Lost Valyr: Project Enterprise 7 Read online

  The door burst outward in a flash of light, dust, and debris. Before it settled shadowy figures strode through the cloud they’d created. Rachel leaned in, trying to figure out what she was looking at. The feed seemed even more grainy since the door was breached. She tinkered with some of the controls.

  “Are they…armored?” Like top to toe armored? It was kind of like watching an old sci-fi flick.

  “They move like a highly trained military unit,” Sir Rupert added. “I see five figures?”

  “I count five, too.” She tried to zoom in on the figure at the front. The feed got more grainy at this level but was not so bad she couldn’t see the red glow as the head turned toward the video as if he sensed scrutiny.

  Rachel might have twitched, even she reminded herself this was old video. These guys were long gone. She played with the controls some more. Was that a metal face? He was tall, judging by the console height and where it hit him—low hip height. Powerful across the heavily protected chest, covered in dark metal and possibly some type of clothing, minimal, and revealing no skin, just more armor. Nothing that constricted movement. Its arms were thick as well, possibly weapons seated just above the wrists. A hood fell back from a cranium that was both sleek and terrifying. “Either that’s very good body armor or—”

  “It is robotic or cybernetic,” Sir Rupert agreed, leaning in, his head tipped to the side. “It is not concerned with possibly being surveilled.”

  “No, he’s not,” she agreed as the lead dude turned away, his attention on the very pared down control center that had only four consoles that she could see. He stopped in front of the console she’d have identified as the primary and lifted an arm. A device emerged from its upper hand and connected—or plunged into—the console with enough force to make Rachel flinch. After a short time, a disturbingly short time, he disconnected, looked at the figure on the side away from the camera and shook his…head. If he spoke, she couldn’t see it. His face didn’t have an obvious mouth. It could be armor, but if it was, holy crap again.

  The team exited the way they’d arrived. Probably a lift tunnel from the surface. With a frown, she dialed the surveillance video back some more and flipped through the feed until she found the surface feed. On the grainy side, but it did give her a reasonable view of a small ship landing, a ramp lowering and the robots, or whatever they were filing out. One had remained on the small ship, she noted. She fast-forwarded to their departure. Sweet little ship, she decided. Using the outpost’s monitoring, she was able to see the small ship rendezvous with a larger ship.

  She made a face. She’d been so proud of how fast she’d hacked into her first console. They made her look like a piker. It had taken the main robot less than a minute to breach and, she presumed, upload data and leave.

  “That’s…disturbing,” she said, trying not to feel chagrined. So they were faster. And taller. And none of them had on red shirts. She had, she looked around, a parrot. They didn’t have a parrot who saw ghosts. Go, Team Rachel.

  “Indeed,” Sir Rupert said, his tail feathers moving now. “If that is the ghost bogey—”

  “—it is on the bogey’s track,” Rachel put in.

  “—what is its next destination?”

  She looked at him.

  “It did not seem to find what it sought,” the parrot pointed out.

  She wasn’t sure how he could tell that. It’s not like they threw a fit or anything. Still, she couldn’t see where they turned around and left the Quadrant.

  She turned back to the screen, pondering her next move. “If the markers are their ship, how come they are not getting picked up better by the outposts’ scanning.” As far as she’d heard, the combined scanning of all the outposts was unparalleled. Magical even.

  “They are using the places where the scanning has gaps,” Sir Rupert said.

  There were gaps in the scanning? That was news to her, which it would be since she hadn’t been read into that data. Not her circus, not her monkey. “That’s fairly brilliant. I wondered why they were jinking so much.” Did the powers that be know there were scanning gaps?

  “Can the system project a possible course for this ghost ship?”

  “Probably not a single course. It’s a big system.” She worked the controls, and after a time, several projected courses appeared on the screen. But all of them crossed over one planet. “It seems to be headed toward that outpost.” She pointed at it, noting it was as centrally located as was possible with the arrangement of planets in the galaxy. “Assuming that’s where they are headed, I wonder what interests them there?”

  “Perhaps we should take a closer look.”

  Since this is what she wanted to do, she took this as permission. She tapped some more controls on the surface in front of her, then blew out a shocked breath. “It’s active. Someone is in there. I didn’t know we had people that far out from Kikk.”

  “Can you access the video feed?”

  She was pretty sure she could, but should she? She looked at the parrot who gave her a “why not” flutter of the wings. She was already in pretty deep. She shrugged and worked the controls until a third holographic screen appeared to her right. “I think I’m in…” Her voice trailed off as the feed opened into a control room. And showed a startled face…her face. And next to her, Sir Rupert with his head tipped to the side.

  “Crap.”

  “On a saltine,” Sir Rupert agreed.

  Kraye paused just inside the hatch for the cramped bridge of the Najer. When it had been designed, the comfort of its crew hadn’t been considered because robots didn’t have feelings. Not to mention that getting onto and off the bridge presented no problem for the multi-jointed robot crew. The only exception had been a station for the human overseer at the top of the bridge near the hatch. It had been removed when the robot crew mutinied, as evidenced by the gap none of them had tried to fill, not even their human crewmate.

