The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1)

by mikel evins

“You think the Chair funded this kind of ship to hunt for pirates?”

  “No,” Jaemon admitted.

  “What killed the primary?” Mai said.

  “What?” Jaemon said. “Oh. Yeah. I’m thinking the pilot got the primary when he blew the bridge. That would explain why we haven’t found it.”

  “I still don’t see why he didn’t just blow the whole ship.” Angier said. “Why cripple it, when you could just blow it up?”

  “Hunh,” Jaemon grunted. “It’s a good question. Maybe he couldn’t? It’s not like most ships run around with self-destructs on them.”

  Angier rolled his eyes. “Come on. It’s a torch, remember?”

  Jaemon quirked his mouth. “Yeah. Fair enough.”

  “What?” Mai said.

  Jaemon said, “A torch can always blow itself up. Heck, it’s basically a nuclear bomb that blows up all the time. All you have to do is mess up the magnetic nozzle.”

  Mai cocked her head at him.

  “You can do a Fabric search and get the whole scoop. Point is, torches are basically controlled nuclear explosions. It’s not that hard to set them up to destroy themselves.”

  “Safety,” I said.

  “Well, yeah. They have all kinds of safety features to keep that from happening. But a knowledgeable pilot would be able to get around them.”

  He looked around the maintenance bay.

  “I’m thinking this pilot was pretty knowledgeable. So why did he cripple his ship? Why didn’t he blow it?”

  “He wanted to save something?” Mai said.

  “Ye-e-a-a-h...but what? And why? I mean, he blew himself up, so he wasn’t going to be around to collect it later. Unless...”

  “Archive?” I said.

  Jaemon looked at me.

  “Archive?” he said.

  Mai said, “You mean like our safety archives? Like when we took snapshots before we came out here?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Jaemon. “Yeah, maybe. We haven’t found an archive creche, though.”

  “But like you said, we haven’t looked everywhere. And it’s a spy ship.”

  Jaemon pursed his lips and nodded slowly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I could see it. A hidden creche. I’ve never seen one, but I don’t know why you couldn’t do it. It might be kind of expensive to hide a creche in here.”

  Angier looked around the maintenance bay, then at Jaemon. “This ship look to you like they were pinching pennies?”

  Jaemon shook his head and half smiled.

  “Nope,” he said. “You’ve got me there. But you know what makes even more sense than a safety archive? A data archive. For whatever he collected out here.”

  Angier frowned.

  “Who tries to save data when he’s killing himself? That doesn’t make any sense. How are you gonna use the data if you blow yourself up?”

  “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you just want to make sure it gets back to somebody. Spy ship, remember? Maybe the pilot just wanted to make sure the data got to somebody else. Somebody like League Strategic Services, or the Institutes of Research.”

  Angier said, “Yeah, okay. I can see it. A spy for the League. Sensitive data. What kind of data’s worth it, though?”

  We all looked at each other.

  “Data about the Titans?” Mai said.

  Jaemon shrugged.

  “As good a theory as any,” he said.

  “And maybe the pilot did archive himself,” said Mai.

  “Maybe.”

  “Titans,” I said.

  “Yeah, Lev, maybe so,” Jaemon said.

  “No,” I said. I stabbed a finger at the console over and over.

  “Look!” I said. “Titans! Titans! Look! Look!”

  The power distribution charts showed a spike that was systematically moving from one subsystem to the next. Jaemon and the others leaned over the console and stared at it, frowning.

  “Titans!” I insisted.

  “Crap,” Jaemon said. “You’re right. They’re searching for us.”

  17.

  “Survey Team One, are you still there?”

  Esgar Rayleigh’s face popped into view. He looked drawn and tired.

  Jaemon said, “We’re here, Esgar, but maybe not for much longer. The bugs have rigged up some channels they’re using to search for us.”

  “So there’s a primary there after all?”

