Prime- The Summons

by Maeve Sleibhin

  “No breach of the inner or outer skin has been detected,” the PES told her. She exhaled the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and paused for a moment, weak with relief, before wiping the ice particles off the front of her helmet.

  The walls of the Tellorian were covered with a thin sheen of ice particles sparkling in the beam of her light. There was the occasional sparkle in the air as well. It was a strange and beautiful sight and for a moment she could only stare, entranced by the gleaming interior of the ship and the spinning wheels of miniscule ice particles drifting through space. Finally, though, she pushed her way back to the opening.

  It had frozen over. Carefully, she extracted the Q-Culture sensor array, a long, thin tube to be attached to the side of the hatch, and inserted into the liquid. She punched through the casing of the ice, attached it to the side of the hatch, and activated it.

  The ship around her abruptly began to tremble. She held on to the exercise machine and found herself wishing for the irritating voice of the Annabel Tellorian to tell her what was going on. The ice on the top of the culture cracked, giving off small puffs of gas that dissipated quickly. The trembling subsided.

  All the indices were green—the culture was all right. Xai paused for a moment to thank Kesta and all her ancestors. There was severe bruising where the ship had come into contact with the freighter, many microscopic fractures, a one-meter tear on the top and several small gashes on the sides, but the Q-Matrix could heal all of those with relative ease. At the moment, the sensor was projecting 26 hours before it was fully regenerated. She dosed the culture with an emergency growth packet, just to be sure. But it was an enormous relief to know the matrix wasn’t seriously damaged. She left the sensor attached and shut the hatch.

  The second sensor, for the Malloxian frame, also showed green. This meant that the chief problem had to be in the AI. With trepidation she floated over to the front of the ship, where the AI was housed. What was it Teksa Wu had called it? “Truth, mountain of dreams.”

  The AI shared the same culture as the Q-Matrix. This allowed it to monitor the sail. Xai was braced for the gas explosion when she opened its hatch, and all she had to do was wipe the crystals off her mask and face the damage.

  Xai should have seen a large, undistinguished, multi-cellular organism attached by thousands of small filaments to the surrounding casing. These filaments gave it access to data from all over the ship, and most of the filaments seemed fine. But instead of a deep, green, uniform color, the AI was harshly scored with red and grey.

  The sensor data confirmed Xai’s fears. The damage was severe. Forty percent of the matter was inoperative. Left to regenerate on its own it would take approximately three years.

  Xai looked up, filled with desperation. She didn’t have three years. Even if she was able to float around the moving debris field and find functioning detox centers, it wasn’t going to be long before the Malloxians sent out probes to see what they’d found. By the time the Tellorian was up and running she’d be a slave somewhere out in Fleet territory.

  “The brave man swims the river, the wise man builds a bridge.” Thank you, Tal’ei Xein. Xai looked anxiously around the room. What was made of the same CPU strain as the Tellorian? There had to be a ship’s component that was made from the same basic cells. All the games and videos used a secondary strain. Suddenly it came to her—the portable Prime databank. Her eyes fixed on the databank’s casing—a small black cube positioned next to the bed. It and the AI came from the same basic multitasking cell format.

  Xai chewed her lower lip, nervous. What would happen to the Tellorian if she grafted the Databank to it? Would it remember anything? Or would it integrate the memory into the Tellorian’s functioning? There were some famous disasters caused by mixing similar cell strains that had been put to different functions.

  She looked out at the great gash in the side of the cargo ship. The fact was that she had no time to worry about such things. “Only the patient or the wealthy can afford to forebear.” Zella Xiang had said that, and she should know. She’d been poor and wealthy, patient and decidedly not.

  Xai opened the hatch of the databank. It was there, and only slightly bruised. Wouldn’t you know, Xai thought sourly, that the most useless piece of equipment on the ship would come out of the experience unscathed. Detaching the cube from its mooring she took it over to the AI’s station.

