Lost Valyr: Project Enterprise 7 Read online

  But there would come a day when the web did too much damage to her mind. And then…

  He jerked as she answered his question and showed him exactly what he wanted to know. The mystical Garradian Galaxy. What had sent them there? It was a question she could not answer from the outside.

  “Can you insert one tiny command in one of them?”

  “I will try…master…”

  He considered punishing her, but really, all she could do is try. The crew of the Najer guarded their code with a fanaticism he could both deplore and admire.

  “Try hard.” He gave her a tiny taste of what would happen if she didn’t try hard. As her body danced and writhed in the web, he sighed with pleasure.

  She hated him with every cell of her body. It was what kept her conscious as the web sent a very precise level of pain through every nerve ending in her body. She had not known there were so many nerve endings in a body until this, until the web. It drained her strength and her will, it took her mind off the task to keep her screams from reaching the computer’s voice processor. She’d have told him so if she thought she could do anything but scream and scream and scream. Perhaps Xaddek realized that he was working against himself because it stopped as abruptly as it had begun—though she knew it would happen again. If he came. If he didn’t. He liked to hurt her almost as he much as he liked her work.

  Somewhere in the past, she’d been free. Almost she’d forgotten that time. It felt distant, like a dream, and it brought a different kind of pain to her mind. But it was also her sole anchor in this sea of black and red pain. She opened a tiny window to that time. She’d had a home, a job she loved, a life. Then a sudden prick of a needle on her neck and when she woke, it was all gone. Replaced by that thing and this room. She’d tried to fight him, to use her skills against him, even as she worked for him. Almost, that had worked. Now he kept her here, trapped in his web. It had spooled out of him, just a few strands at first. A few hot strands that burned, that wrapped her in red-hot fire. She’d fought, tested its limit with the resources he let her keep, lost again and again.

  He’d punished her, restrained her until the only freedom left was inside her head.

  He couldn’t see into her mind, and if he sent the web in there, it would destroy, not reveal. She knew this because he hadn’t sent the web into her head. If he could have, he would have. Since he couldn’t get into her mind, he used her trapped body to torture her, to remind her he was in charge, to break her will to fight him. He also used it to show her what he hadn’t done. Yet. So far he needed her skills more than he wanted to consume her.

  With her mind, she worked to use his system against him. To study his web. In a strange twist, it had allowed her to do as she was told, and it had permitted her to test it. As if they learned together. While she feared that she was teaching it how to keep her contained, what kept her going was the image of Xaddek captive in this web.

  The web had kept one secret from her.

  What would happen if she did break its bonds? It had dug so deeply into her body, it was possible she could no longer survive without it. It refused to let her die. It did not know she lived to destroy it and the monster who had created it.

  She lowered her lids, shut him out, so he couldn’t see defiance in her eyes. He punished her anyway, of course. Why he hadn’t taken her sight, too, she did not know. All her functions were controlled by the web. She knew he could isolate her brain, remove her body if he wanted. That’s all he needed. That’s why he’d isolated her from the rest of this ship. But he’d had to give her the tools to attack the Najer, the other thing he wanted so desperately he’d quelled his hunger to consume her for his evening meal. He’d fire-walled the ship against her, but he’d had to give her outside access to find the Najer. The skills learned in trying to get into the Najer were turned on other ships they came in contact with. Sometimes he used what she gave him to track those ships, so she used them, too, to extend her reach. The ones she was forced to destroy, she learned as much from as she could first, squirreling the data away in her lone firewall: her brain.

  The spider she’d planted on the Najer was a thing of beauty with a single purpose: sending her location data, bouncing it off the ships she’d tagged for Xaddek. She’d learned not to try to do much. The more widespread the attack on their systems, the better the robots aboard the Najer were at defeating it. Her code hid in an inconspicuous piece of data, after burrowing deep into the systems. It was mostly dormant. It sensed when the crew were searching for malicious code and went quiet. And it used their systems to broadcast, hiding in anything and everything it could find. And it did no damage. This was key. It changed nothing except itself. She called it Chameleon.

  What Xaddek didn’t know, what he’d never know if she could help it, was that she’d used the Najer’s planted tracking spider. She’d back tracked it to find them. It was interesting that the Najer felt the need to keep track of this ship. What did they fear? If Xaddek learned the robots tracked him, it would drive him into a raging frenzy. It wasn’t just because she thought it would end with him eating her that kept this from her. She needed that connection.

  It gave her hope.

  Xaddek thought he had the Chameleon’s code because it showed him what he wanted to see. If he or anyone else tried to change it, it would alter, becoming less and less effective, turning more and more in on itself until it disappeared from his sight. And it would stay gone until she called it out again.

  She understood why the Najer fascinated Xaddek. They were the perfect crew for him. He wanted their skills, their fear power, and perhaps he wanted them because they were the one crew he could not eat. He would still consume them by stealing their lives and their will. He wanted them like he’d wanted her. He wanted to turn them into his weapon.

