“I’m on the bottom, Frank,” he said, waving an arm. “There’s a tunnel heading off into the gloom. More footprints heading into it, the same sets, I think.”
“Watch yourself,” Nelyubov replied.
He followed the steps along the tunnel, eagerly pacing forward, playing his torch around, watching the darkness almost swallow up the light. The shaft down quickly faded from view as he bounded into the gloom, and when it was gone completely, he stopped.
“Can you still hear me, Frank?” He waited, then said, “Marshall to Nelyubov. Marshall to Alamo. Any signal?” He could hear a faint pulsing, a repeating noise up ahead, and then continued his advance. There was only one noise he knew like that, a spacesuit emergency alarm.
The corridor opened up into a huge chamber, and he saw a trio of bodies scattered on the ground, his heart skipping a beat before he saw two other figures sitting on the ground further along, one of them looking up as he approached.
“Hang on,” he said, racing forward. Orlova and Carpenter, both of them alive, if not by much. He could quickly see why, Carpenter’s suit leaking air from some hastily applied patches. Their chest monitors showed they still had a little left, so he pulled out his kit and started to apply more comprehensive patches, sealing where every trace of leak showed. No-one would ever wear this spacesuit again, though it ought to be enough to get them back to the shuttle.
Next, he dropped the oxygen tank on the ground, resting between the two of them, and started the filters to absorb the nitrogen from the atmosphere to make the mix work, tossing the absorbers left and right, well out of the way, before plugging it into their suits and turning the gain onto full.
“Either of you read me?” he asked. Looking down at them. Up ahead, another figure approached, and he instinctively reached for his weapon, tossed onto the floor in his hurry to save his shipmates, but the figure, which looked strangely like a combination of Orlova and Carpenter, raised its hands, smiling as it strode forward.
“Ego cemjo en pags.”
Shaking his head, Marshall said, “I don’t understand.”
The figure smiled, nodded, then said, “Tu weltis. Gnotis ciwos.”
At the far end of the cavern, a light shone as a panel opened up, revealing a piece of crystal buried within it, illuminated by a trio of lasers. Abruptly, the lasers shut off, and the figure disappeared, the light beginning to fade. Marshall stepped over and cautiously picked it up, looking at it in his hands, admiring the intricate web-work within, though obviously, it was incomplete.
“Captain?” he heard a voice gasp, and turned to see Orlova struggling to her feet.
“Don’t worry, Maggie,” he said. “You rest a while and get your tanks topped up.”
“What happened?”
“We won our battle, everything’s intact, and I think we may even have some idea what all of this was about.” Glancing down at his watch, he said, “I’d better get moving. If I don’t report in, Frank’s going to take off with our ride out of here.”
Chapter 27
“Are you sure you feel up to this?” Nelyubov asked as the two of them walked down the corridor.
“Susan came over here,” she replied.
“We’re trying to crack open an archive of material from tens of thousands of years ago. I think she’d have floated across from Alamo without a spacesuit quite happily.” Shaking his head, he said, “I still think we should have done this over there.”
“The Captain didn’t want to risk our only fighting ship in-system. I do think that hiding on the other side of the planet might be a bit extreme, but then I wasn’t up here for the first blackout.”
The two of them stepped into the minerology lab, where Bartlett was still making final adjustments to his laser, Harper behind him running a series of tests on the systems, while Quinn looked over the whole affair with a worried frown.
“Relax, Jack,” Harper said. “There’s no way that the data surge can make it to the station mainframe.”
“That’s what we thought last time,” Bartlett said. “Firewalls at maximum.”
“There isn’t any network connection at all this time,” Harper said. “Besides, we’ve got people up on Operations ready to do another hard reboot if we have to.”
“I really hope we don’t,” Quinn said. “It took six hours to get everything working again properly, and it’ll take weeks before everything settles down.”
Marshall stepped in, flanked by Cunningham and Caine, and took a position on the far side of the room, flashing a smile at Orlova as he walked past her. Carpenter, still in a wheelchair, emerged from behind the apparatus, a smile on her face.
“How much longer?” she asked.
“Almost there, Lieutenant,” Bartlett said.
Orlova could hear footsteps behind her, and turned to see Salazar walking down the corridor, standing by the door. She gestured for him to come in, and after a moment, he entered the room.
“I’m not sure I should be here,” he replied.
“The Captain told you to come over to the station, didn’t he? Besides, this is your show as much as it is mine. You’ve got a right to be here.”
“But…”
“And if anyone asks, I gave you an order. Understood?”
He nodded, replying, “Thanks.”
“I think we’re almost there,” Quinn said. “I’ve gone over the few records we have from last time, and I’ve slowed the data transmission rate as much as I can.”
Thumping an almost featureless box, Harper added, “We brought over the largest portable databank we have in the stores, ten exabytes. That should be enough for us to at least get a good sample of the material we’re looking at.”
“Won’t it overload, like last time?” Marshall asked.
