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

just float on down,” he told his team. He suited actions to words, keeping one hand on the railing as he stepped over and turned off the gravity field. With a solid push “down” from the railing, he started himself heading toward the bottom of the chamber.

Sixty meters of molycirc passed him as he descended, and he shivered. Even the largest molycirc cores produced by any modern power—including the Mesharom—couldn’t exceed ten meters before the crystals had fundamental issues.

The core he’d brought was far less powerful than these computers had been—but on the other hand, they’d been built when the conductivity levels of a lot of materials had been very different. The key was finding bits they could bring online, linking them with the Taljzi-designed hybrid tech and then inserting their own Alavan code.

He touched down at the base of the central spire carefully, activating his boots at the last moment as he reached the floor. To his shock, there was a body there—a four-armed Alava, mummified by millennia of vacuum, had been in the process of opening a maintenance panel when their world had ceased to be.

“Sonders, give me a hand here,” he instructed the first tech to touch down next to him. “Let’s not be rude to the poor guy, but he can’t help us today.”

He and the tech carefully moved the Alava’s body, shuffling him carefully into a corner before returning to the open maintenance panel.

One of the other techs had begun to set up the hybrid interface, and Rin fully opened the panel to look inside.

“Everything looks intact here,” he murmured. “Just no power. I wonder what happened to that.”

The equivalent in Taljzi-controlled space had never powered down, according to the records the Imperium had from the Taljzi. The control station had its own solar collectors and had still been receiving power transmission from several of the collector stations.

“We can run some power from batteries to make sure everything boots up,” Sonders suggested. “That will give us an idea of what we need to link in while we go look at the solar collectors. Do as much in parallel as possible?”

“Not much choice on that one,” Rin agreed. “We’ve got batteries?”

“Enough to run the core for a few hours if we need to,” another tech confirmed.

“Let’s not aim for that,” Rin said. “We’ll try to boot it up and run a self-diagnostic. That’s all for today. I’ll want to know more about the sensors and teleporters and power collectors before we seriously try to turn this on.”

“Doesn’t it have control as soon as we turn it on?” Sonders asked.

“No; if we trigger the self-diagnostic, it will lock itself out,” Rin told the tech. “Plus, we’re definitely not going to feed it enough power to do more than boot. Watch the amount of power we give it,” he instructed, pulling up notes on a holographic panel above his vac-suit arm.

“We want to give it one-point-six-five megawatts,” he concluded after skimming the report. “Nothing less will run it at all, so that should be barely maintenance-level power.”

“All right.”

The techs set to work, laying in cables and setting up batteries while Rin stepped back to survey the spire. Like Lawrence, most of his work would come once the hardware was online. He could direct people to the right hardware and could help recode the Alavan software once it was online, but he wasn’t much use for this part.

“Lawrence, report,” he instructed as he switched his radio to a longer-range network.

“We’ve made entry to Teleporter One,” she told him. “No power, but our initial exterior survey suggests the receptors are intact. We can either bring a solar collector online or see what the Wendira have for power transmitters.”

“We’ll need to do the same here,” he said. “Power systems are offline. The Taljzi swarm had power, didn’t it?”

“When the furry buggers arrived, apparently,” she agreed. Taljzi—like their Kanzi cousins—looked much like humans wrought in two-thirds scale, then covered in blue fur.

“They got luckier than we did,” Rin said. “But, of course, we have all of their notes. Control-center computers are intact but offline. We’re going to run a self-diagnostic to see if we can ID what parts aren’t working and need hybridization.

“What does the interior of the teleporter station look like?”

“A morgue,” Lawrence said grimly. “The Wendira have only physically been aboard maybe a tenth of the stations. They didn’t make it to this one, so…bodies and skeletons. I’d say the place had a crew of about a thousand and none of them had any warning.”

“Based off the sites I’ve examined, they just dropped dead where they were standing when the cybernetics shut down,” he told her. “Welcome to why no modern cybernetic has any interface with the autonomous nervous system!”

“And you still have more than I want,” Lawrence told him. “My opinion of your sanity on that matter, by the way, is not improved by moving the bodies of people whose implants killed them.”

“Fair enough,” Rin conceded. “Have you made it to the teleporters yet?”

“Not yet, but so far, things look pretty intact. Based off the Taljzi swarm, either the teleporters were transmitting when the universe changed and instantly blew themselves up, or they were on standby and quietly shut down.”

“Funny that they can still transmit, even now, if the ones that were transmitting died,” Rin murmured.

“Well, it’s one thing to run complex energy fields under a different set of physical laws,” she noted. “It’s an entirely different level of hell to try and maintain complex energy fields while the laws of physics are changing.

“I don’t think the Alava designed for that possibility any more than we do!”

Chapter Fifty-Two

Rin rubbed his eyes in exhaustion and stared at the code. It was a modification of the Taljzi code written for their swarm—and he wasn’t entirely sure he even understood their code.

“You’re sure about this scan data?” he asked Mok. The Tosumi was the only other person in the lab on the Wendira station. Everyone else was busy working on the