The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 28, Pt. 3

Since there was no gravity, he couldn’t even properly wilt despite the growing tide of exhaustion stealing over him. Rose glanced at him and frowned. “Dann is exhausted, and the rest of you don’t look much better. We should get to a housing station and continue this in the morning.”

“Are you sure the housing stations are safe?” Jackson added, stifling a yawn.

“With the AI disabled, certainly,” Rose said.

“How is Rose Dawn now?” Dann asked, realizing that the main computer hadn’t spoken with them yet since their return from the ship’s hull.

“She is occupied, but should be okay shortly.”

Jenny looked up sharply. “Did something happen? Shouldn’t she have been fine as soon as you disabled the AI?”

“She’s running systems checks to ensure all traces of it are purged from the system. Wouldn’t want to leave any hidden code laying around that could cause trouble in the future.”

Jenny nodded. “Is there anything I can do to help with that?”

“Actually, your assistance would be welcome, but not tonight. Tomorrow.”

They filed out through the offices, stopping briefly only to collect the phones that were still attached to the large collection of maintenance bots that hadn’t drifted off down the main corridor. The bots seemed to wake up shortly afterward, moving off to take care of various maintenance tasks around the ship. They got back in the tram cars and made their way to a safe place to sleep.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 28, Pt. 2

“While you were outside,” the computer tech continued, eyes never leaving the AI’s housing, “and Jackson was taking care of the maintenance bots, I was working on a few different things.” She pushed and pulled against the handholds on the bulkhead, looking ready to launch toward the AI at any moment. She seemed to realize what she was doing as well, and stilled herself with a visible effort. “One of those things was that city we saw.”

“We don’t know for sure that that’s a city,” Dann started to object.

“We do know,” Jenny said. “At least we do now. After you left, I got Rose Dawn’s sensor suites up and running again. The AI caught on eventually and shut them down again, and they were useless after that, but while they were on I picked up a lot of very interesting stuff. The colony down there has been filling the air with all kinds of broadcasts. Not nearly as much as Earth was producing, but way more than I need to say, yeah, they’re definitely human, and they’ve been here a while.”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “How can that be possible? How long have they been here?”

“I can’t tell from the broadcast contents, but there’s enough development on the surface that I’d say years, or even c-centuries. Without knowing the population they had to start out with or any knowledge of their living conditions, it’s hard to tell for sure. They’ve built quite a bit and have 3 major population centers that I was able to make out on this side of the world.”

“Three doesn’t sound like that many for half a world,” Dann noted.

“Not for Earth, no, of course not, but it took time to build a lot of huge cities on Earth, too, back in prehistoric times, and they were in an environment that was ideally suited to them. Colonists on another world, like us? We’d have to focus our efforts on the best available spots, wherever they might be on the surface, and prioritize that above concerns like being close to the neighbors, right? I-I’d say they’ve done pretty well to have three cities so fast.”

Dann found himself wishing for gravity so that he could rest his head in his hands easily. If it was true that the planet had already been colonized by humanity, they had to have left after the Rose Dawn had, and obviously they had traveled a lot faster to arrive so much earlier.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 28, Pt. 1

Some time later the passage beyond the hatch was littered with floating disabled hulks. Jackson had gone through several racks worth of the altered phones and was waiting on yet more when suddenly the behavior of the oncoming bots changed. Several were making their way toward their position when, without warning, they stopped, turned, and started toward the forward end of the ship—the bridge, where Dann and Rose were clambering about the hull.

Jackson tapped her phone’s activation sequence. “Chambers? Rose? Whatever you did, thanks,” Jackson said, relief on her face. “They’re pulling away! What did you do?”

“I think we pulled them off of you and onto us,” the reply came. “Let’s just hope it takes them a while to get to us.” Chambers’ voice was stressed, but it didn’t sound serious. She was about to reply when Pixton poked her head out through the door. “Jackson, I’ve got more for you here—oh! W-what are they doing now?” she said, eyes wide.

“Rose and Chambers,” Jackson said. “They did something, pulled their attention. I don’t know if we’re going to need those,” she gestured at the phones, “but let’s keep ‘em out here just in case they decide to come back.

<>

Dann stripped off the suit with shaking hands, barely resisting the urge to hug the enclosing bulkheads that surrounded them once again. “I am so glad to be back inside,” he said fervently.

“You did fine, Dann. In fact, you did much better than fine. Do you know you’re now in the top 1% of known human space walkers, measured by duration?”

“That’s because nobody in their right mind would want to make a habit of that,” he said. “I know I sure don’t plan to.”

