The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 26

Dann’s muscles were screaming at him as he slowly lifted and reset his mag-booted foot again, and again, and again. The cylinder was just ahead; another few steps and they’d be in position.

“Chambers?” Jackson’s voice came through his helmet’s audio system. “You guys about through yet? Pixton and I could really use a hand here,” she said. There was no extra noise in her broadcast this time; no gun fire or the clatter of furniture and metal flying and striking the bulkheads.

“Almost there … but then we have to get back. What’s the problem?” He found himself speaking softly to avoid making too much sound, though he probably didn’t have to bother.

“Pixton found a way to shut the maintenance bots down a while back, but that AI has found a way to get some of them back online. With only the two of us, we can’t hold out for long; they’ll wear us down! How fast can you get back?”

Dann frowned; another step, another step … “Another couple of minutes to reach the AI housing. Then Rose has to figure out what we’re going to able to do with it. Then we have to do it. How fast we return depends on what we do with the thing. Sorry Jackson, that’s the best I can give you right now. We’ll know more in a few minutes.”

“Worst case, I could throw you back to the airlock, Dann,” Rose offered. “I could keep your trajectory low enough that you could simply lower your feet and engage the mag-lock to stop yourself.”

“Um, yeah … let’s keep that as an emergency backup plan.” He broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.

Finally they reached the housing. It was such a little thing really, he thought, to be causing so much trouble. It was conical at one end with a rocket extending out the other, and otherwise featureless. “The sensor components are inside,” Rose said. “Are you ready to help me with this thing?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Dann said. He was just grateful to stop moving. He couldn’t believe how grueling it was to just walk across the ship. Every muscle in his body seemed to be knotting up; tension from trying not to move too fast in the airless weightlessness, he guessed.

“I’ll take the front; the nose looks like the part that I’ll be removing. I need you to grab it from the sides. If this thing is able to detect us tinkering with it, it may try to fire up that rocket. I’ll have the strength to hold it back, but you might not.”

“Would it even have any fuel left after getting to us?”

“It might have a little, but chances are it doesn’t have much,” Rose agreed. “I just want you to be prepared in case it does react. It has a limited number of possible reactions. Based on this design … Dann, you should know that another possible reaction is self-destruction.”

“Yeah … kinda figured that might be one. Got any others we can hope for?”

“I think its most likely response would be to redirect the maintenance robots to come after us instead of attacking the others.”

“Well, that’s good news. It’ll take them a while to get to us.”

“Yes, though not nearly as long as it took us to get here. They won’t have our restrictions.”

“Well.” He swallowed a sudden lump in his throat. “There’s no time like the present.” He timed his grab with Rose’s; together they grabbed hold of the AI housing’s exterior shell. Dann squeezed his eyes tight. There was no reaction.

None that they could detect, anyway.

“Chambers? Rose? Whatever you did, thanks,” Jackson piped in. “They’re pulling away! What did you do?”

Dann opened his eyes back up again and breathed a sigh of relief. “I think we pulled them off of you and onto us,” he said. “Let’s just hope it takes them a while to get to us.”

Rose didn’t reply. Dann looked over at her and frowned. She looked strange; had she been human, he’d have said she looked strained.

“Dann …” she began. “Dann, we have a problem.” She maintained her grip on the housing, and began twisting. The nose cone turned easily, but the effort she was putting into turning it was herculean.

“What’s wrong? Do you need help with that?”

“No, stay back!” She heaved and the cone separated from the body of the housing. She hurled it, barely missing Dann, who staggered back in alarm.

“Rose? What was that?”

“It … it is taking advantage of proximity … faster signal time … response time … think I can keep its influence at bay …”

“Oh crap,” he whispered. He’d thought she was immune. She stood stock still, all of her attention and processing power bent on keeping her own processes from being hijacked.

“You’re going to have to disable it, Dann,” she said. “I’ll do what I can to help.” She took several staggering steps backward, leaving him clear to approach.

Inside he found a shockingly small compartment that housed what he assumed had to be the AI itself; it looked like nothing so much as a mass of tiny computer boards arranged in a cubic matrix of interconnections with connections leading to other components. Most of the interior of the cylinder had to be taken up by space for fuel, he reasoned. He followed the connections as best he could, though he had the sinking feeling he was out of his depth; he’d never learned much about how electronics actually worked. There were various small packages he assumed were sensors, buried in pits in the cylinder’s interior wall. His eyes lit up when he saw one large component a symbol he recognized; any conduit tech worth his salt would recognize a power supply when he saw one.