“No, sir,” Bartlett said. “I threw in a filter. The transmission will stop as soon as the storage unit is ninety-five percent full, to give us a margin of error.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Carpenter asked. “Throw the switch.”
With a smile, Marshall nodded, adding, “Go ahead.”
Bartlett moved over to the control panel, looked around the room for a moment, then timidly tapped the button. The laser raced across to the crystal, the two pieces secured in a metal cage to keep them together, and readouts started to flash on the monitors, the same strange hieroglyphics as before. After only a few seconds, it stopped.
“What happened?” Cunningham asked. “Systems failure?”
Bartlett and Harper started to check controls and readouts, before looking at each other in surprise. Bartlett shook his head and turned back to the laser, but Harper stood up, wiping her hands on her trousers.
“We filled the databank.”
“Ten exobytes!” Marshall said. “That would take Alamo…”
“About half an hour. As far as I can figure, it took that crystal seven seconds. And that was at the slowest possible transmission rate.”
“Let’s get at the data,” Carpenter said, turning to a nearby console and starting to type. “I’ve thrown in a translation matrix, though it’ll take weeks, months to translate it all.”
“Captain, I think we’ve got something remarkable here,” Quinn said. “My estimation agrees with Harper’s. The complete crystal could have a storage capacity of something on the order of a thousand yuttabytes.”
“I don’t…,” Marshall began, but Harper shook her head.
“Last month, there was a lot of celebration in the hacking community, the sort of milestone only we would celebrate. The total storage capacity of all computers in the Triplanetary Confederation passed two yuttabytes.” Pointing at the crystal, she said, “That hunk of glass has more potential storage than five hundred Confederations.”
“There must be some sort of mistake,” Caine said, shaking her head. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“A leap forward as great as that of the transistor,” Quinn said, reverently. “Imagine if Alamo had one of these at its heart. Every starship could have a quantum computer on board. Not to mention durability. I don’t know what that material is, but it’s damn near indestructible.”
Harper reached over, gently opening the metal cradle and taking it out. As she lifted it, her eyes widened, and she almost dropped it, Quinn racing forward to secure it.
“It’s one piece!” she said.
“I thought we hadn’t worked out how to bind it,” Orlova said.
“We didn’t, Maggie,” Harper replied. “That’s why we built the cage. The damn thing has fused together somehow.”
“I’ll have to check, but that looks seamless,” Quinn said. “Add that to the technological breakthroughs we’ve got here. No wonder our late friends were so eager to get their hands on it.”
Carpenter whistled, then said, “First results, people.”
“And?” Orlova asked.
“Most of the data is gibberish.” Raising her hand as a tide of disappointment swept the room, she added, “I think it must have holographic memory.”
Nodding, Harper said, “Double my estimate of the storage capacity, then. The bad news is that most of the data won’t be readable without the whole crystal.”
“What I have got is the manual, I think. There are six thousand copies of the same file here, and tens of thousands more partial ones. Whoever loaded the data on this must have wanted to make sure we had a copy.”
Harper leaned over her shoulder, and said, “There’s an operating system in there as well. Must be, to power that computer complex down on the planet.”
“I haven’t finished,” Carpenter said. “Captain, this is a linguistic breakthrough as well. The manual is in a couple of dozen languages. Proto-Indo is one of them. You realize what this means?”
“A Rosetta Stone,” Caine said. “By God, if we’d just found that, all of this would have been worth it.”
“It’ll take months before we get all of that analyzed…,” Carpenter began.
“Decades to work out the operating system, at a guess,” Orlova said. “I’ll start work right away.”
“Wait a minute,” Marshall said, taking a seat. “What you are telling me is that we have a repository of knowledge that encompasses breakthroughs in laser, storage and materials technology, and we still don’t actually know what is on it.”
“Scientific data,” Quinn said. “The secrets of the universe.”
“More likely a cultural archive,” Caine replied. “This was built to last.”
“Principle of mediocrity, Deadeye,” Cunningham said. “There must be more than one of them.”
Orlova looked around the room, then said, “We’ve got to find the other fragments. That hologram on the surface indicated that they were spread about all over the place.”
“Race has analyzed the recordings you made, and I’m afraid they seem to be essentially stylized. They don’t correspond to any known star patterns.” Shrugging, Cunningham said, “We’ll keep working on it.”
“If for no other reason than that this technology must not fall into enemy hands, we’ve got to find the rest of it,” Orlova pressed. “Jack, you said a quantum computer could fit on a starship. What about a fighter, or a missile?”
“No reason why not.”
“Speaking purely personally, I don’t want to fight a wave of missiles with that level of processing power. Hell, if an enemy force got this and spent any time with our computers, he’d own every databank in the Confederation in a matter of minutes. There’s a reason we put our quantum computer in the middle of a military base.”
“She’s got a point, Danny,” Caine said.
“I know, and I agree,” he replied. “We need to set up some sort of a search pattern.”
