Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9), Glynn Stewart [reading well .TXT] 📗

Taljzi documents, the Dyson swarm they encountered actually did this by accident several times,” Rin told them. “They did have an emergency refueling system already set up that the Taljzi mostly just needed to get control over.

“Something about pinging that interface sensor made what was left of the swarm think it needed to refuel somebody.” He shook his head. “The irony is that the Taljzi Dyson swarm was more dangerous because it was more intact.

“The Skiefail Swarm is less intact, and the computers on the control station appear to be completely offline. The Taljzi had to work out how to take control of a half-working computer and then repair and replicate an existing system.

“We have to actually bring the computer online, reestablish hardware links, bring both the teleporter and the interface scanner back online…and as Commander Lawrence said, the plasma collector controlled how much plasma the teleporter had to handle.”

“Without that lower-level station, we are teleporting directly from the lower corona,” Lawrence said calmly. “While we should be able to control the volume we’re bringing in, we have less control over temperature and mass. There will be a small but recurring chance, with every single shot, that the plasma will destroy the teleporter.

“And that’s after we’ve done all the work to make the damn thing fire in the first place.”

The room of scientists and techs was silent, and Rin smiled thinly.

“Mok and Lawrence are leaving for the first teleporter station in thirty thousandth-cycles,” he told them. “Thirty of you are going with them—Lawrence already knows who, and you should have a note on your communicators.

“The rest of you are going into the control station with me, where we are going to have a long talk with a dead computer about how nice it would be to live again.”

He gestured around the lab.

“This will be our base station and our main operating center,” he noted. “Once I’ve had a chance to look at the station computer, we’re going to set up our molycirc core here and run some amazingly long cables.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and we don’t know how much time to do it in. So, take your rest when you can—and let’s get to it.”

Chapter Fifty-One

Even if the lights had still been powered, the Alava hadn’t seen in quite the same wavelengths as humans. Rin wasn’t sure the space station would ever have managed to not be a foreboding, ominous maze.

Thanks to the Wendira attaching their main expedition station to the control center—it was the largest intact space station—they had decent maps of the structure.

But they had been determined to take things very slow and very careful—and when dealing with a facility the size of a Dyson swarm, that meant things had been taking functionally forever. They’d mapped the station, but they hadn’t even put up lights of their own.

Floating drones spread light out in front of Rin’s team as a trio of Wendira Warriors led the way. He wasn’t sure they needed the armed escort, but he wasn’t arguing, either.

Even with the lights from the drones and the light mounted on his vac-suit’s shoulders, the place was dark. There was no air, nothing. His suit provided air and faux gravity alike to make up for their absence.

“This way,” he told the Warriors, calling them back to an intersection via the shared radio net. “There’s an elevator shaft a hundred meters along this corridor. We need to go down fifteen levels.”

“How do you know what you’re looking for?” the lead Warrior asked. None of the soldiers had given their names.

“I know where the computers we’re looking for were on another one of these stations,” Rin told them. “And I’m familiar with Alavan architecture, and that is a level directory on the wall there.”

He shone his light on the faded text. It was a massive chart attached to an illegible map.

“It says we’re on level seventy-six and that the computer core is on level sixty-one,” he told the Wendira. “Roughly the middle of the station. This entire facility existed to provide brains for the rest of the swarm.”

Or, at least, for about a third of it. He’d be happy if he could get it to talk to a hundredth of the platforms it had once controlled.

He only needed it to talk to five, after all, and it had once controlled thousands.

“Direct as you will, Dr. Dunst,” the Warrior told him, stepping out along the corridor he’d directed them to.

Just getting to the computers was going to be a nightmare. Then they’d need to hook up power—but at least if there was one thing they knew they could find on a Dyson swarm, it was power!

When Rin stepped into the central computer core of the ruined Alavan station, the true scope of their task finally sank in. Up to that moment, it had all been theoretical and somewhat distant, easy to breezily assess the task versus the skills to hand.

But the central computer core was a cylindrical room sixty meters in diameter and sixty high. They entered onto a balcony that circled the top, and he stared out into that open expanse filled with fifty-meter-tall cylinders of ancient molecular circuitry.

All of that circuitry, every one of those computers, had been built under laws of physics that no longer applied. He knew that some of them would be able to work if he gave them power. They’d be missing chunks of their memory, processing power, everything.

This was a graveyard for a people whose arrogance had broken the universe. Their computers didn’t work anymore. Their stations were ruins. Their dreams shattered. Nothing of the Alava remained but their ruins and their artifice.

And their enemies.

“All right,” he said slowly. “It’s a bit more intimidating in person, but we brought the gear we need to do the basic setup. The central spire is the best place to start, according to the notes we have from the Taljzi swarm.”

He considered the whole situation, then grinned.

“Turn off your boots’ gravity and