Cosmosis

Exterior

(Starspeak)

In the elevator, Sid and I shucked our loose clothing off, anything that wouldn't fit under a space suit. I didn't have to lose much but Sid had to ditch his jacket and jeans. I dematerialized everything except my underwear and my shoes.

Unfortunately, my shoes were another pair from Byr, and one of the only non-Adept made pieces of my outfit.

But they couldn't follow me outside.

Nora was aghast at the two of us stripping down in preparation for space suits, but she still had enough wherewithal to keep herself focused.

Sid's spacesuit was first—our model was way more form fitting than the NASA version. Aliens had learned how to make them right. This far from the system's star, the radiation shielding didn't need to be nearly as robust, and that let me maximize the flexibility of the layers.

The end result was a thick nylon-like hexagonal material, and thicker quasi-leather pads over the joints. Heavy boots were seamless around the legs, and the Adept version of the design actually didn't have a way to get out without cutting or dematerializing it.

Even the lower half of the helmet was seamless with the suit: only the transparent top half was removable.

I made sure to tie off the whole creation so that Sid wouldn't be left exposed if I somehow lost consciousness.

Sid and I tucked our helmets under our arms while the elevator took us to one of the station's topmost levels.

Nora scowled.

"Turn around," she muttered, grabbing at her own shirt and beginning to materialize a suit of her own.

Sid and I wordlessly stared at the elevator doors while Nora got changed behind us. But I remained hyper-vigilant every second she wasn't in view.

The memory of my entire body suddenly locking up, paralyzed, was years old now, but it was still fresh and sharp in my brain like a knife...in my back.

It had been a long time since Nora had gotten me with the beginnings of her superconstruct and its trick. Her psionic firewall was good enough to keep even me from peering at her equipped psionics in detail, but I could still sense the huge lumbering things she kept in the back of her mind.

I didn't know exactly how it worked, but I knew pieces of it.

I knew it would depend on her Adeptry to work, and I knew her range was limited to just a couple centimeters.

As long as she didn't touch me, I knew she couldn't paralyze me again.

We exited the elevator and followed signs for the nearest airlock. Standard design was to have emergency bottles of oxygen stored at every air lock in case of an emergency spacewalk.

I had neglected to get the locker's code on our way out of the bridge, but it only took a second to materialize a crowbar and lever the metal open.

I'd materialized these spacesuits with the most common shape of valve on Vorak stations, and that was thankfully the design of these bottles too.

Never one to miss an opportunity for pettiness, I surprised Nora by grabbing her a bottle. But instead of handing it to her, I tossed it, and she gave a stumble catching the lump of metal.

If the small aggression irked her, she did a good job hiding it.

Sid and I fastened the bottles to our suits, behind the small of our backs, running the two tubes of air separately, one up the back and into the helmet's base, the other running around the waist, up the chest, and into the helmet below the jaw.

Redundant lines for your air were a good thing.

Nora, however opted for a custom design. Instead of fastening the bottle to any metal holster or bracket on her suit, she just materialized an ooze of inky black fluid that kept it in place on her back. And custom tubing made out of the same midnight-colored flesh ran between the bottle and her helmet.

Show off. I let myself scowl only when I knew she couldn't see my face.

The three of us carefully stepped across the hazard paint in the airlock marking the boundary of the station's artificial gravity, and I was more than a little satisfied to see Nora fumble for a moment in weightlessness.

I navigated myself by materializing little puffs of air, pushing on my body how I wanted. It was harder to the same for Sid, but he was as experienced with zero G as I was by now. However much help he needed, he wanted even less.

Nora righted herself by materializing a tendril of black flesh, coiling itself and pulling her back to the floor.

I wrangled a new psionic channel specifically for this spacewalk.

<Comm check.>

<Yeah,> Sid grunted.

<Heard,> was Nora's reply.

We cycled the airlock and stepped out into the horrific void of space. Kenophobia was not a word I'd learned until Sid had taught it to me.

It was the complete opposite of claustrophobia—a fear I had some personal connection with—fear of empty spaces. You might have thought a fear of tight enclosed spaces might result in some sort of comfort with the vast emptiness of space, or at least a greater tolerance for it.

But nothing of the sort was true.

Every spacewalk comes with the same dizzying and overwhelming sense of nothingness. In virtually all directions pervasive nothing surrounds you, and even experienced astronauts could find themselves stifled and panicked from the sheer isolation that crashed down on you.

One trick was to force yourself to imagine it in the seconds before you actually stepped out. You had to imagine stepping off the metal beneath your feet and just floating away into endless nothing, forever.

Confronting the dread early, in my experience, blunted the genuine sensation when it actually came. Nothing was more effective at conjuring terror than one's own imagination, and this technique tried to take advantage of that: make the real thing not so bad by comparison.

Arguably though, I made it worse on myself. Because with my particular Adept skillset including maneuvering jets of compressed air, I actually navigated zero-G tasks better when I didn't anchor myself to the station.

