Event Horizon (Hellgate) (82 page)

“I’m afraid so.” Mark rubbed his palms together thoughtfully. “Now the story gets harder to piece together, because the AI never did come back online after the Zunshu took control of it. In fact, there’s compelling evidence to suggest it was deliberately broken to make sure it wouldn’t, couldn’t wake up. The evidence is not quite conclusive, and I should point out that this generation of machinery is very different from current tech … Tor?”

“Different enough for genuine old Resalq tech to be virtually alien to kids of my age,” Tor finished, “and Mark’s right. If Dario and I wanted to melt down an AI of the
Ebrezjim
generation, we’d be reduced to guesswork. But it’s a
very
safe bet, a lot of the damage done to the AI was deliberate; and it was the Resalq themselves who killed it, not the Zunshu.”

“The Zunshu would have controlled it – turned it on them,” Jazinsky said quietly. “How could you ever trust it again? If you wanted to get home, you killed the AI and flew the ship out of there manually.” She was looking along at Vidal, Rabelais, Queneau.

“Transspace pilots,” Travers murmured. His blood had chilled by several degrees. “This, uh, isn’t likely to happen to Lai’a, is it?”

“You mean, could a Zunshu AI override it?” Mark stood and stretched his back. “It’s … possible, and it’s highly likely they’ll try. However, since we’re aware of the strategy, it’s unlikely to be effective. Still, I would recommend every member of this company be in armor before we exit the Zunshu gate. There’s at least one trick they can’t pull on us … and one inestimable service the crew of the
Ebrezjim
have done us. Richard?”

“Yes. And we’ll take the habitation module to zero pressure – and take engine and generator safety protocols on manual.” Vaurien and Jazinsky shared a sidelong frown, and Richard gestured at the screen, where the grainy image of the Zunshu aeroshell had just been replaced by the gold and white gas giant. “So the entire crew was taken prisoner – but there were sixteen bodies still on the ship when we found her. And she made it out of Zunshu space, Mark.”

“As I said,” Mark said slowly as he went to the ’chef for coffee, “a jigsaw puzzle. We recovered fragments from a log begun after they got out. A small handful of the crew had found their way back aboard, and the first thing they did was to kill the AI, the moment they were in armor. They took the ship out with a Weimann jump directly from orbit – they didn’t bother with any Weimann exclusion threshold, and I dare say if they’d played by the rules they’d never have made it away.

“They jumped directly to Hellgate’s malevolent twin sister, took the first event that was big enough to offer a freefall channel big enough to accommodate the ship, and … fled.” He slipped his hands into the pockets of dark emerald slacks and studied the screen, the giant world, thoughtfully. “All we have to go on is a few half-corrupt, half-garbled journal entries made by people who were almost incoherent, and some surveillance footage from automatic systems that kept on working long after the AI died. Dario?”

He sank back into the recliner and Dario picked up the story as he returned from the ’chef with a tumbler of red wine. “We know they’d been prisoners. They didn’t know for how long – they report being in stasis, not in cells. The same kind of Zunshu tech we saw at Kjorin, where Midani and Emil Kulich were imprisoned for
centuries
and walked out of there as if a few seconds had passed by.

“The escapees had no idea where the rest of the crew might be, or even if any but themselves were still alive, but according to the fragment we recovered from one report, twenty of them were being moved from their stasis vessel to a lab. Two of them,” he said pointedly, “were pilots. One was an engineer. And that’s enough to take your best shot, if you have half an idea of where your ship is.” He shrugged now. “Not enough information has survived to tell us
how
they knew where the ship was … for all we can tell, they might have been at a research facility where the ship was also docked – they might have been able to just look out of a viewport and see it.” Dario spread his hands, an expression on cynical frustration. “Pieces are missing from the puzzle, but we know these twenty Resalq took the ship, ignited the main e-space drive right there from the dock – which, incidentally, would have caused mayhem on many levels.

“If they were looking for a little revenge, they got it by tearing the dock apart and deluging half a hemisphere in very nasty fallout. Four people died, presumably killed, in the escape, but the engineer and two pilots were able to get it together, keep it together. They didn’t hit fatal problems till they reached the driftway outside the Ebrezjim Lagoon … and we know the rest from that point on.”

Tor had twisted his chair around and was frowning up at the gold-white globe. “They had bad engine problems – this much we know for sure, because they missed the safe channel through the driftway. The gravity tides around the lagoon caught them, same as the
Orpheus
was caught, and they were dragged through. Like Mick and Jo, they almost burned out the engines, trying to stay out of there; the drive was jacking around, they probably knew they didn’t have enough power. And once they were through the horizon, like the
Orpheus
and the
Odyssey
before it, they drifted for a long, long time.

“We’ve analyzed all the video we captured aboard the
Ebrezjim
, and – well, it’s still guesswork, but I’ll give you one skinny chance in ten we’ve gotten it wrong. They did some real damage to their engines, and it would’ve taken months to get them up and running, shorthanded, one engineer, limited drones. There’s evidence of wide-scale malfunction across the rest of the ship, too, and you’d expect this. The AI was dead. Think about how we rely on AI surveillance and a regiment of drones to keep up a maintenance schedule on a complex ship. You want to try doing it with sixteen hands, only one of whom was an engineer? Good luck.”

“Still,” Mark mused, “they did eventually get the engines back to something like operability, or when Ernst happened along, he’d have found nothing useful. The fact remains, he was able to task the handling drones to undock the engine deck and tether it to the
Odyssey
… would you like to add to this discussion, Ernst?”

