The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  Ayia was more of an enigma. As he walked across the edge of the chasm Kale thought about why he allowed her to remain with him. He didn’t think it was pity and, while she was attractive, he reminded himself that a relationship was not his intended path. She was smart and, though overly cautious, he valued the balance of her hesitancy to his occasional reckless behavior. Kale thought it was the comfort of having that balance keeping him in check that made him like her company. She wouldn’t be around forever though, no more than a year. To that point, Kale refused to allow himself to get attached to anyone, especially her.

  On the other side of the chasm, Kale reentered enclosed space. He checked his cable, trailing behind him in weightlessness. The hallway seemed less destroyed after this point. Gheno continued to guide him. The hallway became larger where it joined other corridors. He couldn’t be too sure as he could make no semblance of a passage down any of them due to the state of their destruction. Just a few dozen yards from where all the passageways connected, Kale ran into a set of solid, sliding doors. Kale searched until he found the manual release and then had to force doors open. As the doors slid open slowly, Kale’s heart rate increased. It wasn’t the hard work in opening the doors that was unnerving; it was the expectation of what he would see on the other side of the door that made him feel anxious.

  It then dawned on him that he was looking for bodies.

  Kale forced the door open just a few inches, just enough to squeeze through. He turned on one of the flood lamps on his helmet and looked into the room, preparing for any surprises, but saw nothing.

  He found the bridge.

  It was a large central elevated area enclosed in a perimeter of monitors. But there were no chairs, no consoles, and certainly no captain’s seat. Instead, there was a large cylinder in the middle of the room that Kale could see. There was a mass of cables coming down from the ceiling hooked up to it. He surveyed the room with the flood light as he squeezed into the door.

  “I don’t see any bodies,” Gheno’s voice crackled with static over the intercom.

  “Yeah, I don’t see any either.”

  “What?” he thought he heard Ayia’s voice.

  There was a layer of dust in the room he had not seen anywhere else on the vessel. The room also appeared stripped of all equipment. The standard electronics that he expected to see in the bridge appeared to have been removed. Gheno pointed out the very same thing the moment Kale realized it.

  “Something isn’t right. The bridge isn’t wrecked, it’s stripped. Do you think someone survived here?”

  “Good call kid, maybe.” Kale pointed the flood light at the mass of cables coming out of the ceiling. “That explains the lines you traced?”

  Gheno nodded in satisfaction with a glance at Ayia.

  Kale walked towards the cylinder and looked over the top of it.

  “What is that?” Gheno over the com.

  “I don’t know,” Kale replied.

  He stepped up onto the center floor to get a better view. The cylinder was nearly eight feet long and approximately three feet wide. The top was flatter than the sides. It felt completely out of place with the angular and jagged construction of the Dominion ship. The cables that came down dropped right into the middle of it and then trailed to the side furthest from the way Kale had entered.

  “Kale, I'm getting some electrical readings from, whatever that is,” Gheno said.

  Kale stood above the top and put his hand down over it. A small cloud of dust instantly floated up, hanging in the vacuum of the bridge. There was a deep hue to the top of the cylinder, it was rather opaque in appearance. Kale began brushing off the dust which caused a mess as the dust just settled in the space above the chamber. Kale grew frustrated. There was no air to move the dust away. Instead, he found himself using his entire body to move the floating grime away. It took a few minutes but he cleared the area and could better see what he was looking at.

  Some of the dust continued to float above the cylinder so he ducked under it and pressed his helmet up against it. As he brought the light to bear against it, he saw deep into the cylinder and was so shocked that he stood straight up, took a few steps back, and fell off the center of the bridge, landing on his back.

  On the Midnight Oil, the still image of the video Kale had transmitted back to the ship was paused. Gheno and Ayia stood in shock, staring at the screen. The image was blurred but the features were clear. In the main screen was the faintly lit silhouette of a young girl.

  Kale stood back up. He landed on his back and the suit’s gravity control took a moment to realize which position he was in. He took a few steps but was dazed for a moment. He stopped to get his bearings. He knew what he had seen and felt foolish for having been startled so easily. Over the intercom, Gheno and Ayia were talking nonstop so he turned down the volume. He stepped back up onto the central part of the bridge and stepped over the cylinder. He looked into it again, looking at the face of the young girl that he uncovered. He brushed more of the dirt off, working slowly this time so as not to cause a zero gravity dust storm. As he cleared it off, he quickly saw that the girl was naked. She was young, maybe twelve to fourteen years old. She had blonde, almost white, hair and it appeared to trail down below her waist.

  The cover he was looking through had a deep hue to it. He looked closely but he couldn’t tell if the girl was breathing. Then again, it didn’t make any sense at all that she would be. There would not have been any humans alive here for the past twenty or thirty years. This was most likely a survivor of whatever it was that had destroyed the ship. Why she was in the bridge was a complete mystery to Kale.

  It was at that point that the fun of exploration was over and Kale wanted to leave.

  “Gheno, have the AI scan this room, see if there is anything worth taking. Then I'm leaving,” he asked.

  The protests began immediately. “What? What about her?”

