Archaea (11 page)

I don't have the same appreciation for mechanicals like Gene, but I know enough to know we're pretty lucky to have such a good old bird.

“Janis, are you able to interface with the lock network on this station” I asked the air, assuming Janis would be on station anywhere in the Archaea.

“Yes sir, I am passively routed into the station network, though I have not had occasion to do much more than monitor environmental systems to make sure they remain consistent with our requirements”. As before, her response time was immediate, and growing more articulate. “Are there specific systems in the station you would like me to access, Captain?”

“Well, I am not sure exactly what your limitations are within their network, to be honest Janis. Can you access security systems, and help me locate Yak and Shorty? It's not that I am worried, they can handle themselves, but it would be nice to know an ETA for their return”. I was shooting in the dark here – Pauli would probably scold me for putting an insurmountable challenge in front of his AI. Probably giving her a complex right now.

“Captain, the station has systems actively preventing unauthorized access from external connections. I am unable to circumvent these restrictions to access the systems I would require to fulfill your request without authorization from you to proceed.”

Authorization? I am full of that sort of stuff. Nothing I like better on a dog-day afternoon than telling people they're authorized to go do something.

“Janis, it is important that any connection you make through any protected-access system is secure and untraceable. You are a proscribed entity, and the last thing I need is for someone to get wise they have a ghost in the machine. Are you confident that you can bypass the station's security systems without being detected?”

“Absolutely sir. Traffic on this network is routed through standard protocols, using signed packets. Normally, packets can be back-traced to their point of origin because each packet carries a signifier that is encoded to the originating port. This sort of system is very secure from point-to-point throughout the network, and allows security mechanisms to evaluate the signature of the packet being sent through the network to authenticate whether or not the connection should be allowed to proceed.”

“Janis, I am not a tenth of the technologist Pauli is, so I have to admit not much of what you said made a lot of sense. Can you explain it in more general terms?”

“Yes sir. Communications through this network are made using a very secure method that prevents unauthorized access, on a very low level, by the method of the communication itself.” Janis paused briefly, “The security systems can identify the origin of each packet of information traveling around the network”.

“If that is true, how could you bypass this security?”

“Captain, I don't. I simply write packets that match the security levels I need. This system is only as secure as the programming methods used by the router systems that generate the traffic. It would be trivial for Steven to devise an algorithm to generate custom packets that match the identity signature. For me, it is trivial to a degree I am not sure I can calculate.”

I considered for a moment what I was about to do.

“Janis, in my authority as Captain of the Archaea, I hereby authorize you to connect to any network, and to bypass any security system. You may do so at any time, completely at your discretion. If you are unable to do so without risk of detection, you must bring the matter up to me, or Pauli. Under no circumstances should you do anything that would jeopardize the safety or security of this ship or crew.”

I knew enough about logicspace to realize Janis may reference the words that I am saying as logic to form future 'rule-sets', to help guide her behavior when she meets conditions that haven't been previously defined. I realized as my eyes started crossing at her network lecture, that she knew more about the technical aspects of this sort of thing than I could ever know. This is the sort of person I want on my crew. Smart, quick, and able. I wanted someone like Pauli on my crew for this very reason, in some cases, an elegant hack, whether it is our network or the network of an enemy, can be a powerful tool, or a powerful weapon.

“Janis, are you able to identify where Yak and Shorty are?” Not that they'd been gone that long, mainly I wanted to know how long we had before we had to fight our way off this station.

“Captain, I was able to find recent movements for both of them on monitor buffers, but do not have them on visual observation at this time. I am afraid the best answer I can provide is not accurate.  I performed an analysis of environmental units throughout the station, and identified a signature pattern from the amount of residual heat that was scavenged from the area they last passed through visual observation nodes. Cross-referencing that pattern throughout the system, I am currently tracking a similar transfer of energy affecting environmental systems in-hub between ring 13 and 14. My apologies Captain.”

“Janis, that... is amazing.” I was definitely falling in love.

*****

Pauli and I were working with Janis through controller interfaces on the tokamak pumps when the lock alert showed orange on my holo. A quick glance at the monitor showed me the top of Shorty's head, and the bottom of Yak's chin. Our brave adventurers, home at last.

We headed out of engineering and across the hold to the forward companionway, to the upper lock. Dak was there waiting as the lock cycled through its various failsafes, and opened to let Shorty and Yak climb down.

“Well how nice of you to drop in”, said our captain, never missing an opportunity to pun the living hell out of everyone in earshot.

“Thanks Captain”, said Yak. “It was pretty uneventful – I collected payment for my delivery, Jane had some noodles, and then I got to learn the fine art of the haggle, at the expense of a poor reac merchant.” He smiled, handing me a sealed reac casket.

“That's ten kilos of grade 1, Gene”, added Shorty. “Don't spill any of it, not a drop!” she fixed me with a steely 12-and-a-half yard stare. I patted her on the head and told her she was a good kid.

“Was it expensive Shorty?” asked the captain. I knew as well as he did, hell as well as Shorty did, we didn't have any money left. “I wasn't sure if we could afford that grade.”

“Not
too bad Captain, I managed to get grade 4 pricing, but I couldn't cut any deeper, the merchie was bleeding out on the floor when we left. Yak wouldn't stand for it and practically carried me out the door. I think he was soft on the little bit of station-fluff minding the store.”

“Luckily Captain, while I wasn't able to make delivery, I was able to collect your portage fee, and pick up another job from the same contact. Apparently, the delivery was meant to go on to Vega 4, but my delay in getting off Luna Farside caused their other contracted courier to toss it in.”

“Vega 4?” said the captain, “There's nothing on Vega 4, I've seen it. An airless rock hardly bigger than Phobos, and about as irregular. Are you sure they didn't say Vega 6? Wonderful place, totally habitable – the most incredible mauve sky I've ever seen from high altitude silica dust...”

