Ironheart Read online

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  The Ironheart’s AI subprograms came to. The shuttle’s AI requested access, but Ironheart didn’t want to give it. So the three men settled in to wait out the computers’ fight.

  But after thirty seconds Burran and Fehd raised their eyebrows at Madaku, who was following the progress of the hack on his tablet. “Must be some pretty weird code they’ve got,” said Burran.

  “I don’t care how weird it is,” said Madaku. By itself the Canary’s AI might have been no match for Ironheart’s, but the hyperdrive link in Madaku’s tablet connected back to the Registry and gave them its encyclopedic knowledge of all computer language and code ever uploaded, from which they should be able to extrapolate all codes in existence. “There must be examples in the Registry of something at least analogous enough for the AI to figure it out.”

  “Especially if it’s so old,” put in Fehd.

  “So why aren’t the doors opening?” said Burran.

  Madaku shook his head in wonder at the readouts. “Looks like this code was rewriting itself and mutating in isolation for a long time before it went to sleep.” Then, as if he were arguing with himself, or scolding himself for his own gullibility, he said, “I don’t care how long it’s been mutating, whatever it was originally extrapolated from must still be in the Registry. Our AI should have found the source code just from this one’s deep architecture, and should have back-engineered by now.”

  Burran gave the other two a significant look. “Maybe it’s been mutating in isolation a long, long time.”

  Fehd and Madaku fell silent, vaguely unsettled.

  But all computers ultimately ran on math, and no matter how exotic the notation and cognition patterns at the base of this program’s architecture, the brute-force computing power of the Registry was ultimately invulnerable. But even once the deep logic architecture had been deciphered, the door didn’t open. Madaku said, “Its mutative rate is off the charts. Now our AI’s problem is just keeping up. Its workarounds cease to be applicable less than a nanosecond after they’re devised.”

  It wound up taking more than another full minute before the Ironheart airlock clanked open. As they made their way through the passage tube over, Fehd said, “We’ll get a good amount of credits just for uploading that exotic code into the Registry.”

  Madaku was too disconcerted to reply. He didn’t think the other two men appreciated the magnitude of this code’s exoticism—there was no record in the Registry of code with such a fast mutative rate. It had been luck that had allowed the Canary’s AI to come up with a workaround that it was able to apply in the nanosecond before the Ironheart code shifted enough to make the workaround obsolete. Madaku wasn’t confident he would ever be able to program translation software that would allow him to establish stable communication with Ironheart’s systems, software that mutated at the same rate and in tandem with the other ship’s AI.

  There was no artificial gravity in the derelict. That was no surprise. But, as they were shining the flashlight through the gloomy crypt of the docking bay, Fehd exclaimed, “Hey, we’re pressurizing!”

  The other two could already see that, in the readouts displayed on the insides of their visors.

  “Pumps still work,” marveled Madaku.

  Burran said, “Whoever they were, maybe they abandoned ship and hoped to come back someday, since they didn’t take their surplus atmosphere.”

  “Or maybe something killed them all of a sudden and their atmosphere leaked out over eons,” said Madaku.

  Burran nodded. “Though there doesn’t seem to be a leak, so far. I guess we’ll find out.”

  “This is human-breathable air, right?” asked Fehd, an exploratory hand floating up toward his helmet toggle.

  “For crying out loud, don’t take your fucking helmet off,” said Burran. “You know good and well it’s impossible for the scanners to check for every single thing in the galaxy that could possibly kill you.”

  Every once in a while Fehd got pissy, when he felt his dignity as ship’s captain was being impugned. “You can never be sure of everything,” he snapped, floating upside-down relative to his comrades.

  “No, but you can at least wait till we’ve checked with more than these rinky-dink prelims.”

  Madaku stayed out of it. He knew where Fehd was coming from—“rinky-dink” was hardly a fair description of modern preliminary scans, and he shared the captain’s urge to remove the helmet. The odds were a million-to-one against the sensors missing something deadly to humans. But, technically, Burran was right that they should guard against the millionth chance.

