“A second teleporter unit then transferred that plasma to a destination fed to it by the control center,” she noted. “That destination was being tracked in real time by a wonky gravity-hyperspace interface scanner, making the interface drive the easy target.”
“From the review of the Taljzi documents, the Dyson swarm they encountered actually did this by accident several times,” Rin told them. “They did have an emergency refueling system already set up that the Taljzi mostly just needed to get control over.
“Something about pinging that interface sensor made what was left of the swarm think it needed to refuel somebody.” He shook his head. “The irony is that the Taljzi Dyson swarm was more dangerous because it was more intact.
“The Skiefail Swarm is less intact, and the computers on the control station appear to be completely offline. The Taljzi had to work out how to take control of a half-working computer and then repair and replicate an existing system.
“We have to actually bring the computer online, reestablish hardware links, bring both the teleporter and the interface scanner back online…and as Commander Lawrence said, the plasma collector controlled how much plasma the teleporter had to handle.”
“Without that lower-level station, we are teleporting directly from the lower corona,” Lawrence said calmly. “While we should be able to control the volume we’re bringing in, we have less control over temperature and mass. There will be a small but recurring chance, with every single shot, that the plasma will destroy the teleporter.
“And that’s after we’ve done all the work to make the damn thing fire in the first place.”
The room of scientists and techs was silent, and Rin smiled thinly.
“Mok and Lawrence are leaving for the first teleporter station in thirty thousandth-cycles,” he told them. “Thirty of you are going with them—Lawrence already knows who, and you should have a note on your communicators.
“The rest of you are going into the control station with me, where we are going to have a long talk with a dead computer about how nice it would be to live again.”
He gestured around the lab.
“This will be our base station and our main operating center,” he noted. “Once I’ve had a chance to look at the station computer, we’re going to set up our molycirc core here and run some amazingly long cables.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we don’t know how much time to do it in. So, take your rest when you can—and let’s get to it.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Even if the lights had still been powered, the Alava hadn’t seen in quite the same wavelengths as humans. Rin wasn’t sure the space station would ever have managed to not be a foreboding, ominous maze.
Thanks to the Wendira attaching their main expedition station to the control center—it was the largest intact space station—they had decent maps of the structure.
But they had been determined to take things very slow and very careful—and when dealing with a facility the size of a Dyson swarm, that meant things had been taking functionally forever. They’d mapped the station, but they hadn’t even put up lights of their own.
Floating drones spread light out in front of Rin’s team as a trio of Wendira Warriors led the way. He wasn’t sure they needed the armed escort, but he wasn’t arguing, either.
Even with the lights from the drones and the light mounted on his vac-suit’s shoulders, the place was dark. There was no air, nothing. His suit provided air and faux gravity alike to make up for their absence.
“This way,” he told the Warriors, calling them back to an intersection via the shared radio net. “There’s an elevator shaft a hundred meters along this corridor. We need to go down fifteen levels.”
“How do you know what you’re looking for?” the lead Warrior asked. None of the soldiers had given their names.
“I know where the computers we’re looking for were on another one of these stations,” Rin told them. “And I’m familiar with Alavan architecture, and that is a level directory on the wall there.”
He shone his light on the faded text. It was a massive chart attached to an illegible map.
“It says we’re on level seventy-six and that the computer core is on level sixty-one,” he told the Wendira. “Roughly the middle of the station. This entire facility existed to provide brains for the rest of the swarm.”
Or, at least, for about a third of it. He’d be happy if he could get it to talk to a hundredth of the platforms it had once controlled.
He only needed it to talk to five, after all, and it had once controlled thousands.
“Direct as you will, Dr. Dunst,” the Warrior told him, stepping out along the corridor he’d directed them to.
Just getting to the computers was going to be a nightmare. Then they’d need to hook up power—but at least if there was one thing they knew they could find on a Dyson swarm, it was power!
When Rin stepped into the central computer core of the ruined Alavan station, the true scope of their task finally sank in. Up to that moment, it had all been theoretical and somewhat distant, easy to breezily assess the task versus the skills to hand.
But the central computer core was a cylindrical room sixty meters in diameter and sixty high. They entered onto a balcony that circled the top, and he stared out into that open expanse filled with fifty-meter-tall cylinders of ancient molecular circuitry.
All of that circuitry, every one of those computers, had been built under laws of physics that no longer applied. He knew that some of them would be able to work if he gave them power. They’d be missing chunks of their memory, processing power, everything.
This was a graveyard for a people whose arrogance had broken the universe. Their computers didn’t work anymore. Their stations were ruins. Their dreams shattered. Nothing of the Alava remained but their ruins and their artifice.
And their enemies.
“All right,” he said slowly. “It’s a bit more intimidating in person, but we brought the gear we need to do the basic setup. The central spire is the best place to start, according to the notes we have from the Taljzi swarm.”
He considered the whole situation, then grinned.
