cells, or containment rooms, or whatever you called a chamber designed to hold experimental subjects between examinations. The one towards the rear of the ship appeared to have been designed more for animals. Rather than the robot arms, half the room was sealed behind a transparent, but extremely tough, shield wall which looked like it had been designed to slide apart.
‘It’s a bio-plastic,’ Ella said, her eyes on a scanner she was holding, a chem-sniffer. ‘Or it was. It’s dead now. There’s no evidence of biological activity.’
‘We should get a sample of it,’ Gillian replied. ‘It can be checked in the materials science lab, though I doubt it’s any different from the plastics they normally used.’ She glanced around at Aneka, who was busy removing a cutting tool from her belt. ‘Do you remember this room?’
‘No, they held me in the one nearer the bow.’ Rather than use a plasma torch on plastic, Aneka took a sonic knife to the screen. There was nothing actually sonic about it, but the blade’s extremely rapid vibration produced a high-pitched whine which had given it the name. It made short work of the degraded material. ‘Well,’ she added as the blade went to work, ‘if they did put me in here at any time I don’t remember it.’
‘You were their star subject,’ Ella pointed out. ‘Maybe they treated you to special accommodation.’
‘Huh, right.’ A section of the screen came free and she looked at it, turning it in her hand so that she could record a full-spectrum view of the material. It had an odd, semi-crystalline quality to it; the light falling on the cut edge refracted to give a shimmer of multiple colours. ‘There’s some sample bags in my backpack. Could you get one, Ella?’ She was wearing a short, Plastex jacket which had a hard-shell pack mounted on the back. Ella popped it open and retrieved one of the bags, and placed the bagged sample back in the pack.
‘There’s nothing much to see here,’ Gillian
said. ‘We may as well move on.’
The next room along that side was, apparently, a cabin. The Xinti had given up on their original bodies, but they still had need of a physical form, and this was where they had spent their off-hours. From the look of the room they had not really had much in the way of time off. There were two double bunks, roughly Human sized though they would have been a little short for Aneka, and very little else. There seemed to be no entertainment systems, or even computers. There was one chair set in front of a small, bare table. No photographs, nothing personal. To Aneka it looked as though the race had given up on the physical world as an expression of their personality.
‘It’s so… impersonal,’ she commented as she allowed her eyes to take in the environment.
‘We believe that they spent much of their time in what amounts to computer servers,’ Gillian said. ‘They employed bodies when they needed to, but when they didn’t need them they would live in a virtual environment.’
‘It’s probable that their rather amoral experiments were the result,’ Ella went on. ‘They didn’t see physical bodies as important, so experimenting on living things was just something they did to further their research.’
As one of their experimental subjects Aneka had a few choice words concerning that, but she chose to say nothing. Instead she said, ‘No computers or entertainment systems because they could connect to the ship’s network any time they wished.’
Gillian gave a nod. ‘Even their organic bodies had an electronic brain similar to the one you reside in. The ones we’ve examined had networking systems with the bandwidth for full-sensorium transmission.’
‘As do we,’ Al put in.
‘Huh,’ Aneka responded silently. ‘You’ve been quiet.’
‘I had nothing to say. However, I have not, as a matter of fact. I have been employing our high-bandwidth networking to talk to Cassandra.’
‘We believe,’ Gillian went on, unaware of Aneka’s internal conversation, ‘that they used physical connections in situations where higher bandwidths were required, such as on the flight deck.’
‘Because wireless networks suffer from frequency conflicts more than a hard connection,’ Aneka said. She was still a little surprised at the speed her new brain could process information. Having two conversations at once was easy now.
‘Doctor Wallace is drooling over the warp core,’ Al said. ‘It seems to be entirely intact and of a far more advanced design than anything any of the current races have.’
‘That’s right, Aneka,’ Gillian said, sounding a little surprised. ‘You’ve grasped the concepts of our networking technologies?’
‘Basic computer networking infrastructure was part of my facilitator training.’ Something about what Al had said was nagging at Aneka and she could not quite put her finger on it. ‘Well,’ she said to Al, ‘don’t distract Cassandra, if that’s possible. Otherwise, enjoy your chat.’
‘Cassandra is as capable of multi-tasking as you are.’
‘Of course she is.’ Aloud she added, ‘Anything you want for the labs, or shall we go on?’
They moved on to the medical bay. Aneka slipped her jacket off, popped open her backpack, and the mundane, but important, process of recording and packing dozens of bottles and other containers began. None of them looked like the contents had survived the long wait in the vacuum, but there was possibly residue to analyse and Gillian was determined that they should miss absolutely nothing.
There were a number of instruments to be catalogued as well: injectors, scanners, various things which appeared to be for parting something to allow someone to look inside, as well as more mundane devices like tweezers. The clever, high-tech, bit of mundaneness was the tube-shaped device that Ella stated was a laser scalpel. Aside from that there was a medical bench with an array of manipulator arms around it. It all looked incredibly complex.
‘If the Xinti didn’t think much about bodies, why all the medical paraphernalia?’ Aneka asked.
‘I doubt they could replace them outside one of their stations or worlds,’ Gillian replied. ‘If they died out here, they were dead.’
‘Couldn’t they just… restore a backup?’
