Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle (32 page)

“Okay, time to see what we have,” Gina said and switched on the computer she had brought and hooked up to the station’s net. “Hmmm.”

There was a lot of data. Her computer was accessing the buffer memory and treating it like just another memory partition available to it. Truncated files or data that the computer considered gibberish was ignored as unreadable, but it could be read—maybe—aboard
Hobbs
with a lot of processing. She wasn’t interested in doing that. At this stage, she would search through the files she could actually read without aid.

She ran searches and looked for information that Liz said would point to the A.I or its backup. Her computer stripped file headers and compared them to its search parameters, and slowly she pieced together a map of where the data had flowed from and where it was flowing to. A lot of it was general system data, stuff the net itself needed to function and of no interest to her, but as the search deepened more and more flags were raised to grab her attention.

She smiled fiercely. This was looking better and better. She shunted the flagged entries to another window and started another search confined only to them. Almost immediately she began getting hits. She opened the files and devoured the contents. She was shocked to find Sebastian’s name almost immediately. Somehow she hadn’t expected that. She read the files, and was disappointed with the contents. They all seemed banal. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, but their presence was still significant. The file headers told her where they had originated, and it wasn’t Haverington. Eric was not going to be a happy bunny. He was looking in the wrong place.

Gina didn’t pack up immediately, though she was sorely tempted. She decided to work through all the data here first. She had already done all the prep here. It would be a waste not to strip every byte of useful data from the effort. She let her computer work, and stood to stretch her legs.

She wandered around the station poking into things while her computer did its job. The station wasn’t a big installation, one main computer centre with a couple of annexes containing offices and storage areas. She peered through open doors, and glanced into boxes at the detritus, wondering about the people who had used it all. She sat at a desk and jiggled drawers. One was locked, but her viper strength made short work of the flimsy lock. Inside was a binder that she pulled out and opened to a random page.

It was a maintenance log. Time sheets and names of people long dead together with signatures and initials signing off on work and inspections done on the network. Nothing startling or even remotely interesting. Gina flicked through the pages noting more of the same. She threw it back into the drawer and shoved it shut. She opened another drawer but found nothing but blank forms. The last drawer yielded a few old books—manuals and technical spec sheets. It didn’t matter how advanced people became in their use of computers, they still had to print stuff out to get the full benefit of the data. It didn’t matter whether it was printed on archaic paper like on Earth before colonisation began, or on plastic flimsies like these. She didn’t think people would ever stop printing stuff out.

She left the office and went back to check progress only to find her computer had finished crunching the data. She looked it over but found nothing to change her mind. She was packing up and moving out.

It took a lot less time to withdraw all her gear and pack it back aboard the APC than it had to unload and set it up. Maybe two hours later she was driving again, heading back to the shuttle. She hadn’t reached the halfway point when Eric contacted her.

“Alpha-Two, Alpha-One you read?” Eric said.

“Alpha-One, Two copies. How’s it going in sunny Haverington?”

Eric snorted. “I found it.”

Gina’s jaw dropped. “You found it?
In Haverington?
” she couldn’t believe it. Her information pointed away from the capital altogether and toward a more historic site. “You sure?”

Eric sounded puzzled when he said, “You doubted your research? The library was right where you said it would be. Intact too. The place looked untouched by time, Gina. Incredible really. I think we should empty the racks and take the crystals home with us. I know Kushiel is a monument, but all those books should be used not left here.”

Gina blinked. “Wait what?”

“The books. They’re wasted here. I don’t think Snakeholme’s library is even half the size of this one.”

She finally caught on. “You mean you found the library, not the A.I?”

“Didn’t I just say I found the library? Maybe you need to run a diagnostic. You don’t sound like you’re tracking right. Check your O2 levels.”

Gina grinned. He would be checking his when he heard what she’d found. “Eric, I found it. The prize is mine.”

“Bull.”

“Nope, not kidding. I powered up the node and it was right there in the buffer. Stripped the header info on a bunch of files and found the originator. Sebastian was up and running when the power went out.”

“Bloody hell... that’s... where is he?”

“Place called Landing. Want to bet it’s the original landing site for the colony?”

“No bet. I know it is. The archive here is extensive and the colonisation is documented in the history section. That’s where I’ve been looking mostly. There’s no mention of his location though, just references to him as an entity in decisions made at that time.”

“Do we know if Landing was bombed?”

“It was,” Eric said grimly. “Not with kinetics though,” he said, sounding a little more hopeful.

Nukes were just as bad, worse in some ways. There were areas of the planet still hot enough that even a viper would have to limit exposure. Gina guessed they would be finding out how hot Landing was at some point.

“You want to meet there?”

“No. I want you to fly here and meet me. There’s something I need you to see.”

Gina frowned. He didn’t sound happy about something. “You want to clue me in?”

“Not until you get here. Alpha-One out.”

“Alpha-Two out.” Gina said and turned her attention to driving. “What the hell was that about?”

Haverington, Kushiel

Eric appeared on Gina’s sensors as soon as she was in range of the city, but she couldn’t land the shuttle at his location. She chose to land next to the other shuttle on the ice over what had once been a park at the centre of the city. She was taking for granted that Eric had chosen it after surveying the ice with his GPR and that it was safe.

She landed safely and deployed the APC again.

