“What’s going on?” I asked. “Any luck?”
“No. Not even close. The LVX is way underpowered for what I am trying to do. At this rate, the semantic analysis trees would take weeks to run through. Is your dad back?”
“Technically, he’s not really my dad.”
“Why do you need Sean?” Ana-Zhi asked Chiraine.
“Well, I either need to hook up to the ship’s systems or he has to scavenge me something with a little more computing power.”
“He’s not back yet,” I said.
“We don’t have anyone who’s qualified to run data security diagnostics on the ship’s computer,” Ana-Zhi said.
“But—”
“Using the ship’s computer is not an option. Beck’s security protocols strictly forbid it. End of story.”
“Well, then we are out of luck,” Chiraine said.
I didn’t know what to tell her, except to keep at it. We really didn’t have any other choice.
The Sean bot returned a few hours later with the hover-cart piled high with cases and crates. There was so much stuff, we had to use a gantry crane to get it up to the main hold.
“What is all this junk?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Junk?” The Sean bot shook his head. “These are all priceless treasures. We need to bring them back to civilization.”
“What kind of treasures?” I asked.
“If you had been paying attention, JJ, you would know what kind of treasures.”
“Are these the artifacts you were telling us about, Mr. Beck?” Chiraine asked.
“Yes.” He pointed to a footlocker-sized box. “That’s Wimalla’s Shroud.”
“It is not!” Chiraine’s eyes widened.
“Over here is the Lyding Mechanism. And that’s the Nightmare Mask of Aethia. All the stuff I’ve collected over the past seven years. Well, most of it, anyway.”
“This is unbelievable,” Chiraine said. “What are you going to do with it all?”
“Step one is to get it away from the Mayir,” I said. “Were you able to make any more progress?”
“I told you, the LVX is too slow.”
For the Sean bot’s benefit, Chiraine explained the problem. He agreed that it was too dangerous to allow the Vostok’s computers to have access to Chiraine’s data, but he did have another idea.
“I’ll work in parallel with the LVX.” He thumped his robot chest. “The quantum array in here is similar to a Kane lattice, so we can run inverted function Grover II algos on your dataset.”
I didn’t follow exactly what he was talking about, but remembered a phrase from one of my briefing sessions on computer technology. With enough time and qubits, nothing is out of our reach. Something like that.
Chiraine obviously understood what the Sean bot was saying. She nodded excitedly. “Grover IIs would definitely speed things up. Let’s do it.”
“Z, you think you can fly this thing out of here?” the Sean bot asked.
“Sure. It’s just the landings that are iffy for me.”
“Good. Jannigan, you’re her co-pilot. Get going guys, and take us to where the Fountain was.”
With that, we were dismissed. As we left the hold, I glanced back. The Sean bot and Chiraine were chattering at each other while he plugged himself into the LVX.
23
Ana-Zhi was true to her word. She expertly guided the Vostok off the landing deck and slipped out into the void of space.
“Check the lower monitors, will you? Make sure the landing gear is up. This damn thing is so quiet I can’t even feel any vibrations.”
“They’re up.”
“Good.”
Once we were clear of Bandala, Ana-Zhi turned to the nav computer and browsed through the list of coordinates to find the location of the Fountain.
“Well, here’s the complete list of where those beacons were placed,” she said, glancing at the display. “Qualt or whoever didn’t bother to encrypt anything. Sloppy.”
“Or lazy,” I said. “Does that mean we could find them?”
“Yeah, they’re all around the system, but like your father said, it wouldn’t make any difference. What’s done is done.”
She was right. He was right. I got it. But it didn’t make me feel any better. I had a sudden urge to go over to the brig, wake Qualt up, and kick his ass until he told me exactly when the Mayir would arrive in this system.
But I didn’t.
We had a job to do and Ana-Zhi needed me on the scanner. According to the nav computer, the Fountain was about 200,000 kilometers away. It would take us nearly three hours to get there.
Because we were trying to scan basically the whole system, I needed to go into centaur mode, working in tandem with the scanner’s AI module, looking for any signs of the Rhya, the Mayir armada, or even the renegade Faiurae commando who stole my starhopper.
It didn’t take long for me to pinpoint the Fountain’s location on the scanner. I didn’t know what to expect, but Qualt hadn’t lied to us. The jump gate was dead.
“Anything?”
The graphs and readouts danced on my display. “Nothing. No ships. No movement. Power levels barely registering.”
“Son of a bitch.” Ana-Zhi, too, had realized that Qualt wasn’t bullshitting us. “I just don’t get how he could have knocked out the Rhya. I mean, they’re the damn Rhya, for Dynark’s sake!”
“I need to let my dad know.”
We both stabbed at various controls for the comm system, but couldn’t figure out how to access the intercom for the hold.
I got up out of my chair. “Screw it, I’ll go down there and tell him in person.”
The Sean bot and Chiraine were both still hard at work sifting through the volumes of data on her biklode. I filled them in on the state of the Fountain.
“They probably infected its energy system with a new kind of scidatium,” the Sean bot said. “Something that the Rhya weren’t protected against.”
“Yeah, but why isn’t the place crawling with Rhya trying to fix it?” I asked.
“Qualt got to them too,” Chiraine said. “Somehow took them out.”
That thought shot a chill through my heart. It meant that the Mayir already had a pretty powerful technology.
“When the Mayir get here, they’ll make sure the Fountain is secure,” the Sean bot said. “They can’t risk the Rhya—or even the rest of the Empire—coming back here. At