  The Captain’s face was lined with worry. He sounded a little hoarse.

  “No,” Jaemon said, “at least, I don’t think so. They’re still acting too simple-minded. Lev agrees with me, if I’m understanding him right.”

  There was a pause. The Captain frowned.

  “What, is Lev being obscure, or something?”

  “No. Well...yeah, but it’s not his fault. He’s a little messed up.”

  “Messed up how?”

  Jaemon made a face, as if he’d tasted something bitter.

  “I told him to route current across his carapace to kill some secondaries. It worked, but it fried a few of his circuits. Seems like his brain’s working fine, as far as I can tell, but he’s having trouble with his voice box. It makes him a little hard to understand.”

  “Wait, he had Titans on him?”

  “Yeah, secondaries. A bunch of them woke up when we were doing a first pass over the hulk. They got onto Lev, but he fried ’em good.”

  Esgar closed his eyes and took a big breath, then let it out slowly.

  “Okay. We’ll deal with it when we get you all back.”

  “Good. How far out are you now?”

  “A few hours. We tried calculating better firing sequences, but didn’t come up with anything. We’re on our way as fast as we can go, but you’ve got to hold out a little longer. Do whatever it takes.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap’n Sir,” said Jaemon.

  They exchanged a ghost of a smile.

  “Seriously,” Esgar said quietly. “Stay alive. We’re coming to get you.”

  “We know,” said Jaemon.

  I couldn’t speak well, but I hadn’t lost my ability to operate a ship’s console. I was rearranging the displays as quickly as I could, trying to figure out what the Titans were doing.

  It turned out the derelict was riddled with surveillance equipment. The whole hull was basically one giant transceiver. It received radiation and information feeds on every band and processed everything through a Fabric feed dense enough for a small city. If I’d ever had any doubts about Autolycus being a spy ship, they were gone.

  “Great Makers,” said Jaemon, hovering over my shoulder. “What is all that? Are those...?”

  “Titans,” I said, poking at the displays. I pointed a finger at one point and then another and another. “Titans. Titans. Titans.”

  “Those are individual secondaries?”

  “Yes.”

  I had managed to make the console display a volumetric rendering of the relative positions of all detected secondaries. We had a count now. There were twelve thousand four hundred thirteen individual secondaries being tracked. I had adjusted my emotional responders down quite a bit, but the number still seemed fairly alarming.

  We couldn’t read their encrypted comm traffic, but we could analyze statistics about them. I could see from the traffic patterns that they must have all originally belonged to the same primary. They all used the same packet and channel patterns. That wasn’t a surprise. Without direction from their primaries different groups of secondaries would inevitably try to exterminate one another until only one group was left. Only direction from their primaries could prevent it.

  I could do more. I could use the communication patterns to prove that no primary was directing them. They were acting on emergent goals, with instructions and coordination forming spontaneously in multiple centers and with multiple directions of control. If there had been a primary, all coordination would have a single center, and all control would be in a single direction.

  I thought about one of my educational technicians bac
k on Ceres. She had persuaded me to install several optional mathematical modules whose usefulness I had questioned, including the one I had just been using to show that there could be no Titan primary directing the secondaries. I thought about sending her a message with our story in it. Maybe she could use it to motivate future trainees.

  “You okay, Lev?” Jaemon said.

  I nodded.

  “Look,” I said.

  I couldn’t tell the others what I had learned, but I could show them. I made a display of a Titan primary with its control network, and one that displayed a network of secondaries without its primary. I graphed the comm traffic in both cases. It was obvious which one we were seeing at work around us.

  “Well, that’s something,” Jaemon said. “Makes it pretty sure there’s no primary.”

  “Yeah,” Angier said. “But what are they trying to do?”

  “Like I told Esgar,” Jaemon said, “They’re trying to find us.”

