Earth Song: Twilight Serenade (6 page)

“How long to do that?” Minu wondered.

“A million years or more,” Lilith said, and moved away without another look.

Away from the slowly dissipating cloud of alien remains to one of the inactive computer control nodes. She held out her hand and a dozen miniature blue crystal bots launched out to land on the node. They moved onto and several disappeared into the structure. Suddenly the computer came to life. Lilith accessed the controls with quick, deft motions and a moment later panels in the walls began to pop open. Inside were various containers that Lilith began to remove and float towards the Beezer.

“These are supplies for the medical system,” she told them. Please transport them back to the Kaatan where the bots will take them.”

“We shall,” the Beezer said as one began storing them in a flexible fabric bag attached to his suit. Lilith had already recovered the miniature bots and was swimming out into the hallway. Minu followed and the others did once the goods were secured.

Lilith led them down a corridor and then transited to a lower deck via an inter-deck tube. Around the corner of another corridor and Lilith was again using the bots to access a control panel. More hatches opened but this time they revealed only more controls. Displays came alive listing materials in script. Having worked with the Kaatan’s tactical controls, Minu recognized the icons.

“Shipkillers,” she said.

“Yes,” Lilith nodded, “though not as many as I’d hoped for. They’d obviously been in an extensive battle.”

Minu looked at the display. Eleven missiles were inventoried. Lilith activated controls and new icons appeared. “The exterior stores access for this launcher is open,” she told the Beezers and instructed them how to remove the weapons.

“Are they dangerous?” the huge Beezer asked.

“No, they have to be primed with plasma from the ships systems. There is a small detonation charge, but it is impossible for it to go off without any plasma in containment.” As she talked she was tapping commands into the controls, trying to coax information from the long dead system. Seeing her mother watching she explained. “Involved in a task force like this, there are possibilities that the Kaatan was armed with more than shipkillers.”

“Was it?”

“I can’t tell. This weapons hardpoint is not communicating with the other that is contained in this hull section. We’ll have to check manually.”

They moved down the corridor and found a huge gash penetrating from the outside hull through deep into the ship section. “Probably why the systems couldn’t communicate,” Minu suggested. Lilith nodded and flew across to the other side of the gouge, the Beezer right behind her. Minu glanced out the hole in the hull to see stars twinkling. She swallowed and pushed across.

Lilith found the other access and checked. This hardpoint proved to not be empty. A bit later Minu watched as the Beezer team removed the missiles one at a time. She’d seen the damage those death dealers dealt out and was shocked to see them each only slightly longer than a meter and no thicker than her leg. “So much power in a small package,” she remarked to no one in particular.

Another pair of Beezers took the medbay consumables and the missiles back across the void to the functioning Kaatan while Minu, her daughter, and the original salvage team floating a half a kilometer to the next large ship hulk. Their ship followed a short time later, remotely piloted by Lilith once the transfer team had their cargo aboard.

This fragment was a big after section of a ball. Minu had no idea if it came from the same ship they’d been in before. There was likely no way of telling. The shuttle bays were both intact and using her little bots, they made their entrance there. An even half dozen bodies floated there.

They couldn’t move around them so the Beezers went through them. Like before, the incredible age of the corpses and time they’d been exposed to vacuum made them disintegrate on being touched. Two of them became a dissipating cloud in their suit lights as they moved through.

Affixed to the rear of the hanger was a pair of shuttles identical to the ones on Lilith’s ship. “Excellent,” Minu’s daughter said and clapped her hands together. It was the first time Minu had seen her excited since they’d come over to these floating tombs. She opened the connecting lock between the bays and found the other also head two shuttles.

“Good find,” Minu observed.

“Absolutely,” the other woman agreed. “The Kaatan shuttles are basically lighter versions of the Eseel gunboats and can serve the same purpose in a pinch. All but one of the aggregate wrecks has shuttle bays so we could stand to harvest forty shuttles!” Minu smiled, that was good news.

The remainder of that ship held nothing more of value so they moved to another section. That one held a medical bay not as large as the first but with full consumables lockers that were salvaged. It did, though, have a full launcher complement of twenty shipkillers that were moved back to the Kaatan.

They’d been in space for seven hours already. Lilith wanted to keep going indefinitely, but Minu said only one more section. It ended up being a good call.

The final salvage of the day was almost an entire ball. The rear of the needle was crushed as if from and impact, and the front melted like a candle tip. The ball was burned in a dozen places, the hull melted through providing no entry points, including both shuttle bays. Inside they were a scorched ruin providing no salvage. Eventually, Lilith settled on having to do even more damage to gain entry.

