Lost Valyr: Project Enterprise 7 Read online

  Hel, Helfron Giddioni, Lead Gadi Diplomat and her ma’rasile, did not take his eyes off the screen currently dominating attention in the room. His lashes flickered once, a sign he knew she’d come in, but Doc also felt him acknowledge her arrival through the link that bound them together. It was always a bit itchy when they got too far apart and, as he liked to put it, “most pleasing” when they were in close proximity. Sadly, closer physical proximity was not possible in a room full of techs and military types, not to mention the scowling visage of General Halliwell being broadcast from the Doolittle. Doc had accepted that the general was never going to like Hel, but she suspected they both exaggerated their animosity because they enjoyed it.

  A guy thing, according to her brother, Robert.

  Doc was not sure Robert knew about “guy things,” having spent most of his life locked in a silent battle with a brain that—like hers—wanted to spin out of control in its search for input. Doc’s brain had been corralled by some sentient nanites, and then, when things settled down, she and Hel had traveled a bit back in time and introduced nanites into Robert. Just as the nanites had done for her, these nanites healed his mind, and in the process freed him from both mental and physical confinement. Then they’d brought him to this time, turning her older brother into her younger brother. At some point, both their sets of nanites had achieved sentience, which was interesting, particularly when she ended up hosting a Lurch, a Fester, and a Grandpa. She did not know how they’d managed to watch The Addams Family, but apparently, they were fans.

  Hel thought it was pretty hilarious most of the time and the nanites were discreet when things got interesting. She’d have been more annoyed, but even with Hel able to mind-talk, it was still only four voices in her head instead of the howling hounds of hell that had plagued her all her life. Having it too quiet in there might have driven her crazy in a different way.

  She’d gotten yelled at by the General for messing with time and Robert’s life, but in the end, things settled down, helped when Robert saved this outpost—and possibly all of time—from being wiped out by some crazy, evil overlord wannabe. That would be why Emily, who he had somehow acquired in the process, had been allowed to stay.

  Emily. Doc gave a silent sigh. Everyone loved Emily.

  As do you.

  Doc recognized this voice as Lurch’s. Hel knew better than to say that to her.

  I’m getting used to her, was all Doc was willing to admit. To end a conversation she hadn’t wanted to start, Doc moved closer to the screens. Thanks to her link with Hel and her nanites, she’d been “watching” the progress of the bogey since the first warning popped up. She missed the days when she could think orders and launch scans with a thought. General Halliwell had made her promise she wouldn’t do that anymore.

  The huddle at the front of the room began to fragment when they realized she was there. What a bunch of wimps. She wasn’t that scary anymore.

  Yes, you are.

  This from Hel, the love of her life.

  Which brings me back to they are a bunch of wimps. She pretended to study the screen, then said, “We need to run possible tracks the bogey might take using the places where the scanning doesn’t completely provide coverage.” And how come they were just finding out the scanning had gaps, she wondered. “If this is a ship,” which she was ninety percent sure it was, “then we need to find out where it’s headed. And can we backtrack and see if it stopped anywhere on its way in? What’s the time lag in our sightings? Are they consistent with a predictable course?” She narrowed her gaze. “If it is using the gaps, where are the scan areas it can’t avoid detection? Can we be ready to hit it with a deeper scan at those points?”

  She hated being behind an incoming bogey. Inside her head, her nanites were busily working on her questions for her, though they also knew not to run ahead of the fingers and brains of the geek squad. They provided Doc with the data so that she was able to stroll up to the screen and point out three possible places the bogey might become visible.

  We make you look well.

  It was a truth she couldn’t argue with.

  “Set up as much scanning as you can here, here, and here.” She frowned. “Where are my projected routes?” She had them, but really, these guys needed to work faster. And she—reluctantly—recognized the value of having multiple points of view. Even she could miss something. Maybe.

  “They could be heading here,” one of the geeks said, highlighting an outpost that was fairly central to the whole network of outposts. “All possible courses intersect with this planet and an outpost tagged by us as Central.”

  Wow, that’s original.

  Grandpa nanite was embracing sarcasm these days.

  “I think it stopped here before heading deeper into the system!” another geek broke in excitedly. He’d identified an outpost on the edge of the galaxy.

  “That’s a defensive outpost, isn’t it?” Hel asked. “Did it manage to get inside the outpost? Did it secure data?”

  Doc was already scrolling through data on the outpost itself. “Not a lot of internal defenses there,” she murmured. She’d have expected better from a border outpost.

  Perhaps they were not concerned with interplanetary intrusions?

  They did seem to be having a lot of inter-system problems, Doc offered in agreement with Hel.

  “And see if there are video feeds there? Maybe we can get a look inside.” Doc added, then she turned back to the first geek. “Let’s see where you think it’s headed.”

  Doc thought she’d kept her tone very neutral, but the geek paled as if she’d threatened him.

  Wimp.

  “Um, someone has already been compiling this data,” the geek looking at the border outpost said, sounding puzzled. “We’ve got security feeds and other data already sitting in a file.”

