Earth Song: Etude to War (17 page)

During the formation of the Rangers, Minu had made zero gravity and vacuum operation part of their basic training. She'd spent hundreds of hours in both standard issue pressure suits and the heavily armored version the scouts and Rangers employed. Donning the complicated suits was second nature to her by this point. Even with the head start Aaron began with, Minu quickly finished and went to help him verify his connections. “Been a long time since I wore one of these,” he commented as he fit the limp plastic helmet over his head.

“Like riding a bike,” she said as she examined the door controls.

“I never learned.”

Unlike the production model, the prototype was not fitted with an airlock. Instead they simply depressurized the entire cabin. It would have taken almost five minutes to pump the air out. Noting that there were ample reserves of oxygen, Minu just spilled the atmosphere into space through relief valves. With a roar of escaping air, the cabin was in vacuum in less than ten seconds. “Let’s go find them,” she said.

Chapter 15

March 6th, 534 AE

Maintenance Access, Unknown Facility, Bellatrix Moon Romulus

Minu walked around the pentagon-shaped outline in the rock. It was now a clearly defined mechanically cut line in the stone, unlike the hinted outline that Pip had spotted. Aaron stood a meter away using his hand-held scanner to examine the area. “No sign of them within a kilometer,” he reported. “Beyond that the planet’s stealth field is interfering with the scans.”

“They're not up here,” Minu concluded. Just like Pip she found the button in only another minute, and just like him she used the same fearless curiosity the Chosen looked for and pressed it. With a rumble the five sided elevator began to descend.

“Got it,” she said and stepped onto the elevator. Aaron trotted over and joined her before it had gone down a meter. Not wanting to start a collection of rescue craft on the surface, Minu quickly opened her radio to the shuttle frequency. “Rasa shuttle, we have located an entrance and are descending. We anticipate LOS any minute. We are not to be considered overdue for,” she consulted her suit’s air stores before replying, “two hours.”

“Acknowledged,” the pilot replied. “I will monitor this—” The last part of his sentence was cut off suddenly as a hatch closed over the top of the descending lift.

“At least we know they didn't get blown up,” Aaron said in the darkness.

Minu reached up and activate her suit light as did Aaron. The wall of the elevator was nearly glass smooth, cut from the living rock of the mountain around them. The lights created kaleidoscope patterns as they moved steadily downward.

“At least they hadn't been blown up when they took the elevator.” She triggered her implant and spoke. “Lilith, can you read me?”

There was no response. That gave credence to her daughter’s hypothesis that the installation belonged to the People. They would know how to block the type of quantum signals sent by the tiny implant. She'd communicated with her daughter instantaneously over light-years before. The Kaatan was orbiting the moon nearby and now she couldn't reach her.
I hope Lilith doesn't begin bombarding the moon!

“You try the implant?” Aaron asked.

“Just did. We're cut off.”

Aaron glanced up at the retreating hatch then down at the floor. Minu couldn't help but notice how he glanced at her stomach before going back to stare at the wall.

“I'm only two days pregnant, you know?” His cheeks turned a surprising shade of red. “Are you embarrassed?”

He shook his head but the blush intensified so he shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“Good grief, why? We've been married for five years! We already have one kid, albeit by accident.”

“I know, it's a weird reaction, it doesn't make any sense at all.” He laughed and shook his head some more. “I just feel… naughty!”

“Did you just say that?” They both laughed long and hard. Then it was Minu's turn to blush as she recalled the night of debauchery when they conceived. It was rather naughty, in a morally sanctioned sort of way. “We can do some more naughty things when we get back home, you know?”

“Consider that a date.” Even though his demeanor was more relaxed, Minu could still sense an extended aura of protectiveness about her man. He would have dived on a bomb to save her before. Now she thought he would fight through a hundred monsters with his bare hands, and then jump on a bomb to save her.
There's no hope for us if this is another girl!