He’d just stowed away the last of his suit when Pixton burst into the room, followed by a steadier Jackson. “D-do you have it? Where is it? Is that—is that it?” she asked, eyeing the large device floating beside Rose within easy gripping range.

“That’s it, at least when it’s got power,” Dann nodded wearily. He’d been out on the hull for almost 10 hours; to say he was run down was a serious understatement. “It won’t be causing us any more trouble.”

“Good,” Jackson said, “because we have more trouble.”

Dann’s heart sank. “What is it now? We didn’t lose any more people did we?”

“No, nothing like that,” Jenny said, eyes still locked on the device. She looked like she was about to attack the thing, though whether she wanted to tear it apart out of anger or a simple desire to figure out how it worked, he couldn’t say.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 27, Pt. 2

Jenny Pixton flew through the air, her heart as light as her body, mind aflame with possibilities. Do something about the bots themselves! Of course! She shot her hand out and caught the edge of a standing desk, pivoting around her hand and hauling herself back to the deck briefly before launching off again in the direction she needed.

The problem with the maintenance bots was that while they were still under Rose Dawn’s control, they kept having their control overridden by the AI’s superior speed. But it wasn’t that much superior, and it wasn’t that much more powerful than Rose Dawn herself.

If she could somehow neutralize or even defeat the speed of the AI, then she could establish some sort of control over them. It would probably only be enough to shut them down or render them immobile, but that would be good enough.

She crashed into the bulkhead she needed, cushioning the landing with her arms. Wrenching open a cabinet, she pulled out one, two, then three racks of phones. Just the things! she thought. They’d do wonderfully. They were quite powerful for their size, already equipped with all the communications hardware she could hope for and capable of fully interfacing with the ship’s systems, and she had enough of them to take down a significant number of the maintenance bots on the ship. There’d been units enough for all of the ship’s crew and passengers after all.

Floating the racks through the air to her preferred workspace, she was tapping away at her tab well before they’d floated along behind her. This shouldn’t take too long, she thought, bits of code flashing through her mind and out through her fingers into the tab.

<>

“Sorry!” Pixton called as she hurtled through the door again, scaring the wits out of Jackson. She held a rack of phones in her arms as she flew, one in her hand, and—she was about to fly right right into one of the bots!

“Eyes forward!” she bellowed; she couldn’t do much more. She herself was wrestling with one of the blasted things. It had gotten her away from the decks, ceilings and bulkheads and she had all she could handle trying to keep it from choking her. It was a long-limbed beast, arms as flexible as the hoses they contained; they were intended to let it pressure-wash interior surfaces of the ship when it was hooked into the water conduits. Now they were trying to squeeze the life out of her. At least it wasn’t one of the vet bots; no needles to worry about.

Pixton glanced ahead with barely a hint of concern in her eyes as another set of robotic tentacles waved towards her. She held the phone in her hand out like a talisman, an almost eager look on her face. “You want me? Come get me, ugly!” she cried with a grin.

It obliged, or at least it started to. The wash-bot snagged her arm and began reeling her in, but then it started to spasm, almost as though it were having a seizure. As Pixton drifted closer and closer, the movement of the bot got jerkier, the freezing lasting longer before it burst into motion again. Finally, once she was right up next to it, it seized up and stopped moving entirely. Moving quickly, she duct taped the phone to the thing’s body.

“How’d you like that?” she called. “Sorry, I broke your toy.” Disentangling herself from the flexible arm, she kicked off its bulk; it had gripper treads to let it traverse wet decks and bulkheads easily, so it wasn’t moved by her launching. Pixton flew straight toward her and the wash-bot that was even now trying to get an arm around her throat. As Pixton got closer, her bot too began moving erratically. Jackson ducked to get her neck out of line with the arm, and then Pixton was on top of them. She slapped the phone against a flat panel on the bot’s chassis and taped it in place. “And that’s that for this round!” she said.

“Pixton? What on earth did you do?” Jackson asked, a note of real respect creeping into her tone; she didn’t waste any time pushing off the now lifelessly-drifting hulk to a bulkhead well away from it, though.

“Overrode the AI’s control. It has to work remotely, so there’s latency in the commands it sends. When my re-purposed phones are close enough, they’re fast enough to constantly override the AI’s ability to—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. You overwhelmed the signals it’s sending.”

“Yeah, basically! It’s too far from them to keep up.”

“So we just have to stick these things on them when they show up and we’re good?”

“Should be. Unless it does something like—”

“Um, Rose Dawn can hear us, let’s not give her or it any tips, huh?” Jackson said, eyebrow arched.