  “Really?” Hel looked at Doc.

  Transmitted from the orbiting ship, General Halliwell’s scowl deepened.

  “It wasn’t me,” Doc protested, wondering who’d got the drop on her.

  “Let’s see it,” the general ordered.

  5

  “Well, that’s embarrassing,” Rachel said when she got her voice back. So that’s how she looked with a dropped jaw. She needed to make sure that never happened again.

  “So we’re not on Kikk,” she said the words without quite believing them. Though there had been that extra spin in the transport module, now that she thought about it. That could have been when it happened. How could she know? She’d never transported off the outpost before. But seriously? There ought to be some kind of warning before you get sent to a completely different planet. An “are you sure you want to do this?” pop up like on a computer.

  Eager to remove her face from the feed, she changed to the single feed still working up top. Yikes. That was not Kikk. No vegetation, no alien-ivy-covered walls. At all.

  It looked like Mars, one that had been bleached to muted reds and browns, and then pounded by asteroids and other space debris. Sky definitely—albeit a pale orange sky with tangled brown clouds—so it had an atmosphere. She compared current readings to the last readings from the surface sensors. Huge change, though it would not have been what she’d call salubrious. If these readings were correct, the wind could go from nothing to gale whenever it felt like it.

  The camera wouldn’t rotate, but she had a feeling that if it could, the view wouldn’t change much. She dug around and found the last time any of the other topside feeds had worked. Never, what she’d call habitable for humans, which explained, she supposed, the remains of the simple blockhouse-like surface structure.

  Of course, if those were robots or cyborgs, and if they were headed their way, she couldn’t count on the corrosive atmosphere, or the weather to slow them down.

  She began pulling up data on the outpost defenses and overall layout. It felt a bit like an exercise in futility. Those things had had no trouble getting into the other outpost.

  As if he knew what was making
her tense, Sir Rupert said, “This outpost is more heavily protected than that one.”

  “That makes no sense,” she pointed out. “Edge of their region of space should be more heavily defended should it not?”

  “Obviously they were not concerned about inter-galactic intrusions when it was built, but sought to protect their information centers from internal predation.”

  Okay, that made sense based on what she’d heard of the Garradian history. And spreading their stuff around the system could be further protection, she mused, though she knew the Expedition, and the Gadi had believed that Kikk was the end-all, be-all of data storage—and still did. The general wisdom within the Expedition was that the outposts were there to increase scanning and data collection and not much else, with Kikk being the big Kahuna. But she’d just proved them wrong, because she hadn’t even begun to deep dive into things here, and the menu still waiting for her attention indicated there was data storage here. Lots of data. The question was, how wrong had everyone been?

  Well, after the ‘why was a ship of robots headed into the system?’ came the next burning question. What was it they hoped to find? They hadn’t searched the first outpost they raided, just grabbed data and left. Even as her mind worried the questions, part of her knew she and her parrot should get the heck out of here. This was probably not the best location for a gal in a red shirt.

  But if they left—what if this place held the secret to Sir Rupert’s species? He’d been searching Kikk she realized, both past and present. Whatever he’d seen had led them here. What if this was his best lead, best chance to the database they were looking for? If they were lucky, it would lead them somewhere more congenial and less robot target, but it couldn’t do that if they turned tail and ran. They had lots of time before that ship got close, well, probably.

  While the system parsed the timing, she opened another screen. Sir Rupert said this outpost had better defenses. The robots had come at the other outpost from some kind of surface access tunnel. This outpost was also an underground facility, but how far down were they—

  “Dang, we are deep. No wonder my ears didn’t like it.” Would she need to decompress going back, so she didn’t get the bends? She tried to remember what she’d learned about that…then gave an annoyed shake. She had other urgencies to deal with, and surely the Garradians had factored that all into the transport system.

  She found the schematic of what used to be on the surface. Yeah, there’d definitely been a structure around the access tunnel and the tunnel was connected to the internal transport system that had brought them here. The single shaft led from the surface right down to them. They could come in the say way she and Sir Rupert had. If the surface shaft still worked, could they get to Kikk using the backdoor she and Sir Rupert had used?

  “There are indications this could have been a semi-habitable planet at some point. Something catastrophic happened. Or was caused to happen?” Dang, she wished she had time to find out how much planetary change there’d been—focus, Rachel. This time you gotta focus. It wasn’t just the Urclock ticking here.

  “Can the transport module still be accessed from above?” Sir Rupert asked.

  That was a good question. Whether those were robots or not, they appeared to have protective gear that allowed them to go where they wanted. The atmosphere, no matter how caustic, was not going to stop them. If they were lucky, the transport module was too damaged to use. If the tunnel was still passable—but dang, that was a long drop. She frowned, then sighed. She had a feeling those things would find a way down.

