Evelyn felt a shiver trickle like cold ice water down her spine as she heard the woman’s voice, identical it seemed to her own. She watched the woman for a long moment, and then she put out her hand.
‘I’m Evelyn,’ she said. ‘What is your real name? Can you remember?’
Again that tiny smile appeared on her face, and she reached out and took Evelyn’s hand, although her eyes searched blindly. Her voice when she spoke again sounded entirely human. ‘My name is Emma. Where am I?’
It was the general who spoke. ‘We’ll have time for catching up later,’ he said as he turned to examine the hatch. ‘Right now we’ve got to get through here and not get eaten while doing so.’
The Marines, still fascinated by the sight of Emma and Evelyn kneeling on the deck, were slow to move as they turn to examine the hatch.
‘Jump to it!’ Bra’hiv snapped.
The Special Forces soldiers advanced before the Marines reacted and began attaching charges to the hatch hinges, working in silence with deft and well–practised moves. As Evelyn helped Emma to her feet the soldiers pulled back from the hatchway as Lieutenant Riaz set the detonators, the timers beeping softly as he turned and ran past them and pointed up the corridor.
Evelyn turned to run with him, her hand reaching out instinctively for Emma’s in order to guide her, but she was surprised to find that Emma did not attempt to follow. Instead, Emma moved toward the hatchway even as the detonators were counting down.
‘Emma, get away from there.’
It was as if Emma did not hear her. She stumbled to the detonators and within moments switched them off, just seconds before they were set to blow. Lieutenant Riaz glared at Emma as he stormed back down the corridor.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Emma turned to confront the soldier, and despite the softness of her voice her words carried surprising weight. ‘There is another way.’
‘But we were told this is the only way through the holds to the aft landing bays,’ Andaim said.
Emma shook her head and gestured to another corridor, smaller than the one in which they stood, which led to starboard. ‘We are near the holds, are we not, and this is access corridor H–1–Echo? That way,’ she said. ‘It’s a service corridor that bypasses the forward holds and emerges further down. It won’t avoid the holds entirely, but it will get us closer to the aft landing bays.’
Bra’hiv peered at Emma curiously. ‘How would you know that if you can’t see?’
‘I’m blind, not stupid,’ Emma replied. ‘I lived on this ship for years, I know my way around.’
The general shrugged, reached out and pulled one of the charges off the hatch. He tossed the charge to Lieutenant Riaz who caught it and raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to trust our escape with her?’
Bra’hiv regarded Emma for a long moment, and then he nodded. ‘You’re damned right I am. Local knowledge is everything. Lead the way.’
Emma turned away from the hatch but with one hand she reached out blindly as though searching for something. Evelyn caught her hand, and Emma smiled briefly at her as though she could see again before she turned and led the way down the corridor.
‘We know nothing about her,’ Commander Andaim said to the general as they started walking. ‘We don’t know what will happen if we just follow her down here.’
‘We know will happen if we go into those holds.’
Lieutenant Riaz strode alongside Bra’hiv. ‘The commander is right, we don’t know anything about this woman. For all we know she could be leading us into a trap.’
The general shook his head. ‘Right now we don’t have much of a choice, and Evelyn seems to trust her.’
Lieutenant Riaz winced. ‘That doesn’t mean much to us, and either way I find it damn freaky that they look so alike. Who is this Evelyn that you put so much faith in?’
The general looked at Commander Andaim, who shrugged apologetically.
‘She’s a former high–security convict who escaped from a prison, and now serves as a fighter pilot aboard Atlantia. She also used to wear one of those masks.’
Lieutenant Riaz stared at the commander as though he had gone insane.
‘Well that’s all right then. For a moment I was worried that you were putting us all at risk.’
‘Let’s just keep moving,’ Bra’hiv said. ‘The sooner we get to the stern, the quicker we’ll get out of here.’
***
XXV
‘We need to talk.’
Captain Idris Sansin strode off the command platform of Atlantia’s bridge as Mikhain arrived, and without preamble he marched towards his private quarters. Arcadia’s captain followed him without a word. Idris led the way into his quarters, the door opening automatically for them and closing silently behind them.
Mikhain watched as Idris moved to stand beside his desk, the countless pictures of his family on the walls moving subtly as Mikhain’s eyes caught them. The cabin was a memorial to people lost, the kind of family that Mikhain never had.
‘Captain, I understand that...’ Mikhain began.
‘Save it,’ Idris cut him off. ‘We’ll have time for discussion about your insubordination later. Right now we have much bigger problems to deal with. What the hell is a Colonial Special Forces team doing aboard Endeavour, and why is there a woman there who appears to be an identical twin to Evelyn?’
‘I have no idea,’ Mikhain admitted. ‘Endeavour was launched almost a hundred years ago, and we have no idea whether the Word could have gotten aboard so early. Personally, I didn’t even realise the Word existed back then.’
‘It existed all right. The question is in what form did it exist when Endeavour launched, and could have had any influence over what happened to that ship?’
‘If it did, then the Word’s extent could have had far greater reach than we first assumed.’
