Event Horizon (Hellgate) (81 page)

“Something like that.” Arlott sighed. “The problem being, if there isn’t an alphabet, you’re going to need the key for two, maybe three or four
thousand
different characters. If you don’t have the codec you’ll be guessing, and the chances are you’ll guess dead wrong a lot of the time.” He shrugged resignedly. “This was the bugbear of archaeology for centuries, way back on Earth.”

“Damn,” Travers said quietly as the autochefs began to run and the aromas of many kinds of food filled the air. “Rather you than me.”

But Arlott’s head was shaking. “There’s a lifetime’s work in this – if it can be done at all. Without the key, I’m not even sure if it
can
be done, and if it could, you’re quite right. Joss would do it one hell of a lot faster and more efficiently than a human brain!” Deliberately, he turned off both the handies. “I was hoping for more.”

“You mean, more from the
Ebrezjim
computer core?” Travers guessed as he pushed up to his feet. “What d’you have a fancy for, Curt?”

“I can smell the lemon chicken,” Marin decided.

“Yeah, more from the old hardware.” Arlott frowned along at the big flatscreen, where Dario, Tor and Midani were done loading their presentation now and were running the ’chef. “Dario did the best he could with it, but … well, he’ll tell you himself. You going to the ’chef, Leon? I’ll take the pork and mushrooms.”

Leon Sherratt was on his feet, standing with both hands on his partner’s shoulders. He gave Roy a companionable squeeze there. “Don’t let it get to you, kiddo. There’s only so much you’re going to squeeze out of an AI that went offline so long ago, it’s spent the last thousand years at the temperature of a superconductor.”

He headed away to the ’chef as Travers arrived back, and Marin took a plate of chicken and crisp vegetables swimming in an aromatic lemon sauce. He tried a piece as Travers sat, and discovered spices that would not have disappointed the Resalq. Travers had no taste for spices that scorched the roof off his mouth, but he knew that after several years on Saraine, Marin found the sizzling food redolent of other times, other places, and good memories.

At the front of the room, Dario tapped knife to wine glass for attention and the assembly fell quiet. He was eating as he spoke, sitting at a short table which had been set up below the screen. He and Tor were still in teeshirts, white slacks, deck shoes, the comfortable garb of the lab; and they were tired.

“Thanks for being here,” Dario began, “and I could wish we had more to give you at this point. The
Ebrezjim
was by no means a waste of sweat and tears, but she’s not going to give up her secrets without some persuasion. The AI … well, it’s dead. Simple as that. The core came slowly up to viable temperatures, and we’d had high hopes for it, since it had been cryogenically stored. Theoretically, at those temperatures damage should have been minimal and the passage of a thousand years or a few hours should all have been the same. I’d have been prepared to bet the AI would be viable to a degree, even if it wasn’t brilliant, but … we weren’t quite so lucky. Tor?”

As Dario took a moment to eat, Tor took over the commentary and, on the screen, a series of images began to loop. They were closeups on microcircuits which might have been abstract art. To Travers they meant nothing, but even he could see areas of damage where parts of the matrix seemed to have corroded away, perhaps even melted through.

“As you can see,” Tor said pragmatically, “a lot of crystallization took place during the freezing process. This was because the computer core wasn’t dropped to super-low temperatures in an instant, as would have happened with proper cryogenic storage procedures. It just slowly, slowly lost heat, got cold … froze, after it went offline and the power failed in the old ship.” His shoulders lifted in a fatalistic expression.

“But there’s one hell of a lot of damage in there. A good deal more, in fact, than can be accounted for by crystallization during the slow freeze. So we knew from hard evidence, before we excavated the database, the machinery suffered major trauma before it froze. There’s nowhere near enough left to wake up the AI. We did try … no joy. So we bypassed the AI circuits entirely and dove right into the database. Mark?”

It was Tor’s turn to eat. Mark was almost finished by now, and set aside his plate as he swiveled the recliner toward the screen. “The damage was widespread. We hunted for coherent data – I’ve likened it to searching through the wine cellar of a bombed-out chateau, looking for the occasional bottle of a fine vintage which somehow survived.”

On the screen, a sequence of images had begun to play and Travers forgot about his food. “The information is tattered, corrupt, patchy,” Mark was saying quietly, “but we were able to piece it together, like one of those puzzles of yours, what do you call them, now … jigsaws. We found several hundred images, some text in the form of journals and logs, a few minutes here and there of viable footage from surveillance drones. Enough to know at least
some
of what happened to the
Ebrezjim
.” His face became grim as he spoke.

“She made it through to Zunshu space, as we always knew. We found numerous images of the skies around the Zunshu Drift, and many worlds. We think the ship had been several years in Elarne by the time it transited what we’re calling the Zunshu Gate, and as you can see, no surprises are in store for us or for Lai’a when we encounter it. The Zunshu Gate is the same phenomenon exactly as the Orpheus Gate or the Orion Gate, and we can handle it.

“So did the
Ebrezjim
. Here is a record of the transit of the Zunshu Gate, and it was a smooth exit. Before reaching this space, they had exited Elarne at the Orion Gate and one other, beyond it, which they named the Red Gate, though all further data about this has been corrupted beyond salvage. In fact, we’re translating this as ‘Red.’ They actually named it for blood; we don’t yet know why. The Zunshu Gate was another smooth transit – and they
did
trade signals with a comm buoy and also an AI vessel as they approached the Zunshu home system.”

His face settled into grave lines. “The
Ebrezjim
was a science ship. She was never designed to fight. Our ancestors believed that if one ventured abroad with a smile and the open hand of peace, one would be greeted as a friend. In retrospect this might have been appallingly naïve. The truth must have shocked them into bewilderment.”