  Another reason Madaku stayed out of it was that the ship was more interesting than the bickering. As he was panning across with his flashlight, the lights began to flicker on, and soon the place was adequately though dimly illuminated. Ironheart, it seemed, had a fairly vigorous welcome-home program, and it made Madaku a little nervous to see the ship’s computer doing so much before the Canary’s AI had entirely learned to communicate with it. Given the apparent decay of the AI when seen from without, he was taken aback that everything aboard seemed to be working so well.

  They were in a large room, across from an open doorway leading out into a corridor. Dust motes were swirling in the still-flickering, bluish fluorescents now that the atmosphere had returned. This room contained many plastic and metal crates, of various sizes. They were stacked in racks that held them immobile in the zero-G. Although the stacks were neat, the crates’ varieties of sizes and materials gave the room a jumbled, cluttered feel. All the crates had code scramblers engaged, and since the Canary’s crewmen were civilized it never occurred to the men to hack through that curtain of privacy, not before confirming absolutely that this was a derelict. Fehd put his hands on some of them, as if he could learn something by touch. He was practically licking his lips at the thought of what riches those crates might hold. Then again, they could just as easily contain shipments of underwear for a species long-dead, and then where would they be?

  They moved cautiously—largely thanks to Burran, but Madaku had to admit that the ship’s interior made him uneasy. Probably just the dire influence of the security specialist. Burran had suggested they send the ship’s robot over, instead of live personnel, but he hadn’t argued when Fehd said no. The presence of a mere robot would not constitute a salvage claim, and if there were any survivors aboard it could create a legally fuzzy situation, wherein the robot could be considered as forfeited to Ironheart’s occupants. More importantly, there were at least twenty major cultures, human and non-, that considered humanoid robots an abomination, and sending one unasked aboard their ships was one of the few ways left to spark a violent confrontation.

  Of course, there were plenty of non-humanoid robot models out there. But Fehd had picked his up on the cheap. One of the few things Madaku and Burran were able to share a laugh over was the idea that the robot was, in fact, so cheap and shitty that the day they needed it, it would probably break down. But that was only a joke—the odds of anything breaking down on the Canary were vanishingly small, unless the ship were left derelict a few centuries as Ironheart had been. It had been a thousand years since the diagnostic and self-maintenance tech had become advanced enough that serious problems repaired themselves, even in bargain-basement second-hand shit.

  They air-swam out of this first room. Their hands were free—all the readings they needed were displayed on the insides of their visors, and if a situation arose in which they needed weapons, their suits’ AI’s would activate its defenses and use them with better reflexes than the humans could ever manage. The firearms mag-clamped to their thighs were formalities more than anything else.

  When they entered the corridor, it curved away to their left, their view obscured by the bend after twenty meters or so, but to their right it continued straight on for about forty meters before making a sharp left. Burran frowned: “Why should it be laid out so irregularly?” There were hatchways on both sides of the corridor, spaced an average of five meters apart but w
ith noticeable variation. The hatches were not all the same make or color, and they all had different locking mechanisms. Some had no visible locking or latching mechanisms, at all.

  They paused to take that in. One or two hatches might be replaced haphazardly in a ship’s lifetime. But none of them had ever been on a vessel where it was impossible to tell which make of interior hatch was the original. Not only that, but the hatches were such different sizes that it looked like the bulkhead must have been cut through in places to accommodate them. Wouldn’t it have been much easier to order or manufacture hatches that fit the already existing specifications? Could the ship’s interior parts have been intentionally mismatched, from the start?

