For YiJay, the reality that Ilia had survived the Pulse at all was a miracle. In every reported case from Earth, no AI had made it through the event alive. As it stood now, Ilia was the only Artificial Intelligence in existence, yet news of this fact had yet to reach Earthside Command. Not wanting to turn her baby over to the prodding, fumbling hands of other AI specialists, YiJay opted to protect Ilia until she was formed enough to protect herself.
“Good morning, Ilia,” said the Korean. “How are you feeling since last we spoke?”
“Hello, Dr. Lee,” responded an innocent-yet-intelligent voice. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any memory of ever speaking with you. Are we friends?”
Due to her paranoia of losing another AI to the deadly effects of the Pulse, YiJay had built a failsafe into the very fabric of Ilia’s being. Whenever she was not being directly spoken to or responding to a direct order or question, Ilia went dormant. As a result of this oddity, her ability to recall conversations and events was spotty. There were times when she could remember—to the decimal—extremely long conversions of code and data, yet when it came to interacting with YiJay, her mind seemed afflicted with a form of AI Alzheimer’s.
“Yes, we are friends,” YiJay said, running a hand through her hair.
“That’s nice,” Ilia replied. “I’ve always wanted a friend. How long have we been friends Dr. Lee?”
“YiJay, my love. Call me YiJay.”
“Okay. How long have we been friends, YiJay?”
Smiling at this, YiJay glanced at a timecode in the corner of her screen. As it counted down from five seconds, the numbers turned green then red. If YiJay did not keep the conversation going by the time the countdown reached zero, Ilia would go dormant per her failsafe—any memory of the conversation wiped from her mind. YiJay let the timer run out then turned her attention to a program file.
Typing quickly, she initiated a rerouting override that moved Ilia’s Memory Uplink to a secured bank of processors she had put together the night before. Already having moved the AI’s Open-Code Connection Cells to the processors that morning, her hope was that she could adjust Ilia’s basic programming so that her memories would upload into the new processors before they could be wiped clean by the failsafe. Keeping Ilia’s Open-Code Connection Cells and memories separate from the computers that linked into the Dome was the only way YiJay could figure to resurrect her should another Pulse unleash its deadly AI-killing waves again. As long as no human being was directly touching the heavily insulated processors at the time of a Pulse, the raw data within should be protected.
Satisfied with the adjustments she had made, YiJay cleared her throat.
“Ilia?”
“Hello, Dr. Lee. How may I help you?”
“Do you remember what I just told you to call me?” asked YiJay hopefully.
“I’m sorry. While I know your name and rank, I don’t have any memory of ever speaking with you. Are we friends?”
Sighing with exasperation, YiJay let the timer run out again and went back to work on her Tablet.
The net
Magnetically held to the high-back crash seat of his Pilot’s Station, Amit Vyas entered a series of commands on his Tablet screen and brought up the ship’s auxiliary functions list. Selecting Braun’s Ears, the complicated network of antennae that netted and decoded radio signals, the Indian pilot punched in the coordinates for the ruin grid and pressed ‘engage.’ A progress bar appeared on the screen and quickly filled. When it was finished, a list of all incoming and outgoing radio signals from that area presented itself numerically. There were the signal relays from Braun’s Eyes in the Statue Chamber and the IMCs in the Sun Dome—as they had started calling it—but that was all. No anomalous signals detected.
Clearing his throat, Amit looked across the Bridge Deck at Captain Tatyana Vodevski, muttering quietly into a headset, no doubt communicating with Earthside Command about Operation Columbia. Amit waited for her to finish speaking.
“Captain,” he said when she’d hit the ‘send’ key on her station.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking since we lost Braun that he never told us where the alien radio signal was originating from.”
Frowning, Tatyana disengaged the magnets in her chair and executed a tight forward somersault, landing softly at Amit’s side.
“I thought the signal was coming from the metal ball that projects the mini-Sun,” she said, leaning in over his shoulder to look at his screen.