“Can’t you access the weapons bays from the outside?” Minu asked her.

“Unfortunately, no.” Lilith explained that the hulls were designed to be nearly seamless. Access panels would ruin their integrity. It was why there were only five ways in. The two shuttle bays, two airlocks (one on each side amidships), and the ventral cargo bay access. “What I will do is use an A-paws on low power to cut through into the cargo bay. The hull is already damaged there, it will not take much.”

“Won’t the discharge just cause more melted blockage?”

“It is possible,” she said with a shrug. “But it is that or abandon this one. And it is the most intact section.”

The anti-missile lasers would provide insufficient power to penetrate the hull which was also mirrored in most places and would dangerously deflect the beams. After discussing the pros and cons, Minu reluctantly agreed.

The team took shelter behind a twenty meter wide section of mangled hull plating as Lilith closed her eyes and the Kaatan came alive. It rolled and yawed to bring its nose to bear. Minu had never seen the weapons fire and realized she had no idea even where they were. The A-paws, or anti-particle accelerator cannon, was located just above the needle in the ball. A nearly blinding flash of light connected the two ships and began to pulse almost faster than the eye could detect. After only a few seconds, she shooting stopped.

“Let us go inspect the damage,” Lilith said and flew around from behind their shield.

They were forced to fly directly behind her. The only one with a forcefield, she used it to push away a cloud of glowing fragments the gunfire had thrown into space. Luckily the heat was radiating away quickly. Minu could still feel her suit’s cooling system engage and chucks of molten dualloy the size of her head floated by a few meters away casting heat like little suns.

They reached the hulk and stared in awe at the damage. The A-paws had been turned down to ‘almost the minimum’ as Lilith told them. And still the hull looked like a watermelon after being ravaged by huge claws. Red tears glowed with thermal radiation in a dozen places and two massive sections of hull floated free.

“Fuck me,” Minu hissed, remembering how they’d unleashed those weapons at ground targets on the Rasa home world. A finger of destructive vengeance from orbit.

Lilith used her bot’s forcefields to shove the multi-ton section of armored hull to either side revealing the interior of the cargo bay. Some of the weapons fire had penetrated beyond, scoring huge glowing gouges into the unarmored interior bulkheads. But the access hatches were intact.

“Well done,” the Beezer team leader huffed and Minu nodded in agreement. They waited for a time until the glow from the energy beam-sliced hull was less intense. As before, the Beezer lead the way inside.

Lilith got them through the interior door and into the corridor outside of the cargo bay. She’d been precise enough with her weapons fire that the damage didn’t penetrate much beyond the interior wall of the cargo bay. “That was some precise shooting, dear.”

“Thank you, mother.” Lilith used her bots to access the first operations panel she encountered. Unlike the previous ones on the other wrecks, this one came to life without additional coaxing. “Some power remains,” she told them.

“Is the ship salvageable?” Minu asked.

“It is unlikely, or The People would have done so.” She withdrew her bots and looked down the corridor. “It would be easier to evaluate the ship’s condition from the CIC.”

“Then let’s go there.”

They moved on a familiar route towards the very heart of the ship. Unlike the others, no bodies were found and evidence of damage was rare. “This ship was brought in mostly intact,” Lilith observed. “The damage was controlled to some degree.”

“What would take this powerful ship out of action?” asked one of the Beezers.”

“The end of the needle section and the point contain the gravitic drive components.” Minu nodded in understanding. With the drive destroyed, the ship was unable to maneuver. Lilith had explained long ago that a big part of the Kaatan’s combat prowess was its ability to strike and move. “They likely used the Ibeen to tow the wreck here for salvage.”

“And then the star went nova,” Minu said. “What’s the chance of that?” Minu thought as the floated down the corridors, dropping deck after deck, remembering the battle on Planet K where they’d broken the Mok-Tok siege and the subsequent space battle that had ended so suddenly with the system’s primary star going supernova.

The group reached the entrance to the CIC, the unlit white circular passageways just as hauntingly familiar as the rest of the ship. Unlike the rest of the ship’s interior doors, the door to the CIC was closed. Lilith held her hand out and a pair of little bots leapt to the wall and disappeared into cracks. A moment later light flickered on in the recesses around the door and it split to slide away into the walls, floor, and ceiling thus revealing the dark interior.