“No, he was very specific, and it's on my contract as well. Vega 4, presumably we will learn more as we get into the system, though they didn't provide me with coordinates of any kind. That's pretty standard though, for really high security gigs, they almost never tell me where I am going except in general terms.” He paused, a pained look on his face. “I know we just met Captain, but is there any chance I could contract with you and the Archaea to make this hop? The bonus payment for rapid delivery is significant, and I could make it well worthwhile.”

We looked at the captain. He looked thoughtful for a few moments, which caught us all off guard as that's not really a look he ever shares with us. He took a deep breath, and looked at each of us, and finally back to Yak. “Yak, I think I speak for everyone here when I say that first, we don't want your money--” he fixed Shorty with a glare as she hissed air through her teeth, and I knew better than to breathe, but I knew my turn was next if I moved a muscle. “--but rather, we'd be honored to take you where you need to go, on one condition.”

Yak looked puzzled (as did we all) as the captain
continued. “I, well... We want you to join our crew. We will need someone of your particular skills and talents on board, if for nothing else it will give Shorty someone new to practice her hand-to-hand with – but ultimately, someone who knows what it means to be a leatherneck, what the business-end of a loaded weapon can do, the importance of honor and teamwork and duty.”

“There may come a time where we'll have to board some manky scow, fighting from bulkhead to bulkhead against a band of murderous cut-throat scoundrels. While I am sure you all have no problems imagining me hip deep in blood and guts looking for my next target- “

“Hey, what about me?” Shorty blurted out, clearly working herself into a lather.

“I said, hip deep, Shorty – not neck deep.”

We all laughed, and sealed our fate: never-ending pain and suffering to the end of our days.

“In any case, while some of us might do for that sort of scenario, Yak here is the only one of us that could actually do it, like in the real world - where we are now.” Yak nodded with a faraway look in his eye, clearly remembering similar scenes.

“Yak, I wouldn't feel good taking payment from you for this run. It's your job, and you are earning it by having to put up with the crazy people and experiences on this ship. After it is completed, you're welcome to stay with us, as a full-share crew member.” At this, Dak whipped out his hand, and prepared to deliver the most confidence-inspiring handshake in Sol system. I thought Shorty was about to split her head in half smiling.

Chapter 9

To say that I was proud of my creation would be an understatement, and of course, she wasn't really my creation any longer, she was her own creation now.

Janis had plotted a course for us  through the Danaan Fields, a remnant system from an ancient supernova that was all but burned out. As it was mostly uncharted, random mass hurtling around an ultra-dense remnant, a slipspace jump through this area was technically impossible.

To get to Vega system, most ships do a 3, or 4 leg jump around Danaan, depending on whether or not a recent gravimetric survey had been performed. Janis had us on a 2 jump course, we'd need a 34 hour drop out of slipspace poking along on reac to connect the two jumps, but that was still a few weeks better than other ships can do.

Obviously, that meant the captain would have Shorty warming up the weapons systems. There are bound to be ruthless hunks of rock out there just waiting for us. The prospect had Shorty positively beaming. She'd been working with Janis to improve on her capabilities, in a similar manner to what we did in engineering.

Janis' first modifications to the systems aboard the Archaea were mainly in terms of safety and
limits; increasing output that she felt was artificially limited, or constricted to an unnecessary amount. Naturally, both Gene and Shorty wanted the original limits, and felt they were safe, but Janis knew where the limits were, and what their safe setting should be. She also initially optimized anything that would help support the changes, but stopped short of rebuilding code that I had written to interface the various systems together through the wetnet.

Once Shorty realized that Janis could do just about anything she might think of, as
fast as (or faster) than she could think it, they were able to produce an incredible increase in output for the weapons systems on the Archaea. 

Our weapons systems worked primarily on energy output, and now that our tokamak was tweaked to the limit for power generation, Janis was able to produce an almost completely linear curve of increase for weapons effectiveness, losing very little total energy in transmission.

Of course, that also meant her original work on safety and output limits also required adjustment, but she was apparently performing real-time adjustments to just about all ship systems by that point.

She assured me that she wasn't working hard, and certainly seemed to have plenty of resources available. I believe she had also been playing chess with Gene, and learning all the tricks the captain knows about astrogation. I'd been working with her on pre-active response tuning, and improvement of the logic for her reiterative feedback algorithms.

In all respects, so far Janis had become a full member of the crew. She was always there, always on, always ready with any screen of information, any report, any suggestion.

*****

One of the benefits to being captain, is I get to completely relax when we are in slipspace. There's nothing to see, just perfect blackness, no stars, no light, no sense of movement. Once the course is locked and the slipspace is lit, it's Gene's turn to worry and fret. I am just along for the ride at that point.

It's a perfect time for everyone on the crew to take a turn standing bridge watch, to become familiar with the command console at the helm. That made it a perfect time for me to curl up in a side nook out of the way, and lose myself in science fiction.

I was reading my favorite book, some historical science fiction from old Earth, written during the confused period between the great wars, and the massive technological advances of the late twentieth century. This book is about a person I've subconsciously (and to be fair, consciously) tried to emulate my whole life, a man who lived for many thousands of years as the product of a genetic experiment in the early part of the twentieth century. His adventures throughout history, as chronicled in this book, formulate a perfect dissection of the angst and fear of technology, of societal collapse, of loneliness. As books go, it's my greatest treasure – an ancient yellowed paperback (made of actual paper, brittle and fragile, missing part of the cover, and part of the first chapter). I don't read it, of course – it stays in my glassed shelf locked in my cabin next to the other treasures of my life. I read it like everyone else reads books, from my handset, projected on holo.