Event Horizon (Hellgate) (105 page)

“It ought to be,” Jazinsky snorted. “Right inside the casing it’s like any Zunshu probe or
thing
we ever salvaged back in the Deep Sky. Congratulations, folks. We just hit the mother lode.”

“But it’s … dead.” Dario was taking readings off the apparatus itself now. “Mark, you remember the live probe we caught one time. We spent years negotiating with it, getting inside its mind, before it melted itself down to keep its secrets.”

“As if I’m likely to forget.” Mark was adjusting his sensors. “I always believed I’d glimpsed into the Zunshu mind itself. Any AI can only ever be a mirror image of its creator. I caught one glimpse into the Zunshu mind, and it was … cool, rational, multi-dimensional – alien. I thought it was beautiful.”

“Like this place.” Marin physically shivered. “It
is
beautiful, and cool – but the way it’s made is like those puzzles. You know the ones, Neil, with the stairways to nowhere and the doorways leading right back to where you just came from.”

“I know them,” Travers growled. “Lai’a, anything moving?”

“Nothing, Colonel Travers.” Lai’a paused. “There is no movement within a kilometer of your position in any direction, save for the tiny schooling creatures, the grazing livestock, and approximately 300 of the large forms identified as some captive species, or low caste of Zunshu. And they,” it added, “appear to be cowering. Some have taken to the passages we assumed were technical access ways, and have frozen in locations where their shells make them virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding surfaces. Recent observations show they have the ability to drop their body temperature to ambience with their surroundings.”

Marin’s nerves gave a prickling start. “You mean, they could be all around us and we don’t see them, can’t detect them?”

“Yes.” Lai’a paused. “Be on your guard.”

“I thought,” Vidal snapped, “you said you detected no weapons.”

“And I do not,” Lai’a said imperturbably, “but you have entered an area rich in apparatus. Machinery,” it added pointedly, “can be configured to explode, implode, short-circuit and emit acids or corrosives. Ostensibly harmless apparatus has a high potential for weaponization.”

“Shit – it’s right,” Vidal muttered. “I’m getting slow. Anything on deep scan from the outer system, Lai’a?”

“Nothing, Colonel,” it assured him. “The transspace drive is secure. Your way back to the boarding tube is open. Captain Vaurien is technically deceased at this point, while nano repair an aneurism in the left frontal lobe of his brain. Body temperature has been lowered to 32
^o
C; cardiac restart in just over two minutes.”

“Sweet Christ,” Jazinsky breathed, “I wish I believed in something to pray to.”

“What is this thing, this
Swee’cryzed
?” Midani Kulich wondered, preoccupied as he summoned the nearest drone and popped open its service hatch. Inside was the full toolkit required for maintaining the mechanism.

“Ask me later,” Jazinsky muttered, “I’ll tell you what my ancestors believed.”

“
Hemshenor
,” Midani guessed. “How you are saying it, Mark?”

“You say deity,” Mark told him.

“Deetee.” Midani was sorting tools, talking absenting. “I saying …
I say
. Deetee.”

“Day-
itty
,” Dario reiterated, enunciating sharply. “Like our own ancestors. Remember your history class. The statues and paintings from On’luve.”

“Daytee… ah! Here, being like this, getting goodly, right-tool-for-a-job!” Midani brandished a slim blue case.

He and the Sherratts seemed to know what they were doing, and they were so busy, they had lost any perception of time. Marin was edgy, anxious, stalking the perimeter set by the gundrones for the sake of doing
something
while the Resalq seemed to fiddle with tools he recognized and procedures he did not.

“Hey, Curtis – relax,” Travers said quietly. “I’m supposed to be the one climbing the walls.”

“I’m not climbing any wall,” Marin informed him. “But every Dendra Shemiji nerve in my entire body is telling me to either vanish or find a defensible position, and we can’t do either.”

It was Shapiro who said, “This is their computer core. I’d say this is a pretty defensible position. They’re not likely to shoot or launch missiles with their AI core right behind us.”

“Unless it’s expendable,” Vidal mused. “It’s small, Harrison … I’m thinking, this might be a node. There could be scores, hundreds, just like it across the platform. In which case they can lose one node and not even notice it was gone.”

“It doesn’t have to be large, Mick,” Dario said over his shoulder as they worked. “All the Zunshu tech we ever researched was comparatively tiny. They can put a sophisticated AI into a bloody thimble. Don’t let the apparent size of the thing fool you. In Zunshu terms, it’s
humungous
. It’s a monster.”

“Big enough to run this whole structure?” Vidal hazarded.

“And the planet, and the whole star system, and their war.” Mark did not look up from the work. “Hush now, this is delicate.”

“You’ve, uh, done this stuff before, haven’t you?” Vidal whispered.

“Many times,” Dario crooned. “The only thing different here is, we’re in an aqueous environment, and on the other side of this silicon-dioxide membrane is a dry chamber pressurized with carbon monoxide, enveloping a mechanism which may not take kindly to being hosed down with water that’s heavy with every mineral you can think of. Now,
shush
.”

They had attached a vacuum-sealed maintenance capsule to the membrane and pumped it out. The seal was secure and, inside, a hair-fine beam was separating glass crystals at the molecular fracture lines. The diameter of the capsule was wide enough to permit a gauntleted hand to pass through, and its center was a smart valve. The nearest point on the six-meter case of the AI core was well within reach. As Dario and Midani obsessed over the vacuum seal, Mark was already configuring a finger-thick conduit. A cable passed through it; on one end, an eight-point plug already socketed into the nearest gundrone, on the other end, a wad of smart-gel in a dry pack. The nano were configured to extrude into any socket, on contact.