  They chose the curving path to the left. Not only did the tubular corridor curve, it also descended down deeper into the ship—they had been swimming along for many seconds before Madaku reminded himself that, in zero-G, one could just as easily say they were ascending as descending, yet he still could not shake the feeling that they were going down and not up. The walls were irregular, and the tunnel gradually narrowed. It was such a subtle change that it would have been on the mere edge of the range of human perception, except that their visor readouts kept them abreast of it. Along the walls were more crates, held in place by racks. There seemed to be no order to their placement or type. One of the crates was not really a crate at all—it looked to Madaku like a great box made of clay. He was finding the whole thing unsettling. There was no reason for a spaceship not to have a rational design; the fact that he couldn’t make any sense of this one’s bespoke some exotic alien intelligence unlike any he’d ever dealt with. Almost like the sort of legendary creatures that had supposedly roamed before the Hygienes.

  On their left they came upon a doorway whose hatch stood open, leading into a big chamber. They floated into it, Madaku first. As he went over the threshold, Madaku spotted something that startled him, and he yelped and floundered in mid-air. Burran automatically yanked first Madaku, then Fehd behind him, placing himself between them and whatever the threat might be.

  Only it didn’t seem to be much of a threat, after all. Nevertheless, each man’s breath grew faster. Even Burran’s.

  Across the room, in a transparent coffin, was a woman, propped up against the coffin’s back. At this distance she was small; yet the sight of her was such a shock she seemed to fill the mind.

  She had dark, nearly black hair; wavy, down to her shoulders. Her face was youngish—there was no telling what cosmetic treatments she may have had, but if she’d aged naturally she was probably around forty. Her oval face was well-proportioned, but her thin lips drooped down at the corners, and even in stasis her eyebrows seemed drawn together, giving her a severe expression. She had to be in stasis, and not dead or asleep. You could see the blood still pink under her sallow skin, despite the fact that her chest and diaphragm were completely motionless under her pinkish-gray unitard.

  The three men hung back at the entryway, regaining their breath. It wasn’t only their irrational fear of ghosts, zombies, and the like that had spooked them. A crewmember in suspended animation was the kind of thing that might be surrounded by defensive boobytraps. Burran scanned even more carefully than he had done so far.

  Finally he said, “Looks safe,” and began to swim toward the coffin.

  Fehd hung back. “Are you sure?” he said. “Did you check for everything?”

  “You can never check for everything, Fehd,” Burran replied, mocking Fehd’s remark from earlier, and continued on his way.

  Madaku and Fehd swam across the room after him. “How long has she been there?” demanded Fehd. “Has she been in suspended animation ever since those thrusters started going cold?” Madaku couldn’t decide whether the intensity of Fehd’s tone came from his aggrievement at having his salvage rights snatched away by a survivor, or by amazement at the ship’s suspended-animation tech. Probably amazement, he decided. Credits were nice, but it wasn’t like anyone was ever likely to have so few they’d go hungry. But tech like this would be genuinely exciting.

  Neither Burran nor Madaku acknowledged Fehd’s question, since they had no way of answering it yet. As they neared the coffin, Madaku started to say, “First thing, let’s see if we can figure out the readouts. If it’s been such a long hibernation, there could be complications during the revival....”

  His words cut off with a gasp. They all gasped, not just him.

  The woman’s eyes had popped open. Not a groggy, slow, blinking journey back into wakefulness. They snapped open, spent a millisecond roving around the chamber, then returned to the three arrivals and moved back and forth among them, fixing on first one and then another.

  “Her chest isn’t moving,” said Fehd. With a chill, Madaku realized Fehd was right. She also didn’t seem to be blinking. Fehd pulled the doctor off Madaku’s thigh. He pointed it at the woman and started scanning.

  “What’s it say?” asked Burran.

  Fehd shook his head at the readings. He seemed to be using the doctor as an excuse not to have to raise his eyes to the eerie woman in the transparent coffin. “Just, she’s, uh, she’s coming out of suspension. Vitals still very low.”

  “I can see that,” said Burran, “because her chest isn’t moving. So why is she awake?”

  “Maybe it’s, um, maybe it’s just a reflex,” said Fehd.