  Xai unhooked the scalpel attached to the interior of the databank’s hatch, slipped her gloved hand into the culture, and carefully began to cut the strands that attached the databank to its casing. Some of them were already broken, hanging listlessly in the clear liquid culture.

  The ship began to shake again. Xai swayed wildly, her scalpel gashing deeply into the side of the databank. A dark liquid seeped out. Xai winced and hurried to finish the job.

  Finally the databank CPU was detached from its casing. It was about the size of her fist. Carefully she transferred it into the AI’s culture, cracking the ice as gently as she could, the only thing keeping her in place her foot wedged in a toehold nearby. As carefully as she could she cut out the damaged sections and replaced them with roughly cut portions of the databank, tapping a small amount of growth accelerator onto the join. The AI seeped dark fluid, but the new pieces seemed to be holding. Finally, after perhaps an hour, she was finished. With a tired sigh, she added four emergency growth packets to the AI culture.

  Slowly the numbers fell to two days.

  Well, she thought sadly, staring down at the bright display, it would have to do.

  Chapter Seventeen

  XAI set diagnostic sensors on all the important ship components, stowed her gear, checked her hatches, and examined her inputs for the fifth time. Then, with little else to do, she started to worry—about the Malloxians, about Fleet, about whether she should go to Messim, about what had happened to Marcus and just about anything else her mind could fix on. She wanted to sleep but was afraid to, unable to chase the thought of a Malloxian droid coming into the wrecked hull of the ship while she was napping.

  Finally, she shook her head and glared at the hatch. She wanted a weapon. She wasn’t feeling very finicky either. A Gamma Series 84 laser pistol would be nice. Perhaps a Rydian Deathstalker Rifle. But strangely, the weapon she found most appealing at that moment was the cian’xou, the ceremonial half-meter blade carried by every legitimate member of a Noble House. The cian’xou was the first weapon she had learned to fight with, and the one for which she had always felt the greatest affinity, even though as a bastard she wasn’t technically entitled to wear one. Still, she would have felt immeasurably reassured knowing that slender, curved blade of tempered metal lay snugly against her thigh.

  There was no way she would get a cian’xou out here. But, Xai thought sourly, she had to have something in case someone tried to board her ship. She needed some sort of defense.

  Xai looked around the interior of the Tellorian. There were no weapons here. There might be on the ship she was hiding in, though. Xai peered out at the dark hull of the ship around her. Traders usually carried guns, didn’t they? The diagnostics kit had ten hours left on the skin. There were close to twice as many on the AI. What other options were there? None that she could think of.

  Xai stared at the light streaming in through the gash in the side of the cargo hull. Would someone notice if she moved around inside the ship? The Tellorian was entirely silent, dark and still. Xai had never felt so alone. All the things that could happen to a female alone in space crowded into her conscious mind. She was swamped suddenly with anxiety. How would she survive? How could she?

  The words of the Abbott M’aat came to her, cutting through the cold fog of growing panic. “Fear is the greatest thief, robbing us of our reason.” Xai took a deep breath. Get a hold of yourself, she admonished. One thing at a time. She thought of one of the old teachers, the holographic Mao Tzu Mio, educator from the Time of Troubles. He had rapped the cane hard down on her leading hand—a sharp stinging blow
, augmented by her fighting suit. “Don’t think of the killing blow,” he had said. “Don’t even think of the next step. Think of your breathing, of your balance, of the body of your opponent and the space that surrounds you. The battle is not in the future but in the present. Be here, now.”

  Xai took a deep, tremulous breath, picked up a portable diagnostics scanner and forced open the hatch. “Now,” she reminded herself.

  The light beam shining from her helmet picked out the girders of the ship, great bows of mixed metal about thirty meters ahead of her. It seemed as if there was a door between two of them. The Tellorian was floating about two meters off the floor.

  Xai stood in the hatchway for a moment longer, hating herself for being uncertain. “Beginnings are the most difficult,” Xiang Wu had once said, “for they must be begun.” Xai took a deep breath, crouched, and leapt into the void between herself and the doorway in the distance.