Idris nodded in agreement, well aware that the cornerstone of his new plan was to travel the cosmos beyond the extent of the Word’s reach in order to discover new technologies and new weapons which could be used to fight it, weapons for which it should have had no defence.
‘I tasked several engineers and archivists to look into every single file we have on the origin of the Word,’ Idris explained. ‘To be honest, and to my shame, I have never really looked that far into the history of the Word but now would seem prudent to do so.’
‘What did you find?’
‘More than I expected,’ Idris replied.
The history of Ethera and of mankind’s evolution was in many ways similar to so many other species in the known cosmos. They had evolved from predecessor species, mankind growing to prominence on a diet of conflict and cooperation, ever at war with neighbouring states and peoples; new weapons, new tactics and new reasons to deploy those weapons against others in the name of national security or religion or fear. Countless lives have been lost in the history of mankind in conflicts over little more than territorial disputes and the intractability of the governments to agree upon them.
It had been the advances of technology that eventually gave rise to a new form of intelligence. There was a single motive behind the invention of the Word, a creation driven by a desire for a machine of logic specifically designed to override the greed, malice and insatiable lust for control that was the hallmark of mankind’s history. Countless names worked on countless devices and those devices melded into a new form of quantum computing, machines blessed with a complexity sufficient to mimic human awareness and intelligence, but devoid of the flaws and pitfalls that blighted their creators.
Installed by Ethera’s government after a referendum of global significance, during which over four billion humans voted in confidence of the new technology, a series of linked supercomputers were tasked with the role of selecting the most beneficial courses of action in everything from conflicts, political disputes, territorial disagreements and economics. This startling new form of governance was given the nickname The Word, after several min
isters in opposition to its creation claimed that its judgements had in effect already become law and that mankind’s own opinion no longer mattered. However, from the moment the Word was tasked with its new role remarkable changes occurred across Ethera. As governments submitted to the Word’s will, accepting its judgement, so likewise did the people and thus did the incidence of conflict dramatically reduce over the following years. The Word chose to channel funds into medical research instead of weaponry, social spending and education instead of global banking, the improvement of existing living standards instead of ambitious high–technology gambits like space travel. Far from being despised by the populace, the Word was soon championed by those on the streets as a new form of governance that placed ordinary human beings first and not the politicians and business leaders.
Within ten years the Word was the unquestioned lawmaker of all states on Ethera, responsible for spreading peace and prosperity across entire regions. Poverty was replaced with prosperity, fear with hope, conflict with resolution and destruction with development. Such a Utopian event had never occurred before in human history and its catalyst was nothing more than a series of linked machines with no perceivable aspirations of their own.
Or so humanity had thought.
Alongside the Word’s responsibilities for global governance, an unforeseen consequence of its all reaching power had been a growing awareness of military programs. Although the Word had largely guided humanity away from the development of weapons, it had become clear in recent times that throughout this period the Word had in fact been studying weaponry closely. Perhaps the people who had invented the Word should have noticed or known that a device based on the gathering of knowledge would not have been prejudiced on which knowledge it gained–that it would have sought to learn everything and anything and judged its future experiences and understanding based on all the knowledge that it had accrued. It was perhaps inevitable that the Word came to the conclusion that humanity was an unreliable, treacherous creator, as likely to destroy the Word as to nurture it.
The archivists had surmised that the Word had probably begun its long–term plan to conquer humanity within a decade of its own creation. Already virtually worshipped by the human populace and with ever greater laws and powers placed under its command, although the Word was not yet an intelligent entity in its own right its degree of self–awareness was growing at a trimetric rate, and it was only a matter of time before the inevitable occurred. Conspiracy theorists of the time had been convinced that the moment the Word gained self–awareness it would launch attacks on humanity, gathering what automated weaponry it could and obliterating as much of society as possible. Yet the self–awareness never came, as far as humanity was aware. When it occurred, nobody actually knew–the Word was already far too intelligent to expose itself at such an early stage. Fully aware of itself and its surroundings, the Word simply continued to gather information and in doing so discovered a means of destroying humanity for once and for all with a single crippling blow.
Nanotechnology.
Although military spending had been cut by the Word by ninety per cent, the technologies that had been in development for so long were still fully available. Extending the tentacles of its reach into the military–industrial complex, the Word was able to study and modify existing technologies while at the same time finding the means to get those technologies into humanity, quite literally. The street drug Devlamine, the scourge of so many cities, was the perfect vector to introduce mind–controlling nanobots into the population. Spreading silently for years, the infectors were present in eighty per cent of the population when the apocalypse finally occurred. Most people never even knew what happened.
‘Endeavour was launched just a few years after the Word was given governing powers by the politicians of the time,’ Idris said as he looked at the files the archivists had sent him. ‘Given what we know about the Word, and the fact that it probably had self–awareness by the time Endeavour launched, it’s a fair bet that it would have tried to get something of itself aboard the ship.’
Mikhain glanced down at the files. ‘We haven’t found any evidence of infectors aboard or anything else except that face melded into the bridge control panel.’