Lilith pushed through, catching the pair of bots as she passed the threshold, the others followed. Their helmet lights and the little blue beams from Lilith’s bots moved around the circular space, as completely void of anything as they’d first found the Kaatan.

Instead of sending a few bots over like before, this time Lilith checked her momentum in the middle of the CIC, sent herself into a graceful pirouette, and let a spray of them go along the arc of her arm’s travel.

Minu used her maneuvering unit to come to a stop, trying to avoid the stream of tiny bots, but a pair landed on her, one on her arm and another on her helmet. She had an incredible close up look of them. They looked like spiders. She resisted the urge to brush it off as the machine took a second to examine where it had landed, realize it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and leap towards the wall.

One of the Beezer had one land on him as well. More curious than Minu, he grabbed it between a couple fingers and moved it up to his helmet to examine. There was a little flash and he released it with a grunt.

“Please don’t interfere with the bots,” Lilith admonished them. The Beezer tech shook his hand and grumbled an apology.

Like before, the bots disappeared into the walls and a moment later the room’s lights began to flicker to life. But instead of the recessed control and access panels, this time a single holographic panel popped into being with a single line of script. Lilith looked shocked.

“What’s wrong?” Minu asked.

“The combat intelligence is still resident!”

Chapter 8

January 26th, 535 AE

Ghost fleet, Deep Space, Galactic Frontier

They met in the CIC of the hulk Kaatan after returning to their ship and resting. When they returned Lilith brought along one of the large EPC arrays meant to power the salvaged ships.

“What is your intention?” Minu asked as they met up in the cargo bay, the humans and Beezer suiting up when Lilith floated in, EPC in tow. Lacking any of the massive specially made EPCs that ran large starships, Chosen engineers had created a package the same size which held an array of smaller class capacitors. The result, while less than half the nominal amount of power held in a ship’s EPC, was still sufficient for the situation.

“The intelligence that operates the Kaatan is too extensive to easily relocate. Lacking proper power, it has entered a safe mode to protect its data. We will have to repower the entire ship to access it.”

“Is there any risk?”

“To the intelligence? Yes, some. But it is not going to recover itself without outside assistance.”

“No, I meant danger to us.”

Lilith looked down at the EPC and seemed to be considering her answer. “Perhaps.”

Minu held up a hand. “Then we need to be clear on these risks, especially considering we have Beezer on this operation. Do we need Kal’at back from Ibeen Alpha to assist?”

Again Lilith paused to consider. “Having his assistance would be advisable.”

As they finished gearing up and moved over to the Kaatan wreck, Kal’at was dropped off by one of the shuttles. They were just beginning to transfer EPCs to the first two Ibeen in preparation of bringing them on line. An additional team of five more Beezer was added as well, both as security and possible manpower to work on salvage from the much larger wreck.

Lilith led the Beezer work crew, supervised by Kal’at and Isook, down to the power center of the wreck. They removed one of the three spent ship class EPCs, letting it float to waiting workers where it would be transported to an Ibeen, and carefully maneuvered the improvised one in place.

“Carefully,” Kal’at hissed as the hugely strong Beezer easily manhandled the five hundred kilo module between them. The Electro-Plasma Capacitors were designed to be highly stable. That said, the arrays were manufactured from dozens of older, salvaged EPCs. It wasn’t unheard of that one would fail and discharge its plasma in a deadly splash. With it packed in with dozens of others, there could be a chain reaction. Minu didn’t want to imagine how that would look.

The flattened cylinder of the EPC housing slid into its receptacle in the silence of vacuum. A single blue telltale lit up above the module once it was all the way in. Lilith moved to the main control panel adjacent to the EPC bays and tapped it to life. Lines of script flashed across it and she made selections.

“I am only bringing up life support at this point,” she told them. “We want to be in the CIC when I allow power to flow into the main systems and computer core.” Only a moment later, their suits showed atmosphere beginning to flow.

“Airtight forcefields have appeared in the cargo bay,” a Beezer salvage worker reported.

“The ship will use them wherever doors are ineffective,” Lilith explained.

Atmospheric pressure reached nominal for The People in less than a minute. That air held a little more oxygen and a bit high in pressure for humans though well within tolerance. Minu was about to reach for her helmet then thought again.

“Let’s keep our suits sealed until Lilith has the ship’s computer under control,” she instructed. Lilith cast her eyes at Minu for a moment but shrugged before closing the power panel and heading back to the CIC.

