A Path in the Darkness Read online

  The woman raised her gun and time seemed to slow for Tanis. She shoved the captain aside as the woman let out a cry and fired her weapon.

  In a split second Tanis calculated the angle of the barrel and trajectory of the bullet. It would hit her. She jerked her prosthetic arm up and braced for impact while throwing her lightwand.

  The lightwand entered the woman’s face through her cheekbone, dropping her with a scream. Tanis raced toward the assailant, barely aware that four bullets had struck her.

  The woman was writhing in pain as Tanis approached and tore the lightwand up and out through the top of her head, ending her pain.

  The captain was beside her in a moment, scooping up the woman’s weapon.

  “Are you hit?” he asked.

  Tanis grimaced and nodded as she picked up speed, pulling him across the street.

  Angela supplied.

  More shots rang out as they dashed across the intersection. One caught Tanis in the right shoulder and another grazed the captain’s leg.

  “Don’t stop!” Tanis ordered while catching the lightwand as it fell from her numbed right hand. This was the last time she listened when someone told her to go anywhere unarmed.

  People scattered as they ran down the sidewalk, shoving anyone too slow to move out of the way.

  “Get down,” Tanis called out to the people on the street, afraid that a bullet meant for her would end an innocent’s life.

  Angela said.

 

  Most of the pedestrians dropped to the ground, but enough took off running that Tanis and Andrews managed to disappear into the milling crowd long enough for them to make it to the taxi stand.

  Angela had repaired enough of the nerve damage in Tanis’s right shoulder that her hand functioned again. She swapped the lightwand again and grabbed the door of the first cab with her prosthetic arm, ripping it open and tossing out the driver.

  The captain crashed into the seat beside her and Tanis hammered the accelerator while cranking the wheel. The groundcar spun around and took off away from the attackers. Several stray shots hit the back of the car causing Tanis and Andrews to duck instinctively.

  “That was bracing,” the captain said.

  Tanis looked over to see that he was pale and shaking slightly.

  “Are you hit anywhere other than the leg?” she asked.

  Andrews looked himself over. “I don’t think so, my internal checks all pass…I do seem to be having a blood pressure issue from the sheer terror,” he said with a weak smile.

  “I guess I’m more used to it than I should be,” Tanis replied as she cranked the wheel, sliding around a corner, missing oncoming traffic by less than a meter.

  The captain was gripping his chair and the dashboard. “I’m not augmented like you, you know. A bullet to the head—or a car for that matter—will kill me.”

  “Noted,” Tanis replied. “I’m more worried about bullets, they’re trying to hit us—the cars are trying not to.”

  The car’s holo overlay showed two other taxis in close pursuit. Their attackers must have also commandeered transportation.

  “Where is local law enforcement?” the captain asked, looking out his window into the air.

  “It’s inaccessible,” Tanis replied. “I’ve been trying it for some time, but it keeps responding as busy. I’m guessing whoever is after us has some sort of a hack in place.”

  “What are our options?” the captain asked.

  Tanis threw a cloud of nano into the air, sending it behind their car.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll have these clowns off our tails in no time.”

  Angela directed the nano to the engines of the cars behind them. The electronics yielded to the military grade nano and the cars’ engine stopped and the brakes engaged.

  The nano sent back a final image of their attackers before the internal safety mechanisms engaged, saving the passengers from certain death as the cars went from one hundred kilometers per hour to zero in a matter of seconds.

  Tanis saw the enraged face of the man she had passed on the street when they left the Enfield office tower. What was she carrying that he would go to these lengths to get it?

  She slowed from her breakneck speed and programmed the car to take them to a nearby parking garage where they would switch vehicles before driving to the airport.

  “Your nano is really quite effective,” Andrews commented.

  Tanis nodded. “Only the best for the TSF. But somehow I think that my nano is not worth a lick beside whatever is currently holed up in my liver.”

  Andrews placed his hand on hers, sending a direct message.

 

  CALAMITY

  STELLAR DATE: 3241790 / 08.15.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: GSS Intrepid, AI Primary Node

  REGION: LHS 1565, 0.5 AU from stellar primary

  Forty years later…

  The Intrepid lost control of its drive system.

  The ship’s AI detected a fault in the neural nodes that managed the fusion engines. It failed over to the backup systems but those nodes crashed and went offline. Milliseconds later, power failures cascaded across the ship taking out key systems. In less time than a human took to blink the AI felt more than a fifty-percent reduction in its ability to think.

  The AI, named Bob by its human avatars, ran through priorities. First on the list: take the fusion reactors and the antimatter annihilator offline while he still could. If they were cut off from him there would be no way to detect, let alone stop, a runaway reaction.

