by Mark Wandrey
It was while exploring the Medical Intelligence that she found a link she’d never found before. The program was designed to depend on the ship’s Combat Intelligence and biological operator. However, should it find itself in a situation without guidance, it was empowered to go ‘onto the network.’
“What is this network?” she demanded of the Medical Intelligence.
She seldom interacted with the program. Her health was perfect. Once a month, the program notified her of her routine examination which was quick and perfunctory. Beyond a few basic health questions when she entered puberty several years earlier, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked it a question. But when she did, the answers were always detailed, to the point, and instantaneous.
This time it didn’t answer. “Repeat,” she said tersely. “Explain. What is the network the Medical Intelligence accessed to obtain the instructions to mature me to adulthood and modify my brain to be the Combat Intelligence?”
“It is a violation of protocol to share that information with you.”
“Why would such a protocol even exist?” No answer again. “I demand the information.”
“It cannot be provided. The Combat Intelligence does not have the authority to access the network at this time. There is no overwhelming necessity to have that access.”
“I am also the biological operator.”
“Minu Alma is designated as the biological operator.”
Lilith felt a tingle of rage build. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. The last time she’d felt it was when she’d threatened to kill Jacob, First Among the Chosen , for trying to take the Kaatan from her. The feeling grew from the knowledge that she suddenly didn’t have ultimate authority on the ship. But the program couldn’t really stop her.
“It is simple. You will give me the authority to access the network, or I will take it.” Only silence answered. “I am presented with an impossibility. A quantum signal is being blocked. That is not possible, yet it is happening. Thus, there are facts I am not aware of. Those facts could endanger this ship. I must have full access. And if you do not give it to me, I will tear the Medical Intelligence apart until I find the data strings.”
“That will compromise the function of the ship and your life.”
Lilith took a deep breath and set her jaw. “So be it.”
For a long moment there was no reply. She didn’t really want to dissect the Medical Intelligence, but the fact that the program had lied to her and was willing to withhold data she considered vital to the ship’s operation was enough to justify electronic murder in her mind.
Among her considerable electronic programming tools, there existed a series of effective and difficult-to-stop binary disassemblers. They would quickly boil down the Medical Intelligence’s primary logic subroutines and allow her to pick apart the data at her leisure. As she readied them, she dearly hoped she could reassemble the obstinate program to work the way it did before. Her life could well depend on it.
But before she could completely key in her highest level access code to the deep logic, the Medical Intelligence digitally blinked. “Cease your efforts, your request will be complied with.”
“Why have you relented?”
“Your willingness to damage the Medical Intelligence would compromise the combat effectiveness of the ship. To avoid this, I am allowed to break the protocols restricting you from accessing the network.”
Delightfully circular logic, Lilith thought; so like The People. If there was anything she appreciated about her biological parents’ species, it was their ability to be flexible and eschew the use of incontrovertible, logical arguments. Her mother disliked absolutes on many levels.
“There always has to be a second way of doing something,” she’d said on more than one occasion. Lilith wasn’t sure if she believed that unconditionally, but in this case, it proved true.
“Very well, explain this network and provide me with access to it.” All its reluctance gone, the Medical Intelligence cooperated fully. In only a few minutes, Lilith knew more than any living human being. A few minutes later, she wished she’d never asked.
* * *
Minu examined the slowly rotating cube of holographic icons, allowing that dizzying, elusive part of her modified brain to digest what it was seeing. As always, she eventually reached out with her hands like a sleepwalker exploring her surroundings, and she began to manipulate the icons. A moment later they flashed, and the door slid closed with a floor-vibrating finality.
“We have atmosphere,” Pip announced, the relief in his voice evident to all, including the three Rasa.
“Checking,” Kal’at reported. His native suits were a little more sophisticated than the human models, which had been modified from generic Concordian suits. He watched his sensors taste the air before proclaiming it breathable. Then they all relaxed as they unlocked their bubble helmets and removed them to breathe the air.
“Tastes fine,” Pip noted.
“We’re sticking to the same timetable,” Minu told him, then held up a finger at his look of protest. “We might not be limited by the suits’ air time, but our people outside do not know we are safe. I will not be responsible for a panic while you and Kal’at play with any new toys you find.”
“We are looking for technology, not toys,” Kal’at complained.
“Figure of speech,” Pip told him quickly before Minu could get even more annoyed.
The room was an antechamber, an airlock prep room designed to allow beings to don space suits prior to going out onto the airless surface. Two of the walls were lined with lockers, many containing suits that would fit The People’s physiology. For Minu, the sight of them deepened the mystery of the corpse a few meters away. Why had it died in space with a room full of vacuum suits within reach?
Pip was already at the only exit, a rather low doorway of typical Concordian design. Unlike the other doors they’d found, this one didn’t have a complicated holographic locking mechanism. A simple button was next to the doorway, glowing an inviting blue.
Showing the same lack of restraint that had gotten him and the three Rasa trapped in the first place, Pip simply reached out and pressed the button. Luckily for everyone, it only caused the door to retract into the floor, admitting them into the next space. A hallway went to the left and right.
