The Lost Aria (Earth Song Book 3) Read online

  “Yes. But you can't delete yourself.”

  “This is most irregular. The steward program has fulfilled its purpose; the crew is now on board and in command. This program needs to be deleted.”

  “Without this battle mind, how are we supposed to operate the ship?” No response came, it was clear the steward program was exceeding its parameters. “Does the steward program have within its program the understanding of basic ships functions?”

  “The steward program is capable of basic maneuvers needed to locate and dock the ship within a base, ship yard, or dock with a support vessel.”

  “Okay, so display manual versions of these controls.” She was afraid it was beyond the program, and it did take almost a minute to consider what to do. Though adaptive, the program was very narrow in its operational sphere. Once completing its primary task, it needed to delete itself. It must delete itself. Still, this request was a valid request from the ship’s commander. In the case of a crew transferring from a different class ship, some familiarization routines needed to be run. But no such order existed in relation to this crew. In fact no records existed at all for this crew. The fire base simply told the ship they were the crew, and you didn't ignore a fire base any more than you ignored a programmer. Their minds were very harsh and utilitarian, prone to quick and sometimes rash decisions. Deciding that familiarization must be necessary, the steward program executed the request.

  “Commander Minu Alma, please direct your attention to the quadrant of the battle space to your left.” She turned her head and looked. A section of the reflective sphere had come alive as a screen about a meter on a side. Within the screen stood a humanoid figure with a slightly slouched posture and prominent tail. It also had longer than normal arms, hands with three fingers and a thumb, and large inquisitive eyes. They could be our ancestors from Earth, she thought. The ‘monkey/man now began to speak with the ship’s voice. “Basic manual interface protocols are as follows.” Minu smiled and grabbed one of her tablets to record the instructions.

  Chapter 14

  January 15th, 522 AE

  Transfer Station, Enigma Star System, Galactic Frontier

  Singh-Apal-Katoosh, high tactical leader of Clan Madhu and war counsel to all the timeless T'Chillen, slithered through the Portal from the fortress world of Skesh onto the transfer station in Enigma. He'd only set tail in the system once in his forty three years of tactical leadership, a required twice per century evaluation of the defenses for this most secret, and most invaluable stash of technology. He hadn't liked his first visit, females outnumbered males five to one, all flitting around with their computers and instruments, so happy and contented in their meaningless mental machinations. He'd even had to kill one of the females who admonished him about touching some delicate piece of million year old tech, and then was forced to suffer through an hour of recriminations by the technology nest master. A loathsome old male, his tail spike long rotted off and poison gone impotent, it was all Singh could do not to kill him as well. Yet a nest master out ranked a tactical leader and a war counsel. Singh single handedly fought nine young warriors that afternoon to rid himself of the taste of bitter humility. It cost two of them their lives.

  As the Portal closed behind him the survivors of the station’s warrior contingent all lay down flat on the floor, tails stretched out straight behind them, helpless in a show of complete submission. Singh was followed by two hundred elite strykers, a complete fan, and replacements for these sorry and disgusting failures. His host clear of the Portal, Singh caught the fan leader’s attention, and then nodded his eyestalks towards the prostrate warriors. A single slash of his flashing and intricately carved tail spike relayed their fates. None of the disgraced warriors so much as twitched as the host of strykers fell on them, killing all but their leader with sure spike thrusts through the brain.

  The head of research, a female of all things, waited nearby with her head and torso centimeters off the floor. Her failure was by association only. Still she would be joining the warriors that moment if not for the technology nest master.

  He didn't wait to see the executions carried out, instead turning to their leader. Ultimately it was his fault that so many potentially useful warriors were having their blood spilled on the floors in great green torrents. The pleasure of removing his incompetence from the T'Chillen would be Singh's, but not quite yet.

  “Speak to me, commander Bofa,” Singh said, using only the commander’s nest name as a sign of how little use remained to him. Likely he hadn't been addressed thusly since he was a new warrior trainee. If there was a lesser thing to call him and still remain a reasonable possibility that he would respond, Singh would have used it.

  “I am ready,” came the reply from the floor, “oh great leader.”

  “How was this possible, your own unlimited incompetence aside. How was the facility attacked through the particular Portal you claim?”

  “I do not know. It is not possible.”

  Singh killed him with a single quick strike of his tail spike; driving the half meter long razor sharp blade through his skull with such force that it threw sparks from the floor. Wrenching the spike free he berated himself for being so rash. The worthless piece of excrement deserved a much slower death, perhaps as food for the hatchlings, or target practice for the new warriors. But he couldn't stand to hear another word from the fool.

  “Take me to the ruined machine,” he snapped at the researcher. The female was up and racing away so quickly that Singh had to move fast to keep up. A squad of warriors followed in his wake as the rest of the fan began to assume control of the station defenses.

