One of its legs was not working, but it was still turning to try again. Pulling her blaster, Aneka snapped off a shot. Sparks arced across the robot’s metal shell and it collapsed. There was the unmistakeable smell of overheated circuitry and ozone.
‘Aneka?’ It was Ella, sounding concerned.
‘I’m fine, it’s not. You better get Shannon down here to see whether this thing did any damage before I got to it.’
‘I’m on my way,’ Shannon cut in.
‘I’ll wait for you, just in case.’ Aneka’s eyes fell on the dead robot: so small, but the cause of so much trouble. They were out of communication, and locked out of all their major systems. Well, things were probably not going to get any worse.
Part Two: Down The Rabbit Hole
FScV Garnet Hyde, in Orbit of Corax, Joval System, 18.8.524 FSC.
‘Communications are still out,’ Drake was saying. ‘The reactor is stable, thank Vashma for that, but the drives are all offline and the docking systems are locked solid. Now that we have the airlocks open, we can’t get them closed, and we can’t be sure of the emergency systems in the cabins, so everyone is to wear a shipsuit at all times and have their helmet nearby.’ He glanced at Aneka. ‘Except Aneka, of course.’
Aneka glanced at the other cybernetic member of the crew. ‘What about Cassandra?’
‘My chassis was not designed with vacuum in mind,’ the android replied. ‘Exposed to space I would suffer damage. I have no need for oxygen, of course, but I would suffer greatly if we decompress.’
‘On the plus side,’ Bashford said, ‘we got all the robots nailed and Gillian and Ella have a new friend.’
The wall screen was currently showing the golden features of the Agroa Gar’s computer avatar, head and shoulders only. Al had managed to patch the video connection through via a peer-to-peer connection. Isolated pockets of technology were working, but the vast majority of the Garnet Hyde was currently dead in the water.
‘Assuming you would trust me to do so,’ the computer said, ‘I am afraid that I would be of very limited use in correcting your problems. The protocols and systems you use are foreign to me. I am… I was a science vessel.’
‘The Xinti made extensive use of cyber-warfare,’ Monkey said, frowning. ‘They got very good at hacking our systems during the war.’
‘Quite possibly, Mister Gibbons, but I was lost many years before that conflict happened. If you were still using the protocols used in Yrimlos’ time I might have been of some help…’
‘Don’t call me that,’ Aneka said. It came across a little more harshly than she intended. ‘I’m Aneka. What do we call you?’
‘I am Agroa Gar.’
‘Far too long. Aggy, perhaps.’
The image bowed her head. ‘As you wish, Aneka.’
Aneka frowned. ‘You’ve got the whole “do as the pseudo-Xinti says” thing going, don’t you?’
‘While I can understand your misgivings, under the circumstances, my systems recognise you as a Xinti, and my programming places the wishes of a Xinti above my own.’ She raised a hand to forestall any reply. ‘However, “Aggy” is not an unpleasant name. It does not mean anything derogatory in Xinti, and it sounds… friendly.’
‘Pleasantries aside,’ Drake cut in, ‘we have a couple of priorities. I’m taking Bash and Aneka to try to stabilise the ship and close those airlocks. Abraham and Cassandra will be trying to fix the ship’s computers. Shannon, Monkey, and Delta will be trying to get everything else stable.’
‘What about me and Gillian?’ Ella asked.
‘Talk to Aggy. We all know you want to and, to be frank, we need to know we can trust her once we have everything working.’ He looked up at the screen. ‘No offence.’
‘None taken, Captain Drake,’ Aggy replied. ‘I consider your stratagem most wise, in fact.’
‘Huh, well, thank you. All right, people, let’s move. This mess isn’t going to clean itself up.’
~~~
Abraham Wallace looked as tired as any of the people who had been doing manual work all morning. He sat slumped at the table in the mess, picking at some food Gillian and Ella had prepared, and drinking a lot of coffee.