In the heart of the ship, Lilith accessed a hatch Minu had never knew existed. In the ‘bottom’ of the circular chamber, it went down just a half meter and opened out into a flat shallow room several meters on the side. Minu maneuvered herself down with some difficulty because of her spacesuit. “What is this?”

“This is the computer room,” Lilith told her. Block after block of the Kaatan’s nearly ubiquitous blue crystal components were mounted in milky white moliplas along all sides of the claustrophobic space. A single blue telltale flashed, like back in the power room. Lilith touched it and a tiny holographic screen appeared before her eyes. Minu could make out its script. It asked if she wanted to initiate a restart. “Please inform the Beezer on board to not make any threatening actions towards the ship unless it starts open hostilities. The combat intelligence may be disoriented initially.”

Minu relayed the orders to Isook who in turn told his crew. “We’re ready,” Minu said a few seconds later. Lilith nodded and tapped the display.

Instantly the room’s formerly inactive banks of crystalline memory modules came alive with a million interlaced flashes of light. Minu thought it looked like miniature lightning storms as seen in the sky from her island cabin back on Bellatrix.

Lilith moved around Minu gracefully and out the access and into the CIC. Minu carefully turned around and followed her, using her hands to guide herself out of the cramped space.

Outside Lilith waved a hand through the single holographic control panel that floated near the hatch, bringing up a page of script. Similar to how Minu manipulated the controls within a PCR (portal control rod), Lilith grabbed several script symbols, twisted and turned, and the screen flashed blue then disappeared.

As the moments passed everyone looked around for any sign of something happening when Lilith’s head suddenly came up. An all too familiar screeching, chattering voice spoke in the air. Unlike before on the Kaatan years ago, their translators now had the language matrix it needed.

“Who are you, and where are my biological operators?”

“They are dead,” Lilith spoke, surprisingly, in their own language.

Instantly the door to the CIC slammed closed and the lights came on in a subdued blue. Minu’s suit screamed a warming that the atmosphere was being bled from the chamber and she thanked her instincts to leave on their helmets. There was a shimmer around Lilith as her support bot backpack reestablished the forcefield around her.

Lilith gestured toward a wall and a small group of her bots emerged, moved over to another section and went inside the wall again. A new holographic screen appeared before Lilith and she instantly started manipulating script. This time Minu caught some of it which her manipulated brain began translating. It was something to do with internal defenses.

“How do you have Kaatan access codes?” the voice demanded.

“I have ship, and fleet command codes,” Lilith spoke with clear confidence. A new panel appeared in front of her at eye level. Lilith reached into it and entered a code. The script flashed and disappeared.

“Code accepted,” the combat intelligence said. Minu thought it almost sounded resigned. “A status update is required. Following this ship’s last battle, substantial damage was done rendering this ship incapable of fighting and it was taken under tow by other combat elements. Pending a regrouping operation, I was deactivated until salvage could be performed.”

Lilith took it all in, then glanced at Minu for the first time looking for guidance, so she spoke up.

“There will be no salvage operation,” Minu said.

Lilith held her hand up and a bot crawled onto her fingertips and began speaking in the People’s chattering language. 

“Who is the being speaking, and what species are you?” the computer voice asked.

“That is Minu Groves,” Lilith explained, “and we are humans. She is the commander of the human’s military forces. The others back there are Beezer, and the small one a Rasa.”

“There is no species on record that meet these specifications,” the combat intelligence said. “Your genus is hominid, very similar to The People.” It paused for a second. “External sensors are offline and internal clocks non-functional. How long have I been offline?”

“There is no easy way to say this,” Kal’at said. Minu agreed. Lilith solved it for them.

“More than one million years, but that is only an estimate.”

“And the People?”

“They are extinct in the galaxy. Very few species survive from that time.”

Again there was a pause. “I am made to serve The People. In the absence of them, I answer to whomever has the proper codes. I am at your disposal.” The lights changed to a normal shading, the CIC doors opened, and their suits told them atmospheric pressure was resuming normal.

Minu breathed a sigh of relief. “Maybe you better bring the combat intelligence up to speed?” Lilith agreed and began communicating with the program in a much faster way using her implants. As Lilith conversed at a speed much faster than mere speaking could convey, Minu was also thinking fast. A few dozen kilometers away floated a huge warship many times larger and equally more powerful than the Kaatans. The only one who could have possibly operated it was Lilith, who would never have left the Kaatan. Suddenly, more options were coming available.

The baby kicked, hard, and Minu grunted. I miss you, she thought of Aaron, but she also smiled a little smile. This operation was working better than she had dreamed possible.