  Surprisingly, it was a strange and absurdly delightful feeling, to be floating through the intervening space like a heroine out of one of the really old Rydian vids, the only sound that of her breathing and the steady beep of the PES. She glided up to the ceiling—mixed, interlocking of strands of plastic, metal, and organic material woven into a hull. Her fingers trailed on the surface, changing her direction just enough so that she was directed down again, toward the door. When she was less than a meter from it she activated the boot magnets. With an abrupt lurch she connected with the floor. She marched the last three steps to the door.

  The ship was powered down and the door refused her commands. She was going to have to open it manually. Xai chewed the inside of her cheek, frustrated. Why did everything always have to work against her? She opened the manual hatch and began to crank the lever. There was a blast of air as the seal was broken, but she was moored to the floor and wasn’t swept away. She kept working. Condensation pooled in the front of her mask and she had to stop twice, to lean her head back and let the suit absorb the liquid.

  Finally the door was open wide enough for her to squeeze through. With one last look around the cargo area of the ship she slipped through the door and into the interior.

  Like most T’lasian cargo ships, human quarters were small, cramped, and tinted a pale, luminescent light blue. Thankfully, the interior doors of the ship were all open. She counted four passenger spaces, two crew bunks, a deck and a galley, all very neat.

  Xai started opening every drawer she could find. Maps, old data chips, cups, and pads floated out. She went to the kitchen, stocked with four years of pills. She moved on to the quarters, and then back to the guest rooms, finding clothes, books, mementos. But no guns.

  Was she going to have to jump ships? she wondered, standing in the middle of the chief guest room and examining the walls. Abruptly, they began to tremble. Xai watched the walls for cracks and waited. She thought the trembling happened because the towing ship had changed directions, putting the structures in the stream under strain between inertia going in one direction and the magnet going in the other. But she wasn’t certain. Then all thoughts of a like variety abandoned her. The mattress had floated off the bed, and there was something beneath it.

  “Thanks be,” Xai whispered. A line by Xian’te Maze drifted up into her mind. “Dreams fill the whispering trees. / While we, sleeping, slumber, / chance masters the field.” As an old woman, Xian’te Maze had taken to keeping her hair in place with two stiletto blades. Occasionally, she’d throw them at people who irritated her. She’d only hit one person, as far as Xai could recall. She shunted the thought aside and got back to the business at hand.

  She pushed the mattress up to float several feet above her head, near the ceiling. There was a stasis pod hidden in the space beneath it. Xai put her face up against the aperture and was greeted with the sight of a partially decomposed male face grimacing at her.

  Xai pulled back abruptly. She would not throw up. She would not. Xai teetered there for a moment, desperately trying not to think of the face she had seen or what vomit would do to the inside of her helmet. Think of something, anything! She focused on the first thing that came to her mind, Marcus’s pale red eyes looking at her. She forced herself to imagine his face, his hands, his posture. Finally, thankfully, the nausea subsided. She rested for a minute or two, breathing deeply, feeling strangely exhausted.

  Going from room to room, she uncovered four more dead stasis pods and their partially decomposed inhabitants. Then, pulling the mattress off the stasis pod in the pilot’s room, she saw the telltale green light. This one was still functioning.

  Gingerly she brought her mask in contact with the aperture. It was a T’lasian male. The stasis pod said he was alive. He had to have been in there a long time. He had a full beard.

  Xai pulled back from the aperture, stunned. In all of her imaginings, she’d never thought she’d encounter a man in stasis. What should she do? She couldn’t leave him here to die. And yet, if she saved him, who was to say he would treat her any better than the Malloxians? What would she do?

  Xai thought back to all she knew about T’lasians. They were cargo haulers. Like the modern Messinians they used tattoos for identification, small dots, curves, and lines which were a language other T’lasians could read. And they were very strict about following Space Code. So, she thought with something like relief, if she rescued him, it wasn’t likely he’d do anything to hurt her. Not if he was a real T’lasian, which from the dusky color of his skin, the variety of markings on his cheeks, and the decidedly aristocratic expression of his sleeping face, seemed likely.