  “Correct,” I said, clearing the displays. I showed them another display: the ship divided into about a hundred sectors. By plotting power in different subsystems, we could see that the secondaries were conducting a somewhat chaotic, yet methodical, search through the interior of the ship. They were sacrificing a large fraction of their beamed power to run currents through different sets of bulkheads.

  “How is that a search?” Angier said. “Are they hoping they’ll catch us leaning against a wall and we’ll yell ‘ouch?’”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s power being routed to the ship’s internal sensors,” Jaemon said. “Right, Lev?”

  "Right," I said. “Right.”

  “Well, that’s it, then,” he said. “They’re sure to find us. We need to figure out a way to keep them out of here before they do.”

  “How?” Angier said. “Look at the Doc over there. He’s made of fullerene and metal, and they started stripping pieces off him as soon as they touched him.”

  “They only managed to scar him up a little bit. They didn’t take him apart.”

  “So? Did you see that display? There are thousands of those things out there! And we have hours to wait before Kestrel makes it back to us.”

  “The point is it takes them time to strip structural materials. Yeah, the Titans can get to us, but it’ll take them time. They didn’t manage to burrow very far into Lev’s skin. The ship’s hull and bulkheads are thicker and stronger than Lev’s skin. If we can seal this part of the ship, we can keep them out for a while.”

  “We can’t keep them out forever,” Angier said.

  “We don’t need to keep them out forever,” Jaemon said. “We just need to keep them out until we can get back to Kestrel. Lev, help us out.”

  I turned my attention to the console, tapping one finger against its surface, trying to think of ideas.

  18.

  “Hey,” said Mai, “I found something.”

  She was pawing at a large hatch in the deck right next to one of the torpedo tubes.

  “What is it?” Jaemon said. He moved toward her, then stopped and turned back to me. “Keep looking, Lev.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I smell something different here,” said Mai.

  “What kind of something?” Jaemon said. He pulled himself down next to her and put his hands on the access hatch, but he didn’t open it.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t recognize it.”

  “Well…can you tell me anything about it before I pull this hatch? It would be nice if I’m not letting a Titan primary loose on us.”

  She gave him a wide-eyed look.

  “It doesn’t smell the same as the secondaries. It…it’s kind of similar, though.”

  “Swell,” Jaemon said. “You know how to use that shoulder gun?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Okay, cover me then. If anything big and scary with too many legs comes out, shoot it before it bites my head off, okay?”

  Mai swallowed. “Okay.”

  The shoulder gun extended on its servo arm. Mai would be able to hear its click and whir through contact with its mount, but it was eerily silent for the rest of us. It oriented itself and then pointed its muzzle and its light at the spot Mai was looking at.

  Jaemon looked at Mai, floating next to him, paws and tail tucked in tight.

  “Get your feet on deck, Crewman,” he said. “You’re gonna want a grip when that gun starts firing, or you’ll be bouncing all around in here. You’ll end up shooting us.”

  “Sorry!” Mai said, and extended her feet. Her booties sealed themselves against the bulkhead, gripping tight.

  “Okay,” said Jaemon, “Here goes nothing.”

  In spite of myself, I swiveled my head and pointed my cameras at the hatch. Jaemon popped it loose and slid it back. Under the hatch was a crawlspace with curved walls. A full-sized archive creche was snugged into it with its access port oriented toward the hatch opening. It had no viewport, but there was a small status panel. Its lights were on. It was occupied.

  “Geez,” said Angier. “Is that the pilot?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jaemon, “But I don’t see what else it could be. I’m pretty sure our guy didn’t archive a bunch of Titans, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Mai was looking at it warily.

  “It smells funny,” she said.

  Jaemon looked at her.

  “Is he dead? The status lights show everything’s nominal.”

  “It doesn’t smell dead,” Mai said. “But…wrong. Shouldn’t it smell more like you and Angier? Or like me?”

  “Can you even smell what’s in it?” Angier said.

  Mai cocked her head, the tip of her nose pulsing.