  Ayia chimed in, “Kale we need to get her back here. We need to try to help her.”

  “Are you serious? She’s a popsicle. This was not the body I came looking for.”

  “Then at the very least we need to bring her back and find out who she is, or was.” There was a hint of concern in her voice and that bothered Kale. His dreams of a huge payout were gone and the whole scenario he was in was making him nervous, agitated.

  “She is already in her coffin, let’s just leave her here and get out. Gheno, that scan please.”

  “Kale, we CAN’T!” Kale could hear her voice shaking, “No matter what.”

  “This is why I fly alone,” Kale murmured. “This is not up for discussion. Nothing about this looks, or feels, good. Again Gheno, the scan, now.”

  Kale heard a beep and he looked at his heads up display and saw that a scan initiated using his helmet sensors. It was being run from the ship.

  “Nothing about this looks good? We find a decades old relic of the Dominion, who knows how far from Earth, and that is what you think doesn’t look good?” Ayia was grilling Kale.

  “No, I agree. Finding this hunk out here was pure luck, odd luck, but I walked into this wreck expecting to find something valuable and a small girl in a coffin was definitely not that. You can agree with me that something odd happened here but this just took a turn for the worse.”

  Gheno had not joined in the argument. Instead he was monitoring the scan intently. The software looked for any forms of energy and metals within a certain area. In this case they were searching the bridge of the ship. It was clear within a few seconds that there was a distinct energy signature in the room. Gheno began adding scanning parameters into the searching patterns. He began identifying the different types of energy. All of them were being emitted or run from the cylinder that contained what appeared to be human cargo. As Kale and Ayia continued to argue their cases, Gheno picked out a radio emission.

  “Kale?”

  He was ignored as they continued arguing.

  Gheno isolated the radio signal. It was a simple pattern,
repeating its frequency. The software began to immediately form the pattern but could not discern what it was transmitting. It was clear this wasn’t a natural phenomenon. Gheno glanced back up at the screen; Kale’s view. He was pacing back and forth in the bridge as Ayia continued to make a claim for why the girl should be brought on board. Deep down, Gheno thought if Kale really wanted to just walk out and back to the ship he could. Kale was having his own conflict.

  Instead of trying to get his attention, Gheno continued to work on the radio signal. He transmitted it via Kale’s helmet back into the ship and began to dig through the archives for software to read the radio signals. When he found one, he ordered the AI to install it into its system. After the brief moment it took to install, Gheno opened the program and began working with the settings. Once he was able to feed the radio signal into the decoder, data started flowing onto his screen. Gheno recognized it immediately. It was code.

  It was ancient, simple in many ways, yet complex in an organic fashion. The code was streamlined in a way he had never seen before. Initially he didn’t recognize what the code might mean but he could see many of the basic commands, emulations, and formulas but they were all melded congruently into each other. They weren’t separate programs but a part of a whole system. As the data continued flowing in, he began to recognize patterns. Images formed in his head and he saw clearly what the code was.

  It was an AI and it was attempting to communicate.

  It was trying to show a picture. Gheno quickly typed a few commands into his AI and began having it translate the code into images he could recognize. It took a while but the ship’s AI began to put pictures together. The first image was a hole in the ground, a cave, and the cave was in a mountain. The image changed to a hand coming out of the cave followed by some kind of herd animal, something small but quick. The herd rushed out of the cave like a river. The scene continued for a moment and then changed to a closer look at the cave. The image showed the inside of the cave where there were number of animals dead on the ground. A rather small animal hobbled towards the exit of the cave and stopped short, falling. It looked back up at the screen, pleading.

  The images began repeating.

  “Kale?” Gheno thought he knew what they had.

  Ayia stopped her pleading. Tears welled in her eyes but she was holding valiantly against her emotions. Kale had not left the room and was sitting next to the cylinder on the ground.

  “Yeah kid?” Kale sounded defeated, “Find something?”

  “I’d like to think I did,” Gheno had the sound of a boy who had found his favorite toy after losing it, “You're not going to believe this but I'm talking to the cylinder.”

  Ayia shot up. “You're talking to the girl?”

  “No, not the girl. I think there is an AI in the cylinder,” Gheno’s happiness was about to fully exude from him, “No, I think the girl IS the AI.”

  Ayia’s head shifted back.

  “What?” Kale asked over the intercom.

  “I picked up a radio signal from the cylinder, it’s talking to me. I think it’s asking for help to get out. It’s stuck. I think the Dominion used some kind of organic AI. I’ve read all about this. I have some theories on how it might be done. I did all this work a year ago, I think…” Gheno started rambling.

  Kale stood up and looked back over into the cylinder. He heard many times before of organic AIs; human brain’s grown to work as artificial intelligence. However, it had always been a rumor.

  “Kid, I know what you're thinking but the Dominion has never been much about having AI. They never had the tech for it.”

  “They put a girl in a box and ran her like a computer?” Ayia was disturbed at the thought.

  “No, it’s not like that, you don’t really need a body, just an organic brain,” Gheno attempted to explain how large brains could be grown organically but stopped when he saw Ayia’s look.