‘The virus,’ he said, ‘has done a lot of damage. Entire sections of the ship’s core programs have been wiped. I’m having to piece together what I can and program makeshift control software from scratch to replace what I can’t find.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Aneka commented.
‘No,’ Drake agreed, ‘it’s not.’
‘It isn’t all bad,’ Wallace went on. ‘The sensor system software was disabled, but not damaged. We can now see, which at least means we can assess the situation better. Internal communications are back up, but spotty. Without the computer, person-to-person calls are unavailable, but you can broadcast.’
‘Good,’ Drake commented. ‘Signals out to the far end of the station were getting a bit weak.’
Wallace nodded. ‘I doubt I can get everything back online without the external backups, but I’m hoping I can have the external comms back up enough to call for help sometime tomorrow.’
‘Can’t we just send some sort of distress signal?’ Aneka asked. ‘Or patch into the ship’s radio manually and send basic voice?’
‘The distress beacon is fried,’ Monkey replied. ‘Looks like a laser was used on it.’
‘And if we sent normal audio,’ Wallace added, ‘no one would hear it. I’m afraid this is one case where technology is our undoing. Analogue signals are no longer used, so no one has the equipment to listen for them.’
‘Huh,’ Aneka grunted. ‘Here I am in the future, wishing I had a walkie-talkie.’
~~~
‘Aneka?’ The golden shape of Aggy appeared in the corner of Aneka’s vision along with the voice in her ears. Aneka was going over the primary structural members of the station with a hand scanner, but she could spare the computer some attention.
‘Aggy. What can I do for you? You obviously want to talk privately.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘You’re speaking Xinti.’
‘Ah. Yes. I wanted to ask… if it was true.’
‘If what was true?’
‘That all the Xinti are dead.’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s likely. The Herosians have been hunting them down for centuries. They claim that there are still some alive, but I think that’s just to let them hit Xinti sites without mercy whenever one is discovered.’
‘Uplifting the Herosians was considered an error. The reason your programme was initiated was to avoid the mistakes of the Herosian project.’
‘We worked out that you, uh, uplifted the Herosians and Humans. The crashed ship on Old Earth with drive technology they could understand back then… What did you actually do with the Herosians?’
‘A ship with a functional warp engine was left on one of their moons. They discovered it and used it to manufacture their own warp drives. The results were… horrible. An entire sentient race was wiped out during the first years of their expansion.’
‘So I was uplifted to see if Humans were going to do the same kind of thing?’
‘Yes, though the view was, given our preliminary studies, that the Human race was less likely to carry out racial genocide simply to take one planet.’
Aneka laughed. ‘I’m not sure I have such a high opinion of my fellow man.’
‘Why not? They seem to have turned out well.’
It was a valid point. The Jenlay were a largely peaceful people. There had not been any wars for centuries. They lived more or less happily with two other species, but… ‘There’s no pressure for resources, and there’s always room to expand without attacking their neighbours.’
‘True, but that could have been said about the Herosians. They still killed an entire planet just to get the land.’ She paused and then added, ‘When I first awoke I sent a distress signal to my home base, but there will be no one there to receive it.’
; ‘I’m sorry, Aggy.’ To her surprise, Aneka realised that she meant it.
~~~
It was early evening and the crew were still trying to get the station in some sort of working shape when Wallace’s voice came from the speakers and through their headsets, and in Aneka’s case her internal radio. ‘Everyone, the sensors are picking up some unusual electromagnetic effects outside the ship. I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.’
Drake answered from somewhere. He was not on the flight deck, Aneka knew that; they had still not managed to bypass the security fail-safes which were failing to keep them safe. ‘Can you tell where it’s coming from? The Agroa Gar?’
‘It is not anything I am doing,’ Aggy chimed in.
‘Not the Agroa Gar, no,’ Wallace replied. ‘In fact… I can’t isolate a source. The signal appears to be some form of long-range sensor, I think, but I’m not able to…’
His voice cut off into a screech of static and Aneka pushed herself down the corridor towards the Garnet Hyde, unsure of why she was moving, but sure that she needed to be with everyone else. Something was very wrong.
