by Mark Wandrey
He wished the minisub had sensors like a starship so he could scan for a fusion power plant. Unfortunately, he only possessed rudimentary sensors, like a compass, depth gauge, and temperature readouts. The latter showed the water temp down three degrees, further proof the volcano was dormant and extinct. He shivered, and he knew Katrina must be even colder. They needed to get into the base and out of the cold.
“Skritch?” he called over the comms.
“Terry, Terry!” the leader of Sunrise Pod replied.
“Can you look for an entrance? A hatch we could use to get inside?”
“We look,” Skritch replied instantly.
Terry could see the bottlenoses racing around the tanks and other structures by their headlights. In less than a minute, one of them called. Wikiwiki had found an entrance. Terry let Katrina know, and together they accelerated toward Wikiwiki’s sonar beacon.
The inside of the disassembled extractor wasn’t like the other one at all. There was barely any area in atmosphere, and what there was seemed almost an afterthought. He knew there were often no spaces in atmosphere in Selroth bases because they were water breathers. Doc had believed the reason that there were extensive breathing spaces on Templemer was the result of the water being unfavorable to the Selroth.
Terry and Katrina spent some time warming up in their drysuits and exploring, but there just wasn’t much to see. Eventually he located a data port and used his slate to log into the system. Like the others, its access code was a variation of the correct code, and he was quickly reading through the files.
“This is it,” he said excitedly. “There’s thousands of tons of sorted minerals here.”
“But why is it here?” Katrina asked.
“I have no idea,” he said. With full access to the computer, he began copying the entire OS and memory to his slate. With 11 exabytes on his slate, he had plenty of room. He’d only used two exabytes, and the extractor’s complete memory was less than 5 petabytes.
He glanced up as the files were copying. Katrina was examining a locker full of rusty gear. He caught himself admiring the way her drysuit clung to her hips and quickly looked away as she turned around. He was certain his cheeks were bright red.
When he looked back at the slate, he saw it had slowed way down. It was struggling with a series of files. Strange, he thought, his slate was massively more powerful than the entire processing power of the extractor. No file should be able to tie up his slate, especially one in an industrial machine like the extractor.
Terry waited until the copy was completed, then pulled up the strange file. It was unlike anything he’d seen in the Union to date. At first, he didn’t understand how the station’s computer could even cope with the thing. Like when he copied it, his slate struggled to load the file.
“This is the strangest thing,” he said.
“What?” Katrina asked, coming close.
Terry swallowed when she leaned on his shoulder to look. “It’s a file in the computer here. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
She watched the Tri-V display the codes moving in three dimensions. “Weird,” she said. She moved around to the side and looked at it from another direction. “It’s in three dimensions, layers upon layers.”
“I’ve never seen a program like it.” He froze the view and pointed. “Look at those strings. They’re almost woven together. How can you even program it? A three dimensional jigsaw puzzle, you’d have to have a strange brain to even understand it.”
“Like the code you put together to find this place?”
“A little,” he said. “Only a million times more complicated.” Who programs like this? he thought. Even more interesting, why do computers recognize it?
Terry spent a few minutes examining the other files, then saved them all and put his slate away. He checked his core temperature, then his drysuit’s power. They’d been gone two hours, and his suit showed four more hours of power. “How’s your power?”
“Three and a half hours left,” she said. “Is that enough?”
“Yeah, if we don’t spend too much longer.”
“We have to go back in the water so soon?” she asked.
“If we don’t, we risk running out of power for the drysuits.” The air inside the station was 10 below zero. Their suits could easily handle much lower temperatures out of the water than in it. Even so, without the hot air blowers, they’d quickly freeze to death. Time to go.
The return to Templemer took less than an hour. Terry and Katrina chatted about being out so far and finding the missing extractor. Terry carefully monitored their depth information and ran it through the dive computer app on his slate twice more to make 100% certain they were safe. As they were approaching the dome and the lights became visible, his radio came alive.
“Terry, are you out there?” It was Doc’s familiar voice.
He cringed. He’d hoped they’d beat the mercs back home. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Where are you now?” The question was asked in Doc’s serious adult tone.
Crap. “Almost back. We found the missing extractor.”
“Come in immediately. Kiddo, you really screwed up.”
So much for a celebration, he thought. For the last few minutes of the ride, he ran the chain of events through his head, including how he’d justified their going out alone, despite the little voice in the back of his mind knowing it wouldn’t wash with the adults. By the time the cetaceans bid them farewell as he and Katrina sailed in through the lock, he understood that the idea was far from his best one.
Doc and his mother were waiting. Doc looked disappointed; his mother was just pissed. Yeah, not my best decision, he thought as he surfaced to face the music.