“Rose, I’ve found the power supply. What’ll happen if I yank the connection from this? It doesn’t look like there’s room for it to have a backup—”

A pair of arms like vice grips locked around him from behind. Rose’s left arm wrapped around the seal of his helmet and started constricting. “Rose! You’re going to break—”

“Sever … the … power,” she said. Her right arm was constricting his chest; his breathing went shallow. His helmet creaked alarmingly.

He shoved his gloved hand awkwardly into the housing where the power supply connection was, then had to grasp blindly as Rose awkwardly jerked him backwards. “It’s tapping into … my senses. Knows what you’re—”

Dann ripped his hand out of the AI case. A trail of broken wire came out with his glove; Rose’s arms slackened. He filled his lungs as the constriction eased; relief flooded through him. He stepped away; Rose stood motionless in front of him, eyes lit. She convulsed a bit, posture gradually relaxing.

“Dann, that was horrible. Remind me to ask if Pvt. Pixton can do anything to improve my internal firewalls when we get back in.”

“I’m just glad you’re okay, Rose. But, speaking of okay, I’ll be a lot closer to it once we get back inside. What do you say?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I’d like that too.” She hefted the now dead weight of the cylinder. “We should bring this in with us.”

“Is that really a good idea? What if it reactivates?”

Rose smiled. “Computer zombies are just as unlikely as biological ones, Dann. You destroyed the power connection; it’s harmless. Pixton and I will study it—after cutting its ability to transmit commands. Besides, if it does become a problem again, which would you prefer? To be able to take care of it inside or to have to come all the way out here again?”

“Right. You win, let’s bring it with us.”

“I knew you’d see it my way.”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 25

UTS Rose Dawn

Aft Engine Maintenance

Jun. X, 2565 A.C.E.

Cobb finished fastening down the explosive mix and affixing the mixing chamber. The remote detonator was set. He gave it one last careful check—it wouldn’t do to spoil his surprise for the others—and grinned. He was going to enjoy this. This one device, this one act, would finally put to rest all the shattered dreams, the broken lives, the reek of failure of this whole enterprise. How he longed for that release. He was severely tempted for just a moment to detonate it right then and there. No, he thought. He couldn’t do that. Can’t deny the others the knowledge that they’ve failed, that whatever insanity led them to destroy this mission was for nothing. They destroyed everything for everyone else; now it’s their turn. They will know that before they die.

He carefully stepped out of the conduit hatch and closed it securely behind him. Time to go start the show, he thought, eerie grin still plastered on his face.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 24

The outer hatch slowly slid open. It was a weird feeling; such a large and heavy weight of metal ought to have made a lot of noise, but the only sensation Dann felt was a slight vibration transmitted through the deck and into his feet through his magnetized boots. Just one of the many oddities of operating in a vacuum; he hoped he didn’t have to get too used to it.

Light flooded the airlock as the doors opened; even as far out as they were from the center of the solar system, so much farther than Earth was from its sun, there was no problem seeing. He waited until the doors were fully open, then took his first awkward steps out towards the hull of the ship.

He was seized by a sudden crushing disorientation and terror as he left the airlock and immediately lost all sense of direction at the edge. There was nothing but stars in front of him, and more stars beneath his feet. He had to stop in his tracks and close his eyes, just focus on his breathing. They’re counting on me, he reminded himself. I have to get to that AI unit. I have to.

He got his suit gloves into as good a grip on the inside of the airlock as he could manage, and knelt down, awkwardly lowering his foot to try and let the magnets get a grip on the hull. How do real astronauts do this? he found himself wondering. He thought back to space walks he’d seen and archival footage he’d watched as a kid. They were tethered, I guess, he thought, wishing he could be. That lead to thoughts of just how easy it would be to accidentally lose his footing and simply float away, helpless and hopeless until his air ran out.

He fought down nausea again, and thumbed his com unit. “Jenny? These suits aren’t networked in any way are they?”

“What? Networked? No, why?”

“Just making sure. I’d hate for it to shut off the mag boots on me. There’s only so long I can hold my breath,” he said, trying to hide the nervousness in his voice.

“No, no chance of that! The worst you might have to face would be EV bots.”

“Say again? It almost sounded like you said—”

“Extra vehicular bots, yes,” Rose cut in from her radio. “Long-duration space flight carries risks of collision with dust and debris that can damage or even pierce the hull. I can operate externally of course, albeit with difficulty, and we have several purpose-built bots available to repair minor damage.”