“Wait a minute,” Cunningham said. “There are nine systems within one jump of here, and half of them are in enemy territory. Most of the rest are unexplored. Go beyond that, and we’re getting into a few dozen within two jumps. More than a hundred within three. It’s a very big galaxy.”
“It isn’t getting any smaller,” Orlova said. “And think of the prize.”
“We’d have to invent whole new indexing techniques just to study it,” Harper said, her face in reverie. “Not to mention devise bigger databases, working in parallel. I suppose there’s no reason why we couldn’t build one of a comparable size…”
“You’d need ten thousand databanks working in parallel,” Quinn said, frowning. “No-one’s ever done anything that big. And the connections would have to be perfect.”
“Details, Jack,” she said. “We can do it.”
“With a couple of theoretical breakthroughs,” he replied. “We’d need a massive research project just to work out how to properly access this.”
“Not to mention a substantial project to make use of the data when we found it. It could literally take centuries just to scratch the surface.”
“I’m rather more concerned about the here-and-now security implications,” Cunningham said. “We already know that we aren’t the only ones with knowledge of the crystal.”
“Which suggests that our new friends already have a fragment, or at least access to one,” Caine interrupted.
“Exactly, and we’re on the border with both the Cabal and the United Nations out here.”
Nodding, Marshall said, “This is classified Top Secret. No question. Everyone in this room who doesn’t have the necessary clearance will have to take their oaths again.”
“Fine for the short-term, but we have to consider that inevitably a leak will take place. Whereupon this is going to be a far more active station than planned. We’ll have to strengthen our defenses.”
“Speaking of which,” Carpenter said, “I’m going to need an archaeological team for some work on the surface. Those murals are a problem that we can tackle right here, and there may be some clues about the location of other crystals. Not to mention the other corpses I'm pretty sure are down there.” She looked up, and said, “The one we found was one of our friends, or at least his evolutionary ancestor, say, ten thousand years ago.”
“That figure sounds familiar,” Orlova said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Carpenter replied, nodding.
“A nice quiet station,” Caine said. “A chance for a straightforward tour of duty. I should have known it wouldn’t work out that way.”
“It was never going to work out that way,” Marshall said with a smile.
“I certainly hope not,” Orlova added.
“For the present, I think Alamo is safe enough. Dragon is scheduled to arrive in ten days, and we can transfer the crystal back to the Confederation.” Looking around to forestall the expected protests, he continued, “They can put a full Espatier company around it for security, we can’t. Moreover, they’ve got a lot more capacity to properly start a research program than we do.”
“I can handle it,” Harper said.
“You want to be transferred back with it?” Orlova said. “Spend the rest of your life in a military research facility?”
“No,” she said. “I just don’t like…”
“Don’t worry,” Marshall replied. “Finding the rest of the crystal just became our number-one priority. You’ll have a chance to see some more of it. Mr. Quinn, how long before Alamo is ready for space?”
“Two weeks,” he replied. “By a miracle, there’s no damage we can’t fix with the station to back us up. I’ll have her factory-fresh before you know it. I think I might be able to make some modifications as well.”
“Why didn’t you do them at Ragnarok?” Orlova asked.
“Out here, no-one’s going to ask me any difficult questions about ship specifications.”
“Feel free to pleasantly surprise me with your wonder
s,” Marshall said. “In that case, Maggie, you and Race start work on a survey plan. I want a course to take in as many of the unexplored systems as possible in a single sweep. I think it’s time to take a look across the border again. We've got some scoutships coming, let's get good use out of them.
“Aye, sir,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. “I think we can come up with something interesting.”
“Good. Now I suppose I’d better get back over to Alamo and relieve Mr. Grant.” Looking at the rear of the room, he said, “I see you decided to put in an appearance, Midshipman.”
Salazar nodded, and said, “I hope…”
“No, not at all. Why don’t you go and get the shuttle ready for launch. I’ll be along presently.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, saluting, then walking off down the corridor. After he left, Orlova walked over to Marshall, a frown on her face.
“Sir, about Mr. Salazar…”
“Don’t worry, Maggie. I know what to do.”
Chapter 28
Salazar ran his hands across the controls, running through the pre-flight checklist, focusing on the task in a bid to calm himself. Hardly anyone had spoken to him since Grant had escorted him back to Alamo, just a quick medical check-up before he was taken to his cabin, and Grant had taken him down to the shuttle for the transfer over to the station.
He hardly heard Captain Marshall step in beside him, looking at the controls, then sitting down in the co-pilot’s chair.
“Looks fine, Midshipman,” he said. “Begin launch sequence, please.”
“Aye, sir.” he replied, tapping a control. “Shuttle Two to Operations. Request departure clearance.”
“You have clearance, Shuttle. Launch when ready.”
With a loud crack, the docking clamps disengaged, and the shuttle dropped away, falling from the station. Salazar reached over to fire the engines, but Marshall shook his head, pushing past him to engage the autopilot.
Battlecruiser Alamo: Aces High Page 23