* * * * *
Chapter 10
Templemer, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
May 9th, 2038
Terry held the bottle as Pōkole drained it greedily. He dearly missed his friends’ help, but that would still be some weeks coming. Pōkole jerked on the empty bottle, reminding him what he was there for. Terry climbed out of the moon pool and got another, balancing the 10kg container in the water where the calf waited eagerly.
“Here you go,” he said and offered it to him. It was taken immediately and hungrily. He used to really enjoy feeding the ravenous little guy. He realized more every day that a large part of the fun had grown to include the companionship of his friends. Not to mention Katrina, of course.
As the calf quickly went through his seventh jug of milk, Terry thought about her. Aside from classes, he hadn’t been alone with her since their ill-advised trip to the excavator stash. He’d tried a couple of times, but his mom was always there to stop him with a none-too-gentle reminder that he was grounded—for a month.
She hadn’t even wanted to let him continue feeding Pōkole until he played his trump card. “It isn’t fair to punish Pōkole for what I did,” he’d said. She’d relented only after telling him he had to do it by himself. Feeding the calf a hundred liters a day was no mean feat, especially by himself.
“I miss Katrina,” he said to Pōkole.
“Terr, Terr, more?”
The young orca’s language continued to develop faster than anyone had expected. Dr. Orsage said she hoped they had more calves so she could study whether it was a phenomenon related to the pinplants or not. The bottle was empty, so he went for another. Almost two more weeks before his month of grounding was over. A part of him knew he’d gotten off light. It didn’t help when he chafed like he was then. At least she’d also allowed him to continue swimming every day to build up familiarity with the leg. He missed his friends and Katrina then, too. Crap.
Finally Pōkole was stuffed, and he swam out the lock to rejoin Moloko and another pair of orcas who were waiting. While the huge predatory cetaceans had no real fear of the Oohobo, the calf was at risk. They protected Pōkole with the same vigor they’d protected Terry. He guessed they thought of him as their calf of sorts as well.
For a second, he considered sidling over there as if he was going to get something. When he glanced around, he saw Doc with his people nearby, and he was watching Terry closely. He’d hoped the man would at least partly understand and maybe cut him a little slack. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” Doc had said. “Frankly, I expected better of you. But I guess you just had to step over the line in a big way, didn’t you?”
Terry hadn’t had a response, so he’d kept quiet. Even when the one-month grounding sentence came down, he’d held his peace. What could he offer in his own defense? It was a dumbass move. He did his best to hold Katrina harmless, claiming it was all his idea, and it mostly was. Still, she’d caught some blowback. Her own grounding was over after two weeks. He glanced at Doc, then went over to get a drink and returned to his solo table.
Back in his quarters, he was early enough he didn’t have to face his mom, which was good. Her reproachful disappointed looks were worse than Doc’s by far. She hadn’t said anything more about the incident after the first day. “I trusted you,” was all she’d said before pronouncing sentence.
He spent two hours doing his homework, and some time studying pinplant technology. Afterward, he went back to his current personal project—the files he’d copied from the strange extractor.
“You want to redeem yourself a little?” Doc had asked. Of course he did. “Figure out what the Selroth were up to from all those files.” Offered a chance to get out of the doghouse, he went to it. Only it proved much more exhausting than he’d expected.
Of the thousands of files, most were routine records of one kind or another. The extractor’s original OS was still functioning and creating operations logs dutifully, as it had been for more than 300 years. Each subsystem generated a report each hour. There were 122 subsystems. This resulted in a lot of files.
The work was complicated even more because the system didn’t seem to follow a normal convention in naming files, or dating them. “It’s all designed to stymy investigation,” he’d told Doc after two days of work.
“Sounds like a good job to keep you out of mischief,” he’d replied. Despite being frustrated, Terry went back to the task.
Now 15 days into his analysis of the files, he finally felt he was making some progress. The biggest part was deciphering the file naming convention. It had taken him two weeks just to realize that each name was linked with the date in a rotating series of identifiers, and those were in Selroth. He got his slate to translate, and things made a lot more sense. For the first time, he eliminated 90% of the files by identifying their timing to coincide with routine equipment log files. Score.
With only a fraction of the files left, he was able to move through them much faster. He hadn’t gone back to the weird 3D file yet. He didn’t know where to start with it. After the drama about his punishment, he’d checked with the GalNet, but found no help there with the unusual programming methods. So he stuck to what he could work with.
Huge groups of files were put aside using his understanding of naming conventions. The further along he got, the better his understanding grew. He intermittently opened files to look for anything interesting. It was close to bedtime when he came across the first files matching the criteria of the program he’d first cracked.
“Locate and secure,” he read from his slate, translated off the program commands. What does that mean, he wondered, and dug further into the file. There was some indexed information, but nothing understandable would translate.