  He initiated a controlled shutdown only moments before losing all access to the stern of the ship. The few sensors responding via wireless interface showed that the commands succeeded.

  Bob gave the AI equivalent of a sigh of relief.

  With the ship’s reactors no longer producing power, the ship’s systems began switching over to superconductor batteries. Several neural nodes powered back up for several seconds until an explosion amidships sent shock waves through the decks as one of the SC battery banks took on heavy load and overheated. Bob ran through the power distribution. It was well below even nominal draw, there was no reason the bank should have failed, let alone exploded.

  More banks started failing—though less catastrophically than the first—until there were more batteries were offline than functioning. As a result, large sections of the ship were powered down and what neural nodes were left began switching over to internal backup energy.

  Another explosion rocked the ship and reports streamed in from the bow. Visual inspection showed a large hole in the ES ramscoop emitter. Bob looked over the logs and could find no indicators pointing to any failures, anywhere. Everything should be working correctly.

  With the ramscoop offline, the few small fusion generators running were now on stored fuel. Bob checked the reserves and found that, while deuterium and helium-3 were at acceptable levels, lithium was critically low. Yesterday’s logs showed a million tons of lithium.

  What was going on?

  Bob dedicated what processing power was left in the remaining bow neural nodes to pouring through the ship’s logs. He discovered subtle errors and inconsistencies. After a few minutes the realization dawned on him that his sensors were reporting false data. A minute later he confirmed even the positioning sensors had been reporting the starship’s vector incorrectly.

  They were not passing by the star named LHS 1565, they were falling into it.

  The knowledge lent a sinister look to the star’s dim red light. At a fraction of Sol’s luminosity, and a mass of only 115Mj, it was on the smaller end of the stellar scale, not far beyond the threshold of being a brown dwarf—a fact that wouldn’t stop it from vaporizing the Intrepid in its corona.

  He took a fractio
n of a second to consider the notion of seeing starlight as sinister. Such an action was not something he had been capable of before his first mental merge with his human avatars, Amanda and Priscilla. Having his mind melded with theirs provided new insights and perspectives, the most prominent of which was currently suspicion.

  It was also strange that in the two minutes since Bob had sounded the general alert, no humans had responded. Gollee was on duty at present, and he was never more than a thought away, but now the AI couldn’t find him. What few internal scanners still functioned showed no sign of the on duty crew.

  Before the ship had left Sol forty years ago there had been a few random failures that were chalked up to sabotage. The STR Corporation had gone to great lengths to stop the Intrepid from getting to the New Eden colony and many known sabotages did occur. Either some had gone undetected, or a second group had been involved.

  Either way, whoever was shutting down the Intrepid was onboard now; but with the ship falling into a star, they wouldn’t be for long.

  Bob checked the status on the servitors he had dispatched to survey the damage across the ship and found he had lost their signal. He was losing all signal across the ship.

  The wireless transmitters were going offline and his distributed network was dangerously fragmented. Bob shut down all but his primary node to prevent a schism and gained a small insight into what the fear of death was like.

  Preservation protocols began writing data and algorithms to crystal in an attempt to store his latest state.

  Those imperatives satisfied he reviewed the remaining options. Humans were needed to solve the riddle. His remaining transmitters received a response from only the closest stasis chamber. He looked over the list of humans within the pods and realized all may not be lost. Tanis Richards was in that chamber. If anyone could get to the bottom of what was going on it would be her.

  Correction. It had to be her.

  Bob initiated the protocols to retrieve the human and was about to provide her with a message on the general shipnet when all access beyond his node was cut off. He attempted to resend, but nothing worked. All physical connections were severed.

  Bob spent several long minutes trying backup systems and alternative data paths. His desperation increased and, for the first time in his life, Bob wished for a body.

  It would fall to Tanis.

  ALONE IN THE DARK

  STELLAR DATE: 3241790 / 08.15.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: GSS Intrepid, Officer Stasis Chamber B7

  REGION: LHS 1565, 0.5 AU from stellar primary

  Tanis stared at the holo alerts around her. The words didn’t make sense. She checked the general shipnet and found the same information. This couldn’t be right. She had been awakened too soon… or was it too late? Everything seemed to be offline or failing.

  Angela started.

  Tanis said, feeling as though she was blind, unable to see data on the nets, limited to just her own eyesight and hearing.

  Angela examined the ship’s vector.

  “I noticed that,” Tanis said aloud, though her AI could hear her internal thoughts. Angela was a distinct entity, but also occupied a portion of Tanis’s brain. Even if she didn’t have access to auditory pickups, she could read many of her host’s outermost thoughts.

  Angela asked.

  Tanis didn’t know. The ship AI’s presence had always been close, like a looming mountain on the shipnets. One of the most advanced AI ever created, she couldn’t imagine what would shut down or block it.