For some moments he was quiet and Shapiro asked, “I’ve always assumed she was attacked, but does enough data survive to know how, and with what?” He was thinking like a Fleet commander, and they were good questions.

Dario was only pushing his food around now, and took over the commentary as the screen continued to display images of words which were, to Travers’s eyes, mundanely familiar. Planets were simply planets. Very few were remarkable enough to stand out, such as a gas giant like Zeus, a ringed jewel like Saturn, a terrestrial world like Velcastra.

“You’re imagining the
Ebrezjim
was attacked by a warship, or at least a gunship,” Dario said sourly. “And I’m sure Lai’a would have driven into the Zunshu system with sensors wide open, Aragos interlaced, every cannon we possess powered up, expecting the same. We would have been taken unawares, now, the same way our ancestors were. I’d hope Lai’a would be a couple of jumps ahead of us!

“We uncovered enough to know the
Ebrezjim
was assaulted from within, by its own AI. The Zunshu overrode it – and before you thump the table and tell us it’s impossible, and there was no way a Zunshu system could handshake with ours, much less take control of it, let me remind you, Lai’a was able to reach deep into the control core of the stasis chamber we opened on Kjorin. It sucked out so much data, it took 20
hours
of processing time before it was satisfied.

“There’s an unfortunate but undeniable similarity between Resalq and Zunshu firmware, and probably even the underlying patterns of our AIs. It may be that when firmware reaches a sufficient level of sophistication, it might always be similar at the core, since form follows function – though this is just conjecture. Critically, we must remember that in the last ninety years we’ve taken to pieces several rudimentary Zunshu AIs, such as those in their probes. What we learned there prompted developments in our own AI technology, which in turn has probably made late-generation Resalq AIs
more
similar to Zunshu AI tech.

“This similarity in structure is the whole reason Lai’a was able to reach into the core of the Kjorin stasis chamber and derive useful data … but it’s not a good thing. This very compatibility places Lai’a at even greater risk than the
Ebrezjim
’s purely Resalq command core.

“The Zunshu AI did essentially the same thing: reached right into the AI at the heart of the
Ebrezjim
, paralyzed it, analyzed it. And 17 hours, 42 minutes after it overpowered the Resalq core, it took control … and suddenly the life support was pumping out a toxic gas mix, or possibly huge dosages of a drug. We can’t be sure which, but it’s no matter – and perfectly feasible. All ships have the capacity to generate ‘medical air.’ Billy, you want to add your two bucks’ worth here?”

“Huh, me?” Grant was surprised, but he stood with a stubby bottle in one hand, and addressed the gathering on cue. “Sure, any sophisticated AI can take control of life support if it’s told to, or if the human crew has keeled over, and it needs to. It’s smart enough to take air samples, rad readings, and pump out a concoction of drugs suspended in air that might be oxygen-rich, or maybe even oxygen-poor, given the necessity. It’d make up the balance of the breathing mix with something harmless – xenon, say – and lace the air with drugs, medication, whatever was needed to facilitate healing and bring the crew around …

“And I can see where this is going. Suddenly the AI of the
Ebrezjim
adjusts the gas mix till the Resalq keel right over. It didn’t even have to be done with a toxin or a drug, guys. It could have been an adjustment, too little O
₂
, with the hazard sensors shut off. God knows, if it happened to us right here, right now, we’d just go to sleep, do the classic face-plant, before we knew what hit us. It’d be the last thing we thought of, because you trust your AI implicitly.” He paused to empty the bottle and set it down, and was frowning at Dario as he asked, “Is this what happened to your people?”

In fact, Mark took up the commentary now as the screen shifted to views of a glorious gold and white gas giant. “Something very much along those lines seems to have happened, Bill, but
some
of the crew seem to have realized what was happening. They scrambled for the escape pods – which makes sense. The pods operate on their own discrete power and life support, and they’re not under AI control. Each is a bubble of stable environment. If you couldn’t get into armor or find a respirator fast enough to keep yourself alive, you’d jump into the nearest escape pod. And since you didn’t trust the AI, which had just tried to kill you, you’d blow the pod to put distance between it and you.”

“They seem to have raised the alarm in time to haul a large number of people into safety, so they blew all the pods,” Tor went on. “They probably intended to return to the ship and take it back, once they’d recovered from either oxygen starvation or drugging. It never happened.” He turned in his seat, frowning up at the screen, where the gas giant sailed with a flotilla of its moons. “If they could have redocked and gotten even a few people into armor, things might have turned out differently. They might have scrammed the AI, for a start, so it couldn’t do something disgusting with the engines, or flood the ship with a rad spill from the generators.

“Me, I’d have pumped the ship down to zero pressure, so it couldn’t hurt me with an explosive decompression. Then, they’d need to get a couple of transspace pilots into the tanks, or whatever they used for manual flight in transspace. I haven’t had the chance to look into that yet. With flesh and blood pilots online, they could make a run for it. Take off back to the Zunshu Drift, looking for the first big storm to come their way.” His head shook slowly. “According to the last remnants of the surveillance logs, recorded by automatic systems independent of the AI, the escape pods were picked up by a squadron of drones.”

“
All
of them?” Vaurien asked quietly.

“All of them.” Dario rummaged through a menu and pulled up an image so grainy, the object in it was only just discernible. “This appears to be one of the drones. Look familiar?”

So familiar, Travers’s mouth had dried out to dust. “Looks like one of the aeroshells that shot out of Hellgate, at Oberon. Curtis?”

Marin had leaned forward, the better to see. “Those, I’ll never forget as long as I live. You see ’em close up, with the airlock sealed behind you, and …” He looked down from the screen, at the Resalq. “So the whole crew was taken off?”