Etude to War (Earth Song Cycle Book 4)

by Mark Wandrey

  Minu got up from her station and looked around the room. “We know we’re probably alone, but let’s go out in force. Kal’at, leave a squad behind just to be safe.” She didn’t want to say it but leaving Lilith alone in the alien space station made her nervous, and she didn’t know why.

  A gangway extended to the starboard port, another courtesy the station wordlessly provided. It was only the second time they’d ever used the egress; the first was when they took possession of the ship years earlier in the Enigma Fire Base.

  They marched down the gangway, through a pressure door into the station and found it different from the abandoned city on Atlantis. Whereas the city had been a ghost town, all but dead and inactive, this station throbbed with life and buzzed as bots of all types whizzed past the surprised visitors.

  After observing for a moment, Minu saw the look on Pip’s face and scowled. “Don’t go disappearing on me,” she warned him.

  “I have a theory I want to confirm or deny,” he replied without looking at her.

  “We’re not here to indulge theories.”

  “No, we’re here to indulge you.” They stared at each other.

  “Is that a problem?” Aaron asked. Pip turned to look at him. He was only a few centimeters taller than Pip but carried at least two dozen extra kilos of pure muscle. The lights of the station sparkled off the dualloy plate in Pip’s skull, and his eyes betrayed no emotion.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” It was an accusation more than a question.

  “Is something wrong?” Kal’at asked from behind the humans. Two squads of his soldiers milled around, checking their gear. As usual, the tech-oriented Rasa only carried a sleek beamcaster pistol, but his belt held a plethora of scientific equipment. He glanced between Pip and Aaron without understanding the interplay between the humans. Were two Rasa facing off, there would be hissing and bared claws.

  “Nothing, really,” Minu said, glaring at her husband and friend with equal venom.

  The last thing she needed, thousands of light-years from home, was a pissing contest between the two guys. And, with those words, they nodded to each other, and Minu led them into the station.

  Eight hours later, the team took a break in one of the station’s many operations offices, comparing notes on what they had found. All together, it was a big nothing.

  “The station is constructed from standardized modules,” Lilith explained to Minu through the gem in her ear. “These same modules were utilized for many purposes by The People and were manufactured in large quantities.”

  “A sort of space building kit?”

  “Exactly. Placed within a superstructure, they can make anything from a habitat on a hostile world to a starship such as the Kaatan.”

  “So, we have a problem. My father left something here. Where and how do we find it?”

  “I will attempt to analyze the facility for probable cache locations.”

  While Lilith worked, Minu considered the problem. She thought about Atlantis. They didn’t find a specific clue there. Instead, they found a working factory, the only one manufactured by The People any human had ever seen working. She’d come to Dervish because it was next in his logs, a logical choice.

  Her father wrote that he was sure almost no one had visited this station. He outlined how they had gotten there from a backwater world barely able to support human life. That Portal was in a nearly-demolished industrial complex that showed no evidence of exploration. He had detailed an arduous quest to reach this point. She smiled a little. Her father never thought his little girl would be cavorting around the galaxy in a starship.

  “There are no more starships,” he had told her when she was small.

  Now she smiled: “Surprise, Dad!”

  “What was that?” Aaron asked.

  “Just thinking aloud. Kal’at, can you use the directory to locate the energy storage system?”

  The Rasa tapped the icons on one of the terminals by the room’s doorway and quickly obtained results. “There are hundreds of bays holding EPC storage arrays, but only one main handling system.”

  “That is our destination,” she said with certainty.

  “The power handling system is in a dangerous area of the station,” Lilith cautioned.

  “I’m all the more certain then,” Minu said.

  As a team, they followed Kal’at’s directions to a tram station which took them many kilometers deeper into the ancient structure. Dozens of stations went by, one after another, each looking identical to the previous one.

  Suddenly the tram shot out into a transparent tube over a vast, open space. The circular shape of the station was visible as it curved away to either side. It was an amazing vista, but an even more amazing use of space. “Look!” Aaron called and pointed.

  Running on huge spiraling tracks, hundreds of robotic manipulators placed, removed, and carried things from notches in the walls.

  As they sped along the axis of the space, Minu watched a robotic arm pass by. Instead of a hand, it sported a specialized manipulator capable of holding four large cylindrical items. With a shock she realized they were massive EPCs. Before she could share that fact, Pip did it for her.

  “This is one big EPC warehouse,” he observed.

  “How many?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “Ten, twenty thousand?” he guessed with a shrug. “These are bigger than any EPCs I’ve ever seen.”

  “The units are class one EPCs,” Lilith told her, evidently listening in on the conversation.

  “How much power is in each one?”

  “Each unit is capable of fully charging a Kaatan-class cruiser. Some classes of ship use multiple capacitors. They are sometimes employed to power terrestrial facilities as well.”

  “You could probably run our planet for a year off one of them,” Pip said. You couldn’t tell by looking at him or listening to his voice, but Minu knew he was impressed. Some of his old mannerisms were still there.