“Right. Nobody thought I should know this before I came out here?” he grumbled.

“We’ve got other things to worry about, Dann,” Jackson called weakly, through Jenny’s pickup. The sounds of fighting reached him from the distance. More maintenance bots. Gunshots ran out. He swallowed, closed his eyes, and clanged the sole of his magboot against the outer hull, then levered his body perpendicular to where he’d stood in the airlock.

He let out his breath in relief and brought his other foot out. He felt much better with solid ground under his feet again; the view was spectacular, once he was in a frame of mind to appreciate it. Before he could stand and goggle at it for too long though, the sound of gunfire got him moving again. He started forward along the hull, heading for the underside of the bridge.

“When can we expect EV bots, Rose?”

“Unknown. If the hijacker is unaware that we’re outside, it won’t send anything after us. I believe we’ve escaped attention so far, but we’ll have to be careful. There are no sensors that could pick us up out here, but we can easily make sound inside the ship that would tip it off. Our best chance is to go slowly and very carefully.”

“Right,” Dann said. Since that was generally in line with his personal goal of not floating off the ship for all eternity, he couldn’t argue. “Got it. And when we reach it? Won’t it know we’re removing it from the hull?”

Dann spotted Rose on the hull, a little ahead of him and on the other side of the ship, just crossing up over the artificial horizon of the hull curvature. She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if it will know or not.”

“What’s your best guess?” It was a long way to the front of the ship, made longer by their need to move so slowly. Dann conservatively estimated it as at least a three hour trip, each way. Thankfully the suit was equipped with food and water, and to deal with waste.

They angled themselves to join up along the center line of the ship. “We must assume it has some sort of external sensors. Without them it would have been unlikely to successfully attach to the ship years ago. What kind of sensors they are, whether they’re sensitive enough to detect us, whether it could tell that it’s being physically moved to a different part of the ship … these we can’t know. Due to the size of the device, I think it’s likely that it has the minimum sensory equipment necessary to carry out its mission according to the parameters known at the time—that all aboard the ship were in cryo-sleep and would be killed without resistance.”

“So we’re relying on the laziness and/or frugality of the designers.” He smirked. “That’s usually a safe enough bet, I suppose.”

Rose smiled at him. She wore no suit, of course; it was a disconcerting sight. “I wouldn’t say ‘relying.’ It would certainly make our task easier, and I believe it is the most likely scenario.”

Dann nodded inside his helmet. He kept his eyes on where he was stepping, and together they moved as quickly as they could while staying quiet. The optics of the helmet were good enough to let him focus on their goal. The small cylinder bobbed as he moved, but barely seemed to get any larger. It was going to be a long haul.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 23

When Lt. Cobb awoke next, he was stiff as a frozen rag, and quickly found that that was a reasonably accurate description of him. He was laying face down in what looked like a cave; he had no memory of finding it, or of anything that had occurred during the night save for a long nightmare of cold and snow and darkness. He lay there a while, disoriented and confused, and then the memory of the explosives flashed into his mind. With a groan, he forced himself to his knees. Right. He was going to teach them a lesson … whoever they were. Them. The other survivors, who had driven him to this hellish place. Of course. It was their fault he was in this position, frozen and half-dead. It would’ve been better if they’d just left him fully frozen in the first place, instead of driving him to this half measure.

He hung his head and just breathed a moment. It sounded like he was breathing twice as fast as he was, and it took him a moment to realize why—he was not alone in the cave. He turned his head slowly to see the mountain of white fur further back in the cave. His eyes widened in sudden fear; he couldn’t move fast enough to get away. But it didn’t move either, except for the steady rise and fall of its flanks as it breathed. He locked his mouth shut, making himself breathe slowly and shallowly.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he slowly crawled toward the mouth of the cave, where he was relieved to see that the snow had stopped and light had returned to the shockingly white landscape. As soon as he was outside of the cave mouth, he got to his feet and ran as hard and fast as he could away.

There was no way for him to judge where he’d entered the cave from; the snow had continued long enough to cover over the tracks he must have left. He quickly recognized the direction he’d been traveling in from the position of the artificial sun in the “sky” and, orienting himself to that, he moved on.

Frustration started to mount. The armories weren’t that far from the entrances; he must have missed what he was looking for somehow. Yet another misfortune that would never have come his way had it not been for … Chambers, that was it. Chambers, and the cold one, Jackson. He half-snarled, half-chuckled at that. He was the cold one now. And not to forget the coward, and the robot, Rose. They were all in league with … what was it that Pixton girl had said? A hijacking AI? He couldn’t see any reason Pixton couldn’t have set up an AI, so sure, whatever they wanted to call it.

