Symphony of Destruction (The Spindown Saga, #1) Page 7

  “Doc?” he motioned at Brother Anderson, “is that Hannah? Maison Bhutros’s daughter?”

  “Yes, it is. Do you know each other?”

  “We’ve met.” Then, “She hates me.”

  “Hmm. Me too.”

  “What!?” he asked, confused “Why would YOU hate me?!”

  “No, no. I mean Hannah hates ME as well.”

  “She hates you?! But you’re her doctor!”

  “Yes, well...” Brother Anderson trailed off. At any rate, Colin did not want to get into a discussion about why Hannah hated him, and he had other pressing questions as well.

  “What about my friends, the other guys from the fire, did they... I mean, are they...” he let his question trail off. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

  “Your friends did not survive the initial incident, I’m afraid.”

  “Initial? What?!”

  “Colin, the ship has suffered a series of hull breach-”

  “I knew it! Something was really off about that fire! Was it some kind of weapon or what?”

  “Well, that’s a really good question, actually. In fact, I have pondered that myself. Of course, there is no way to know intent, but it almost does seem to be the most probable explanation. Although, I scoured the databanks and there has never been any record of a weapon of this exact nature.”

  “What? Are you serious? How can that be? There is nothing new around the sun, Doc!”

  “I’m absolutely serious, Colin.”

  “Wow, that’s unbelievable! What exactly was the ‘exact nature’ of this weapon?” Colin modulated his voice to sound similar to Brother Anderson’s phrasing.

  “The breaches appear to have been caused by contact with centimeter scale granules of fluorine and chlorine molecules packed in an open lattice framework stuffed with a microbial payload. As I’m sure you know, fluorine is an incredibly powerful oxidizing agent so it reacted violently with the hull, effectively exploding its way into the ship.”

  “No,” argued Colin, “That’s impossible. You can’t make a lattice of halogens. The ions repel each other.”

  “True,” agreed Brother Anderson. “And yet, that is what seems to have been done. Which means that someone figured a way to stick these ions together. Which means that this was no naturally occurring phenomenon.”

  “So how did they do it?”

  “That, I do not know. I am still trying to come up with a satisfactory explanation. I have run millions of simulations using every known compound.”

  “What? Every compound! Why? That’s a waste of time. You can narrow down the possibilities based on trace elements in the residue left from the reaction.”

  “Yes, you are correct. I misspoke. I meant every known compound of elements present in the samples. But after I got no positive results, I widened the parameters and eventually, removed all elemental filters altogether. And then, I quite literally simulated every single compound.”

  Colin let out a low whistle. “That must have taken forever.”

  “It took a month.”

  Colin was speechless. He could not imagine it. The hardest engineering problems he had ever fed into the ship had processing times in milliseconds. He had heard of navigation problems taking minutes, but a month? How could that be? Then another thought dawned on him.

  “Wait. I’ve been out of it for a MONTH!?”

  “No, Colin. You have been in a coma for almost four months.”

  Colin reeled. How could that be? It felt like maybe a day or two! Instinctively, his body urged him to sit up. He struggled to do so. His muscles felt soggy, and he managed only to lift his head and left shoulder, pushing feebly against the bed with both arms. The sudden movement made him dizzy, and his head throbbed.

  “Rest a moment,” Brother Anderson told him.

  “Rest!? Like I need to rest?! What have I BEEN doing!?” He wasn’t sure if he yelled, or if he merely thought it. Nevertheless, he slumped to the bed, too weak to sit up. Brother Anderson gave him a few sips of water. After a few minutes, his body and mind recovered their strength.

  “Doc?”

  “Yes”

  “You mentioned something else. Some kind of biological agent?”

  “Yes, a microbial payload. Again, it’s like none on record. It has many similarities to viral pathogens, but the structure differs from a virus in several key factors.” He went on to elucidate on structural and metabolic minutia composed entirely of highly technical biological jargon. Colin had impressed himself with his ability to argue chemistry with the robot-doctor, but the conversation had veered very far out of his wheelhouse.