  The little used Portal was a considerable distance from the other main Portals, down a long hallway and around two bends. As they moved down the hall Singh took note of intermittent burns and gouges from the ancient dualloy walls, signs of a running battle. When they finally reached the Portal chamber, the damage was much worse. A single beamcaster emplacement lay against one wall, blown to smoldering pieces. The two warriors who'd manned the weapon were not recognizable from the other debris except for their blood.

  Opposite the destroyed weapons emplacement, only meters from the quiet Portal were the remains of a transport. The debris was being examined by a trio of female technicians who took no notice of the new arrivals. As they were trained, they would ignore the warriors unless addressed. Just as that fool's report had said, the weapons crew was alert and made a good accounting for themselves. One of the two invading transports was destroyed. But it was that wreckage that drew him closer. It didn't look like the transport was torn apart by weapons fire, or blown up from the inside by overloaded shield capacitors. No, this looked like the transport had been sliced into irregular pieces and piled on the floor. Only the rear section of the craft was essentially intact. What had destroyed this craft?

  “What weapons did it carry?” he asked the female.

  “We found no evidence of weapons.”

  “What? Ludicrous.” Singh turned and gestured with a tentacle at the ruined weapons emplacement. “What do you suggest did that?”

  “A high order plasma weapon of undetermined origin.”

  He worked to understand the terminology. “Plasma weapons are ineffective against shields,” he said, a statement of fact. “You mean the attackers possessed unknown weaponry?”

  “Yes, leader. We searched the area of the downed transport first and found only ruined components. We did find a large amount of magnetic interlocks suggesting the craft was modified to use them as structural-”

  Singh silenced her blathering with a hiss and a wave of his arm. “See what can be discovered of these weapons, I care nothing of magnetic interlocks.” The female bowed low, so low she almost touched the floor. Realization that she would live was setting in.

  “Technical leader!” one of the females digging through the wreckage called out. The female leader cast her eye stalks to him and he waggled his own eyes back in permission for her to proceed. After a mi
nute of excited hissing between the leader and her workers, she gestured in a most disrespectful way for him to approach. He did, hoping for her sake that whatever she'd found was worth her life.

  “We have located one of the crew of this craft,” she told him.

  This was worth her life, without a doubt. To know the identity of these deceitful attackers was worth many lives. He looked down to where a female was brushing away blocky chunks of debris from a still form. It was badly crushed and bloody, but instantly recognizable to Singh. “Rasa,” he hissed and instantly spun to rush away.

  The technical leader looked down at the body and cocked her head, wondering what it meant. She'd met Rasa before, and they'd been allies. Why had they attacked this station? And then there was the bigger mystery. She left her people to secure the bodies and continue to look for clues, slithering over towards the Portal. The military commander was racing away back down the hallway, only two warriors remained behind and they were examining the remains of the gun emplacement. She wasn't interested in ruined guns, or smashed transports. The bigger mystery was the Portal. This one was referred to by the technical staff as the 'back door'. It only accessed two destinations, one was a very distant world that would be used as an evacuation site should the personnel be trapped away from the main Portals in a disaster. The other was a world from which no one ever returned. The Portal on the other end of that destination was broken. A one way trip set up millions of years ago on a world that would kill almost any being in the Concordia within days at the most.

  She looked at the Portal and wondered. She knew the invaders didn't come from their fall back world, she'd checked that right away and the defenses were untouched. Certainly none there had seen two heavily armed transports come through. That only left one place they could have come from, and that was impossible. No, she didn't want to know about mystery guns and Rasa; she wanted to know how they’d managed to fix a broken Portal. No one had ever done that before!

  “This is going to be harder than it looks,” said Ted. The CIC was significantly different than it was twelve hours ago. Instead of a featureless sphere, there were four workstations arranged in a semicircle around the center, complete with holographic chairs in which Ted, Bjorn, Minu and Aaron all sat. The original chairs called up were all but invisible. Minu found sitting on air to be even more disconcerting than standing on air, so the system was tweaked to make the seats more visible. In doing that, they'd discovered the CIC was an immensely complex holographic theater riddled with thousands of miniature hoverfields. The reason for so many hoverfield generators had thus far eluded them.

  “What's the problem?” Minu asked from her station. A trio of holographic displays floated in front of her where she was striving to put the lessons from the Steward program to use. Her newly realized ability to read and understand ancient Concordia script was proving useful, if also a continued source of consternation to Ted.

  “This ship is a study in contradictions,” he complained. “Every system is basically automated. But the individual subsystems are not connected except through the computer, and this CIC.”

  “And that's a problem why?”

  “Well, you would need dozens of operators all able to instantly communicate with each other to run a ship like this. And based on Var'at's explorations, the ship simply isn't equipped for that sort of a crew. There are weapons system, which I can't even gain access to, and defenses that I have partial access to.”

  Minu knew about the latter, she'd been the one to restrict access to the ship’s tactical systems. She did it out of fear of accidentally unleashing the ship’s armaments on the station around them. Especially since she really had no idea what most of the weapons did, despite her command of the language. “So how did they manage?”