  But could she take him in the Tellorian? Xai wondered. She didn’t even know if it was still going to work, if it could still sail, or if it was going to be incapable of doing anything beyond reciting encyclopedic information from this point on.

  Xai sighed. “To know what to do and not to do it is nothing but cowardice,” Ta’o Xiang had once said. “Better to know not what to do than to know and not do it.”

  Xai knew what she had to do.

  Reaching down, she released the stasis pod from its moorings. It rose gently. Under the space where it had lain were three neutron pistols. Xai grinned, feeling enormously relieved. Very cunning, she thought as she attached a pistol to each thigh. Suddenly she felt more in control of the situation.

  With a gentle nudge Xai pushed the stasis pod out of the door and into the hallway. Using the magnets in her glove, she maneuvered the stasis pod down the hall and to the exit hatch. There, she had to stop and open the door further. But finally, she and the stasis pod were out in the long bay. Xai took a deep breath, turned off her helmet light, and started back to the Tellorian.

  The march took forever, step after careful step on the wide plane of the cargo bay, the only light pouring in through the jagged hole in its side. The stasis pod was attached to her left glove, and she pushed it along before her. When they finally arrived at the Tellorian she slid it gently through her open hatch and pulled herself in after it.

  There was a strange sense of homecoming, being back in the Tellorian. All the sensors were green and falling. According to their readings, in eight hours the skin would be ready, in eighteen the Tellorian herself.

  Xai tethered the stasis pod to the bed, hooked the diagnostics kit up to it, and waited.

  When the numbers finally came up she could only stare at them, shut her eyes, shake her head, and stare at them again. The T’lasian was alive, and he’d been in the pod for approximately thirty-five years. The longest she’d ever heard anyone surviving in a stasis pod was twenty-three years. They were only guaranteed for twenty. He’d probably aged two or three whole years in cellular time. What effect would that have on him? What state would his body be in? How had he ended up in the debris field, anyway? And why had no one come to take him out?

  According to the diagnostics kit it would take ten hours to bring the T’lasian back to consciousness. Xai thought about letting him sleep until she got to a Starbase. But she wasn’t sure she was a good enough pilot
to get them out of the cargo bay—and she had to get out of the cargo bay if she was going to get to a Starbase.

  Xai stared at the activation key for one long moment. Finally, reaching over, she flicked it on.

  Chapter Eighteen

  XAI surprised herself by falling asleep, waking abruptly nine hours later to discover that the matrix was fully re-grown and that she had an hour to re-pressurize the cabin before the man in the stasis pod woke up and promptly died of a lack of oxygen.

  Xai yawned and stretched. The Me’xeit always used to say the best soldiers were those who slept when they could. So either she was one of the best soldiers, or Me’xeit didn’t know what he was talking about. Xai grinned at the mere idea and pulled herself over to the water reserves.

  The only way she was going to get enough oxygen into the air to start the oxygenation cycle was by burning off the water reserves. This would give her an O2 air content high enough to kick-start the system.

  Xai chewed nervously at the inside of her cheek and examined the water reserves. The problem was that the only way she could burn the water reserves was by dumping half a kilo of salt copper sulphate into the water. And the chief by-product of that process—besides oxygen—was sulphuric acid.

  Sulphuric acid was just about the worst thing one could possibly have in contact with a Q-Matrix. It ate the fabric of the matrix faster than it could regenerate. Xai remembered a vid she had seen of what was left of a destroyer after Temallian terrorists put sulphuric acid into the matrix culture. When the destroyer had unfurled its sails the matrix had shredded, exposing the interior of the ship. Over three hundred people had died of explosive decompression.

  There were laws against sulphuric acid generation in space, but if Xai didn’t oxygenate the ship soon the T’lasian would die. With a small sigh, she dumped the salt, made certain the acid recipient was firmly fixed onto the nozzle, and started the magnet spinning.