  They fascinated her for a different reason.

  They were very good at not getting caught. So far they’d flicked off almost all of her attempts to penetrate their programming like one would an insect. She’d learned though, from the attempts and from accessing data anywhere she could find it. Encounters. Battles. Trade deals. She knew or thought she knew their one weakness. If she was correct, the Najer could be her salvation. Of course, convincing them to save her might be impossible.

  But she would keep trying.

  It was all she had.

  Rachel looked around, her uneasy survey not that helpful since the light bubble was not big. She tried not to make a mental link between the ticking and things that exploded, things such as self-destructs but it wasn’t easy. She wished she’d been issued a personal weapon. She’d gone through the training at Area 51. Survival, obstacle courses, and shooting range. She’d eventually got over the obstacles, and her shooting had surprised her instructors. And then they’d told her she didn’t need a personal weapon because she was “just a scientist.” Bet Doc had a personal weapon. Or ten of them. No security detail because she was in a “safe” zone. Would have been nice to have a guard. Someone big and strong with tight—okay, don’t go there, Rachel. This is so not a Hallmark romance movie. You’re “just a scientist,” not a single white female looking for that special someone who doesn’t mind a brainy gal with no sidearm. She might have doodled that a few times, but she’d never posted it in a singles forum. Even when tempted—a temptation that was much easier to resist in another galaxy. It made that “let’s meet for coffee” particularly challenging.

  One might feel regret if one blew up today…

  She could call in for help but what could she say? It’s dark and ticking, and I have on a freaking red shirt? She’d get laughed off the outpost. Doc was right. Who took a red shirt on a trip to another galaxy? Or more than one. Just because someone sometime had told her red was her color? Really? Her genius creds were showing some wear today.

  She reminded herself that just because this room was ticking, it did not mean it was about to explode. And she’d gone into dark, empty rooms almost every day since she got to the outpost and jus
t because none of them were ticking did not mean anything.

  “It’s just a clock,” she said, and even though she spoke in a whisper, it echoed a couple of times before fading into…ticking. There were clocks all over the Kikk Outpost. Outside, not inside, but lots of clocks. Actually, it was kind of weird they didn’t have inside clocks.

  This is good, she repeated to herself as she stepped out of the transport module, there is a clock. The lights came on as they did in the other buildings, but the level of illumination was lower and blue. She took a couple of steps forward. The light moved with her, but it did not get brighter, deepening the shadows that lurked just outside the area of illumination. She paused, trying to figure out why she felt uneasy. Other than the ticking, it was not that different from the other places she’d been exploring with Sir Rupert. There was no reason to feel more alone, more isolated. Actually, it was a good thing that they were alone. The one thing she didn’t want to run into with no way to defend herself. Not being alone here would be much scarier.

  “We’re deeper than usual,” she said, more to erase some of the silence. Who were the people who did this? Who had dug this deep into the Kikk moon? What were the secrets housed here? Please let there be some secrets. She had a feeling she’d need some to placate her supervisor, who would probably consider this an important find that she should have reported. “You can’t say they don’t use all the space they had.”

  “No.” Sir Rupert sounded amused.

  Just to her left was a chest-high wall, about the same height as the one up top. If it looked like a security counter, it was probably a security counter. The familiar unfamiliar? That was it, she decided. It felt different because this was alien territory. She was just more aware of the alienness of it all today. With the feeling identified, it receded somewhat.

  “Okay.” Her voice echoed weirdly. Nasty air moved sluggishly from both left and right. She had the impression that corridors stretched from either side, but sensed this main section was circular—for no reason she could define, other than that the shadows seemed to bend.

  She moved forward, light spreading ahead of her so that now she could see work consoles similar to the consoles typical throughout the Kikk Outpost. Ahead of her, a wall emerged from shadow. On it was a sort of circular sculpture or decoration. It was a bit on the grand side, like a company logo in the reception area of a business. Except this was, well, she didn’t know what this was. It’s inner circle had seven symbols. Kind of like a messed up clock, which, as she realized now, it was the source of the ticking, so the clock analogy kind of worked. At least it didn’t look like a bomb. Except for the symbol that pulsed faintly yellow, then red in the sort of three o’clock position.

  “That’s…” She stopped because she wasn’t sure what it was, other than odd. Or a bomb.

  “It’s a Urclock,” Sir Rupert said.

  “Really?” She said it like she knew what that was. Did she? Didn’t feel like she’d heard of it. She’d feel better if that meant it was for sure not a bomb. When the echo of her voice faded, she realized the sound of ticking was louder. And the one pulsing symbol—number three position—pulsed brighter and purple before fading back to yellow and red. “So, it’s three urclock?”

  She glanced Sir Rupert who tipped his head to the side and possibly gave her a Look. She grimaced. “Sorry.”

  He ruffled his feathers. “I’ve heard worse.”

  “It’s not…explosive, is it?”