  Ahead of their course was the center of the cylindrical storage chamber, a tube-shaped structure hundreds of meters across and half a kilometer long. All the tracks for the robotic EPC handlers ended there. This was obviously the control center of the power handling operation.

  The tram stopped, and the doors slid open noiselessly. Just as in the rest of the station, several little crystalline bots were busily performing unknown maintenance. They took no notice of the visitors.

  There was only one exit, secured by one of the holographic interfaces The People favored. They spread out, humans in front and Rasa behind, as Minu addressed it.

  She examined the ancient script for a moment as the part of her brain modified by the Weavers worked on the puzzle. Without conscious thought, she reached out and began manipulating the icons. Her waking mind knew she was entering a master code, the highest-level cypher there was. The door instantly began to slide open.

  The Rasa soldiers held their weapons at the ready. After the run-in with the Squeen on Atlantis, they expected the unexpected.

  The door revealed a nondescript hall like every other one they’d seen on the station. Minu walked in, smiling and shaking her head. She’d recognized the cypher’s coding. No one else was inside.

  A series of control rooms for the robotic handling systems lined the hall, with the main operations center at the end. Pip studied the systems for a minute before speaking. “The energy storage and handling functions could all be run from here.”

  “How did they ship out the EPC?” Minu asked.

  “There must be a group of Portals here somewhere.”

  “He is correct,” Lilith said in her ear.

  Minu unlocked the storage controls. The cylindrical room came alive with floating displays much like those Lilith used in the Kaatan CIC. She touched one of the displays, experimenting with the power management system.

  In moments she was moving displays around with quick, deft flicks of her fingers. The system displayed matrixes of stored EPCs: types, sizes, amount of power in e
ach one, and current reserves in the station’s power banks.

  Another control showed the current amounts of power available for storage and historical quantities in complicated graphs. Seeing the immense quantities of energy the station had harvested over eons was amazing.

  The storage regime was systematic. Along the wall were rows upon rows of storage containers ordered according to capacity, current storage, and destination. But in the middle of a thousand huge, fully-charged EPCs, was a single empty one.

  “What have we here?” she asked aloud as she accessed the system’s logic routine. Vastly simpler than the Kaatan’s artificial intelligence, these routines were simple and straightforward. It only took her minutes to find the modified code. That EPC was exempt from the handling protocols, essentially locking it in place. “I’ve got something.”

  Minu easily overrode the lockout and ordered the questionable EPC brought to the control center. The capacitive batteries were simple devices, essentially nested arrays of many smaller capacitors all interconnected with a small computer to control output and monitor the entire setup.

  Outside in the vast storage chamber, robotic handlers stopped their automated routine and moved in response. They moved to one of the largest EPCs, secured it via two attachment points, and slid it from its notch in the bulkhead. Then, working together, they quickly slid it along the tracks toward the main module.

  “Let’s go check it out,” Minu said and headed toward the door.

  The maintenance section was in the rear section of the control center. It was basically an open cylinder, its walls studded with maintenance bots and analytical computers. There were stores of spare parts to repair common failures in the EPCs as well.

  When they entered, they found two other EPCs undergoing repairs at one of the dozen work stations. Seeing the EPCs up close for the first time really put the outside view into perspective. They were easily five meters long and four meters in diameter, about the size of Minu’s aerocar back on Bellatrix. She shook her head at the thought that one of those modules could power their entire planet for months, maybe a year.

  A door opened at the opposite end of the room and the robots pushed the new EPC through it. At first, it appeared identical to the two already locked into recesses in the wall.

  Pip moved to an operations station on the side, and he manipulated the script as the bots inside the maintenance room secured the EPC to a wall. Diagnostic tools built into the bay quickly linked with the module and fed data to Pip’s workstation.

  “Anything unusual?” Minu asked once the data began to display.

  “Nothing’s normal,” he replied. “The module is empty.”

  “You mean no power stored?” Kal’at said.

  “No, I mean empty. There is no power storage equipment inside the module.”

  “What’s inside?” Aaron asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Pip said and manipulated the script.

  Two more crystalline bots exited a glass panel and joined the two already working on the EPC. In moments, they split the external covering in two and deftly moved it aside.

  Inside, instead of racks of EPC cells, there was a dualloy frame cut to hold four large, standardized Concordian cargo modules like the cylinders in the old-design Enforcers.

  “Looks like your father, again.”

  Minu nodded and told Pip to have the modules removed from the framework so they could take a better look at them. The bots did so in under a minute, and the group moved in to look as Minu examined the code pads.

  “We could have the bots cut them open,” Pip suggested.

  “Considering my father, that might not be the smartest course of action.”

  She entered a standard high-level code commonly used by the Chosen into the locking mechanism. The code pad flashed red, code refused. Next, she tried the one from her father’s diaries that had worked the last time she found one of his special caches. The mechanism refused it, as well.

  “Huh,” she grunted and scratched her chin. He was being more obtuse this time.