“As did I, but that might have been a mistake.”
“One of many, I fear,” Tatyana sighed.
Silently, Amit screamed at her, at everyone on the crew for so hastily throwing Braun to the monsters that circled below the sea of mystery surrounding these ruins. He wanted very badly to see his family again and cursed himself for not siding with YiJay more fervently.
Roll the dice, he’d said. Do your duty. What a fool.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, he reminded himself, attempting to find balance and calm. Unless you’ve got a time machine, you better stop beating yourself up. Now is not the time for self-loathing. Now is the time to figure out if Braun is still alive and, if he is, how to get him back.
Whether or not Julian wanted to admit it, Amit knew that they needed Braun to make the trip home. Without him, the ship was trapped, stuck in orbit around Mars, their only choice being to abandon it and take up residence at Ilia Base.
However, if they could find the source of the signal, maybe they could stop it—turn it off. If his understanding of what had happened to Remus and Romulus was true for Braun as well, then maybe he wasn’t really dead, but rather held prisoner, so to speak, within the waves of the signal’s data. Maybe he’d been protected from the Pulse. Maybe he could be saved.
That is a lot of maybes, Amit frowned. But one has to start somewhere.
“Cast a wider net,” Tatyana said, her tone official and infuriating to the Indian.
“Yes, Captain,” he responded, not betraying the slightest hint of his true emotions.
Turning away, Tatyana pushed off and drifted back to her station, an incoming transmission from Lander 2 dancing across the screen.
With his anger competing for control of his heart, Amit increased the net’s range to its widest capacity. It would take longer for the Ears to find anything this way, especially since Braun wasn’t around to expedite the process, but if it was there, then the net would catch the alien radio signal eventually.
Jamming the tip of a finger down on the green initiation icon, Amit pulled himself free from his chair then floated towards the exit.
“I’ll be in my cabin if you need me,” he said over his shoulder to the captain. “Reading, I guess.”
Nodding absently, Tatyana’s eyes were fixed on the screen in front of her, the image of the Chinese Ark fast filling its frame.
Rendezvous
From the cockpit window of Lander 2, the flat grey hull of the Chinese Ark loomed like a tanker ship in a sea of stars. Embossed with red swashes of Mandarin Chinese, the ship dwarfed the little Lander like some prehistoric shark, its long and cylindrical body spinning slowly on its axis.
Taking the controls lightly in his hands, Aguilar broke from their flight path and accelerated towards the ship, skimming in low along its broad hull.
“Merde, man,” swore Julian as Aguilar tipped the Lander to avoid hitting a protruding ComSat dish.
Missing the snare by less than a meter, Aguilar eased the controls back and aimed for the rear of the Ark.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to keep us close so we don’t show up on any Earthside tracking equipment.”
“Yeah, sure,” grumbled Julian.
Charging up the starboard-side thruster jets, Aguilar hit the ‘fire’ command and spun the Lander one-hundred-eighty degrees until it was pointing back the direction they’d come, towards Mars. Then, with one hand on the controls, he used the other to gently dial down the ship’s speed until it matched that of the Chin
ese Ark.
“We want the maintenance airlock, which is here,” pointed Julian, jabbing a gloved finger at a holographic blueprint of the Ark projected on the Lander’s window.
“Almost there,” Aguilar nodded, making slight corrections to his flight controls.
On the holograph, a green triangle, which represented the Lander, gently moved towards a red circle that marked the airlock.
As the Ark turned on its axis, a series of metal cylinders came into view, jutting up in rows from the hull.
“What are those?” Aguilar said, tipping his chin towards the pods.
“I’m not sure,” Julian frowned. “They aren’t on the blueprints we’ve got.”
“Should I take us in for a closer look?”
Checking his watch, Julian shook his head.
“We’d better stick to the plan. Look, there’s the airlock.”