A sudden rushing sensation broke him from his idle thoughts just in time see the steep drop-off he’d walked from before he crashed to the bottom of it in a tangle of hard, woody brush. All thought was washed from his mind by a bright splash of pain and heat in his leg. A deep gash cut down his calf, splashing bright red blood in the snow and sending waves of pain up his leg and through his body. He gritted his teeth and bit back a cry of rage. “You’re not going to stop me this easily,” he ground out between gritted teeth once the initial shock had worn off. He’d fallen almost three meters; he wasn’t going to get back up there the way he’d come down. When he turned to examine the embankment he’d fallen off of, he gasped with relief; there was a door there! It was one of the heavy latching doors that indicated a cryo-bay, not an armory, but just then he didn’t care one whit which it was. The cryo-bay would have clothes and food and medication, and he cared about that more than the explosives, at least for the moment.

He painfully dragged himself up and leaned into the lever, opening the bay door, all but collapsing inside once he had it open far enough. It was strange how the air inside, the same temperature as the bay he’d woken up in originally, felt so very warm now. Back when Rose had rescued him, he’d have sworn it was as cold in there as the winterscape he’d just left.

The door closed with a crash; he stood just within, soaking up the comparative warmth. Then his purpose drove him on; he limped into the bay, heading immediately for the stockpiles of clothing and supplies. With shaking hands he roughly cleaned the gash in his leg and, not knowing enough about first aid to properly treat it, wrapped it in a bandage with a bit of antiseptic. He replenished his food and water, changed his clothes for warmer ones, and then stood, eyes closed in the middle of the bay, trying to concentrate enough to make a plan to go on.

It’d been a mistake to go through the biome itself, he realized now. That was exactly what they’d wanted him to do, and like a fool, he’d played right into their hands. If he hadn’t come across this bay, how long might it have been before that bear woke up and needed something to eat? It had been clever of them to put that brush where he’d fall on it too. The blood trail would’ve led the bear right to him. He wouldn’t underestimate them again. He opened his eyes slowly and looked around. There was a ventilation cover, just as there had been in the last bay they’d visited as a group.

Undoubtedly they believed they had him trapped; he lacked the tools they’d had before to open the grate, and in any event, he was on the wrong side. He’d have to go back through the biome and into the maintenance tunnels to get at the bolts to open it the way they’d done before, and that would only give them more opportunities to try and kill him. No, that wasn’t the way to get through this, he thought. But if he could get into the tunnels, it would give him another route of access to the armories. It wouldn’t be as easy; the armories had no large, convenient ventilation shafts. They did have power conduits though, and those were serviceable. It would be a very tight squeeze, but with tools, he could get into one from the maintenance shafts.

First he had to get into those shafts. That meant forcing his way through the ventilation cover. While difficult, that wouldn’t be too hard; it was only intended for safety, not to keep people out. He he looked around the room, surprising himself with his own reluctance; the familiar crushing sea of red lights stared at him piteously. Immediately he saw again the eyes of the dead within, staring at him, accusing. He felt an all new chill despite the warmer clothing. He forced the eyes from his mind, but the lights wouldn’t be banished. There was something about them tugging at his awareness …

There. In one corner, almost hidden. There was a group of three pods, identical to the rest save that their lights glowed green. They were like him. They had survived when all the rest of these poor wretches hadn’t.

But wait, were they like him? What if they were like the others? The only thing different about these was that they hadn’t been awakened to take part in the rest of the plan yet. His eyes narrowed. Could the others have meant him to come here? Were they just waiting up there in their computer room, fingers on the switch that would wake these people up and let them come after him? Maybe they’d tired of sending mindless robots after him; it had been some time since he’d seen any of those, let alone fought any. If they were going to sic animals and weather after him, why not their fellow conspirators, too?

Cobb left the smashed in grate behind him, an empty pack he’d need over his shoulder as he moved painfully down the cramped maintenance shaft, his leg throbbing in pain. The cryo-pods in the bay behind watched him go in his mind, the ghostly imagined eyes of the dead following him, every light glowing red.

It was slow going, both because of his leg, and because it was dark. Very dark. The lights switched on at the other end of the shaft, and while Rose Dawn might have been able to turn them on for him, he’d be damned if he was going to ask her to do anything for him, or trust her to do anything but lead him to ruin. So he felt his way down the hallway along the wall, trusting his own instincts.

