Cyber Dreams 4.41 - It Pours

Hope you enjoy the chapter :)

-Plum

Juliet stood before the door, gun tight to her shoulder, ready for anything as Angel finished her exploit. The blast door latches thunked as they slid out of their housings, and with a hiss of slightly positive air pressure, the thick, heavy door began to roll open. Juliet had imagined a wide-open cargo space filled with exotic equipment and perhaps a violent squad of combat synths waiting for her, so she was a little surprised to see a small airlock chamber coated in some kind of powdered black paint. As she cautiously stepped forward, the blast door slid closed with a resounding thud, and a pleasant, feminine voice emanated from a scanner array near the closed inner door, “Welcome, technician. Please provide identification to avoid safety protocols.”

“Juliet, jack into the scanner array near that door. Quickly!” Angel didn’t often sound panicked, so it startled Juliet into action. She let her gun hang from its sling and pulled her data cable out as she took two steps to cross the little airlock chamber, shoving it into the data port at the base of the scanner array. Juliet didn’t like how the outer door had closed. Shouldn’t Angel have been in charge of that? She looked around the little room. It was only about three meters deep by four wide, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were smooth plasteel coated in that strange, powdery black paint. The room’s only feature was the scanner array above the inner door.

“Welcome, technician. You have thirty seconds to provide your credentials before safety protocols are enacted.”

“What’s going on, Angel?” Juliet knew what was going on, generally—she was about to trigger some kind of alarm. She wouldn’t mind a few more details, though. When Angel didn’t respond, and the back of her neck began to feel hot, she knew something serious was happening; Angel was pulling out all the stops, trying to force her way past the ICE in the little airlock’s security package.

“Welcome, technician. You have twenty seconds to provide your credentials before safety protocols are enacted.”

“Angel . . .”

“A moment, Juliet.”

“Warning: you have ten seconds to provide credentials to avoid safety protocol enactment.” With soft hissing clicks, several panels in the ceiling, heretofore invisible, slid open, revealing shiny chrome nozzles.

“Angel!”

“Warning: you have five seconds . . .” the voice cut out, and the panels slid closed. “Welcome, technician Emilio Fuentes. Please stand by for decontamination.” New panels slid open on the sides of the room, and suddenly, Juliet was awash in brilliant green laser-like beams. Vents in the ceiling slid open, and fans began to whir, evacuating the smoke as tiny particles of lint and dust were incinerated by the beams.

While the lasers were frisking her, Angel said, “Fido interrupted a message from this room’s commlink. It was meant to warn the ship and the station that self-destruction was a possibility and that the crew should prepare to evacuate.”

“The ‘safety protocols’ were going to blow the ship?”

“That would have been the second stage. The first stage was to incinerate everything in this airlock.”

The lasers stopped their crisscrossing pattern, and new nozzles emerged from the ceiling, spraying a fine mist into the chamber. Juliet didn’t know what it was, but she was thankful to be inside her airtight suit. “You mean I was five seconds from being cooked?”

“Yes, though your suit would have protected you for several seconds. I would say I cracked the security with ten seconds to spare—no mean feat, I might add. This room has a pseudo-AI managing the entry and exit of all personnel. Don’t worry, I have complete control now. The good news is that there’s nobody currently registered to be working within.”

“No synths?”

“Not inside, at least according to the scanner logs.” The mist stopped spraying, and weird, extremely bright, strobing lights began to flash. Juliet watched as steam began to rise from her armored suit.

“Is this thing dosing me with radiation or something?”

“No, those flashing lights are meant to activate the sanitizing agent that was just disbursed.” As the strobing lights switched off, air jets began to blow from grates that had silently opened under Juliet’s feet. “You’re almost through the sanitation process.” Juliet fidgeted nervously, looking around the room, wondering how freaked out she should be that she’d almost been incinerated for stepping into it. The air jets stopped hissing, all the hidden ports snicked closed, and then the inner airlock door clicked loudly and began to roll to the side.