Gillian had obviously considered this. ‘Unless they had some form of moral qualm about that, yes. However, all the experience they had gained on the mission would be lost. Hence good medical facilities.’
‘I think Doctor Wallace is going to want to see this table,’ Ella said. ‘I think this is like the scrapped field medic robots we’ve found on old battlefields, but this is intact.’ She glanced back at Aneka. ‘They could perform even very delicate operations in battlefield conditions. They used nanofibre probes to get into the body without causing excessive tissue damage.’
‘They really had technology far in advance of what you have even now, didn’t they?’
‘Some of what they could do was… magic to us.’
‘None of this is magic,’ Aneka said, ‘just really, really advanced.’
‘I think Doctor Wallace might disagree when he works out what that warp core can do,’ Al said.
~~~
‘It’s not possible,’ Wallace said as they sat around eating their evening meal. ‘That drive is not possible.’
‘Told you so.’ Al sounded a little smug.
‘What’s the problem, Abraham?’ Gillian asked. She was grinning; her friend’s perplexity amused her.
‘It’s a binary core,’ Wallace explained. ‘All our warp engines have a single core.’ He glanced at Aneka and apparently felt that a more basic explanation was required; he was not entirely wrong. ‘The warp core produces a, well, a warping of space-time. Essentially it foreshortens space in front of the ship and extends it behind. This allows the vessel to exceed the speed of light while not actually breaking the rule that nothing can travel faster than light. Even our largest engines have a single core system, generating a single warp field, and this limits the efficiency of the drive.’
‘Okay,’ Aneka said, since he had directed most of the last part at her. ‘This one has two cores which somehow makes it more efficient.’
‘Exactly. One generator pulls, the other pushes, if you will. Actually, from the power feeds it’s not really more efficient, but the resulting drive is half the size of an equivalent one of ours. More bang for the tonnage. But the mathematics simply does not exist to handle synchronising the two fields. Get that wrong and you end up with the two halves of your ship a few parsecs apart.’
‘Something to be avoided then?’
Wallace looked at her, blinking, and then burst out laughing. ‘Thank you for putting my problems into perspective, Aneka. We have managed without such drives for the last thousand years or so, and the search for the principles behind this one could keep the next generation busy.’
Aneka frowned, the thought which had surfaced and then hid earlier finally sneaking out from wherever it had concealed itself. ‘Yeah, a thousand years… Stop me when I get something wrong. A few years after I was taken a Xinti ship crash lands on Old Earth. The Humans of that time were able to salvage enough of the warp drive to understand how it worked and build their own.’
‘The mathematics behind a normal warp engine are complex,’ Wallace said, ‘even what one might describe as “esoteric,” but there is nothing that could not have been understood in your time given what I know of the technology.’ He looked at Gillian for confirmation.
‘Agreed. We even have a few examples of scientific papers written back then, and we know of a couple of scientists during that period who worked in this kind of area. Laplace, Einstein, Chandrasekhar, Rosen, Hawking… Though the latter may have been an early android.’ Aneka giggled and Gillian winced. ‘That’s not right, I take it?’
‘Stephen Hawking had a degenerative nerve disease and a brilliant mind. When his speech decayed to the point where he was indecipherable, someone built a computer with a voice synthesiser in it. He was a genius, but he was also something of an icon, like Einstein was befo
re him, I guess. Except Einstein never got to guest star on Star Trek or The Simpsons.’
‘I have a T-shirt with Einstein on it,’ Wallace commented.
‘As do I,’ Cassandra added. ‘Doctor Wallace bought it for me. It is considerably shorter than his, however.’
Wallace coughed. ‘Do go on, Aneka.’
‘Right… So this ship that crashed on Old Earth was, what? Would you say it was a first-generation warp ship?’
‘I suppose we’ll need to start calling them something like that, yes.’
‘And it crashed after I was taken off Earth by something with a second-generation engine?’
‘Apparently, yes.’
‘Oh,’ Gillian said, getting it a fraction of a second before the others.
‘Yeah,’ Aneka said, filling in the silence. ‘So if the Xinti had been using these second-generation drives to get to Earth, why did a first-generation one crash?’ No one seemed willing to answer so Aneka said it. ‘Because we would never have understood one of their current model engines.’
‘The Herosians got warp technology from a crashed ship,’ Ella commented. ‘Since the structure is almost identical to ours we’ve always assumed that was Xinti.’
‘Are we saying,’ Drake said into the next silence, ‘that the Xinti crashed those ships on purpose? They gave warp engines to the Herosians and the Jenlay, well, the Humans back then?’
‘There was nothing in the historical databases the Xinti robots gave us,’ Gillian said, but she was not sounding convinced.
‘Well, I’m saying it,’ Aneka stated flatly. ‘It makes sense of me. Part of an observation project leading to pushing the new race out into space.’
‘But you never arrived and they went ahead anyway.’
‘Yeah, that really worked out for them, didn’t it?’
7.8.524 FSC.
Aneka pushed her way through from the Agroa Gar side of the station into the central core and was a little surprised to see Delta hanging around in the corridor. Everyone else was back in the Hyde getting ready for the evening meal and there she was, holding back for some reason.
The Cold Steel Mind Page 3