  Burran snorted.

  Right now the woman was looking straight into Madaku’s eyes. He said, “That’s not a reflex.”

  Her eyes bore into him—no muscle of her body seemed to have moved except for those controlling her eyes. Madaku found her expression and the thoughts behind it inscrutable, but he was certain there was a wakeful awareness behind those eyes.

  Her gaze continued to move from one to the other of them. They didn’t dart back and forth in confusion. They went from one to the other at a slow, steady pace, as if she were evaluating them, summing them up from her distant, aloof vantage.

  “Yeah,” said Burran. “Madaku’s right. She sees us.”

  Four

  Fehd was scanning her with the doctor and shaking his head.

  “What is it?” Madaku demanded.

  “Her brain’s back on, but it’s way ahead of her body.”

  “So she’s got a suspended animation chamber that works on different principles than the ones we know,” said Burran. Madaku held his tongue, reflecting that Burran probably didn’t understand just how radically different those principles would have to be.

  Whatever the readouts Fehd was staring at said, it must have been pretty damn interesting to have ripped his attention away from the woman herself, and her cold glare. Frowning at the doctor’s screen, he said, “Her brainwaves are weird. The doctor can’t diagnose it, or come up with any theories on what it means, but they’re weird.”

  “But she’s human, right?” said Burran.

  “Uh, yeah. Almost definitely.”

  The woman’s chest and diaphragm began to move. She pushed a button set into the wall of her coffin, and the men began to drift to the floor as the artificial gravity cranked back on. It was a slow descent, and they had time to orient themselves so that they landed comfortably with their feet on the floor, standing before the coffin. The gravity was heavier than what they maintained on the Canary, but as cosmopolitan prospectors they were accustomed to a range of gravities.

  They tried not to fidget as she pressed another button and they heard the hiss of her coffin unsealing. It was ridiculous for them to be the nervous ones—the woman was the one waking up all alone after who knew how many centuries, surrounded by three strangers.

  Then again, they’d only assumed she was all alone. It might not be a fluke that her suspended animation coffin had kept working so long, and there might be other crewmembers sprinkled throughout the ship, waking up now. Their readings hadn’t picked up any, but they hadn’t picked up this woman, either.

  Even lying there prone and silent, she had such a strange air of confidence about her; there wa
s a quality to her that Madaku had never quite seen. It took him a long moment to find the proper words to describe it, because they were words which had passed out of active use in all the cultures he’d lived in: words like stately, and regal.

  The lid of the coffin raised itself. The movement was accompanied by a chime, a little touch Madaku had never come across. Not that he’d seen more than a couple dozen suspended animation chambers. When you could zip across the whole galaxy in the space of a few months, thanks to hyperspace jumps, there wasn’t much need for suspended animation.

  The straps that had held the woman in place during the long centuries of zero-G unwrapped themselves and snapped back inside the coffin’s interior walls. Madaku thought that he’d like to get a closer look at some of that tech, and at some of this circuitry that seemed immune to entropy. Then the woman was stepping out of the coffin, and Madaku stopped caring about the circuitry.

  She held herself erect, her posture perfect. Each foot landed perfectly as she took three steps. By rights she should have been groggy, confused, clumsy as her body tried to shake off the long, accumulated inertia, as her mind tried to plug itself back in. But there was no hint she’d had so much as a brief nap.

  It was Burran she moved toward. Halting before him, she said, “Art thou the leader?,” in a clear strong voice with no cracks from disuse.

  Burran paused a tad longer than this straightforward question called for. Madaku noted the way Fehd bounced on his toes in annoyance at the delay. He wondered if Burran’s hesitation came from a desire to needle Fehd a little, or from a genuine unwillingness to admit that he wasn’t the leader.

  When Fehd was on the verge of taking it upon himself to answer, Burran finally jerked his head the other man’s way and said, “Nah, that’d be this guy.”