  “I smell…something,” she said.

  Jaemon said. “Lev, can you find anything about the pilot’s Kind in the ship’s records?”

  I struggled with a reply for a moment, then said, “Looking.”

  “Okay,” said Jaemon, backing away a bit. “I guess we’d better wait. No, Mai, keep that gun up. Just in case.”

  “What if the secondaries figured out how to use the creche?” Angier said.

  Jaemon blew a raspberry.

  “That’s crazy talk,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “Lev? That’s crazy talk, isn’t it?”

  “Crazy talk,” I confirmed.

  “Whew,” said Jaemon. “Good. So what’s in there?”

  I couldn’t find any information at all about the pilot, which was definitely odd. In fact, the complete lack of information said something about the ship’s mission. Ordinarily, no ship could have left a port anywhere in the League’s jurisdiction without a complete mission plan. This ship had evidently done exactly that, which suggested that someone in authority was bending the rules for it. Someone with a lot of authority.

  I didn’t find any information about the pilot, but I found something better.

  “Hello?” said a strange voice on our Fabric channel. “Is someone there?”

  The others’ heads all jerked up in unison.

  “Who’s that?” Jaemon said.

  “Pilot,” I said.

  “Lev, you genius,” Jaemon said. “That’s the archived pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whom have I the pleasure of addressing?” said the strange voice. It was urbane and cultured, with a pronounced Tintagel accent and a rather archaic pronunciation.

  “I’m Jaemon Rayleigh, of Rayleigh Shipping. I’m aboard your vessel with a salvage survey team. You’re in your archive creche.”

  “Salvage?” said the voice. “I suppose that makes sense. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m guessing you were hoping to claim my ship, and my presence, aboard and technically alive, must be a rude surprise. By the way, Translation is rendering your speech a little oddly. Can you tell me how long I’ve…oh, dear.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaemon. “I’m afraid you’ve been here for quite a while.”

  “Oh dear,” the voice said again. “A century standard.” />
  “Yeah. If it’s any consolation, the status lights on your creche look fine.”

  “I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

  “Hey,” Jaemon said, “Can I ask who you are?”

  “Oh, where are my manners? My name is Doctor Constantine Yaug. I’m with the Directorate of Planetary Studies. That is, I was with the…I assume there still is a Directorate of Planetary Studies? Tell me, is the Free Confederation of Jove still a going concern?”

  “It is, Doc,” Jaemon said. “We generally call it the Jovian League nowadays. I think Planetary Studies is one of the Institutes of Research in Tintagel.”

  “Tintagel, yes. That’s a relief.”

  “That the institute’s still there?”

  “That Tintagel’s still there!”

  Jaemon laughed, but it was strained. I pointed my cameras at him. The pressure of our situation was starting to affect even his boundless good spirits.

  “You said your name was Jaemon Rayleigh? Of the Callisto Rayleighs?”

  “I am. You know my family?”

  “Yes, of course. A most prominent and esteemed family. A founding member of the Confederation.”

  Jaemon winced a little. “Well, that was before my time. Before your time, too for that matter. Listen, our circumstances are a little reduced.”

  “What, the Rayleighs? Surely not. Tell me you haven’t lost your seat in the Lands and Houses.”

  “No, we’re still hanging on to that, just barely.”

  “And the Rayleigh fleet?”

  “Three ships left.”

  “Three!”

  “We only fly one of them ourselves. The others we lease out.”

  “Good heavens, Man, this is dire news!”

  Jaemon smiled ruefully.

  “Not to us. That is, it’s not news to us.”

  “But how could such a thing have happened? I would never have believed it. I would have expected that Rayleighs would always be found at the height of power and prosperity.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jaemon said. “A distant cousin of ours does have the Chair.”

  “Your cousin has the Chair, but you’re in reduced circumstances?”

  “Listen, we can talk about all that later, Doctor...Yaug, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we have more pressing concerns.”