She drove carefully through the eerie streets of the capital. The looming buildings with their empty windows were oppressive and sad. The weather was fine for a sub-zero climate. Skies were clear and painfully beautifully blue, but it did little to raise the oppressive feel of the place. She drove passed shattered buildings, obviously the results of a battle, and back into untouched streets heading toward Eric’s location. His icon was clear on her sensors, but he wasn’t in the library she had located for him. He was city blocks away.

She found Eric standing in a street in the commercial district of the city waiting for her. She parked a couple of metres from him, sealed her helmet, and climbed down from the cab. His APC was parked just beyond him. She ran a sensor sweep as she walked toward him, trying to discover what he found interesting. The buildings were the usual sort of thing. Commercial towers, modern for their time she was sure, but looking old before their time with windows gone and bare steel showing the depredations of a climate they weren’t designed to handle.

“So,” Gina began. “What’s up?”

For his answer, Eric beckoned her to follow him toward one of the buildings. She shrugged and followed. He stopped and looked back at her before drawing her attention to the structure.

Gina saw what had him concerned right away. The doors should have been buried by up to three metres or so of ice, but they weren’t. The other buildings had snow and ice piled against them, half covering their entrances, but this one had been cleared. It was obvious now her attention had been drawn to it that someone had cut the ice into a gentle ramp and then cut away the doors. She could see them lying on the floor inside.

“Did you...?”

Eric shook his head and crouched. Gina joined him to study the tracks in the ice. “See here and here?”

Gina nodded.

“Droid tracks.”

“Yeah,” Gina said remembering the marks left by the use of her IED droid earlier. “Have you been inside?”

“Briefly. I wanted you to see this before going deeper in.”

Gina nodded and they entered the building.

Eric switched on a powerful hand lamp to illuminate the room. As soon as he did, Gina knew she was standing in a bank, and that someone had been here before them. Of course it was possible the mess was part of the chaos caused by the evacuation of the city. Desperate people losing their heads might have thought they would need money to survive, but she doubted that was the case here. This looked like the aftermath of a salvage operation, and she knew no salvaging had been sanctioned.

The doors had been roughly cut away and allowed to fall inside. Beyond them, the floors were iced over but only thinly, indicating to her that the doors had not been down for long. Eric played the beam of his light over the scene, and stopped. Most of the bank’s droids were still in place. Like sentinels standing guard, they stood waiting for customers who would never come. The main counter divided the space, but the central section had been destroyed. The people responsible hadn’t bothered with niceties. It hadn’t been surgically cut away. It looked to Gina as if they had used demo charges to blow their way through. Probably had to, she mused as she studied the damage. Bank security would have dictated the partition be armoured.

Eric led the way and Gina followed him into the restricted area of the bank. She proved herself correct as she passed the droids, and saw the damage more closely. Demo charges had been rigged to blow through the armoured wall. The telltale burn marks and splintered steel, still covered in the remains of synthetic wood to hide the armour, told the tale. She eyed a fallen droid. Half its face had been blown off, left where it had fallen, but still smiling.

Gina shivered.

Eric stopped. “Surprise surprise, but not really.”

Gina grunted. As Eric, she was unsurprised to find the vault had been blown. The vault door stood wide, its locking system neatly blown away. She ducked inside and found more mess, but it was obvious the thieves had methodically broken into every drawer and every safe within the place, only discarding the things they couldn’t sell or trade onto the floor. She wondered how much loot they had salvaged... no not salvaged. This was grave robbing. The safe boxes in here had been people’s personal stuff.
Dead
people’s personal stuff. The bank’s platinum reserves were probably held elsewhere on Kushiel, but there would have been a sizable amount kept here. Even today, despite government disapproval, platinum wafers were still universally accepted as currency.

“What do we do about this?”

Eric shrugged. “Nothing I can think of. They’re long gone.”

Then why had he even bothered to bring her here to see it? Eric turned away and retraced his steps. She shook her head and looked back at the sad remains of people’s lives. It wasn’t right, but she couldn’t think of anything to do either. She headed back to the street.

“We heading for Landing now?”

Eric stopped on his way to his APC and looked back. “We could do that, or fly back up to the ship and start fresh tomorrow. Preference?”

Gina looked toward the sun and estimated flight times. It would be dark when they reached Landing, but she would prefer to stay on planet. It would waste so much time going back to
Hobbs
only to fly back down tomorrow. She explained her thoughts and Eric agreed to stay the night.

“You can come to my place for dinner,” Eric said and Gina laughed. “My shuttle’s autochef can handle a pizza I’m sure.”

She made a face.

“Don’t like pizza?” Eric said in shocked tones. “That’s damn near unpatriotic!”

“Huh?”

“You come from Faragut and you were a marine. Double whammy.”

Gina snorted. “Despite what you may have heard about marines, we are...
were
not all pizza eating beer swilling grunts. Some of us know one end of a chopstick from the other you know. We don’t all eat with our fingers.”

Eric snorted. “And the Faragutians?”

Gina scowled. “You won’t hear me defending Faragut, crack about patriotism or not, but I’ve seen them eat linguine and plenty of other stuff. They don’t live on pizza, and neither do I.”

“Does this mean you’re not interested in coming over?”

“Nope. I’ll be there but I’ll do the cooking. I know a few good codes you’ll like.”

Eric nodded. “See you there then.”

She watched Eric mount up, and then trotted to her own APC to do the same. Eric pulled out while she settled herself. She let him get a good lead before starting after him.

Aboard Alpha-One, Landing, Kushiel

Eric leaned back in his seat and took another mouthful of his coffee. “You were right; you do know a few good codes.”