By the time he got to the end, it was all but pitch black and he’d added a number of bruises to his collection of injuries and stoked his rage at the others. He slapped the light switch, smiled a cold smile, and slipped out into the tram tunnel beyond.

It was the same one he’d come down before, functionally identical to the tunnel the group of them had used a lifetime ago. He limped back up the tunnel to where the car still sat and awkwardly turned it around to go back up, then hit the switch for the tunnel lights. There was a door just up the shaft, this tunnel’s equivalent of the tool room they’d used before. Within minutes he was sitting in the car heading back up the tunnel, tools in hand, on the lookout for likely doors.

<>

In the end, he spent hours searching before he finally found an access he could use, and had built up an enormous store of rage and resentment at what he saw as the survivors’ attempts to keep him from his mission. In the end though, he set to work on a serviceable panel for one of the armories with his tools, the grin plastered on his face made haunting by the manic light in his eye. Inside he found exactly what he needed; a modest amount of a very powerful binary explosive kept on hand for use in clearing usable land when they eventually were to have made landfall on New Eden, and possibly for emergencies in the biomes, as a last resort.

“This’ll show ‘em,” he grinned to himself. He stowed the containers of each part of the substance in the pack along with a measured mixing mechanism and remote detonator. His limping footsteps echoed in the silent tunnels as he returned to the tram car.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 22, Pt. 2

Dann and Lydia sat, stunned. Rose just nodded. “I agree,” she said. “I think we will have to assume that that’s true.”

“But how can … we …” Dann closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s crazy! I know we talked about this, but I just don’t see how that can be possible.”

“There are several possibilities,” Rose said. “One, someone from Earth left long before we did and arrived first. Space flight had been a possibility for decades, even if cryogenic suspension wasn’t. A generation ship could have been launched decades before we left. Two, a faster ship could have been developed and launched after us and yet arrived first. And three, the originator of this technology may not be human.”

“No,” Jenny said. “It’s definitely human. It uses all the same protocols our computer is using, and that tells me it wasn’t a generation ship launched decades before us, either. There were too many changes in computer tech, it would have been completely out of date compared to our state of the art. If those are the three possibilities, I say it has to be the second. Somebody left Earth after us with a more advanced ship, and they beat us here.” She got a thoughtful look on her face then and pursed her lips. “That would explain why this thing is so good at defeating Eden Rose’s security protocols. We might be too out of date to compete against this thing, at least in that respect. It could have complete documentation on exactly how this whole ship works.”

Dann felt himself going pale. “Okay. I vote we get rid of this thing, and we do it right now.”

“And just how do we do that?” Lydia asked testily. “If this thing is so advanced, is it going to just let us walk up to it and take it off?”

“I think we’ve got to risk it,” Dann said. “You said it’s really primitive in some ways, didn’t you, Jenny?”

“Yeah, but I’ve got nothing on what it’s like physically,” she said, cautiously. “I don’t even know exactly where it is, though if we get back to the main lab, I can probably pinpoint it. Worst case, I know I can narrow it down.”

They dragged their boat back out to the water and set out, Lydia and Jenny scanning the horizon as Dann and Rose rowed, but no other boats showed themselves. When they reached the dock, they found the other boats were missing. They moored theirs and headed straight for the door back to the tram.

It was waiting for them, just as they’d left it. They turned the cars around and drove it back up to the center of the ship as fast as they could go. They passed several maintenance bots along the way, all of which turned and started for them, but they were going too fast and the bots were too slow; they left them in their dust. “None of them seem to be much of a threat,” Dann said.

“Don’t underestimate them,” Rose said. “Many of them are designed to work on extremely heavy-duty equipment and have more than enough strength to crush any of you to pulp. Some of them could crush me to pulp. And some of them have other, more exotic weapons. Veterinarian bots for instance; they’re equipped with tranquilizers that can put down the largest animals kept here, and dosages that high would easily kill any of you, too.”

Dann nodded, grim-faced. Right, he thought. Try not to underestimate the stupid, lumbering death machines. The thought didn’t exactly make him happy.

The coast was clear when they reached their original spot outside the complex of offices that housed the main lab. Lydia closed and secured the hatch that led to the offices and then the one to the lab for good measure.

“Dann,” Rose said, “How would you like to learn how to spacewalk?”

Dann’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask? What do you have in mind?”