  As the doctor spoke, Colin’s attention turned toward the rumbling feelings and sounds in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten in forever. That was an expression he used often, but this time it was nearly true. The rumbling seemed to surround him though. His hunger seemed to be part of his surroundings as well as just his body. He cocked his head to the side and listened. It was not only his stomach that was rumbling. The ship herself was vibrating and moaning softly.

  “What is that?” he interrupted Brother Anderson.

  The robot misinterpreted the question, thinking Colin was actually listening to him, and repeated some obscure word from his diatribe, then began launching into a further tangent based on that word’s definition.

  “No, no... Shut up!”

  Brother Anderson shut up.

  “Listen!” Colin whispered, his index finger raised and pointing vaguely in the general vicinity of the ship that surrounded them, by gesturing toward a structural bulkhead that protruded along the med bay ceiling. “Do you hear it?” He stared at Brother Anderson, who somehow, through some unintended and unknown facial pose, managed to convey the correct body language that said:

  “Yes, I hear it. I know exactly what you mean. And I know exactly what is causing it. Colin, we have some problems.”

  Chapter 25

  Colin jumped out of bed, aided by a brief rush of adrenaline, and much to Brother Anderson’s dismay, who immediately tried to ‘help’ him by offering his support.

  “Get off me!” Colin protested, but more due to distraction than annoyance. His attention was focused on the vibration of the ship. He spun slowly around in circles, trying to listen to the sound from every angle - trying to feel it with the entirety of his body - arms outstretched like some ancient divining rod. An intravenous tube became tangled and taut, pulling its stand over in a loud clatter.

  “Unhook me, I need to go,” Colin requested. “There’s something wrong with the ship.”

  “I know, Colin. Just wait a minute. We need to talk about a few things.”

  “Listen to that! She’ll shake herself apart! Why isn’t someone fixing that!”

  “Colin...”

  Colin subconsciously recognized the serious tone, and followed suite, calming himself down with a deep breath before looking at the doctor.

  “What is it?”

  “There is no one else to fix it.”

  Colin stared blankly.

  “Colin, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. You are the only surviving crew member.”

  Still Colin just stared.

  Brother Anderson continued, “As highest ranking engineering crew, you are therefore now ‘Acting Chief of Engineering’. I have done my best to monitor the situation, but there has been little I could do. I hope that we can work together to address the issues of ship instability.”

  “Of course,” replied Colin, his face like stone. Of course he would. And they needed to act quickly. Already things had been out of control far too long. That much was obvious just from the immediately noticeable sounds and vibrations. How long? How long had the ship gone unmaintained? He had been asleep for - what was it? Four months? Still unbelievable. How long after that had the crew been lost? He put two and two together and saw no point in asking for elaboration. The doctor had already told him about a virus-like infection. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out the rest of the s
tory. He knew in general how pathogens spread. It could take days or weeks to spread through a closed system. But ultimately, what was the difference? Fast or slow, the result was the same, and was now upon them. All they could do now was address the situation and try to stabilize the ship. He held out his wrist toward the doctor, indicating the intravenous shunt. “We need to go to engineering deck”.

  “Very well, Colin” Brother Anderson replied, reaching out to gently remove the shunt from Colin’s wrist, then turning toward Hannah. “I’ll just make one quick adjustment here.” He deftly injected yet another dose of sedative into her airstream. This was against his better judgement, but it seemed like a bad idea to risk the chance of her waking while he was away from med bay. Earlier, he had brought a couple Omega Bars to sick bay, for when Hannah finished detoxification. He picked up the two bars from the tray beside her, and handed them to Colin. “You must be hungry?” he asked.