  “Something doesn’t add up. You sure it’s an AI?” Kale was focused on the cylinder. He took a few steps back to take it all in.

  “Positive. Its rather old code, well, primitive almost, but its AI code,” Gheno confirmed.

  “And it’s coming from the cylinder?”

  Gheno nodded his head before realizing Kale couldn’t see him. “Yeah.”

  “Can it hear us?” Kale wondered out loud.

  The image on the screen changed to a plus symbol being repeated over and over in several different colors.

  “I think it just said positive? As in yes.” Gheno replied

  “It said what? It…what is going on up there?”

  Gheno explained the code being translated into the images. Kale walked back up the cylinder and then asked Gheno to feed the images back into his HuD. A smaller screen opened up inside the larger, direct video feed from the ship. He looked back down into the cylinder and the young girl inside it.

  “Are you alive?”

  An image of a question mark popped up on the screen. That could mean a few things.

  “Did you understand my question?”

  The plus sign appeared.

  “You don’t know if you're alive?”

  Plus sign.

  “Do you need help?”

  Plus sign.

  “Are you trapped?”

  A circle. Kale didn’t know how to interpret that.

  “Do you want to get out?”

  Plus sign.

  “How do I get you out?”

  No picture came up right away. Instead there was a slight delay and then the image of a bird showed up.

  “It wants to fly?”

  Plus sign.

  “Maybe it thinks of the spaceship as a bird, wants us to fly it out,” Ayia interjected. Her interest piqued with this new development.

  Kale walked around behind the cylinder and looked at the feed of cables going into the cylinder.

  “Does this keep you alive?”

  Plus sign.

  “How long?”

  Half circle. Kale shrugged.

  “We’re going to have to work on our communications.”

  A picture of two hands shaking appeared.

  Ayia laughed. “I think it agreed with you.”

  Kale continued, “Can you live without it?”

  The picture of the cave with the dead animals inside of it appeared. Kale shuddered.

  “Ugh, I’ll take that as a no.”

  Kale stopped for a moment, deep in thought. His initial goal of finding the body of a great Dominion legend had failed, but finding an AI was momentous. The Dominion shrugged off AI technology in favor of simply overdeveloping their organic brains. If they had somehow managed to mold the two technologies together then maybe this was an even greater find. His mind began reeling with the possibilities of who he might sell it to so he focused on how he could get the AI onto the Midnight Oil.

  “Gheno, can you download it to our cores?”

  “I don’t think so. It would probably take years through that radio signal and even if we hooked a cable up to it I have no idea how to interface with this code. I recognize the code, but that doesn’t mean I know how to use it.”

  “So we move it. Is it going to need power to be moved?”

  A picture of an iceberg floating in water came up.

  “That makes sense, kind of. How long can you last without power?”

  The screen began filling up with odd symbols, some rotating, others just changing. They weren’t anything Kale could understand. The images kept changing faster and faster until the screen suddenly went black. Then the question mark came up.

  “I'm guessing it doesn’t know.” Gheno added over the intercom.

  “Can you still talk to me once I cut the cables?” Kale continued.

  There was another pause and then a minus symbol appeared.

  “Ok, Gheno, scan this thing well because when I get back you're going to have to find a way to get it plugged back into power.”

  Gheno was already ahead of Kale and was actively scanning the
capsule. He narrowed down the scope of wiring to the cables that provided the energy and thought he had an accurate reading of the amount of power required. He also figured out the density of the cable to see what he would need to find as well. He yelled at Kale over the intercom that he was already getting to work and dashed out of the pilot’s cabin, towards the back, to see what kind of cabling he could find in the reactor room.

  Ayia was left alone in the cabin. She could see through Kale’s helmet camera that he was unpacking the gravity discs and attaching them to the cylinder.

  “Is this a good idea Kale?”

  Kale breathed a very evident sigh of frustration over the intercom.

  “Just a few minutes ago you wanted me to bring it over. Now you don’t?”

  “I wanted you to bring HER over. Now it’s an IT and it seems, different.”

  “Now it makes more sense than just a corpse in a glass coffin.”

  Ayia agreed that what she said wasn’t making sense but she couldn’t disregard the feeling that a machine inside a human body was not normal and, perhaps, not a good idea to bring it onboard the ship. Ayia knew though that Kale already set his mind to bringing it onboard and when she looked back at the screen he had already cut the cables to the cylinder. It was too late. He was beginning to float it off the bridge. On the screen above her the images from the AI stopped and the data showing the radio transmission ceased.

  Gheno was ready when Kale floated the last small section over to the rear of the ship. This time Ayia and Gheno waited in the pilot’s cabin while Kale depressurized the rear of the ship, allowing the large hatch in the rear to open. He floated the cylinder in and followed right behind it. He brought the cylinder down in the middle of the ‘Hall’, with the large case nearly taking up half the room. He sealed the hatch back up and asked Gheno to pressurize the ship again over the intercom. Air hissed into the room as Kale unhooked his helmet and set it down on the table. Gheno came rushing in as soon as the cabin door opened. Ayia followed slowly behind him.