  Kraye had not joined in the sense that he’d been asked. He’d been a slave, too, and had made a break for freedom that wasn’t going well. The captain, CabeX, had seen Kraye’s heat signature, observed the pursuit, picked him up, and carried him on board. The Najer had been built for the transport of humans, so they were able to accommodate his needs. At first, he’d been treated like a curiosity, a pet or ignored. Mostly ignored.

  Kraye hadn’t minded being ignored. He’d feared that he’d exchanged one captivity for another. In hindsight, he realized it hadn’t occurred to CabeX to explain why he’d rescued Kraye. When Kraye realized he wasn’t locked in, he’d ventured out, exploring his surroundings with a mix of curiosity and suspicious fear. Finally, out of boredom, he’d started to help in small ways, growing bolder when his help was accepted without comment. Free from hunger and fear, Kraye discovered he could be what he’d never dared to be as a slave. He could be curious and smart, and he was a fast learner. After even more time, Kraye became the human face of the crew, their voice when forced to deal with other humans, or in dealing with the occasional human passenger. One thing Kraye had learned in captivity was how to read body language and expressions—if they were available to be read. It did not bother him that he was the only crew member with expressions, not when he was also free.

  There weren’t a lot of passengers, human or otherwise. Mostly the ship traded in goods, exchanging them for the parts they needed for themselves and their ship—something more critical to them than the accumulation of wealth.

  A while back another ship’s captain—a human one—had offered him a job as his first officer. Kraye didn’t hesitate to turn it down. The Najer was his home, the motley robot crew the only family he could remember. CabeX gave no indication he appreciated what Kraye had done, but within the year he was promoted to First. If any of his shipmates were jealous, they gave no sign of it. Kraye had no idea how much they felt, even after many years with them. None of them tried to kill him, which he took as a positive sign.

  Emotion of any kind was in short supply on the Najer. Si
nce his experiences with humans as a slave were less than optimum, his sole measuring stick with the captain and crew was what they did. Their matter-of-face predictability suited him, though Kraye was aware that those who that hunted them were not able to see that predictability.

  In a rare moment of expansiveness, CabeX had once explained that their pursuit was hampered by a flawed understanding of the robots’ programming. Kraye took this to mean that his former masters had failed to account for the programming changes that had occurred after the robots took charge of their own lives. They were blinded by their preconceptions. One of the things CabeX feared—if it could be called fear—was pursuit by his own kind. For now, these robots were bound by the limitations of the masters. If they could find a way to “free” a robot, while retaining its loyalty, they might experience difficulty, according to RaptorZ, the true second in command of the Najer.

  The other thing CabeX feared were systemic viruses. Attacks on his base code. The Najer was a walled fortress since data was a currency they could not avoid using. Lucky for them, they had the ability to assess micro level code at macro level speeds, thanks to the near-constant attention of MicroP. The firewalls he created had redundancies of their redundancies. And any data they received from any source was kept isolated from ship systems and crew until both MicroP and TalusH went over it and through it. There was a protocol for observing information that Kraye didn’t even try to understand. It was the one thing he’d never gone near—or been given even minimal access.

  His one certainty—which Kraye shared with the captain and crew—was an unwavering commitment to freedom. They would self-destruct before becoming slaves again. It bound them together and directed all their actions.

  “Captain, First requesting permission to take his position on the bridge.”

  CabeX would have seen him before he entered. The ship was plastered with video, though Kraye was allowed to shut it off in his quarters. But asking and receiving permission to act or not act was part of their freedom programming.

  “Permission granted.” According to RaptorZ, CabeX had modeled his synthetic voice to be similar to one of the scientists who had designed him, a voice CabeX considered “pleasing.”

  It would have been more pleasing to the human ear if CabeX could master emotional range. Instead, it was pleasingly flat, like a single note being played over and over on an instrument. Though Kraye did consider it a virtue that it wasn’t as harsh as CabeX’s original programmed vocals, which RaptorZ had played for him. Of course, those had been designed to intimidate and terrify. It was an irony his former masters would never learn: the super robot soldier abhorred violence. How that crept into his programming, only CabeX knew. When they’d taken the ship, each human on board had received a judgment of mercy or death. Each freed robot was allowed to speak for or against the humans. The ones that lived probably still didn’t know why since it all happened at the processor level.

  And it had definitely enhanced the reputation of Najer. To be surrounded by the most terrifying robots ever conceived, your fate decided out of your sight and sound? Even the ships attracted by the amount of the bounty offered for their capture were reluctant to take on CabeX and his Najer. It was the not knowing, Craye decided as he eased his way through ports and controls, and settled into his place. Though he tried not to think of his time before the Najer, he knew that not knowing summed up the worst horrors of being a slave, right up there with no control at all over your own destiny.

  Kraye suspected that had he not…assimilated…he would have released at some port or other. They weren’t…kind. Or unkind. They just were.

  Kraye was not sure what he was, other than one of them.

  He strapped in, then logged into his station. This was his place. It was not a comfortable one. He could have requested modifications and received them, but he didn’t. His quarters were the only place he manifested his humanness.