Even though Angel was confident no one was inside, Juliet lifted her shotgun as she peered through the opening, suddenly a lot more nervous about stepping into unexplored spaces in the hidden facility. What she saw was the weirdest, most sci-fi room she’d ever laid eyes on. She’d been in some high-tech environments, not least of which was Doctor Ladia’s clinic. This place made all of Ladia’s equipment look quaint. The deep hum of powerful equipment, the weird static-like energy in the air, and the bespoke nature of all the hardware made her feel like she’d just stepped into the heart of an alien spacecraft.

The space was ample, probably forty meters by twenty, with a high ceiling. It didn’t feel big, though, with all the equipment crammed in there. Everything was white or stainless steel. Three huge stainless cylinders that looked almost like gas tanks with wide Diamatex viewports cut into the sides lined the right-hand wall, one stacked atop the other horizontally. Stainless pipes ran from those cylinders to five other stainless containers that got progressively smaller and less rounded. The final one was only about as big as a mini-fridge, and it caught Juliet’s eye because it was wrapped entirely in tubing that looked like it was made of gold.

Data terminals lined the opposite wall, and huge, bulky machines filled the center of the bay, all of them housed in stainless steel shrouds, making it very hard for Juliet even to guess what they were. One thing she recognized right away, near the back of the room, and cut into the rear wall, was a domed containment chamber that clearly housed a fusion reactor a good deal larger and more modern than the one on the Kowashi or those on the smaller ships she’d flown. Conduits and pipes ran between nearly every component, and Juliet was tracing them with her eyes when Angel said, “You should connect me to that central data terminal. There’s no wireless signal in here.”

“You lost your connection to Fido?”

“Yes.”

“Dang it!” Juliet hurried toward the indicated terminal, her boots hardly making a sound on the insulated white plastic floor panels, and plugged into one of the many open ports on the side of the big cube.

“This might take me a few minutes. I wish I had Fido; I could set him loose, and we could explore while he worked.”

“I know you don’t want to copy him, but why don’t you make him some brothers or sisters?”

“I’ve thought about it but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m still learning from Fido as he grows and expands his capabilities. I’ve been making plans for an assistant AI for your gunship if Bennet ever gets the main systems back online.” She paused for a minute and, in a quieter voice, asked, “Are you disappointed that I don’t have a suite of helper daemons like Fido?”

“Disappointed? No, you goof! You just kept me from getting barbequed! How could I be disappointed? Besides, you see Fido as an individual, well, maybe a pet, but whatever, he’s not just some code to you. You have your quirks, and so do I; that’s one of the reasons we get along so well.” Juliet watched the display on the data terminal, but nothing Angel was doing was represented on the screen. “While you’re working there, can you help me understand any of this equipment?”

“That fusion reactor could easily power this entire ship and several more like it. Some of these larger components look similar to those I saw while researching gravity generation technologies back on Luna. However, none of the photos of that hardware were current; all of that information became proprietary after the war as corporations fought over the technology.”

“Some kind of gravity generation? But this ship doesn’t have a gravity field, does it? The only reason I feel gravity is because of the station’s spin, right?”

“That’s correct, but we don’t know what the ship is capable of when fully powered up with a full crew. Still, it was definitely not designed with a gravity generator in mind. Other than this extra cargo bay, the ship is very close to factory specifications.” While Angel worked, Juliet continued to let her eyes wander over the big space, studying the dozens of machine components, though most of them were simply stainless-steel boxes with tubes and pipes coming out of them. On a whim, she closed her eyes and opened her mind, trying to see if she could pick up anything with the lattice, but nothing greeted her other than the hum of the reactor and the sounds of fluids and gases moving through pipes.

“They’ve gone to great length putting those stainless shrouds over every piece of machinery in here.”

Juliet opened her eyes and looked around the room again. “You don’t think they’re necessary?”

“No. I think they’re protecting proprietary technology.”

“Wouldn’t the techs know what’s under them anyway? You figure they have people coming in here who aren’t in on the secret?”

