Fourteen
Myla did not hibernate to save air and power. She
was awake to see the flurry of activity in the outer system. Hive
warships arriving in the system had converged momentarily, like predators
attacking prey, and then
dissipated. "Was that Jeremy?" she cried, her voice shrill with panic.
"I have no way of knowing," Dikki said.
“But he can’t reach us with all those ships out
there!”
An avalanche of silence banked against Myla.
"How long can we drift like this?"
"We have air for fourteen standard hours."
She felt increasingly harried, fearing for her own
life and regretting having dragged Jeep and the mud dragon to their doom.
She turned back to the screens with renewed determination. "I'll think of
something. I can't leave Jeremy out there alone."
A screen to one side flashed warning.
"Hive activity," Dikki announced.
More to the point, a Hive vessel drifting parallel to
their trajectory.
"What is it?"
"A courier," Dikki said. "A derelict. The machine
is inactive. There are many such inactive craft adrift in this region."
Damaged software caused Hive machinery to freeze
unexpectedly now and then. The Hive simply abandoned affected machinery
and replaced it, oblivious to the nature of the software glitch that
plagued its numbers, unwilling to try to let humanity fix it for fear
humanity would deactivate the Hive because of the self-defensive war it
had fought against humanity. This was the first malfunctioning Hive
component Myla had ever seen with her own eyes. It was something that
never happened with Covonian MI.
Myla watched the courier spin slowly against the
stars. If only they could reach it. A courier was fast and agile, built
to deliver critical components to Hive manufacturing facilities on a
moment's notice.
"Estimated time of impact," Dikki said, "seven
hours."
Myla looked around sharply. "What?"
"We're on a collision course with the derelict craft,
Myla."
She rejected the possibility with a shake of her
head. "Can't be. Dikki, it's some kind of set-up. The chances of a
coincidental encounter..."
"Are beyond calculation," Dikki said.
Perhaps she had been set up, but if someone had put
the Hive vessel on an intercept course, she had only one small mystery to
resolve. Who, and why?
"Dikki, I feel like I'm having a bad dream."
"I do not understand the reference, Myla."
"Imagine the mud dragon sprouting wings and flying
out a window."
"Myla, I find nonsense difficult to calculate."
"Well, I guess that's the problem I'm having right
now. I find this entire situation nonsense and difficult to calculate."
She glanced back at Jeep, chilled again with suspicions to horrifying to
contemplate.
Dikki had no way to carry on a conversation on that
level. Myla let it slide and instead began to do a bit of calculating of
her own. "How hard will we hit?"
The impact, it turned out, would be negligible, no
more than a few meters per second.
"We need that ship, Dikki. I don't care how it got
here."
"Myla, we have no means of interfacing with Hive
technology."
"I don't see why not. It's not all that different
from our own MI web technology."
"I have safeguards that disallow Hive interface,"
Dikki said.
"I guess I can understand that, but at least you
could pilot the courier, couldn't you? Can you get the courier engines to
work?"
"I could not pilot the courier, but the engines are
more sophisticated than our transport. They are never entirely inactive,
if they are still functional at all."
"Could I myself pilot the courier?"
A moment of hesitation. "Yes, manually, with
guidance."
Myla sighed. The little MI was stymied at every
junction. If things couldn't be done by the book, they couldn't be done
at all.
"Then I'll do it myself," she said.
"You do not have the necessary training with which to
succeed. You would be slow to respond to my guidance."
"But you have the information I’d need.”
Dikki thought about it. "Yes, I do."
"Then you'll tell me what to do and I'll do it
myself. Let me worry about how good my reflexes are.”
"Yes," Dikki said. “As you wish.”
"Well, how very nice. How about if we get started
before I run out of air and you have nobody left in the whole universe to
talk to. Wouldn't that be awful?"
Dikki didn't bother with a reply. Time meant nothing
to the MI. Activity and inactivity were all the same to the machine.
"Do we have EVA equipment aboard our transport, Dikki?"
"We do. However..."
"I don't want to hear any howevers. Can I get inside
the courier?"
"Hive equipment incorporate all standard manual
overrides."
"How dumb. Machines with manual overrides who think
of themselves autonomous. But convenient."