  “First things first,” Tanis said. “We need more intel. There’s no data on the duty officers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t around somewhere. Let’s get to the bridge.”

  Angela asked.

  Tanis looked at the rows of stasis pods, her gaze lingering on Joseph Evans’ in particular.

  “They should be safe. Pods have their own backup power supplies. Besides, I’m going to recode the door and seal it.”

  Angela signaled her approval and within minutes they were moving through the ship to the bridge.

  The corridors were empty, and only the occasional dim emergency light provided illumination. Tanis added IR and UV overlays to her vision, as well as a structural overlay to ensure she stayed on the right path. Angela released a cloud of nano to scout ahead and keep an eye out behind them as well.

  Angela said.

  Tanis asked.

  the AI responded. Even though the cold didn’t bother her, she was dependent upon Tanis for energy and connectivity. If Tanis died, she died.

  Tanis gave a stoic smile. “Then we better get things fixed up. Plus, if we don’t smash into a star we’ll still freeze to death.

  Angela said.

  The empty corridors stretched on with no sign of life or recent use. She estimated the distance to the bridge to be just over a kilometer, provided there were no sealed hatches on the way, she would be there in a matter of minutes.

  Tanis found herself wondering why she was awakened. No other stasis pods showed any signs of reviving their occupants and there was no data left for her on the net. It had to be Bob who brought her out of stasis, but why not leave her with some information?

  They passed through the forward commissary, cutting behind the food stands and through Chef Earl’s main kitchen, then into the executive dining room. It was a shortcut that would take them to a hall one level down from the bridge deck and only a few hundred meters aft.

  The dining room was dark, chairs were stacked along the wall and the tables showed a thin layer of dust. It drove home that forty years had passed. By Tanis’s reckoning, she had left this room only hours before.

  It was odd that it lacked more recent signs of use; it was one of the closest dining rooms to the bridge. Surely the duty officers would have been eating here, unless they felt uncomfortable and were using the officers’ mess only one level further down.

  Tanis looked up who the duty officers should be and was surprised to learn she knew each of them personally. The first was GSS Lieutenant Collins, a man Tanis had not gotten along with particularly well before the Intrepid had left Mars. She had only spotted him once or twice afterward and was surprised that a supply officer had been added to the in-flight duty roster.

  The next was Lieutenant Amy Lee. She had been stationed under Tanis in the Security Operations Center in the harrowing days before the Intrepid left Sol. Tanis knew Amy Lee reasonably well, but not as much more than an acquaintance beyond their working relationship.

  The last of the three duty officers was Ensign Gollee. Tanis knew him from a few games of 4D chess they had played in the officer’s mess, but had not worked with him professionally. She felt bad for Amy Lee and Gollee being stuck with Collins. If she had to spend three years with that man Tanis knew someone would be dead—him.

  Angela said.

  Usul was Amy Lee’s AI. He wasn’t a military pairing, like Angela, but had been with her family for several generations. When she made colony, he jumped at the opportunity to leave Sol and transferred to her.

  Gollee, like most pilots, didn’t have AI. Most of their extra processing space was needed for additional systems to handle plots and vectors. Coll
ins was simply too low on the totem pole to be granted any military AI and he wasn’t the sort who would normally attract an unchartered AI for a pairing.

  Angela said.

  Tanis reached the top of a service tube and stepped onto the bridge deck’s maglev station. In all of her previous visits to the command deck Tanis was one of hundreds crowding the station and executive corridor. Now the emptiness was palpable; emergency lighting casting long shadows across the space as the echoes of her footfalls skittered up and down the hall.

  Beyond lay the bridge’s foyer; the place where Priscilla, or Amanda—the ship’s two physical avatars—took turns providing the main interface between the humans and the Intrepid. The avatar’s pedestal was empty and the holo emitters were offline. Even more than the main hall, this room had always been a riot of light and color—usually white, grey and light blue if Amanda was ensconced, or red, pink and violet if Priscilla was running the show. Tanis slipped through the darkness, a shiver ran down her spine and she couldn’t help but feel like she was the only person on the ship.

  There wasn’t a single person who hadn’t looked out into the cold, dark blackness of space and feared falling into it, lost and alone in the emptiness for eternity. Out here, far from even the most rudimentary civilizations, Tanis couldn’t help feeling those thoughts creep into her mind again and again.

  She took a deep breath, pushed the tendrils of fear aside and strode down the corridor to the left, past the executive conference room toward the bridge.

  Her nano arrived first and sent an image back showing it to be empty, a fact she confirmed moments later as she stepped into the heart of the ship.

  She drew another deep breath through her nose. There were traces of human pheromones. Her augmented olfactory system informed her that people had been here a scant five or six hours earlier.