  “It has to be another program,” Bjorn said. His responsibility was to plumb the depths of the ship’s massive computer, but there wasn't much there. “The Medical Intelligence seems to be a bios, automatically installed when the computer was built. The steward program was uploaded by the station. It’s still trying to delete itself.”

  “The station is no help either,” said Aaron. “I even went out the lock and tried chatting with it. About all I got was directions.”

  Minu nodded and continued her explorations. She was splitting her time with trying to understand the tactical systems, the ship’s basic engineering, and the libraries. The latter was by far the most frustrating. She'd been excited a few minutes ago to realize that a vast store of library quality data was locked away in the far recesses of the computer’s memory. Again, without a central controlling intelligence, she couldn't get at it. “Ted, as soon as Pip is out of medical, try to figure out how to get the human codex onto a chip, just in case we have to run for it back to the station.”

  “Will do.”

  Minu turned to engineering and studied the rudimentary 'manual' controls the Steward had shown them. Three types of drives were available. An impulse drive for slow maneuvers, based on an ion propulsion system she'd read about years ago. A gravitic lens drive, which was more of a mystery. The controls were very complicated and implied speeds far beyond her imagination. And finally the tactical drive. Its controls were the most basic by far, simply enter coordinates and it did the rest. The problem was that drive system reported “Unmanned/Unavailable.” Ted was right, there was too much to control, too many systems to oversee. She had eleven crew to call on, including the Rasa, and she didn’t know if it was enough to even undock and putter around the star system. “Do you think you can write a control program?” she asked her two scientists.

  “In a thousand years,” Ted mumbled. Bjorn snorted and laughed.

  “I'm not asking for something like the medical intelligence, just something to tie a few key systems together.”

  “The damn systems won't talk to each other; I tried that as soon as we realized what we had here.”

  “So run them through us where necessary. Use the Steward as an example, it seems to have access to everything except tactical controls.”

  “That might be possible,” he said, scratching his chin and tapping a few holographic keys.

  “Best to save an uncorrupted copy of the Steward,” suggested Bjorn, “just in case.”

  “Good idea,' Minu agreed and got to her feet. “I'm going to go look at something, be back in a few minutes.”

  Chapter 15

  January 15th, 522 AE

  Kaatan Class Cruiser, Firebase Enigma, Galactic Frontier

  Armed with a location in the ship, Minu set out through the curving, interlocking corridors. Var'at had increased their knowledge of the ship’s interior by a great deal, including the location of two dozen crew quarters, all identical, with no fancy captain’s cabin, a number of bays similar to medical, and four large cargo holds ringing the exterior of the ball shaped ship. Inside were thousands of crates, none with any identification or clue what they might contain. Minu decided against messing with their content until later, lest she accidentally unleash some ancient prisoners or inconceivable weapons on her friends. For all she knew, they contained trillions of Styrofoam peanuts, something she'd read about in books. A small docking bay in the rear of the ship held four shuttles and their fighter, delivered by the firebase as promised. The shuttles were somewhat smaller versions of the one they’d rode in with Sally.

  Minu came around a corner and paused, calling up a map of the ship in her mind, then turned left. Right away she could see this hallway was different. It was the same circular shape, but instead of the omnipresent white walls with glowing light bars, it was black with red lights. Everything about it said, beware, you are going somewhere dangerous.

  The corridor ended in a heavy air lock that didn't immediately respond to her presence. Instead one of the now common holographic locks appeared and a voice screeched 'access code required!” Not English, like all the other audible systems were now using, even the Steward.

  “Commanding officer,” she spoke, and instinctively
entered the access code the Weavers taught her.

  “Granted,” jabbered the voice. The lock disappeared, and the door swung inwards. She took a step in and found the gravity suddenly gone.

  “Damn it,” she barked and grabbed at a conveniently placed handhold, “they could at least put a sign up or something!” The room was colored like the corridor, black walls with red lighting. As she moved fully into the round room, her attention was drawn to the center. There rested the unmistakable shape of a Portal dais. She floated over, pushing off carefully and catching the slick feeling steps in her hands. Unlike other Portals though, the archway didn't flash into existence, and this dais didn't glow from the inside. This Portal was shut down, or broken.

  She looked around but found nothing else of interest in the room the ship’s schematics described as the ‘Tactical Drive Room’. But how could it be a ships drive? You couldn't fly something this big through a Portal, and even if you could, what good would it be to have a Portal inside the ship? You'd have to turn the craft inside out to even use it. That thought sent a shiver up her spine. If the old Concordia could move stars…

  She floated around for a few minutes, seeing if anything responded to her. Nothing did. Everything about the room spoke of a shutdown systems. The schematic had this room in the point of the needle, where the cockpit was on Sally’s little ship. The room itself was slightly pointed in one direction. Finally, with nothing more to do, she left the confusing room behind.