Ancient (Earth 50,000 BC Book 1)

by David Edward

  Many biologicals would have breakdowns if they were disconnected from the ether for any meaningful amount of time. To a lesser degree, etherreals could have issues, but still, a significant number might not handle being disconnected for more than a few micro cycles.

  It took a special breed of etherreal or biological to be successful on these missions. The immediate sense of isolation was often overwhelming.

  Some, however, were able to prosper in a disconnected environment and thrive with the independence a localhub offered.

  Everyone onboard the Thorik would have this personality trait.

  E7 received an inload from her primary sensors.

  She was picking up faint signs of another localhub. It had an older binary key and was low on power, but the signal was strong enough for identification. She switched her scanners to Physical. The impression of a scout vessel of the same configuration as the Thorik was presented in her heads-up display.

  She switched to the command frequency outloading to Odessa, second to second. “Ma’am?” E7 waited for the return to inload.

  “Copy, E7,” Odessa outloaded. It sounded like she was still in her combat armor.

  “I picked up outloads from another localhub. It has a weak signal. When I did a physical scan, it was another Machi scout class ship,” E7 outloaded on the frequency.

  E7 thought for a moment. “Ma’am, please hold a cycle.” She outloaded a command to the other recon teams to switch to physical scanning.

  Inloads started flowing in of more discoveries. No other power sources or local hubs, but dozens—no, hundreds—of smaller Machi scout class ships. All abandoned, some dating back thousands of Machi cycles.

  “Ma’am. I am getting reports from all the recon teams on the physical scan of hundreds of abandoned Machi scout ships, some incredibly old.” E7 stopped her flight in midair. She wanted to wait until Odessa could crossload, as there was a high probability of a plan change with this new information.

  E7 watched Odessa’s outload go red, meaning she was checking with Logan.

  After several micro cycles, new orders came through the frequency: “E7. Hold position. Recall the other recon teams to your position. Wait for my arrival. Remain airborne.

  “Once I arrive, we will decide if we should explore the ship nearest you. The one that still has an operational localhub,” Odessa outloaded, sounding tense.

  Within a few micro cycles, E7 could see the three other teams of E2s airborne and heading her way, moving fast. Etherreals could use the full speed of the magnetic quick-flight belts. Bios, like Odessa, could use the belts but could not handle the same levels of acceleration, needing to build up speed gradually to prevent internal physical damage.

  The units quickly developed a modified vee formation with one of the E2 units directly behind and a few measures back from the point of the vee that E7 occupied. E7 outloaded the command to switch to a trailing vee formation. This put herself and another E2 unit to the center and rear of the vee to make way for Odessa when she arrived.

  After a few more micro cycles, Odessa decelerated and took the point position of the formation. “E7, any suggestions to a strategy?” she outloaded.

  “Yes, ma’am. I suggest we send one of the E2s with hand-to-hand bracings as a scout using physical scanning to the area. Dark so no commands can come in through the localhub. If everything is clear, we proceed.”

  Odessa turned to look over the forested area where the other scout ship had been found. It was close to the base of one of the larger mountain peaks. The weather looked clear, and the sky remained cloudless.

  Using ether scanning, she could see the localhub glowing under the trees. She outloaded a request to it to provide its last date of ether connection. It instantly returned a date that was fifteen Machi cycles old. That was roughly six full circles of Alethia in its orbit around the prime luminary.

  She outloaded a request to the localhub for the last ship's log and was met with an Access Denied outload, so she switched to physical scans and could see the outline of the scout ship.

  It was the same class of ship as the Thorik and looked to be in bad condition. There were signs of an internal fire. Externally, there was scarring on the hull, and large dents where it looked like concussion ordinances had impacted.

  The back of the ship was open, and the mining equipment and machinery had been deployed. The equipment was smashed and inoperable, spread about the area in pieces.

  In what had been cleared as the center of the compound, some small trees were starting to grow. Ground foliage growth was underway as well and was close to waist high.

  Odessa looked back from the ship to E7. “I don’t know, E7. It looks like the ship down there was attacked while on the ground. My instincts are to wait to explore the site until we have more data.

  “The localhub is weak, but it has enough reserve power to last for several Machi cycles. Seems the system is locked anyway. I could not get access to the logs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” E7 outloaded. It seemed like a reasonable set of precautions to take.

  The entire group hovered stationary in the air for a few more moments.

  Odessa continued to survey the area around the ship using a range of scanner settings. Nothing was coming up other than the physical ship and the localhub grid. She looked up to the mountain again. This site was remarkably close to the border of the off-limits coordinates, which started near the summit of the mountain. Her sense of unease was growing.

  E7 waited patiently.

  After what she felt was a reasonable amount of time, E7 said, “Ma’am, maybe we should explore one of the other ships. We have located hundreds in all directions. Maybe one of the older ships away from this area can yield as much information as the one below.”