  She nosed around, found an integrity assessment program and started it up. For whatever reason, it was going to take time to run the test. She studied the timer’s Garradian symbols. She had a pretty good sense of Garradian time on Kikk. Was time measured differently in different outposts? These were different planets, not just different time zones. She activated the timing macro she’d created to see if she could get a read on what was different and then turned her attention to the tracking screen again. “No sign our squadrons have launched to intercept,” she said. The space around Kikk was still empty, other than the two Earth ships and single Gadi craft in synchronous orbits over the moon where the outpost was located. It was possible they’d deploy in stealth mode, but the tracking on Kikk could still “see” cloaked ships, so she had to assume this one could, too. “Kikk still has the ghost bogey marked as an unknown contact. No threat assessment assigned yet.”

  Could they see as much data as they did? She waited for Sir Rupert to suggest they contact Kikk and report in. Instead, he fluttered his wings.

  “I wonder what information our ghost bogey is seeking?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’ve been wondering that myself. This place has a lot more data than Kikk if reading this menu right.” She stared at the ghost bogey’s flight track. “If they are pirates, they could be looking for almost anything,” she mused, wishing he could assess this “ghost.” Sadly, this was not a situation where the parrot’s special skills would help them.

  Sir Rupert looked around them, taking his time. Then he looked back at the map of the galaxy. As if she knew what he wanted, she added outpost markers for him.

  “This is more than a part of the medical complex, isn’t it?” she asked the question soberly, as the implications of where they were sunk in.

  He gave the parrot version of the shrug/nod which made him puff out for several seconds.

  If this outpost was valuable, was it possible to secure it against the incoming robots? She was not that brave, but she sure hated to leave it for them without trying to do something.

  “How long until they reach this outpost using the shortest mapped route?” asked Sir Rupert.

  While time might be counted differently here, the speed that ships traveled was science, well, mostly. She was assuming this bogey had the same limitations on space travel that they did.

  “I’ll have to use their past tracks…” she moved her fingers on the console “…and assume they won’t change their velocity at any point…” she entered those parameters “…that should give us the shortest transit time…” She had an idea. “I’m also going to set up a special scan at the points where we expect the ship to become visible to scanning. Maybe by being ready for them, we can get more data on their capabilities and such.”

  “That seems wise,” Sir Rupert agreed.

  Rachel hesitated with her hands above her console. What if they were following her thought processes back on Kikk? Doc was probably ahead of Rachel, having had more experience working in this system. If she’d already set up the extra scanning then all Rachel needed to do was get herself added to the reporting without getting caught. She hesitated. This would be her first time going head to head with her, but if Doc was setting up a separate scan, it was a waste of resources for her to duplicate that, and could slow them both down. And she was already in a lot of trouble for being off planet.

  “What’s wrong?” Sir Rupert asked when she didn’t move.

  “I’m wondering if I’ll be duplicating what they are doing back on Kikk.”

  “And you are fearful of Doctor Clementyne.”

  She glanced at him. He was a very observant bird. She grimaced. “Yeah.” She sighed. “I’m going to get chewed out for being off planet without authorization, even if it was unplanned. We should probably already be heading back now that we know.”

  Sir Rupert did not look concerned, but then maybe that was not in his skill set. She carefully poked the bear that was Doc’s data, found she was correct—they had set up scan traps for the bogey—and carefully added herself to the notification list.

  “If we have time to do further evaluations of this facility prior to the possible arrival of that ship, then we should do so,” Sir Rupert said, in a tone that sounded a lot like an order.

  Rachel blinked. It was possible that he outranked her if she factored in Doc and the orders she’d received to render him all assistance. It gave her an out that woul
d be hard for Doc to argue with, well, a little hard. The transit module was maybe twenty feet from where they sat. It would be a pity to retreat prematurely, just because she had on a red shirt.

  “Okay.” She’d almost said, “Yes, sir.” She met his gaze with a look she hoped was resolute. “Let’s see what we can find out while we have time.” She took a deep breath. “I’m going to leave the bogey to Kikk and deep dive into these systems. Let’s see what we can find out before—”

  “Excellent,” Sir Rupert said. She could be wrong, but his head seemed to be higher, and there might have been a little more puff to his feathers. Now that she thought about it, he kind of reminded her of General Halliwell.

  Captain CabeX reached out with his metal hand and made a small adjustment to their course. For some reason, the long, highly flexible digit caught his attention. It had been a while since he’d been this aware of the artificiality of his container. The refinements he’d made were as close to human as he dared go. If the Quh'y ever discovered what he’d done they would seek the destruction of CabeX and his crew and not just their capture. They would never risk leaving them alive.

  Alive. It was ironic.

  The data they’d obtained from the first Garradian outpost was available to him, but he did not waste processor power assessing it. It was true he could do millions of different operations and fly this ship into battle, but it was not necessary when RaptorZ was already working on it. And the truth was, it…wearied him. It was not logical, but there were times when not logical felt better, more human.

  He directed his visual orbs in Kraye’s direction and tracked the interval until Kraye sensed the scrutiny. It was within previous parameters, with a small variation from his normal. Kraye was slightly more attuned to his captain today. Was it because of their location? He’d not been happy about this venture.