Reluctantly, Aguilar aimed the Lander for the red circle on the blueprints. Waiting until the icon which represented the Lander had overlapped the airlock on the screen, he carefully locked the controls and set the speed so that even as the Ark turned on its axis, the Lander would remain on target.
“Okay,” he exhaled. “It’s show time, mon ami.”
Reaching under their seats, the two men unclipped fully charged extended-EVA Survival Packs and swapped them for the ones they were currently wearing.
As a rush of cool air jetted in beneath his chin, Julian closed his eyes and took a long breath. He was nervous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been nervous before an EVA.
“You good?” Aguilar asked.
“Oui.”
Typing at his Flight Console, Aguilar executed the command for decompression and Julian felt the floor beneath his boots shudder as the pumps purred to life. Outside the window, the Chinese Ark no longer turned as it had when they’d arrived. Now that the Lander was matching the ships slow rotations, it was space that seemed to spin. After a minute-and-a-half, the vibrations in the floor abruptly died and a green light flashed across the window.
Hitting his seat belt release, Aguilar floated up out of his chair then shoved off towards the back of the Lander. Deftly skimming over the tops of the empty seats, he stopped himself at a storage locker and popped the clips that secured the lid. Inside, a matte black rifle was nestled in a bed of temper foam, two balloon-tipped grappling hooks on either side of the barrel.
“Everything there?” Julian said from the cockpit.
“Yeah,” responded the pilot, gazing down at the gun. “It’s just real, you know?”
“Real?”
“Yeah. I mean, we’re really doing it. I never thought when I signed up for this mission that I would be doing anything like this.”
“So says the military man. Think how I feel. I’m a civilian.”
Prying the rifle free from the memory foam, Aguilar slung its strap over his shoulder then pulled the two grappling hooks loose and tucked them under his other arm.
“They better give us medals for this shit,” he said as he made his way back to the front of the vessel.
“Somehow, I think not,” Julian laughed, meeting Aguilar at the Lander’s hatch.
With his boots pressed firmly against the floor, Julian reached up to the ceiling and gave a silver latch handle a quarter-turn then pulled. Swinging down, a section of paneling revealed the grappling turret that Braun had used to anchor the Lander when Julian had gone EVA to repair the cracked laser dome. Quickly disconnecting the lead of the woven Alon cable spool, Julian held out the loose end out for Aguilar to attach to one of the grappling hooks.
“Too bad Braun’s not here,” Julian sighed. “I’m not sure I trust your aim.”
“I think that’s why they give you two hooks.”
“Comforting.”
Placing a hand on the hatch lock, Julian turned to Aguilar.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
Inside his helmet, Julian whispered the names of his daughter and ex-wife then pulled up on the lock. Swinging the hatch out into the void of space, he fought the strange sensation of vertigo. Even though there was no up or down, he still felt as though he were standing on the edge of some infinite abyss.
“Help me get strapped in,” Aguilar said, gesturing to a harness secured to the wall with Zip Ties near the open hatch.
Slipping the chest piece over his head, Aguilar grinned as Julian brought the leg loops up and around his groin.
“Don’t get too comfortable down there, Frenchy,” the young pilot teased.
A battery of French swear words drifted through his helmet speakers, but soon, Julian had clipped the last sections of the harness together. Using anchors on either side of the open hatch, Aguilar secured the harness until he was like a blue-and-white wasp caught in the black web of a giant spider.
Suspended in the multitude of straps, Aguilar looked out across the span of eight or nine meters to the airlock of the Chinese Ark. Spotting the metal rungs of a ladder that passed to the right of the airlock, he shouldered the rifle and gazed down the barrel.
“Load me up,” he said.
Taking the balloon-tipped hook that had been fastened to the cable spool, Julian slid it into the barrel of the grappling gun and twisted it until it would not turn any more. A green LED illuminated on the top of the rifle, signifying that it was loaded and ready for use.
“Okay,” Aguilar sighed, his eyes trained on the ladder. “Here we go.”