  “Famished!” admitted Colin, taking both bars, unwrapping one and eagerly biting off a large chunk. He relished the chewy, slightly gritty texture. It always made him feel slightly happy. The bars had a mildly sweet, meaty flavour with a nutty aftertaste. Calling them delicious would be a stretch, but Colin regarded them as efficient and effective nutrition, satisfying without being overly pleasurable. That somehow seemed favourable to him, in a way that more delicious foods did not. He was a practical man, and this was a practical food.

  The two exited the med bay as Colin continued to munch on the bar, turning down the corridor toward engineering deck. Colin often stopped mid-chew, listening intently as they moved along, sensitive to minor nuances of the ship’s vibrations through her various structural elements. A rattle here, a whistle or moan there. A lot of information could be gleaned by a well-trained ear. Of course, there were all kinds of diagnostic checks, reports, and routines, which he would have to run. Doubtless, Brother Anderson had already run them, but they all required manual steps of analysis, troubleshooting, and human instinct. By themselves they were merely tools. A ship required human contact. Human maintenance. Human control.

  Chapter 26

  Colin logged into his usual terminal in engineering deck, and his screen immediately coated itself in yellow and red error boxes. He hesitated for a moment, tempted to simply dive in randomly and begin reading them, but ultimately flicked them all away with a ‘clear all’ gesture. It would be far more productive to start with current conditions only, and approach them in a systematic way. His usual daily full system check routine would be a logical start; it already had a good prioritization grid built in. He triggered the routine and waited.

  It typically took about five seconds. He suddenly noticed his attire - med-bay pyjamas. He had forgotten to dress. Luckily, there were always a couple of changes of clothes in his locker across the room. Stepping over to the locker, he quickly donned a pair of coveralls and an old pair of sneakers. His boots were up in med bay so these would have to do. Back at his screen, he was presented with an initial list which would let him navigate into the results in an orderly fashion. He spent the next ten minutes or so examining, refactoring, and texturing the reports, as the doctor stood by, waiting patiently for him to draw his own conclusions.

  Chapter 27

  Brother Anderson saw Colin walk up to the terminal and wave his login handshake. He was completely unprepared for what would happen next.

  The terminal recognized a motion trigger and initiated the authentication routine. One thread opened a gesture analysis routine, breaking down the three dimensional image sequence into a series of consecutive relative spatial coordinate deltas. Several random images were chosen from this sequence, and sent to a subroutine for fingerprint and retinal analysis.

  A second thread launched the actual login routine, which began to open the local credential summary cards of the top ten last users of this terminal, then waited for the delta string and biometrics from thread one, so it could start running comparators. Upon receiving the delta data, a match was found in the list, so the process called up Colin’s profile for biometric comparison.

  This process was quite interesting to Brother Anderson, for it was the first time he had witnessed a user login from the perspective of CSO. The programming had all been part of his initial takeover download, but he had not felt any of them run. But it was what happened next that truly blew his mind.

  As Colin’s profile began to load into memory, a large portion of the data was in the form of Colin’s personal notes and tanglebase sync files - a hyperlinked mashup of ideas, questions, research, and musings. Brother Anderson tried to ignore the data - he considered it unethical to snoop on someone’s personal files - but as the bits loaded through the memory buffers of what was effectively now his mind, he inadvertently began to experience a very strange phenomenon. It was somewhat analogous to, though not at all similar to, the installation of a new program, or even of a new protocol language. This was something vastly more intense.

  Odd and novel data structures began to appear in his mind. Known facts became twisted into strange shapes; stretched out into long strands which wrapped around one another, braided in and through each other, then forked and branched off in unexpected ways, to intersect with yet another strand in another braid on another fork. There was more to it than shape though. The whole of his mind seemed to reverberate with a sudden burst of frequencies; invisible colors that highlighted and backlit the mass of intertwined strands. Brother Anderson felt as though he had suddenly grown an extra limb unlike any he had ever known or even heard of; a limb with its own whole extra brain, a neural network vastly different from his own, in structure and in power source and in signal type. He felt he had somehow just acquired and added to himself, the brain of an alien life-form. Or perhaps he had been acquired by, and added to it.