Wallace’s voice cut back in as she negotiated the half-open airlock door. ‘That was a massive spike in electromagnetic activity. Huge! Cassandra is…’
‘Cassandra?’ Al’s voice sounded only in Aneka’s head, but he sounded worried.
‘The pulse caused a reboot in her core processors. She appears to be recovering.’ Aneka thought she felt a sense of relief from her other half though his ‘feelings’ had never crossed over before. ‘We’ve lost external visual sensors and I’m not sure what state the communications are in. Broadband electromagnetic sensors are… fluctuating. Gravimetric sensors…’ His voice cut off and Aneka wondered whether the comms had cut out again.
‘Doc?’ Drake’s voice, so the radios were still working.
‘There’s a massive gravitational force out there,’ Wallace was obviously concentrating hard on something. ‘Tight, but strong. I can only think… It looks like a string.’
Aneka lost interest in what he was saying as she made it up onto the main deck and found Gillian and Ella. The Doctor was clearly leading a trembling Ella towards the labs where Wallace was and Aneka had been heading. ‘Ella? What’s wrong?’
‘She can’t see,’ Gillian replied. Ella was already turning at the sound of Aneka’s voice, rushing forwards off course. Aneka grabbed her and the redhead clung to her fiercely until Aneka picked her up with no apparent effort and started walking towards the lab.
‘The pulse,’ Ella whispered. ‘My eyes are cybernetic and the pulse wiped them out just like it knocked Cassandra out.’
‘We’ll fix it,’ Aneka said. ‘Delta can probably fix it in her sleep. We’ll…’
The ship gave a sudden, massive lurch. Gillian hit the wall of the corridor and then fell. Only Aneka’s enhanced balance kept her upright. ‘What the Hell?! Are you all right, Gillian?’
‘I’ll live,’ Gillian replied. ‘We’re accelerating.’
‘What was that?’ Drake sounded angry, and worried. ‘This station isn’t in a fit state to handle that sort of acceleration.’
Aneka walked into the lab in time to hear Wallace’s response first-hand. ‘We’re being dragged towards the string, or…’ She saw the man’s eyes widening. ‘That’s impossible!’
‘Doc?’ Aneka asked as she set Ella down beside a dazed looking Cassandra.
‘These readings suggest a circular, high-gravitation singularity effect. It’s not possible, but it looks like a wormhole.’
‘My understanding was that those were unstable at best,’ Gillian commented.
‘Theoretically, wrapping one in a cosmic string with negative energy density could stabilise one, but…’
‘The technology is far beyond what you have?’ Aneka suggested. Wallace nodded dumbly at her. ‘Aggy sent a distress call when she first woke up. I’m thinking that was the weird electromagnetic effect you had us looking for when we came back from Corax… and I think she may have got an answer.’
‘The Xinti did not have wormhole technology,’ Gillian stated flatly.
‘A thousand years ago,’ Aneka countered. ‘We need to…’ She stopped speaking, her eyes widening as her voice simply cut out and her vision dimmed. She heard shouting, Gillian and Wallace she thought, but the voices seemed distant. She had a brief sensation of falling before her mind switched off entirely.
22.8.524 FSC.
Aneka watched her diagnostic displays as they scrolled across her closed eyelids and tried to take stock of her situation before looking. She was naked, she thought; she could feel something like a blanket under her back. The air was warm and she thought she could feel sunlight on her skin. Her diagnostics were all in the green, but she had been offline for close to four days.
‘Al?’ She half-expected there to be no response.
‘I am here Aneka.’ Well that was a relief. ‘I am relieved to see that you appear functional too.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were hacked. Very quickly and efficiently. The attack was overwhelming. I could do nothing to stop it.’
‘Okay.’ Aneka opened her eyes and saw trees. Through the canopy of alien leaves she could see what looked like a blue, cloudless sky, though there was something wrong with it she could not immediately place. Lifting her head revealed a clearing among the heavy trunks of what could have been pine trees if they were on Earth. It also revealed the rest of the crew. Everyone was there, lying naked on their own, individual blankets. What the fuck is going on?