The lift moved downward for five minutes before they were suddenly in the open of a large room, riding a pentagon shaped hoverfield powered platform through open space. “Oof,” she whispered and reached out to grab Aaron. Her pilot husband was his normal unshakable self, leaning out to glance down to try and see how far down it went.

“Ground a few meters below,” he announced.

In less than a minute, the lift gently settled to the floor.

Minu stepped off the slight rise and played the light mounted on her chest around. The room was cylindrical, five meters on a side and tapered upwards until it became the bottom of the shaft they'd just descended through. Like that shaft, the room was a glass bottle carved from the volcanic basalt of the mountain's heart. “Door over here,” Aaron called. Minu took one last look around and turned to see what he'd found.

The floor was the same material as the walls and ceiling, and it was utterly clean. Either the space was perfectly sealed, or it was kept spotless by robot maintenance. Aaron was standing by an arched doorway a little over two meters tall. Short for a human. Luckily they were both short for humans.

He was examining a Concordian locking mechanism with floating holographic icons of a type they'd both seen before. “Same as the Fire Base,” he noted. Minu knew only too well. Thanks to the Weavers, her brain had been uploaded with a vast amount of secret codes usable on just such artifacts left behind by the People. She understood only a fraction of the codes and algorithms that rattled around her brain.

“Sure is,” she agreed. “Lilith was dead on. This is the work of the People all right.” She stepped closer and twisted a few of the icons. The codes itched in the back of her mind like she imagined a missing limb would feel. “This was recently unlocked.”

“Pip?”

“I didn't think he knew any of the codes.” She started down the hall. Ten meters down there was another door, this one closed. The floating icons swirled in a repeating pattern. “Well, if it was Pip he screwed up.”

“What does it mean?”

“The door is under lockout. Someone tripped the security protocol.” She started manipulating the codes, allowing her hands to work without conscious thought. She learned years ago that trying to think it through was completely counterproductive.

Her conscious mind analyzed what she saw, ever so slowly making sense out of one series of codes or another, occasionally picking up a logic string or a recurring series of elements. Each icon could be manipulated in three axes or interfaced with any other icons, thus creating dozens or hundreds of more icons. The possibilities were nearly limitless. Her hands worked steadily.

“Doesn't that ever make you dizzy? It must be like having a computer in your brain.”

“More like being possessed,” she said without looking away. “The scary thing is I'm starting to really understand some of it.” He just shook his head as she worked. “How are we on time?”

“No problem. I'm more worried about Pip and the Rasa. They've been EVA for more than eight hours. These suits are only good for twelve in ideal circumstances.”

“Not a lot of margin for error,” Minu agreed. There might be four hours by the books, but that didn't include extra exertion, or the time it would take to get them back to the shuttle.

“Can you get through this?”

“I think so. It's just got several extra levels of security.”

“Then how did Pip get through?”

Minu smiled. “He was tricked. It let him in, and trapped him.” A second later the icons flashed and the pattern changed. Then the door obediently retracted into the floor to reveal four surprised bipeds in space suits. “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” As soon as the door opened, their radios were once again working.

“Very funny,” Pip said, exasperation obvious on his face. It was hard to read the expression of a Rasa, but the way they all came out and shook their hands (another learned human ritual) and patted them in thanks it was clearly understood. “I sometimes regret getting you interested in old Earth literature.”

“You've been memorizing lock codes from me?”

“I can hardly deny it now, can I?”

“The problem is the algorithms are not linear.”

“I know that now. Maybe you can teach more to me.”

“I doubt it. My ability to use the talent is completely subjective.” Pip made a face and she shrugged. “Shall we get you out of here?”

Pip glanced at his suit computer and shook his head. “I've got almost two hours of air.”

“Yeah, but we have to get up the lift. What could be so important here?”

Pip's smile was full of the old sense of excitement she remembered from before his injury. It contrasted sharply with the flat shiny dualloy plate in his head.

“This.” He stepped aside to reveal a corpse.

“Oh!”