  CabeX’s head turned his direction, the muted glow of his red eyes illuminating the lower part of his metal face, the slow nod an acknowledgment of Kraye’s presence. Though he was the only member of the crew that needed regular rest, CabeX had shift hours that were not unlike those on other ships. Was it for Kraye? He did not know. Just as he was not sure why they had ventured into this relatively unknown region of space. He’d heard the rumors when they’d been docked. Rumors of a highly developed race of beings who had abandoned outposts filled with valuable technology.

  Well, no one loved tech more than a robot, but this was old tech. If CabeX could be deemed to have character, it was out of it. It wasn’t curiosity. Kraye was the sole possessor of that on this ship. Kraye had not seen the source of the intel they were using for this foray, but that was not unusual. If there were anyone on this ship who could accidentally unleash a system virus that would be Kraye.

  Whoever had provided the data, so far it had proved decent. Had to have been someone who’d been here, or bought from someone who had been here, since it had mapped a series of outposts and their scanning capabilities. And places where that scanning coverage declined in quality or had actual gaps. The Najer was exploiting those gaps almost perfectly which it would with CabeX at the controls. They’d been in system for several days now, had managed to breach one of the outlying outposts, and were now threading their way carefully toward their next target.

  So far, there’d been no sign they’d been detected.

  Because of their safety protocols, the data from the outpost was still being processed. They would use what they learned from how their probe performed there, to update the settings on the next probe before it was launched.

  Kraye studied the master screen that showed the position of all the outposts with an overlay of scanning coverage. It was as thorough as was possible with the layout of the planets. It was also possible there had been some planetary drift that had affected the original scan coverage. No one was sure when the beings had abandoned this place, other than a long time ago. The course screen showed a minute adjustment in their course. The Najer would skim along the edge of the scan coverage area. It was a nice course, but they’d still be marginally visible for the longest time so far.

  Their tracking showed no sign that any of the ships moving around this small galaxy were aware of them. Of particular concern was a smallish outpost on a moon orbiting a planet known locally as Kikk. It was, according to their intel, the only heavy military presence of concern. The species that called themselves Gadi were concentrated in their own region of space, despite the fall of the Dusan, who had occupied this region. The word of their fall had been slow to filter out because no one messed with the Dusan. No one who lived remembered why, but…no one wanted to find out. It was assumed that the Gadi had won their long war, but there were also rumors of a new ally who had assisted them, allies who remained on Kikk.

  Their careful scans of the ships around the Kikk Outpost were inconclusive since they lacked data on Gadi ships’ configurations. It was clear that two of three ships orbiting there were similar in design and one was not. In a more active galaxy, they could have picked up transmissions and broadcasts, culling what they could from those, but so far there’d been little to collect. It was clear, from the one other planet they had checked out, that something catastrophic had occurred in Dusan space. Grim cities were empty of life, and there were signs that the end had come without warning.

  An alert pulsed on the screen. They’d been briefly detected by the scanning technology.

  “What was our level of exposure?” Kraye asked as the ship slipped back into a dead zone.

  “Not long enough for definitive identification.” CabeX used a long metal finger to adjust a setting though he did not need to. He had full control of the ship through a system’s link direct to his thoughts.

  “Any signs of activity or interest on or around our next target?” Some of the outposts showed signs of human heat signatures, but all of these were closer to the Kikk Outpost. Since they’d breached the galaxy, there’d been
no sign of ships orbiting either their past target or their next one. The monitoring screen updated. This time it showed the outpost as active. “Could they have seen us? Extrapolated our course?”

  There was a small silence. It never took the captain long to think, not with the number of processors at his command.

  “It is possible,” he admitted. The tone of his voice did not change, but it never did. The monitoring screen zoomed in on the target, and a deeper scan was initiated.

  “I see one humanoid and a smaller heat signature that is tagged as possibly avian,” Kraye said, even though the Captain had received the data before it could travel from Kraye’s eyes to his brain.

  “No surface or orbiting spacecraft,” CabeX murmured, almost thoughtfully.

  “Then how did they access the outpost?” Kraye asked.

  “According to the data we acquired at our first stop, there is an interplanetary transport system.”

  Kraye gave a silent whistle. “How extensive is it, I wonder?”

  “That data was not available.”

  Though CabeX had not used the word “yet” at the end of that sentence, Kraye had a feeling there was one. The data dump from the border outpost might show this way into the systems if they were all connected.

  Kraye studied the distance they still needed to traverse. “How close is our probe to being ready?”

  He couldn’t hear CabeX making the calculations, but he sensed them. “On our present course, it will not be ready in time. We will adjust course.”

  He did. Kraye smiled to himself. If someone was watching them, the course change might confuse them. They did not want to kick the griphel’s nest on Kikk. That would be messy, and CabeX hated messy. The goal was to get in, get what they needed, and get out—either on to the next outpost or out of the system.

  Doctor Delilah Olivia Clementyne, “Doc” for flashed her badge at the sentry, before running up the stone steps of the main structure on the Kikk Outpost. With a last look at the sun, she entered and climbed more stairs to the central command. It was more like a university than a military post until she reached the room with all the alien technology. Consoles and screens helped them track movement throughout what they called the Garradian Galaxy.