‘Cassandra’s networking systems just came online,’ Al told her. Around the clearing there were other signs that people were waking up, but it was the android who opened her eyes and sat up first. She spotted Aneka sitting up and, surprisingly, looked down quickly and covered her chest with her arms.
‘Oh… crap,’ Drake groaned from off to Aneka’s right. ‘I feel like I spent the last year in cold sleep.’
There were boxes on one side of the clearing and Aneka went to inspect them without saying anything. Sure enough, the first one she came across contained bottles of water. Picking up the box she started back to the group of slowly rising Jenlay.
‘There’s water here,’ she said, pulling out a bottle and tossing it to Drake, ‘and I think there’s food there too. I’ve no idea what planet we’re on, we’ve got no clothes or equipment, but we seem to have been provided with rations.’
Wallace, deprived of his exoskeleton, remained lying down, but rolled onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow. ‘I don’t think this is a planet. The light is wrong. Too white.’
Al popped up a frequency spectrum analysis in Aneka’s vision. ‘Okay,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m not great on this stuff, but a star wouldn’t be putting out equal amounts of all frequencies of visible light, would it?’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Wallace replied. ‘You can see ultraviolet light too. I believe you’ll find the shorter wavelengths are entirely missing?’
‘It cuts off at three hundred nanometres.’
The physicist nodded. ‘The shorter wavelengths tend to cause melanomas and some other even less pleasant issues. We’re under artificial light.’ He nodded his thanks to Gillian as she handed him a water bottle. ‘The question, of course, is where?’
‘All right,’ Bashford said, ‘we’d better find out.’ He had wandered over to the supplies they had and appeared to be taking stock. ‘We have some basic tents here. Monkey, Delta, Shannon, you’re in charge of getting these up and taking stock of what we have here. Drake, Aneka, you’re with me. We’ll check the area, see what we can find.’
‘I’m coming too,’ Ella stated, moving quickly to stand beside Aneka.
Bashford appeared to consider arguing for a second, but then said, ‘We may need some science support. Cassandra? Would you come with us?’
Steeling herself, the attractive android, who should have had no body image issues that Aneka could imagine, climbed to her feet,
straightened her back, and stepped forwards. ‘Of course. Doctor Wallace will be in some discomfort in this gravity without his frame.’
‘I’m afraid I’m going to be of little help with the tents too,’ Wallace added, his voice forlorn.
‘Why did they take our clothes?’ Ella whined.
‘Nothing they didn’t supply,’ Aneka replied. Raising her hand she pointed it at Ella’s discarded water bottle and blasted it across the clearing. ‘I appear to be the only weapon we have, and that was on purpose since they must have known about that force generator. They had four days to examine us before leaving us here.’
‘Four days?’ Gillian said, frowning. ‘What were they doing?’
Aneka shrugged. ‘What happened after I blacked out?’
‘I’m… not sure,’ Gillian replied, her frown deepening.
‘Cassandra collapsed a second after you,’ Wallace put in.
‘Probably hacked the way I was,’ Aneka told them. ‘Al said it was too fast and efficient for him to stop it.’
‘Then…’ Gillian was obviously concentrating on remembering. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t remember any pain. I don’t remember much.’
‘I remember hearing the ship groaning under the acceleration stress,’ Drake said. ‘Then… I woke up here.’
‘May I?’ Shannon asked, raising a hand towards his head. He nodded and she laid her palm on his forehead before closing her eyes. A second or two later she opened them. ‘I think our memories have been tampered with. There’s a whole lot of blank that just starts too suddenly for it to be natural.’
‘Whoever took us didn’t want us remembering anything we might have seen,’ Gillian said.
‘But it’s got to be some Xinti group, hasn’t it?’ Ella asked. ‘We were studying a Xinti ship, and the technology…’
The Cold Steel Mind Page 10