They'd only seen a living specimen of the being in computer images. It resembled a human in many ways, but with only three dexterous fingers and an unusually long thumb.

Minu caught herself flexing her right hand, also with three cybernetic fingers. The space suit glove's extra finger was tied down to her palm with tape to keep it out of the way. The aliens face was slightly more elongated than a human skull, and a short tail protruded from the coccyx. The corpse was desiccated but there was no sign of decay with the absence of atmosphere. Light tan fur covered the body and it wore a simple harness holding several pouches. Pip held out a familiar design tablet, crystalline like the ones from the Kaatan.

“A victim of the same trap?” Aaron wondered.

“Caught in their own plan,” Kal'at agreed.

“Doesn't seem likely,” Minu was suspicious. Pip concurred with her. “What else did it have in those pouches?”

“Data chips and some tools. I can't read the chips, they're encoded with your special codes.”

“We can mess with them later. The tools?”

“Energy systems tools. I've seen or worked with most of them. It's rather disconcerting how little Concordian technology seems to have changed in a million years.”

“Ted knows what he's talking about,” Minu said simply. “So you want to go through the next door then?”

“This is what we're here for.”

“The place already tried to kill you once,” Aaron pointed out.

“We've got the ultimate key now,” he said and patted Minu on the shoulder.

Minu rolled her eyes and checked her computer. “We have an hour and a half before we're overdue and Gregg comes with the Rangers. You have one hour.”

* * *

Twenty miles above the surface of the moon, Lilith orbited inside the climate controlled cocoon that was her pilot’s chamber on the Kaatan class warship. The entire array of sensors that the ship had at its disposal were probing every millimeter of the moon within a kilometer of the spot she'd visually watched her mother and father disappear into the rock. Moments later all communications had been severed, including the quantum communicator implanted in Minu's brain. And that should not have been possible.

Since the signal loss Lilith had spent almost every moment trying to subvert the active stealth fields of the planetoid to get some details of the mountain. The defenses were perfect in every way. To her sensors and computer analysis it was a ball of rock without so much as a stray erg of electricity.

She floated in the pilot’s chamber surrounded by hovering icons representing the ship’s various systems. Admitting that the Kaatan was not up to the task of penetrating the moon's defenses was not something she was happy to do, but it was becoming obviously the case.

Allowing her sensors to return their normal sweeps, she floated away from the interface and grumbled. Her education by the ship’s medical intelligence had been directed by a series of protocols themselves designed by the long gone species simply known as The People. Lacking a proper Combat Intelligence for the Kaatan, or a biological operator, the ship’s system improvised with Minu's aborted fetus.

In the years since her 'birth', Lilith never pursued any details of her origin. It was never really a question that drove her to seek an answer. Her knowledge of the rules she operated under was absolute. The information imparted to her during the subjective years she spent in the Medical Intelligence's maturation chamber not only formed her mind, it laid out the rules for how things worked. And one of those rules was that nothing, absolutely nothing, could stop a quantum signal. Distort or interfere, yes. Stop, no.

With the ship’s automated systems once again watching the vast area of space around them, Lilith delved into the computer’s records. First, starting at the primary data banks, then moving deeper into protocol files, operational controls for the ship, and deep logic, she examined the workings of the Medical Intelligence and the enigmatic Steward program. The Steward program had been isolated in buffer memory for years. It had never been quite the same since Bjorn and Pip had corrupted its deep logic strings in an attempt to better operate the ship.

It was while exploring the Medical Intelligence that she found a link she'd never found before. The program was designed to depend on the ship’s Combat Intelligence and biological operator. However, should it find itself in a situation without guidance, it was empowered to go 'onto the network'.

“What is this network?” she demanded of the Medical Intelligence.

She seldom interacted with the program. Her health was perfect. Once a month the program notified her of her routine examination which was quick and perfunctory. Beyond a few basic health questions when she entered puberty several years ago, she couldn't remember the last time she'd asked it a question. But when she did the answers were always detailed, to the point, and instantly delivered.