  Odessa looked to E7. She then set her scanners back to Physical. “E7, I have scanned for any sentient signs below. If there were someone stranded here, it would be a compelling reason to investigate now.

  “I have not found any signs of the original ship’s crew. Would you please also scan so we can be sure?

  ”Logan and X7 are going to recon one of the older ships. We can review their findings before we proceed if you don’t find anything.”

  E7 ran her scanners through all the different settings and crossloaded the same information Odessa had found.

  With that confirmation, they flew back to the Thorik.

  Gaxx, the hunter, watched them fly away.

  He felt both disappointment and anticipation.

  Commhub

  Machi ships were some of the best ships built in the luminary circle. Machi produced everything from small scout ships like the Thorik to large battle cruisers that could stand toe to toe with the best of anything manufactured on Fovis.

  There was a time not too long ago, before the great resolution, that piloting a Machi ship meant you boasted pride. That you were confident in battle.

  That was fading now.

  There were no battles.

  There was nothing left to war over.

  Everyone lived under the same set of laws. Everyone contributed as they could.

  Everyone was equal.

  Well, anyone a direct member of the cogitate circle was first among equals, of course.

  Logan never really fully understood the concept of first among equals.

  X7 understood it fine. He lived it in his head. Every single moment. Every single day.

  Both Logan and X7 were in the communications hub of the Thorik.

  The commhub contained the infrastructure that ran the localhub when they were on the planet and connected to the ether when it was available.

  It stored zettabytes of datagrams which could be crossloaded instantly. Every action taken by anyone attached to the ether was logged by the ether. All actions taken when on the localhub were logged here until they could be outloaded to the ether.

  They were stored physically in this room. It was a difficult concept to understand given the abstract nature of the
ether. Being disconnected made life very different.

  Logan was seated while X7 stood.

  X7 respected the fact that Logan took the only chair. It showed that at some level, maybe, he understood what it meant to be prime.

  Logan was running a filter to follow up on the packet anomaly that had been found by Odessa.

  When datagrams were outloaded onto the ether fabric, they were organized into packets. One datagram could span multiple packets. A datagram was a complete set of information self-contained in both headers and footers and broken into smaller parts that could more easily move across the fabric.

  A datagram contained an internal map that was present in all packets.

  This allowed for structural integrity throughout outloads and inloads as the map for the datagram was available with every packet received. Upon the first of several packets inloading, the exact size and nature of the datagram were identifiable. The packet map served to provide both fabric integrity and datagram security.

  What Odessa had alerted Logan to was that some of the packets in the mission briefing contained extra information in their internal packet maps. Only a very few. Enough that the localhub recognized them and created an alert in the technical log.

  “X7, here are the anomalies as identified,” Logan said, looking up from the console workstation he was seated at. “I can see that there is extra information in the packet map. It actually looks like a lot of extra data. Could you reconstruct the map so we can see what we are dealing with?”

  X7 felt pride. With E7 away, he had the fastest crossloading times by a lot. Even faster than the ship. “Yessir. The crossload is completed. Would you like an audio outload or visual outload?”

  “Visual, please.” Logan leaned back in his chair so he could see the video presentation area near the back of the modest-sized communications room.

  On the display was a picture of the datagram map as received and an overlay of the anomalous map recovered from the few packets that contained it.

  There was clearly a lot more information in the anomalous map. Without the actual packets, though, there would be no way to reconstruct exactly what was missing from the received datagram.

  “X7, please crossload the two maps and overlay where the missing information is and where the received information is.”

  The display changed to show that they had only received the middle third of the datagram. A large portion of the front of the message and a smaller portion of the end of the message was missing.

  “Would you now crossload the briefing to the full map and identify if the missing packets are from the cogitate circle or the Machi circle? Those were the only two sources for our briefing.”

  X7 had predicted this request and had already done the crossloading.

  He was awash in purple headers.

  Purple headers, purples headers.

  He knew that E7 could perform these same tasks, but not as fast as him!

  Maybe he should be the ship’s prime instead of Logan?

  He had always felt Logan was a terrible prime.

  While never being able to predict with one hundred percent accuracy Logan’s decisions, was it possible this was because Logan was such a bad example? Was X7 not predicting correctly because he was a better prime?

  “Yessir,” X7 said underneath the onslaught of purple headers.

  The video screen showed that they had received the full briefing from the cogitate circle but only a fraction of the datagram as transmitted from the Machi circle.

  There was scoring on the packets near the Machi packets headers as well. It looked like there had been a second attempt to delete the small number of packets that made it through the fabric from Machi.

  “Sir,“ X7 outloaded in audible voice, “when I was working to come up with the proper ordnance strategy for the E2s after receiving the Level Two command, I did note that there was no explanation to the intent or threat we were to counter with our defensive posture.”