“Turn off your boots’ gravity and just float on down,” he told his team. He suited actions to words, keeping one hand on the railing as he stepped over and turned off the gravity field. With a solid push “down” from the railing, he started himself heading toward the bottom of the chamber.
Sixty meters of molycirc passed him as he descended, and he shivered. Even the largest molycirc cores produced by any modern power—including the Mesharom—couldn’t exceed ten meters before the crystals had fundamental issues.
The core he’d brought was far less powerful than these computers had been—but on the other hand, they’d been built when the conductivity levels of a lot of materials had been very different. The key was finding bits they could bring online, linking them with the Taljzi-designed hybrid tech and then inserting their own Alavan code.
He touched down at the base of the central spire carefully, activating his boots at the last moment as he reached the floor. To his shock, there was a body there—a four-armed Alava, mummified by millennia of vacuum, had been in the process of opening a maintenance panel when their world had ceased to be.
“Sonders, give me a hand here,” he instructed the first tech to touch down next to him. “Let’s not be rude to the poor guy, but he can’t help us today.”
He and the tech carefully moved the Alava’s body, shuffling him carefully into a corner before returning to the open maintenance panel.
One of the other techs had begun to set up the hybrid interface, and Rin fully opened the panel to look inside.
“Everything looks intact here,” he murmured. “Just no power. I wonder what happened to that.”
The equivalent in Taljzi-controlled space had never powered down, according to the records the Imperium had from the Taljzi. The control station had its own solar collectors and had s
till been receiving power transmission from several of the collector stations.
“We can run some power from batteries to make sure everything boots up,” Sonders suggested. “That will give us an idea of what we need to link in while we go look at the solar collectors. Do as much in parallel as possible?”
“Not much choice on that one,” Rin agreed. “We’ve got batteries?”
“Enough to run the core for a few hours if we need to,” another tech confirmed.
“Let’s not aim for that,” Rin said. “We’ll try to boot it up and run a self-diagnostic. That’s all for today. I’ll want to know more about the sensors and teleporters and power collectors before we seriously try to turn this on.”
“Doesn’t it have control as soon as we turn it on?” Sonders asked.
“No; if we trigger the self-diagnostic, it will lock itself out,” Rin told the tech. “Plus, we’re definitely not going to feed it enough power to do more than boot. Watch the amount of power we give it,” he instructed, pulling up notes on a holographic panel above his vac-suit arm.
“We want to give it one-point-six-five megawatts,” he concluded after skimming the report. “Nothing less will run it at all, so that should be barely maintenance-level power.”
“All right.”
The techs set to work, laying in cables and setting up batteries while Rin stepped back to survey the spire. Like Lawrence, most of his work would come once the hardware was online. He could direct people to the right hardware and could help recode the Alavan software once it was online, but he wasn’t much use for this part.
“Lawrence, report,” he instructed as he switched his radio to a longer-range network.
“We’ve made entry to Teleporter One,” she told him. “No power, but our initial exterior survey suggests the receptors are intact. We can either bring a solar collector online or see what the Wendira have for power transmitters.”
“We’ll need to do the same here,” he said. “Power systems are offline. The Taljzi swarm had power, didn’t it?”
“When the furry buggers arrived, apparently,” she agreed. Taljzi—like their Kanzi cousins—looked much like humans wrought in two-thirds scale, then covered in blue fur.
“They got luckier than we did,” Rin said. “But, of course, we have all of their notes. Control-center computers are intact but offline. We’re going to run a self-diagnostic to see if we can ID what parts aren’t working and need hybridization.
“What does the interior of the teleporter station look like?”
“A morgue,” Lawrence said grimly. “The Wendira have only physically been aboard maybe a tenth of the stations. They didn’t make it to this one, so…bodies and skeletons. I’d say the place had a crew of about a thousand and none of them had any warning.”
“Based off the sites I’ve examined, they just dropped dead where they were standing when the cybernetics shut down,” he told her. “Welcome to why no modern cybernetic has any interface with the autonomous nervous system!”
“And you still have more than I want,” Lawrence told him. “My opinion of your sanity on that matter, by the way, is not improved by moving the bodies of people whose implants killed them.”
“Fair enough,” Rin conceded. “Have you made it to the teleporters yet?”
“Not yet, but so far, things look pretty intact. Based off the Taljzi swarm, either the teleporters were transmitting when the universe changed and instantly blew themselves up, or they were on standby and quietly shut down.”
“Funny that they can still transmit, even now, if the ones that were transmitting died,” Rin murmured.
“Well, it’s one thing to run complex energy fields under a different set of physical laws,” she noted. “It’s an entirely different level of hell to try and maintain complex energy fields while the laws of physics are changing.
“I don’t think the Alava designed for that possibility any more than we do!”
Chapter Fifty-Two
Rin rubbed his eyes in exhaustion and stared at the code. It was a modification of the Taljzi code written for their swarm—and he wasn’t entirely sure he even understood their code.