  Minu stood and considered her options. Her father had carefully detailed, in his diary, dozens of codes he’d used during his years as Chosen.

  There were codes for use in temporary safe stores, codes for long-term caches, and codes for some of the items he termed ‘personal.’ She looked again at the four gleaming cargo modules. They weren’t personal unless he’d hidden a house full of furniture. And there was no way he used one of the Chosen’s high-level codes.

  Dervish was not in the Chosen database. The star system existed in the Concordia books, known only by its identifier. And since there were no planets in the trinary system, who would ever come here?

  “Pip, how long has this been here?”

  He consulted the station’s computer. “The record locater was locked thirty-four years ago.”

  Minu chewed her lip and tried not to look as concerned as she felt. Thirty-four years. She had been born thirty-four years ago; subjective years, of course, since she really wasn’t even thirty. Faster-than-light travel played hell with one’s sense of time. How old would she be when they got back to Bellatrix, she wondered?

  Only one person was supposed to find the hidden modules. Minu pulled out her tablet, accessed Chriso’s diary and located his index of codes. She looked at the list of personal ones; they were in order by date.

  She ran her finger down the list and stopped at December 5, 499. Fifteen days after she was born. It was a code in the more advanced, old-Concordian script. It had meant nothing when she looked at it years earlier when the diary first came into her possession, but now the script rearranged itself in her mind, instantly translating into the word, Sapphire.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  The others watched her as she coded in the script. Instantly, the code panel flashed white, and the module broke open. They stepped back as the mechanism unfolded the protective shell like a complicated puzzle, peeling back in on itself and turning forty-five degrees as it revealed its contents.

  “Son of a bitch is right,” Aaron breathed when they saw what was inside.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Cherise asked.

  Cherise had never been in battle against or with a higher-order species of the Concordia. Minu and Aaron had, more than once, and Kal’at’s Rasa, had worked with the T’Chillen many times before their falling-out. Pip knew what it was because, well, that’s what Pip did. So, he was the one that spoke.

  “That my dear Cherise, is a combat suit.” Minu thought even he sounded a little awed at the sight.

  “Not only that,” Minu said as she moved closer, after the module finished its high-tech origami act. She examined some of the script markings and leaned in even closer to see the configuration. “This one was made for one of The Lost to use.”

  “Wait,” Aaron said, getting even more excited, “we’re damn near physiological matches for The Lost, right? Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Pip nodded, already working to interface one of his omnipresent tablets with the suit. It only took moments for him to activate the machine.

  Minu hopped back as it came to life. Holographic panels on the suit’s chest lit up, along with rows of lights and virtual switches.

  Micro-motors whirred to life after untold millennia of waiting, and the machine leaned forward to step from the module. The deck plate reverberated slightly as the ultra-sophisticated moliplas-armored killing machine stepped down.

  “Why do I feel like whistling the theme from The Terminator?” Aaron asked. The humans chuckled, and even Pip had to smile.

  The Rasa soldiers were chittering so excitedly in their native language, the translators were unable to keep up. Kal’at examined the machine and spoke with Pip, using his own tablet to research and make notes as the two talked shop. Everyone there saw something different.

  The Rasa saw an unbelievably powerful war machine that only higher-order species owned and dared to employ in battle.

&n
bsp; Pip and Kal’at saw a living example of technology that no longer existed in a place they could see and touch. It represented a chance for them to learn things that were unlearnable only minutes earlier.

  Cherise saw the wealth they could represent to humanity. She often dealt in off-world trade and knew these sorts of machines never, ever came up for sale. Even if they did, humanity would never have the chance to buy them because the big boys didn’t want little species to have such power and because they wouldn’t be able to afford them. The planet’s entire economic output for a year wouldn’t buy one, and they’d found four.

  Aaron’s thoughts were a hybrid of the others. As an industrialist, he saw the potential boon these machines might be for his corporation, and thus, the planet. But as Chosen, he knew that to humanity, they were like firearms in a world where everyone else had rocks and sticks.

  Everything that the others were thinking also went through Minu’s mind, moments before she settled on something much closer to home. Her father had found these shortly before she was born. Like many of his discoveries, he had never brought them home. He had carefully cached them away in a place only he or someone with his diary could find. And that someone had to know him well enough to guess the code.

  While everyone else was jabbering and drooling over the armored combat suit, she walked around and examined the cargo module’s control area. She used a driver set from the maintenance crew’s nearby tool rack to carefully remove the control panel. Inside, she found additional wiring which was obviously not part of the mechanism. It was human-manufactured, though skillfully added to the module’s photronic circuitry.

  She’d removed three more panels before Pip noticed and abandoned his examinations with Kal’at. When he saw her work, he whistled quietly.

  “That’s quite a little surprise your father left,” he said, admiring the work. “It’s more than enough to make me glad we didn’t cut it open.” Hidden in the module’s shell and scattered all round its workings were dozens of high-explosive charges. There was enough to destroy the suit and all four of them as well.

  “The explosive charges in this module would likely have detonated the other three too,” he remarked.