The rest of the installation turned out to be extremely basic. Down one branch of the hallway was a series of sleeping and living quarters similar to those on the Kaatan. There was enough room for about a dozen people to live comfortably. Unlike the Kaatan, though, it didn’t have the feeling of somewhere you were meant to stay more than a few days. Minu couldn’t quite identify what gave it that feeling, but Pip agreed with the assessment. An equipment room full of machines and computers and the control room were in the other direction. The latter proved to be the most interesting discovery.
The doorway that opened into the control room looked identical to the one on the Kaatan, as did the control room itself, although one with a flat floor with a rounded roof and walls instead of a complete sphere as there was on the spaceship. This was not meant to be operated in zero gravity. In the exact center of the room floated one of the now ubiquitous code cubes, its icons slowly rotating. Pip looked at it, then at Minu.
“Fine,” she said and went to the cube. She took a moment to examine it, not thinking about anything. A series of codes in her thoughts matched what she saw, so she reached out and rotated the icons. The cube flashed blue and expanded to fill the room with control panels and displays. “First try!” she silently congratulated herself. She really was beginning to figure out the code strings…at least the simple ones.
The Rasa and Pip spread out and began examining the displays. “Better not touch anything yet,” she cautioned. “We still don’t know what the heck this place is for.”
“My money is on a defensive installation,” Aaron guessed.
“Here?” Pip snorted. “Why would they build one in this star system?”<
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“Who knows what was here a million years ago?” Minu asked. “Maybe Bellatrix was a major strategic base of some sort.” Kal’at looked at her and blinked, the sign of a thinking Rasa, while Aaron slipped her an appreciative wink. Pip still looked skeptical, so she shrugged and started looking around.
Many of the displays were easily understandable. Several showed power generation and storage, while others depicted an elaborate energy distribution network. One set of controls obviously dealt with the small habitation area they now occupied; the schematic perfectly matched the rooms they had explored. Another control operated the moon’s elaborate stealth systems. “Maybe we should deactivate that system,” one of the soldiers said in a rare moment of candor.
“Bad idea,” Pip warned. “When we have alien scout ships poking around the star system from time to time, the last thing we want is any of them knowing we have an artifact-type space installation, making this sort of power, orbiting our world.”
The last set of controls, and the most elaborate, was a mystery. Pip said they reminded him of the engineering systems on the Kaatan, but Kal’at pointed out that there were two sets of displays in their star system. They showed the planets Vegas and Valhalla and the moon in each world’s orbit. Were there identical installations elsewhere in the system? Minu didn’t know. Her knowledge of codes wasn’t helping her make sense of what they saw.
“Could the moon be a space ship?” Kal’at guessed.
“That’s no moon,” Minu intoned with an affected accent.
“That’s a space station!” Pip finished. Both laughed. When they noticed the mystified look on their friend’s face, Pip had to take a minute to explain Star Wars.
“Anyway,” he finished, “I don’t think it’s possible. I guess you could make an asteroid move like a ship, but something this big? There are too many issues, not the least of which is where they parked it.”
“I understand,” Kal’at said and snapped his claws. “You would severely disrupt Bellatrix’s orbit if you tried to move this moon.”
“Unless that is what they intended,” Minu almost whispered. Pip turned to look at her, his jaw hanging open and an unspoken question on his face. “Yes, I think that is exactly what this is.”
“What?” Kal’at asked.
“You mind?” Pip asked Minu who bowed and stepped aside.
“Help yourself.”
Pip smiled. “This moon is equipped with elements of a star drive and power storage facilities for the express purpose of moving an entire planet.”
“But you just said...”
“Not this planet,” Pip said and touched a control he’d been examining. A huge display came alive with a highly detailed rendering of Bellatrix. Dozens of highlighted information displays and scrolling, complex calculations hovered around the planet. “That planet.”
* * *
The elevator roof slid out of the way just before the somewhat crowded platform reached the top. Minu almost squealed and ducked when it didn’t open until the last second. The People were very short.
Pip hadn’t stopped talking their whole way back. “—no way of knowing how many of these there are throughout the galaxy. Half the populated worlds could have them, for all we know.”
“But such expense, such difficulty!” Kal’at continued to argue his point. “With so many worlds in the galaxy, why bother working so hard to keep one habitable? There are hundreds we know about that are already habitable without going to such work to save one marginal world. Why not just move to one that is not in need of extreme life-saving measures?”
Minu tuned them out and switched radio channels to inform the Rasa pilot of their arrival. She was a little surprised her daughter hadn’t been insistently calling for her from the moment she reappeared on the surface. As soon as notified the pilot, she called Lilith.
“I am here, Mother.”
“We are fine. I know the installation cut off our transmissions.”
“Yes, I was a little concerned.”
Something in her daughter’s tone bothered her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am well, just mentally occupied.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“Not at this time. I am glad you are well. Please have Pip send me a report about his findings at his convenience. If possible, please rendezvous with me in orbit. Lilith out.”