Reluctant, thoughtful, Rabelais got to his feet. “Don’t know what else I can tell you,” he admitted. “She was a frozen, dead hulk when I arrived and I didn’t poke around much. I saw some bodies, of course … never did manage to work out how they died, but from what we know now, I’d guess it was inevitable. Cold and hunger and
despair’ll
always get you in the end.”

But Tor’s head was shaking. “They were doing reasonably well, right up till the moment the hull was ripped open. From the analysis of the fissure, the
Ebrezjim
was gouged open from the outside in one mother of a collision with something much bigger, much tougher. Something we didn’t see in the lagoon – and we wouldn’t expect to. At the rate of drift bodies in there maintain, the other party in this head-on smash could be anywhere in a void that has the diameter of the heliopause of the Velcastra system!” He shook his head slowly. “In the end, entropy got the sixteen crew and what the real heartbreaker is, they had the transspace drive back online when they were hit.”

“Our best guess is,” Dario said gravely, “they were working on the shipwide malfunctions, trying to get enough back up to speed to make a run for home. They were recycling everything, waste, water air, and bleeding power off the transspace drive to keep the ship warm. They weren’t going anywhere till they were sure the ship would hold herself together on the gravity express, but they could have survived for a long time. Quite long enough to get the work done and leave.”

It was Vaurien who asked shrewdly, “So, they didn’t just fire up the drive and avoid the collision?”

Now the Resalq could only shrug and Mark said, “Ignition failure, maybe active scanning wasn’t back online, fatigue, blind panic. We won’t know till a science crew gets back aboard the
Ebrezjim
and makes an intense study. Or,” he added, “we might pull the hulk right out of Elarne, take her to Saraine and go over her with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. And
that
is another project for another time. But at this moment, we can say we’ve learned many things.

“One: the Zunshu will more than likely try to take control of Lai’a. Two: the Zunshu are not infallible – prisoners could, and did, escape. And Three: their homeworld is one of the most beautiful gas giants we’ve ever charted, with an incredibly varied atmosphere.”

Travers gave a small start. “This planet you keep showing – this is it? This is the Zunshu homeworld?”

“According to the
Ebrezjim
database,” Mark agreed.

“But … surely, you mean a moon orbiting it?” Marin protested. “Nobody can live on a gas giant – there isn’t a surface!”

Mark, Jazinsky and Rusch shared a glance now, and Jazinsky said with a certain dark glee, “You wanted to go exploring, Richard? Now you know for sure you’re off the map! Dario tells me he and Tor literally ripped the database apart, looking for viable data, and nothing they found references any moon. There’s plenty of allusions to the planet, but the only offworld objects mentioned are orbital platforms. The planet does have a family of around 30 moons, all of them arid, icy, sulphurous, whatever. Now, I’m not saying life can’t arise in improbable places. It can. Since the first survey cruises, planetologists and
xenologists
have been
cataloging
creatures breathing everything from methane to hydrogen and living at temperatures so cold, they swim in ammonia oceans, and you could mine water like a mineral! But if the data referencing
exactly
where the Zunshu are, on or around that gas giant, was in the
Ebrezjim
archive, it’s not viable now.”

“There’s just a few snippets,” Dario said, “throwaway remarks made in journal reports that are more like … babble. In one fragment, someone speculates that the rest of the crew are being held for research.”

“Research?” Vidal echoed. “You mean, vivisection?”

“Probably.” Dario rubbed his palms together. “And you’d have to expect this. We must be
very
different from the Zunshu. They’d literally take us apart to figure out how we function. Not a pleasant thought, but entirely predictable. The planet itself is about the size of Saturn in the Earth system, or
Guanyu
… not quite as massive as Jupiter or Zeus, but quite large enough to be a formidable world. It’s very hot, down deep, with a complex core, a mother lode of liquid metallic hydrogen. Higher in the atmosphere, we’re seeing accessible pockets of everything from fluorine to oxygen, nitrogen, you name it. The planet’s one big chemical engine.

“Better yet, its orbit is almost identical to Velcastra’s, in terms of distance from the sun, orbital inclination and so on. The star is a comparatively large G7 dwarf – stable, long-lived, luminous; and from what we can tell, the planet’s axial tilt is less than 20
^o
, so it’ll have very mild seasonal variation … insofar as a gas giant will have seasons any of us would recognize. That planet’s warm, bright, stable, mineral-rich, and from spectroscopic analysis we’ve confirmed that several layers of the upper atmosphere are heavy with organic molecules.”

Jazinsky’s fingertips drummed a tattoo on the table as she glared at a short loop of video which played over and over, an approach view to the giant world, clearly showing three attendant moons. “I’ve already seen some of the transcript,” she said slowly. “There’s curious little comments in the logs and journals. I might have hoped these people would be systematic, methodical, but they were completely traumatized by the time they were recording their memories. There’s nothing resembling scientific method.

“It’s quite possible several of the escapees had undergone some kind of experimentation and just retained no memory of the procedure, though it left a footprint in sheer disorganization. Autopsy on the remains found in the hulk of the
Ebrezjim
might prove this. As Dario said, much of what was recorded was babble, but not all of it. A few of the survivors were coherent, and one of them spoke of light gravity while they made their escape – he said he was disoriented by it, inside the ‘vessel’ where they were kept.”

“Stasis vessel?” Travers wondered.

“Perhaps.” Jazinsky sighed. “He could also have been referring to a ship, perhaps a prison ship in which they were being transferred from place to place. There’s a lot more guesswork involved than I care for. Elsewhere in the reports there’s a mention of enormous air density. And when I say ‘air,’ at such density, it’s the wrong word. We’re still reading a rather literal translation here.
Air
simply means the medium involved in respiration, and the environment surrounding the dominant species. What can I tell you? We’ll know more when we see it for ourselves.”