Marin might have fretted about compatibilities in current and baud rate, but Lai’a had already deep scanned the AI. It was enormously sophisticated, but mechanically identical to the AI at the heart of the Kjorin stasis chamber.

“Hold on,” Dario whispered, “one more second … one more second …
got it
! We’re through. Lai’a – is the thing awake? Does it know we’re in?”

“No response, Doctor,” Lai’a told him. “It appears you are correct. The machine has malfunctioned. This,” it said baldly, “is almost certainly the reason I have suffered no attempt to override my processes. Any such assault could only have issued from an AI of comparable or greater sophistication than myself; and it is defective.”

“Which suits us,” Mark decided. “Have you scanned it sufficiently to run any diagnostic?”

“Superficial diagnostics only,” it warned. “The mechanism appears to be extremely old, and has not been maintained in an appropriate manner. Power cells have exceeded their potential to accept or retain energy levels sufficient to power the core. The AI is compensating by allowing power to accumulate for up to an hour, and then coming online for periods measuring in one or two seconds. These bursts of activity are sufficient for it to monitor and regulate machinery operating across this structure.”

For a moment Mark hesitated in the act of feeding the cable through the valve. “Then, it could be aware of you, Lai’a, and us.”

“It probably is,” Lai’a said calmly. “However, its resources are too meager for it to harass me. It could easily deploy automata to harass your party, Doctor Sherratt. The fact it has not done so indicates that no such automata exist.”

“Which is weird enough to make your blood run cold,” Vidal growled. “Get on with it, Mark. I’m starting to look for shadows to jump at. Make it quick.”

“Quick,” Mark warned, “is a relative term. We’ll be transferring data as fast as the gundrone’s command channel permits, and I’d like to empty out the database. It could be a download of stunning proportions.”

“You’re in luck,” Travers told him with grim satisfaction. “Modern gundrones are smarter and faster than they’ve ever been. The reason they’re so smart is, they deploy with only default behaviors. Their brains stay home on the gunship. Everything they see is uploaded for analysis. Their commands squirt in microsecond pulses through the J-layer, tickling e-space – way beyond comm jamming. These guys
hose
data.”

“All right, then.” Dario’s tone was dark, rich. “Let’s get some power to this puppy … not enough to wake the AI, just enough to make basic functions accessible. Lai’a, you want us to poke around in there…?”

“No, Doctor.” A thread of eagerness sharpened the AI’s normally serene voice. “I will be infinitely more swift. I know the structure and language of the Kjorin stasis chamber’s core controller. From preliminary deep scan results, this machine is merely a more sophisticated version of the same technology.”

“Equal to yourself?” Mark asked as Dario and Midani teased a power line out of the gundrone.

The smart-gel connector at the nose of the cable fed through the valve, and Dario muttered, “Gimme a steer here, Lai’a. Damned if I can see any power coupler. Where does it want to be fed?”

“Pass control of the cable to me, Doctor,” Lai’a offered. “Its sockets are on the opposite side of the case from your position. Also, the whole casing is extremely old and delicate; all power and data sockets are atrophied, despite the carbon monoxide environment.”

Travers was intent on the smart-cable, which coiled and reared like a snake with its own micro servos embedded in the jacket. It might have been alive. “Why carbon monoxide?”

“Less oxygen – less oxidization,” Dario reasoned, “it’s dead easy to make, and to pressurize ... here we go.”

A flicker of power had appeared in the ancient machine, just enough for Marin’s sensors to detect a faint trace of warmth, a hum of old, old crystal-matrix holographic circuits flickering to life on a level far too low to permit the AI to wake.

“Lai’a, will the power cells absorb this current?” Dario asked.

“No,” Lai’a assured him. “They are deteriorated past the point of storage potential. Power is adequate only for our purposes. Please extrude the data conduit.” And then, without any pause or change in tone, “Captain Vaurien’s brain chemistry has been rebalanced; hepatic and renal function are normalizing. Pulmonary function is compromised by massive edema. Doctor Grant is configuring nano therapy to correct this; the cryogen tank remains on standby.”

As it finished speaking the wad of smart-gel oozed into place on, around, inside, the data socket, and Dario stood back. “That’s it, Lai’a. That’s all we can do. Good enough?”

The gundrone’s control panel had lit up at once as Lai’a began to use it as a military-grade router. Marin’s instruments registered a thermal bloom in the drone, a shriek of comm activity, before Lai’a said, “Quite adequate, Doctor Sherratt. I have access to the computer core. The AI remains dormant. I am temporarily disengaging its higher functions.”

“Temporarily?” Vidal echoed.

“You mean, why not just shut it down?” Shapiro asked. “Because when we leave it still has a job to do, in one-second bursts of life. It keeps this structure in trim –”

“While nobody here seems to know enough to service it,” Jazinsky added, “even to the tune of changing its power cells once every few centuries!” She made sounds of frustration. “A dead AI at the heart of a city-sized installation filled with creatures who only know how to run away and hide. And we’re sure,
positive
, these creatures are the Zunshu?”

“This is a Zunshu computer core,” Mark said slowly, “classic technology from the height of their war effort, and it’s looking after them to the best of its ability, even though it’s almost dead itself.”