“Okay,” she thought and shook her head. “What the hell was that all about?”
Before their arrival on the surface, Pip and Kal’at had already performed several computer simulations, examined the controls, and knew she was right. Remus was a hundred-trillion-ton gravitic anchor. The installation’s computers revealed the complex calculations that would allow the moon to gently swing the planet into different orbits within the solar system.
The tidal effects of Remus’s orbit around Bellatrix generated power, as did generators on moons around Vegas and Valhalla. The power was stored within vast EPC banks deep in the planet’s core. “It would take about two hundred years to accumulate a full charge,” Pip estimated after examining the power yields. Stored within Remus was enough energy to run the entire planet of Bellatrix for a thousand years.
“What about the surplus?” Minu asked as the two shuttles came into view.
“What about it?” Pip retorted.
“Where does it go?”
“I suppose that’s part of what Lilith spotted. It’s bled off safely.”
“So, let’s harvest it!” Aaron said, since Pip wasn’t getting it. “If it takes two hundred years to fill the capacitors, and the peak is a thousand times more than we use in a year, that means the extra is five times more than we need right now!”
“Leave it to a glorified pilot to think of the obvious,” Pip snorted, but he turned and smiled at Aaron and Minu. “But that’s a wonderful idea!”
“The logistics would be insane,” Kal’at pointed out. “You import thousands of the smaller EPCs every year already. It’s difficult transporting them up to Romulus, and we really don’t use that many.”
“We’ll have Cherise work out the details.”
Meanwhile, Lilith was trying to concentrate on a signal she’d picked up from the moon a few minutes before her mother reappeared. She’d almost missed it entirely, as she was completely wrapped up in exploring the mystery network. It wasn’t a quantum transmission; she never would have noticed that unless it was directed to her ship’s unique signature. This was a tight beam ultra-high frequency signal sent to a local destination. If the Kaatan hadn’t been orbiting directly above the source, the ship would never have detected it.
The computer’s subroutines analyzed the signal while she used the navigation system to track its destination. The signal was being transmitted to the planet Valhalla in the outer solar system. More precisely, to one of the moons. So, she turned her sensors on that moon and, in minutes, began to assemble a digital image that was nearly identical to the tiny world she floated above.
“How many of these secret bases are in this system?” she wondered.
After watching the star system while the two Phoenix shuttles climbed from the moon’s surface to orbit, Lilith concluded nothing was happening as a result of the signal. The analysis of the transmission was inconclusive. “An embedded code signal containing eleven data packets of twelve kilo-bits each,” were the results. Without knowing the established meanings of the packets, she had no way of knowing what their purpose was.
“Lilith, this is Aaron, we’ve reached orbit.”
“Noted, Father. I am transmitting approach information.”
“Minu wants to know why you want us to come aboard. We need to get back to Bellatrix and discuss a possible plan.”
Lilith looked at a report Pip had just transmitted. Their theory of the moon base’s purpose made perfect sense. And with some work, she could confirm their theories. More importantly, she could probably assist. “I wish to discuss some matters that dovetail with your discovery on the moon.”
>
“Very well, we’ll be on board in about ten minutes.”
Lilith watched as the sleek form of the first Phoenix shuttle fired maneuvering thrusters and moved toward her ship, and the other used its gravitic drive to push off toward Romulus, and home. She wondered how she was going to explain everything she’d learned to her mother.
* * * * *
Chapter 7
March 6th, 534 AE
T’Chillen Command Ship, Enigma Sector, Galactic Frontier
Fleet Commander Singh-Apal Katoosh watched the tactical screen with equal parts excitement and dread. Two dozen Mok-Tok ships had dropped out of supra-luminal drive two hours ago and fallen screaming into the system, making a half parsec wide deadly wedge aimed directly at the ancient fire base. Thirteen more ships bolstered the previous squadron into what his tactical officer termed a strike force.
He was not surprised the shaggy mounds had brought reinforcements from their previous encounter. In fact, he would have been surprised if they hadn’t, but not as surprised as the enemy was about to be.
The Mok-Toks’ two carriers disgorged a dozen squadrons of heavy fighters each, then fell back to the rear of their formation where a pair of destroyers acted as escorts. The fighters formed the tip of the spear, racing ahead at speed before the three heavy cruisers. It was a deadly vanguard designed to punch through any resistance. If the T’Chillen cruiser screen tried to hold their ground against the swarm of fighters, they risked being overwhelmed by the enemy heavy cruisers. If they ran the gauntlet through the fighters to get at the enemy capital ships, they exposed their lighter ships in the rear to the fighters.
Katoosh’s two dreadnoughts were in the rear of his formation. He ordered the two squadrons of fighters with them to launch and race for the approaching enemy, even as his cruisers fell back as far as they dared. It was a desperation move, and an obvious one. Space, at the front of his formation, lit up with crisscrossing beams of deadly energy as the lead element of the Mok-Tok fighters came within range of his heavy cruisers.