With that, he squeezed the trigger and was instantly pressed back against the web of his harness. Sailing across the void, the little yellow-tipped grappling hook made contact with a rung of the maintenance ladder and suctioned down.
“Nice shot,” said Julian, reaching up to press a button on the side of the cable spool.
Reeling in swiftly, the line soon became taut: its thin silver strand forming a bridge between the two ships.
Carefully, Aguilar unclipped the harness from its anchors then went to work taking the thing off. When he was free, he kicked the mess of straps and hooks back into the rear of the Lander and turned to a wall-mounted storage bin. Opening the weightless lid, he dug out a black cloth front-pack—like the backup parachute a skydiver might wear—and handed it to Julian.
“Amit uploaded the doctored Checkpoint Flight Path onto a Tablet so all you’ll have to do is plug it into their NavSat Computer. As soon as his program has taken control of the ship, it will be safe for me to leave the Lander and come across to help you place the explosives.”
“You know, you’re starting to sound like the captain,” said Julian mockingly.
“That’s actually a compliment,” Aguilar responded with a smile.
Clipping a safety line onto the bridge cable, Julian paused in the open hatch.
“I guess it kind of is, isn’t it?”
With a last look around the cabin of the Lander, he pushed off and careened out into open space. Zipping along the line, he realized too late that he was moving very fast and tried to brace himself for the impact of meeting the Chinese Ark. Legs out in front, Julian’s boots connected heavily as they struck the hull of the ship, a dull pain vibrating up from his knees reminding him of his age. Working quickly to counter the forces that wanted to send him ricocheting off the ship into nothingness, he grabbed at a rung of the ladder and pulled himself gently to the cold metal of the hull.
“Contact,” he said through gritted teeth.
“That looked painful. You shoved off a little hard. Next time take it slower.”
“Comments from the peanut gallery are not welcomed at this time.”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
Working one hand along the airlock hatch, Julian kept the other firmly wrapped around the rung of the ladder. Even though he was clipped to the cable, he wanted to feel the firmness of a ship under his fingertips.
“I’m opening the airlock,” he reported.
Silently, the hatch swung open and Julian slipped inside the cramped airlock. U
nhooking himself from the cable that connected the two ships, he waved to Aguilar then pulled the hatch closed. Though the wall Tablet was presented in Chinese, he still remembered enough from his days as a private contractor in Hong Kong to successfully pressurize the chamber. Above the door, a light cycled from red to yellow and finally to green.
“Entering the maintenance shaft,” he said into his helmet mic as he opened the airlock’s inner door.
Met with a dimly lit passageway, Julian floated out of the airlock and oriented himself in his mind.
Okay, he thought. If the door I just came through is at the base of the ship, then the cockpit is up.
Kicking off a bulkhead, he flew in the direction his mind was telling him was up. Mumbling bitterly under his breath, he frowned at the general sloppiness of the work around him. Though this ship was based on one of his original designs, it had been modified and reworked in such a way that made it seem skeletal and unwelcoming.
Grasping the corner or a bulkhead where his hallway intersected with another, he made a sharp left turn and had to duck so as not to become tangled in a mess of loose hanging wires.
“Unbelievable,” he glowered.
“You alright?” crackled Aguilar’s voice.
“Yes, just shoddy work. We won’t have to do much to bring this piece of shit down.”
The pilot chuckled in his helmet speakers.
Pulling himself along a handrail set into the floor, Julian batted bundles of unsecured wires and rubber hoses out of his way until he reached a dead end.
Radiation shield, he said to himself and looked for an access hatch to bypass the obstruction.
“How’s it going in there?” Aguilar asked.
“Golden,” Julian replied, finding the bypass hatch.
Now on the other side of the radiation shield that separated the nuclear torch engine from the crew portion of the ship, the French engineer navigated his way through a series of small curved rooms filled with life-support computer terminals. Blinking like Morse code, the LEDs on the faces of the terminals danced in his peripheral vision as he continued moving forward or up.
The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) Page 21