“You’re sure about this scan data?” he asked Mok. The Tosumi was the only other person in the lab on the Wendira station. Everyone else was busy working on the hardware in the Alavan stations.
“As sure as I can be,” Mok replied. “I went over all of the scan data we have from the Infinite, but we’re not even entirely sure what the ice-cursed scanner is looking at. Something about the hyperspace interface, but we’ve never duplicated it.”
“But you think the Infinite’s reactionless drive also has a signature on the interface?” Rin said.
“Ninety percent,” the astrophysicist doctor replied. “Maybe ninety-one. I think the actual physics behind their engine are closely related, but without a sample to test, I can’t confirm it.
“The drinkable water of it all, though, is that the Infinite will ping the Alavan scanner. Just not as a ship—but then, the interface drive shouldn’t properly register as a ship.”
“But it does,” Rin said quietly. “We know that because it was occasionally triggering on Taljzi ships long before they actively modified it into a proper weapon.”
“I think—but this is just guessing—that the Infinite drive won’t register as strongly and likely won’t be classed as a ship without us doing something.”
Rin snorted.
“That’s what this code fixes,” he told Mok, tapping the screen. “The Taljzi eventually added an identification database, basically, to the system, telling it that interface drives were ships. They weren’t able to narrow it down to only target particular drives, but they convinced the computer that interface-drive ships needed fuel.
“And since the teleporter was grabbing coronal plasma rather than refined hydrogen, well…” Rin shrugged. “Even war spheres died. I’ve rewritten the code to include your estimate of what the reactionless drive looks like.”
“Can we take interface drives out?” Mok asked. “We’ve only seen those on their missiles so far.”
Rin grimaced.
“We know the sun eater developed a biological interface drive,” he told the other scientist. “I have to assume that the Infinite have done the same by now. There are definite advantages to both systems, so…some of their fleet may well arrive on interface drive.
“Plus, looking at the signature we’ve included for the reactionless engine, I think that will ping for interface drives as well,” he admitted. “When we turn this on, every friendly interface drive in the star system needs to turn off or they’re going to die.”
The lab was silent.
“Did you ever think you’d be doing this kind of work, Dr. Dunst?” Mok asked. “Assembling a weapon from xenoarchaeological artifacts?”
“No,” Rin admitted. “I knew that the tech artifacts I recovered would be studied and attempts would be made to replicate them, but I was never expecting to be involved in that side of things. I was a field archaeologist.”
He stared at the code blankly for a moment, not seeing the symbols.
“Then we met the sun eater and I got dragged into a pile of overly classified bullshit,” he said. “And here we are. I do what I can.”
“I was recruited to disable a weapon like this,” Mok said quietly. “As a doctor and an astrophysicist, I study people and stars. I was brought in to the Taljzi swarm to study the stellar effects of the thing.
“Assembling the weapon I once destroyed…feels wrong. And yet…”
“Any chance to save people,” Rin said. “So, here we are.”
He tapped the code on the screen.
“We’re only a cycle or two away from being able to load this into the control center, though we’re further from having the teleporters online,” he told Mok. “I’m going to see if I can refine the code to give us a bit more direct control of the targeting, but my suspicion is that if the Taljzi couldn’t manage it, we can’t.
“They had hundreds of years of personal experience with their swarm. I just have their notes.”
“Which I hope is enough,” a familiar translated voice told him. Rin looked up in surprise to see Princess Oxtashah standing in the entrance to the lab, flanked by her Warrior bodyguards.
“It might be, Your Highness,” Rin conceded. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Zokalatan has remained here to act as a security force,” she told him. “And to stay in the communications loop for the war. May we speak in private, Dr. Dunst?”
Rin led Oxtashah to the office the Wendira had put aside for his use. Like the lab, it was a prefab space clearly unused before his team’s arrival. Unlike the lab, he’d barely used it. All of his gear was in the lab he shared with the rest of the team, leaving the office without even chairs that were comfortable for humans.
Awkwardly perching on the desk, he looked at Oxtashah. Her wings were ever so slightly lifted from her carapace, seeming to twitch unconsciously every so often.
He didn’t know Wendira body language…but he suspected she was terrified.
“How may I assist you, Princess Oxtashah?” he finally asked when she didn’t speak.
“How soon will the weapon be ready?” she asked.
“Faster than I dared hope,” he admitted. “Ten cycles. Maybe twelve. That will only be two teleporters, though. Given time, we think we can get up to five online. The odds say we won’t get many shots from any given teleporter, so more is better.”
He spread his hands.
“This won’t be a sustainable weapon, Princess,” Rin warned. “We don’t have all the pieces that the Taljzi did, so we can’t build as solid a system as they did. There’s about a point-two percent chance every time one of the teleporters activates that it will pick up more plasma than we can contain—and the station will be destroyed.”
“So. Five hundred shots,” she whispered.
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 26