  Sir Rupert’s head leaned back, as if in surprise. “It’s…” his head tilted to the side “…not clear what it is. The images are muddled and heavily overlaid.”

  So, not a no, then.

  His head bobbed in the direction of the line of consoles. “Are you going to stand here all day or attempt to boot something up?”

  It was a better choice than standing around waiting to be blown up.

  “I’m going to boot it up.” She’d seen all the original Star Wars. There was no try. There was only do. But which was the main console—

  Sir Rupert flew forward and landed on a central console to her right. “This is where you should start.”

  “Then that’s where I’ll start.”

  4

  Turning things on was the easy part. The surfaces were touch sensitive. After that, things got a little more challenging. So Rachel had built a backdoor for herself to speed up the login process. Getting through the first layer of protections was relatively easy. Once in, she took a minute to equalize the pressure in the room. This made her ears pop the rest of the way, but also made the ticking louder. Which made her eye twitch. Thankfully, she had a cure. She turned to her tablet, picked a playlist and set it to play through the intersystem speakers. The Garradians must have liked music, too, or just liked to make announcements, because they had a sassy, outpost-wide sound system. She’d found how wide the first time she’d tried to use it. Luckily, she’d got the range narrowed before the other geeks had traced it back to her. Now soft rock filtered into the room, muting the persistent ticking to a metronome-like background.

  She hooked one of the movable stools and locked it in place—here was another lesson learned—and sat, flexing her fingers and possibly some brain cells. Only then did she start her dance with the database’s deeper levels of encryption, her shoulders moving with the music. She made a move. It blocked her. Same with next three attempts. She was vaguely aware of Sir Rupert moving along the work stations at her back, perhaps studying the Ghosts of Outpost Past, the soft click of his claws becoming part of the music’s beat. And then he faded into the background as she kicked on the mental thrusters and engaged. Was it a good sign when her music list found “Woolly Bully?”

  Her shoulders moved to the music, her fingers stroked across the flat surface, while her eyes noted what the system did to block her and her brain learned from it. She wasn’t sure how long they battled. One minute she thought she was losing and then suddenly she was in. Her neck and back hurt and her playlist was churning out “Free Falling” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got for us,” she muttered, shifting her shoulders to ease the knot that had formed in both her trapezius. Her latissimus dorsi wasn’t happy either. She realized she hadn’t taken off her pack, so she slipped it off and dug out a bottle of water and something to help with the pain. That dealt with, she flexed her shoulders and then focused on the various menus now available to her.

  The first time she’d seen one of these, it had looked like a disorganized mishmash, but now she was more used to them, and her brain automatically began to sort it by functional menus and what might be a path to the good stuff. It helped that she’d started studying the Garradian written language before she left Area 51, so she could read most of the idents on the various menu options. She had a little more trouble with the moving tickers running underneath some of the menu sections. It took her a couple of times through to realize one was an actual alert.

  She tapped the ticker tape, and a holographic screen appeared next to the main menu screen.

  “So this seems to be a summary of all ship movement in the galaxy.” It was kind of an odd option for a medical complex. She studied the visual report, tapping on the different ships. Most had a tag identifying ship type and general purpose. A few were “not known.” She studied those carefully.

  “Pirates?” she muttered. It looked like the pirates were also being monitored up top in the control center.

  “That would be my assessment,” Sir Rupert said, startling her by fluttering over to land on the edge of her console. “Could this be the ghost bogey?” His head bobbed forward, intersecting and briefly disrupting the hologram moving deeper into the Victor Quadrant where a symbol pulsed in and out of view.

  She hesitated. This was not her brief, but she wanted a look. Her professors used to tell her she needed to focus—though they’d stopped when they realized what they needed was to get out of her way. Curiosity was both a blessing and curse.


  “We could take a little peek.” What would it hurt? It wasn’t like she was the enemy. She tapped this alert, opening another holographic screen on the opposite side of her main screen. This produced a 3D representation of all the outposts. That was interesting. There were a series of exclamatory looking markers on this map, tracking all the way from the border of Victor Quadrant. The track of the possible bogey, she assumed. A new marker appeared, and for a second the symbol of a ship appeared, then vanished. There was also a flashing symbol over the first outpost inside Victor Quadrant.

  Sometimes you needed to know where something had come from to figure out where it was going, or so her dad used to claim.

  She tapped that symbol, and a report appeared. In Garradian, of course. She sent the report to her tablet and set it to translate, then activated the blinking outpost’s internal security systems and ran through the vids. It was grainy, the video lens probably needed cleaning, or it was just really old.

  “Pretty paired down compared to this place,” she said, studying as much of the layout as the video would let her see.

  “Indeed.” His wings fluttered a bit. “Go back to the time stamp of the alert,” he recommended.

  She rewound the feed. At first, it looked the same. Then the feed jumped a bit, went sideways, then settled back to merely grainy.

  “Did you see that?”

  “I did.”

  “Some kind of surface impact—?” She reared back. “Holy crap on a saltine.”