“It’s possible that human or synthetic technicians are trained on individual components and won’t know what function the system as a whole serves.” As Juliet thought about that, her imagination ran wild with ideas about why a gas harvester might have a modified gravity generation system powered by a reactor big enough to energize a small city. She kept coming up blank, though; she just didn’t know enough about the science to understand what the point of it all could be.

“Any progress?”

“Oh yes! I’m partially in, working my way past some tertiary layers of ICE. This terminal was well-defended. There’s a single access point where this room’s network interfaces with the ship’s network. Once I make that connection, I’ll be in touch with Fido again and can begin analyzing the data in this server.”

“You think I’ve got enough footage to satisfy Mary Moon?”

“She asked you to get detailed footage of the equipment in here. I don’t think that’s particularly valuable, considering how all the equipment is compartmentalized. I think the data I get out of this server might prove far more valuable.”

“Yeah, I don’t think Mary banked on me being able to get at that, though.” Juliet idly tapped at the hilt of her vibroblade. “What if I opened up some of these shrouds?”

“If you were careful and cut shallowly through the hinges of those access panels, I think that may be a good idea.”

“Okay, when you’re done there.”

“I’m through to Fido! All is still clear on the ship. Juliet, plug your deck into this server, and I’ll work through that so you don’t have to stay tethered.

“Oh, duh!” Juliet dug around in her vest pocket, pulling her data deck out. She ran its cable into another empty port, set it down on the workstation’s charging pad, then asked, “Can I unplug?”

“Yes. I’m working through the deck now.”

“Roger.” Juliet pulled out her data cable, then drew her vibroblade, approaching one of the big stainless cubes. She walked around it until she found a locked access panel. Just as Angel had suggested, she took her blade and carefully inserted it into the seam between the panel cover and the shroud, slicing down through the little stainless hinge. She repeated the process for the bottom hinge. Then, she used her knife to pry the cover away from the shroud, exposing the machine’s hidden innards.

The insides were just as confusing to her as the outside. Thousands of wires were tightly bundled and ran from one black plastic box to another to another. She saw compressed air tanks, refrigerant coils, and dozens of circuit boards. She took a long minute to look at every visible component carefully, knowing the footage might prove valuable down the road, and then she moved on to the next big stainless box. While Angel worked on the data terminal, she repeated the process four more times.

Angel seemed too preoccupied to speculate about what she was revealing under the shrouds. Each time Juliet cut away one of the panels, looking inside at the mysterious machinery, she was left with more questions than answers but hoped Angel would have some theories soon. She squatted before the stainless, rectangular tank wrapped in gold tubing and was closely examining it from every angle when Angel finally spoke up. “I have a theory about what this ship has been doing with this hardware.”

“I’m listening!”

“This compartment and the array of hardware within is only half the picture. Conduits are running through the decking down to the ship’s collection array. I figured that out when I began to read the data they’ve been gathering from scanners that aren’t part of the gas harvester’s array. This ship has been measuring gravitational anomalies around Jupiter. It seems that Jupiter’s gravity well has allowed for a high concentration of dark matter.”

“Dark matter?” Juliet knew the term. She’d learned about how the presence of dark matter was considered necessary for many fundamental rules or at least the theories of rules in the universe to make sense. She was pretty sure people hadn’t ever found or seen it, though. That was part of the whole reason it was called “dark.”

“Yes. I think the people responsible for the design of this collection and containment system discovered that Jupiter has been naturally ‘collecting’ dark matter, for lack of a better word. This room doesn’t house a gravity generator; it houses a gravitational field generator. It’s not making gravity for the crew of the ship but to capture dark matter. I see references to a quantum gravity resonator or QGR. This is the heart of the process they’ve developed; the QGR manipulates the fundamental forces at a quantum level, allowing it to generate concentrated gravity wells specifically to capture dark matter.”

“Uh, is that possible?”

“Dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter or electromagnetic forces, making it nearly impossible to detect, let alone capture. It does, however, interact with gravity. This ship is exploiting that interaction. If I understand things correctly, I believe they capture it using the QGR, and then they store the dark matter in gravitational containment fields within self-contained units that can be removed from the ship. Do you see that empty platform opposite the fusion reactor shroud? That’s where the containment unit would sit. This ship has recently had its payload removed.”

“What are they doing with dark matter?” Juliet’s mind was racing through a hundred corny sci-fi plots where dark matter was responsible for everything from doomsday devices to the origin of a superhero’s powers.

“That isn’t explicitly stated anywhere in this data. I can guess, though, based on the values in this database from the scanners—they’re measuring the effects the dense pockets of dark matter near Jupiter are having on spacetime. If I were to postulate the purpose for all this, I’d say the dark matter is being studied elsewhere for applications in altering or ‘warping’ spacetime.”

“In English?”

“Juliet, they’re trying to build a warp drive. Something that will fold space and allow faster-than-light travel.” Juliet’s mind bloomed with the implications of what Angel said, and she found herself plopping down in the chair bolted in front of the workstation. In the back of her mind, she’d been thinking this whole thing was a kind of conspiracy goose chase. Why would any corp hide such a big operation inside a gas harvester? Surely, this was just some experimental gas harvesting tech that Mass Gas or whoever owned this ship was trying to hide from the competition. Angel’s revelation and theory had blown that idea out of the water.

Why hide a dark matter collector inside a gas harvester? Because they needed to gather a lot of the stuff, and they didn’t want anyone to catch on to what they were doing. Any corp that mastered dark matter and managed to keep their know-how a secret would stand to gain so much wealth that Juliet’s mind simply couldn’t fathom it. What could they do if they really managed to create a faster-than-light drive? What kinds of resources would suddenly be available if trips to nearby solar systems were a possibility? What if they weren’t limited to those “nearby?”

How were they doing it? How had they built the QRG or QGR or whatever Angel had called it? How were they managing to build those portable gravity-powered containment units? “Angel, is an AI helping them? A true AI?”

“I’m not able to discern that from this data.”

“Did you copy everything?”

“I copied the database of scan results and all the system information. I didn’t copy the raw scan data because your data deck doesn’t have the room.”

“Any idea where they’re taking the dark matter?”

“From this station to the nearby moon, Ganymede. I have logistical information for the shipments; the containment units must be tuned precisely to interact with nearby gravity wells.”

“The gas collecting corp, the one that owns a piece of all them, don’t want the other big corps to catch wind of what they’re doing. They’d be attacked. If they succeed, it’ll upset the power structure in the entire solar system. If someone like WBD knew this was going on, they’d try to steal it for sure.”

“There’s also the likelihood that your question bears weight: are they using a true AI? If so, that would spell their destruction as well.”

Juliet turned and unplugged her deck, slipping it back into her pocket. She felt like she’d just picked up a nuclear bomb. “Can I give this to the pirates? It seems a little too hot to give to a bunch of criminals.” Angel didn’t answer right away, so Juliet stood and walked to the airlock, punching the button to open the external door. She had to wait while the inner door closed and the airlock thoroughly sanitized her again. While she waited, she voiced what was on her mind, “I feel like I just stepped on a landmine. Who do I trust with this kind of information? Do I trust anyone that much? Is it okay for a corporation to figure this kind of tech out? If they do, is it okay for one corp to have the secret? Will it spark another big war?”

The big door thunked open, and she hurried out past the blasted remains of the combat synth. She glanced at her AUI and saw Angel had populated it with a path to the shuttle bay. “I don’t know, Juliet. I hadn’t considered all of those questions in my earlier fascination with what I’d found.”

“I’m starting to wish I hadn’t taken this side job. Still, it puts things in perspective. I don’t know if I can afford to worry about Nick, Antigone, Larry, and all that. I need advice, and I don’t have a clue who to ask.”

“Not to add to your concerns, but Fido says three armed synths are approaching the airlock from the station.”

Juliet groaned and started jogging. “When it rains, it pours, Angel.”