  Colin’s customary engineering status reports launched automatically as soon as his profile confirmed the biometrics and allowed a complete profile unlock. A large stack of messages queued up for display. Brother Anderson began scanning them, but found himself distracted by the stream of personal data still buffering through memory. It felt difficult to multitask back to the reports. He felt disappointment in the prospect of leaving focus even for a millisecond, on what was now obviously and easily the most interesting data he had ever seen. It was not that there was really any new information. Nearly all the referenced concepts were already quite well known to him. What he found fascinating was the relationships between the data bits, or more precisely, the patterns of types of relationships between seemingly disparate bits.

  Suddenly he was aware that the message queue belonging to Colin’s engineering report process had been emptied. How? What was going on? Was there some kind of error? No. A glance at the system log confirmed an intentional action on Colin’s part. He had deleted the queue. That made no sense. Why would he do that? It was all the data he needed. For a split second, he thought about asking Colin. It wouldn’t matter though. It was probably an accident. It was gone now though, and the data would have to be re-initialized. No matter, it would only take seconds to regenerate.

  His mind drifted back to the memory stream data. The structural framework completed its preload sequence, and the memory buffers fell vacant. Even so, Brother Anderson could not stop thinking about these fascinating patterns. His curiosity welled up, threatening to overcome his privacy ethics. This should not happen. He knew it. How could he be feeling this temptation - morally speaking, but more so, physically? How was this scenario possible? It was a disturbing realization. Thankfully, it distracted him from the temptation itself. He shook his head rapidly, as if to shake loose the thoughts.

  Colin moved beside him, catching in his peripheral vision. Brother Anderson had momentarily forgotten about Colin. He had not noticed his movement to and from the locker. He had not noticed the passage of time. Now they were suddenly staring at each other. Brother Anderson wondered if Colin wondered if Brother Anderson was feeling alright? Had he noticed his odd behavior? And how was
it that Colin was wearing different clothes?

  Chapter 28

  Colin turned to Brother Anderson, “You are seeing this, right?”

  “Yes. I have been scanning all of your activity.”

  “Well, we’ve got quite a mess on our hands.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So aside from all the blatantly obvious issues, my main concern is with the structural integrity of the ship itself. See these areas here, here, and here especially,” he pointed to several spots on a color coded wireframe representation of the ship that slowly rotated on his screen. Sectors A and C glowed yellow, particularly toward the ship’s bow and outer hull. Sector B was an unreadable sheet of red overlaid on red. A separate screen showed an external camera view courtesy of the hull monitoring subsystem. Where formerly had been sector B was now a mangled and burnt wreckage, nearly completely destroyed, but hanging like a disgusting scab from the fore-bridge strut-work. It dangled grotesquely ahead of the drifting ship as if the Ventas-341 were some half decapitated beast. It was this jutting twisted steel appendage which was magnifying the harmonic resonances of the main power supply. Its shape and size happened to coordinate with the internal frequencies of the skeleton of the ship, and the missing sections of hull bracing prevented the usual dampening control obtained from properly designed and constructed ship framing. The normal vibrations and shudders of the ship became amplified into a taunting howl. Much more concerning than the sound itself though, was the very real threat that the vibrational motion posed to the ship’s structural integrity. Sector D was a central zone built around and within a complex steel lattice whose hollow sections housed several operational units and crew facilities. Parallel structural components ran the length of the ship, from the bridge in sector A, all the way back through the main engineering decks and on to the cargo areas behind and on top of sector H. This massive structure was now being played from both ends, like a giant tuning fork, with positive feedback amplifying the vibrations to levels that the ship was not designed for. Even worse, these sympathetic vibrations were drifting in and out of phase slightly as the severed neck of the ship flapped slowly but uncontrollably. The phase discrepancies reverberated through the steel and bounced back toward each other, meeting in the central spans with cyclical flurries of chaotic and violent interference patterns, weakening the structural material at the molecular level.