  Logan leaned back, thinking. “I made the same request during the briefing. I was told there was no additional information available. That now seems to have been incorrect. There was additional information available, but it had been blocked once in the fabric.

  “The Machi circle outloaded it, but the inload into our commhub was blocked somewhere close to this end of the transmission.”

  Logan looked at X7, and they both seemed to be processing the meaning of that statement.

  X7 spoke first, none of his usual internal noise this time in the way of clear thought. “Sir, wasn’t your briefing done by a truth-teller? I know an etherholo, but still. A truth-teller, correct?”

  Logan continued to stare at X7. “Yes. A truth-teller from the cogitate circle.” He stood up and walked over to the visual display as though getting closer to it could provide an answer.

  X7 walked over with him. “I did a full recursive scan of my internal crossloads and a full index search of the ether before we disconnected. I could find no rationale for the defensive order.”

  Studying the missing areas of the datagram map, Logan spoke without looking away, “I wonder what they were trying to tell us?”

  At that moment, Logan’s commlink broke the spell, and Odessa cut in with an excited voice. “I just received word from E7. They found another Machi scout ship with a working localhub several dozen measures from here. The other recon teams have found hundreds of older ships—all Machi—dating back thousands of cycles.”

  Breaking his gaze away from the video display and looking back to X7, Logan said to Odessa, “Go check it out. We are working through the packet anomaly you found. Something is not adding up.

  “Use extreme caution. If things do not feel right, come back here, and we will decide what to do.

  “X7 and I will take a look at one of the ships closer to us here.

  “It looks like we are on this defensive posture for a real reason, not just fun.”

  Odessa replied, “Sounds like a good plan. We can rendezvous back at the Thorik in a few cycles.”

  Logan walked to the doorway. “X7, how about you and I go check out one of these old ships and see what we can find.”

  Ancient

  Logan, X7, and a small contingent consisting of three E2s flew through the air using the quick-flight magnetic belts. The sky remained a bright blue, and the luminary shined in through Alethia’s atmosphere.

  Wind had picked up, and there was a noticeable drop in temperature, but the day otherwise remained crisp and shiny.

  X7 had set his scanners to Physical. It was a setting that was not often used because all objects in the hub were attached to the ether. An etherscan provided much more detail about the objects and sentient beings than a physical scan.

  However, part of the isolation of visiting a planet like Alethia was that the ether did not extend all the way down to the base of the planet. Had the Thorik been scanning Physical when it entered the atmosphere, at least some of the derelict ships would have been spotted.

  Instead, it was using the data generated from the ether, missing real data and showing what was in the data banks instead as an overlay.

  No ships in the data bank, no ships on the display.

  The terrain was rocky. There was ground cover in some places. In other places, there was little cover, if any.

  The flow of liquid water over the course of billions of cycles had cut deep into the rocks, leaving a trail behind it. In some places, ravines were hundreds of measures deep. Plant life seemed to be flourishing in parts of the area, creating a green contrast to the red and yellow rocks and dirt that were dominant in this region.

  The temperature had only recently fallen, perhaps only a few dozen daily cycles before they had arrived on Alethia in the Thorik. The green plant life would eventually fade from green to brown to match the color of the landscape and rocks.

  But not yet.

  They were heading to the oldest recorded ship found during the recon scans.

  It was relatively
close to where the Thorik had landed. A handful of measures in the grand scheme of things.

  After just a few moments of flight at the quick-flight belt's top speed, then a slower acceleration, X7’s physical scans were finding the same ships the E2s had reported finding.

  They were not close together, just like the current mining site was not close to any particular ship. But the volume of ships now derelict was high.

  As they came into view of their target ship, they could see that it was partially buried in the sand on the top of a large plateau. Water flowed to each side of the plateau over a hundred micro measures below the top. There were several smaller buttes and mesas in the area with flat tops at the same height as the target plateau.

  Buttes, mesas, and plateaus were all cut from the same basic geological structure; their only real differentiation was the size of the area on the top. Plateaus were very large, and buttes were fairly small. All had straight, flat sides creating a large drop-off to the ground below.

  It struck Logan that the site for this ship was a good match for the site the Thorik had been assigned and landed on.

  The group landed, approaching the back of the ship. The hatchway was still open. Roughly a third of the hull was under the sand.

  “X7,” Logan outloaded while crossloading readings from his physical scanner, “would you please post the E2s out here and then see if you can interface to the commhub of this ship? Search for any information as to its age. The design looks ancient but clearly recognizable as a Machi scout ship. Also, pull the last few logs so we can get a feel for what happened.”

  X7 quickly crossloaded instructions to the E2s, which almost instantly touched their quick-flight belts and established a perimeter just a few measures out from the ship opening. They stayed close to the ground, but since they were already airborne, their reaction time would be that much faster if they needed to mobilize. Their shooters were drawn, and they were in scan mode for any change in the environment.