Terry ran searches for related terminology in the files and got several hits. Amazingly, most of those were in the discarded data logs. He recalled the files to view and went over them.
“Still working on homework?”
Terry turned at his mom’s words, surprised to see her there. “No, I was working on the files...files for Doc.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Nothing had been said in his punishment about working on the files retrieved from his misadventure. “It’s late,” she said after a few seconds. “You need to go to bed soon.”
“Yes, Mom,” he said. She watched him a little longer, then went into her room.
Terry waited for a moment, then went into the little kitchenette and grabbed a meal pack from the cooler. He collected his slate and retreated to his room, closed the door, and set up on his little desk.
The meal pack was self-contained and made by their autochef. He squeezed the tab and it chemically heated itself as he went back to his research. The meal was almost cold again before he remembered it was there. He begrudgingly shoveled the fish and noodles into his mouth—feeding the machine, as Doc called it, all the while displaying files on his slate’s Tri-V.
He had the machine’s Tri-V range maxed out, with nine square meters of space in his tiny room full of file elements and floating descriptions he’d added to them. As he worked, he thought the strange 3D file that had made no sense might be onto something. If you could operate in 3D, you could process and collate an order of magnitude more data.
He caught himself yawning and glanced at the simple chronometer in the corner of his Tri-V display. It was past midnight already. He needed to get to sleep or he’d be useless in classes tomorrow, which would get back to his mom.
Terry spent another half hour going over the log files, trying to understand what they meant, and what the Selroth were doing with them. However, eventually he gave in to fatigue and crawled into his bed. Shutting off the lights, he drifted off with files and content buzzing ceaselessly through his mind.
* * * * *
Chapter 11
Templemer, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
May 10th, 2038
Terry barely got to his class on time. Dr. Patel taught biology and life sciences, but hadn’t arrived yet when Terry entered. In these classes, they shared time with the middle school-aged kids, so in addition to the four other high schoolers there were five younger kids. They all looked up when he came in.
He immediately caught Katrina’s eye and smiled. She half-smiled back, which caused him to pause. He glanced out the door and saw no sign of Dr. Patel, so he went over to Katrina and his friends. “What’s up?”
“You didn’t notice all the doctors weren’t around at breakfast?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted. “I was working late, so I skipped breakfast. What do you think is going on?”
“No clue,” Dan said. Taiki shook his head to show he didn’t know either, while Colin just shrugged. The middle school students at their own table glanced at the older students nervously. The adults had been scrupulous since arriving on Hoarfrost at maintaining a daily schedule in order to give the children a grounding in routine. Some of the much younger kids were having regular counseling sessions to help them deal with their new environment.
He sat with his friends and listened while they gossiped about what might be happening. To fill the time, Terry went back to his slate and the files he’d been working on when he’d given in to sleep the previous night.
As soon as he looked for them, he had an epiphany. The Selroth program had set aside one of the extractors to create a storage depot! Which meant they’d always intended to hide all the resources, maybe even for hundreds of years. Which led him to the communications protocol of the original program, and his own slate’s communications log.
Betrayed by his own beloved slate. It had used Templemer’s own communications system to quietly send a signal to the surface station, which in turn...
“Oh, shit,” he cursed.
“I gotta go,” he said, snatching up his slate and running for the door.
“What’s going on?” Katrina yelled after him, but he was already out the door and running out of the building. Simulated sunlight shone from the dome above as he ran across the open space, past the swimming pool, to the central building tower that contained Templemer’s command center. He saw only a few people between the school and the command center.
Inside he went immediately to the second floor, where the ops room was. As soon as he reached the 2nd floor, he found all the ranking staff of the colony, former directors of the institute.
“We’re in trouble!” he blurted.
“Terry,” Doc said from where he stood by a Tri-V display. “What—”
“You have to listen to me,” he said, and held up his slate. “The Selroth are coming back.”
“Son,” his mom said, “how did you find out?”
“It was in the program...wait, you know?”
“Yes,” she said. “We haven’t made any announcements yet. So how did you know?”
“It was in the program,” he said, then quickly explained how the operating system from the extractors, once reassembled, contained a hidden trigger that sent a signal off planet. “I could have locked down my slate, but I didn’t know there was a reason to,” he said with a shake of his head. “I messed up again.”
“No,” Tina said, standing next to Doc. “If you hadn’t done it, one of us would have eventually. It’s not your fault.”
“But how do you know? Did someone else activate the signal?”
“No,” Doc said. “The Selroth are landing at the power station up on the surface.” He pointed to the ops room Tri-V. On it was the surface fusion plant floating in the melted ice. On the landing pads squatted multiple ships. They didn’t look like commercial vessels. Each one had stubby swept wings and a turret on its back. He’d learned about those kinds of craft in MST—dropships.