“R-right, good idea. Anyway, we won’t run out of these any time soon. Here’s the first batch. I’ll go make more!”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 27

Lydia Jackson was all but beside herself. She’d been fighting off maintenance bots for hours, trying to keep them away from the systems and from Pixton, but defending an area in zero g was like nothing she’d ever trained for.

The foreign AI didn’t act anything like she’d have expected. At first it would send bots at them randomly, singly or in pairs. Usually they’d be larger ones, and their purpose wasn’t always clear. They might have been sweepers or polishers for all Jackson knew.

They’d lumber awkwardly to the hatch through the main hall of the ship, feet or wheels or appendages or treads magnetized to keep them on the ground. They’d open the hatch, every time. She’d started out trying to keep it locked, but there was no way to keep them from unlocking it. They had clearance for all areas of the ship, and Pixton had so far been unable to revoke that clearance.

Once inside the hatch, they’d simply shove whatever obstructions she’d managed to move into place and everything would tumble away. She gave up that plan before they started directing it to fly towards her where she waited in cover at the back of the room.

As soon as they were in the hatch frame she’d open fire, and that’s where the real trouble would occur.

She’d had to learn in a desperate hurry that guns with recoil send floating people spinning in unexpected directions when fired. It was a nightmare. She had despaired at first, but practice and timing allowed her to make some progress. She gave up on the gun quickly; she was going to run out of ammo, which she had precious little of, and it wasn’t doing much good. Instead, she started keeping the desks and chairs back by her, and when the AI sent more bots after them, she would brace against the back wall of the room and launch the furniture at them. It took a few tries, but she got the technique down well enough that she could knock the bots out of the door and off their feet back into the enormously long corridor. They’d tumble helplessly through the air for the whole length, effectively putting them out of commission for hours.

She had just gotten comfortable with that steady rhythm when the foreign AI, apparently having had enough, sent a set of three.

She tried slamming the first one back and through, only to have the other two brace it and keep it from tumbling. “Oh CRAP!” she yelled, more to vent her frustration than anything, but also to let Pixton know that they might have some trouble. Assuming she wasn’t so lost in what she was doing that she couldn’t hear her.

One, then two of them made it into the room. Some part of her brain recognized that these ones looked a little different than the menial labor bots it had sent so far. It wasn’t until it got within a few feet of her that she saw the hypodermic needle it had in place of its right forefinger. Her eyes flew open in panic. “Pixton!” she called. “Jenny, a little help? Please?”

She pushed off the wall, sailing through the air clumsily, twisting to face the opposite wall. She grabbed for a handhold to stop herself there; all the walls in the area had plenty of them, designed as they were to house people and do it without gravity. Once she had herself semi-stabilized, she was able to grab the gun from her holster.

The other problem with shooting in weightless conditions, she’d found, was aim. It is remarkably difficult to aim properly when you have, not just no solid footing, but no footing at all. She fired anyway, and managed to disable one of the bots with a lucky shot—one among almost a dozen—that landed in a vital housing.

The stopped her tumbling against the wall again and grabbed a chair. “Pixton!” she yelled. Suddenly the hatch to the server room burst open and Pixton flew out, another chair in her hands, and all but tackled the nearest bot. It tried to stab at her with its injection-finger, but the needle embedded itself in the base of the chair and snapped off, liquid floating out of the broken reservoir.

Jackson quickly worked her way to the side wall and kicked off, sticking as close to the wall as she could without running into anything. She reached out and grabbed the hatch that Pixton had flown out, and lined up on the bot she was wrestling with. “Pixton! On three!” she yelled.

Pixton looked back at her, eyes widening as she saw her. The security specialist readied her own chair like some bizarre over-sized broadsword.

“3!” Jackson cleared her mind and focused her attention.

“2!” She readied her chair, leg muscles tense.

“1!” She launched directly to the far side of the bot that Pixton had damaged. Pixton was swinging her chair low, so Jackson aimed high; the two chairs collided with the thing, and Jackson used her own momentum to direct the bot right out the doorway. One down, two to go. “Watch the needles! They’re some sort of veterinary bots or something, and I bet we really don’t want whatever they’ve got in those drug reservoirs.”

It took them almost 20 minutes and they were both sweating with exertion, but finally they got rid of the last of them.

“This … is ridiculous,” Jackson panted. “There has to be something we can do. If you can’t secure the door, can you … at least do something about the bots themselves?”

“That’s it!” Pixton exclaimed, then kicked off along the walls until she disappeared through the hatch again, back to her screens.

“What, what’s it? Pixton? Pixton!” Jackson sighed and grabbed some water, locked the hatch again, and settled back to wait for either news or another attack.