Myla asked questions that could be answered by a
simply yes and no and collected the equipment she would need from among
the transport's emergency stores. She stuck a handheld cutting torch into
her belt as an afterthought, the closest she had to a personal weapon.
"Myla, the transport will not allow you egress into
the vacuum," Dikki said somewhere along the way, confirming what she had
suspected might happen as fact.
Myla glanced up at the docked MI in mock
astonishment. "My goodness, it won't?"
"The transport would calculate the attempt to leave
this vessel as an act of self-destruction."
"Shut it down," she said. "We don't need it
anymore."
"It will defend against an act of sabotage, Myla."
"How would it stop me?"
"You would be incapacitated, if the need arose."
Myla wasn't entirely convinced. In her own mind,
only one problem remained. "If I could reach the courier, I don't have
vacuum suits for Jeep and the mud dragon. Will we have a way to dock?"
"Docking ports are standard."
Myla gave her old mechanical mentor a satisfied
smile. "Then I don't see a problem."
She positioned herself in front of the transport's
control panel, reached behind her shoulder, and pulled the hood in place.
The body glove pressurized. She slipped the harness of the EVA pack over
her shoulder, a compact unit that would allow her to maneuver in an open
vacuum and then put her hand over a slight hump in the surface of the
panel. "The processors to the transport are in here, aren't they? If
they were to fail for whatever reason, would you have emergency control
over the transport, Dikki?"
"I would retain the ability to issue basic control
sequences."
Myla whipped her cutting torch from its holster at
her side. The moment she took aim at the control panel, the air filled
with a sudden haze.
"What is it, Dikki?"
"A neural paralyzing agent, Myla. You will not be
harmed."
"Dikki, I'm wearing a body glove and I'm
pressurized."
"The agent will penetrate the material of the body
glove, Myla."
She glanced back at Jeep doubtfully. Jeep didn't
seem to be affected. Maybe Jeep had a different biochemistry, but the
fact remained that she seemed unaffected as well.
"Dikki, I told you this transport was
malfunctioning."
She triggered the torch and smoothly sliced deep into
the control panel, then swung away and hurried to the airlock. "Open the
outer airlock hatch, Dikki."
The outer hatch opened freely.
"So, can I get out now?" she called over her
shoulder.
"The transport has been rendered inactive," Dikki
announced. "I have several warnings I wish to deliver at this time."
"I'll listen to them later. I want to get this out
of the way first."
Myla stepped inside the airlock, closed the inside
door behind her, and activated the outer door. The controls flashed
sequences of red, orange and then green. The outer hatch open onto the
magnificence of the unobstructed universe.
Stars like jewels sparkled in the darkness and glowed
in a dense haze along the galactic ecliptic. Banks of clouds a thousand
light-years across speared the core itself, spotted here and there with
globular clusters of stars that glared in dangerous light.
Myla's eyes teared. "Dikki, it's so beautiful out
here."
"You may not survive," Dikki's voice warned from the
speaker in her helmet. "Radiation levels so close to Immamat are far
above lethal intensities. Neither can your body glove protect against
micrometeoric dust of high velocity."
Myla backed against the inner hull fearfully and
gazed out into the deadly night. "How far away is the courier?"
"Twelve hundred meters and closing."
"I can't see it. We're rotating a little bit. A
whole sky is turning. Tell me when the courier is in my line of sight.
Can you do that?"
"The courier will be in your line of sight in
seventeen seconds."
Dikki counted them down to her. Myla finally saw a
silver flash of light, and then another. The courier was tumbling slowly
in space.
She wet her lips nervously. "How long will it take
me to reach it?"
"Myla, you are not proficient in the use of the EVA
pack."
"If I was really proficient, how long?"
"Seven minutes."
She wanted to ask how long she would survive in open
space, except that it didn't matter. Jeremy had been captured by the
Hive. She and Jeep and the mud dragon were doomed aboard the derelict
transport. That left the courier as their only hope of survival. If she
died before she reached it, nothing would be lost. Jeep and the mud
dragon would die in any case, and Dikki would float alone among the stars
forever.
With a cry of pure exhilaration, exactly as she had
done leaping from the hovering air-car above a sink hole on Covonia, she
soared with abandon out into empty space.