‘You don’t consider that to be a hint?’
‘I don’t know what the hell that is,’ Mikhain admitted. ‘Fact is we’re out of our depth here, cruising well beyond the Icari Line and likely to stumble across a lot more things we don’t understand. It could be the Word, and that mask sure looked like the one that Evelyn was wearing when she first showed up.’
‘It’s too much of a coincidence to find such similar technologies in such widely displaced locations,’ Idris said. ‘We’ve got to assume the Word is behind this, even if it’s some kind of earlier version, perhaps not fully aware.’
‘You mean like a prototype?’
‘Something like that,’ Idris said. ‘If I’m right then it might be something we can learn from.’
Mikhain sucked air between his teeth. ‘That’s risky, even for us. You’re saying you want to go digging in that ship and find out what’s behind all this?’
‘We can’t pass up the opportunity that there’s something there we could use, something that might help us find a way to defeat the Word. Right now, doing that is the only reason we have to exist.’
‘Your wife’s aboard Endeavour,’ Mikhain reminded the captain.
‘I’m aware of that.’
Mikhain rubbed his temples wearily. ‘There are no other vessels in the sector this time, at least not that we can detect. With both Atlantia and Arcadia we can properly maintain a secure perimeter of around fifty thousand cubits. We’ve got regular fighter patrols in place, so nothing is coming in without us knowing about it but I still don’t consider this area to be completely within our control. You remember what happened on Chiron IV?’
‘Yes, we were bounced by a Veng’en cruiser and I’m aware that we just don’t know what might happen next. But that’s as much a reason to take the chance as it is to avoid it. No risk, no gain.’
‘That’s a mantra that might come back to haunt you.’
‘We all take risks,’ Idris said as he looked directly at Mikhain. ‘It’s whether you’re taking the right kind that counts.’
The two captains stared at each other for several moments, both of them preoccupied with their own doubts about each other. Idris waited to see what the former executive officer would say, willing him to fall into line.
‘I’d say it’s whether you can deal with the consequences that matters,’ Mikhain replied.
‘And can you?’
‘I do, every day.’
A long silence filled the cabin, the air suddenly feeling heavy. ‘Anything you want to talk about?’ Idris asked.
‘Now is not the time.’
‘There is never a perfect time,’ Idris pointed out. ‘The longer our mistakes linger in our past, the more they will poison our future.’
Mikhain regard the captain for a long moment. ‘Like you said, we’ve got bigger problems to deal with. Bra’hiv’s team have only got one way off that ship and we don’t have any way of reaching them from the outside, plus the fact that the deeper they go the weaker their communications link becomes. Only thing they’ve got going for them are the Special Forces soldiers they found aboard.’
‘Which brings me to my next question,’ Idris said. ‘How the hell did they get there?’
‘Got to assume they were on some kind of mission. As far as the general can tell they were not fleeing the apocalypse and they claimed not to have received orders for more than two years. That means they’ve been out here for some time and won’t be deserters if they’ve been expecting orders, which means an officially sanctioned operation.’
‘That’s what I was thinking, but who sent them? Our government, or the Word?’
‘You think they could be infected too?’
‘I don’t know, but we need to get word either to my wife or t
he general that those soldiers could be as big a threat to their safety as anything else aboard that ship.’
***
XXVI
The corridor that Emma led them down grew smaller with the passing of each of Endeavour’s bulkheads. Evelyn followed her faithfully, Emma apparently counting the steps between each bulkhead and stepping gingerly through the endless hatches. Ceiling lights flickered unevenly, the power supply intermittent and casting moving shadows all around.
At the end of the corridor Evelyn could see a final bulkhead, but this bulkhead contained a hatch that was half the size of all the others. Circular in design, the hatch was sealed and she realised with a start that the hatch was not actually a corridor at all but a ventilation shaft.
Emma slowed as she reached the hatch and turned to face the Marines. Lieutenant Riaz examined at the hatch as though she’d gone mad.
‘Seriously?’
‘Are you sure this is the safest way?’ General Bra’hiv asked Emma.
‘This ventilation shaft leads aft and exits directly over the aft hold. It’s the only way through.’
‘And do we know what’s in the aft holds?’ the general asked as he turned to Lieutenant Riaz. ‘Did you and your men get that far back?’
‘No,’ the lieutenant replied, ‘we’d only just started searching the for’ard holds when your men showed up. There could be anything back there.’
‘Great,’ Lieutenant C’rairn uttered as he too examined the hatch.
‘We don’t have much of a choice,’ Evelyn said. ‘Whichever way we go we’re going to have to fight our way through. At least this gives us the advantage of surprise.’
‘That’s not particularly reassuring,’ Lieutenant Riaz snapped as he reached out and spun the locking wheel on the hatch. ‘We don’t know who’ll be getting the surprise.’
His men formed up behind him without orders, their weapons aimed at the hatch as the lieutenant prepared to open it. The magazines on their plasma rifles hummed into life and they pulled the weapons into their shoulders and the lieutenant yanked the hatch back.
Endeavour (Atlantia Series Book 4) Page 18