So while Nora materialized a set of four inky tendrils and began picking her way up the station like a Spider-Man villain, I simply floated my way up the station on jets of gas.

I propelled Sid too, though with far less grace. He put up with it because even as clumsy as I was using my jets on another person, it was still faster than making his way up the station by hand.

And time was short.

Sid and I made a beeline for the massive antenna and satellite array jutting out of the station. I had to analyze it for almost a minute to flag all of the laser emitters. They weren't traditional 'weapons', but communication lasers were designed to blast beams of light all the way to the other side of the star system and maintain clarity. At that intensity, point blank, light didn't have to be in the ionizing portion of the spectrum to be dangerous.

Luckily, the emitters weren't hard to steer clear of.

Nora however, veered off as we approached the array.

<Where are you going?> Sid asked.

<Well there's a rocket that somehow got strapped to the top of the station, right?> she said. <I'm thinking it might have clues.>

I didn't say anything, but threw a psionic message toward the Jack. My ship was hovering about a mile off the station. There was still a decent chunk of my crew aboard, and it was all hands on deck.

My working theory was only about thirty seconds old, but my guess was that the rocket had been grafted onto the station by SPARK or CENSOR in the middle of the remodeling that the governor had mentioned.

I doubted either of the AIs were lazy enough to leave any real evidence we could use against them, but the station was supposed to be destroyed on impact. So there was the remote chance corners had been cut under the assumption that it would all be destroyed in the wreckage anyway.

Sid and I focused our energy on scouring the array. He went visually, while I moved from circuit box to circuit box, pushing my cascade through the machinery looking for any signs of AI tampering.

The chances of the interference being solely on the software level were almost nil. The first thing the station would have tried was a rebuild from scratch, wiping all the software blank and reloading it all from air-gapped backups.

Was there a chance that the AIs could have compromised those backups? Yes.

But it struck me as unlikely.

If they'd infiltrated the station that thoroughly on a software level, there was very little stopping them from ever being discovered. There would be no need to meddle with the comms or strap a rocket to the top of the station at all.

The compromised software could have brought down the station with its own maneuvering thrusters. Instead of firing them all at once, they could have done so very quietly, very slowly, over a dozen hours.

If all the software was cracked, then the first warning anyone would have gotten about the station falling out of the sky would have been impact with the moon.

No, the AIs were not so omnipotent like that.

They could compromise computers, yes. But not by any means resembling 'hacking' back on Earth. If they wanted to hijack a computer, some drone or agent of theirs had to physically gain access to the computer in some way.

Most commonly, that meant grafting a machine of their own creation onto the computer somewhere, something that could let them gain access in real time.

We were already familiar with several designs, some favored by SPARK, some by CENSOR.

Sid, despite having no Adeptry of his own, was bravely leaping between arms of the comm array, visually guessing what panels and boxes might be the right size or shape to hold one of the familiar designs.

One miss and he would spin off into space, and I'd have to rescue him.

But he was every bit as laser focused as me; he didn't miss.

He flagged the best prospects, and I jetted to each one, cascading the interior to check closer.

<Caleb!> Sid called. <This one.>

He had kicked a panel open already. I floated over.

<It wasn't fused shut,> he said. <All the others were seamless.>

Sure enough, a large panel near the base of the primary satellite array hung open. The interior of the panel was mostly plain dark circuit boards and blocky power regulator units. But where there should have been an oversized alien-made bioprocessor, instead there sat a compact Terran-inspired silicon processor.

That alone would not have been alarming. My Flotilla had been funding itself by selling and licensing Earth computer technology for years now. But it did give me a clearer idea of when the compromising elements had been added.

Said compromising element in this case was a dark green round clamshell nestled to one side of the panel. It was taking up almost exactly the same space the old bioprocessor might have.

The round design—roughly the same size and shape as a five gallon water jug—was one of SPARK's favorites.

<Nai, you're looking for SPARK's drums,> I sent to one of my allies before switching to another. <Ben, Shinshay, I've found a unit grafted into the comms. Am I tearing it out or plugging into it?>

<It's an active system,> Shinshay said. <It's continuously spitting out override commands and splicing in false comm data—>

<Tear it,> Ben said.

<Right. Crisis. Simple. Tear it, yes,> Shinshay said.

I jammed my arm deep into the box, feeling around for the precise fasteners keeping the drum bolted in place. I melted through them with some precise Adeptry before yanking out each cable and wire connecting it to the comm array.

<How's that?> I asked.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

<…It did something,> Shinshay said. <Give us a minute to check more. Keep looking just in case there's more.>

Sid and I did just that.

We found two more smaller units grafted into the smaller antenna, but having torn out the big one, they didn't seem to be operating anymore.

After ten minutes, we'd looked through almost every panel on the comm array, and Ben had at least confirmed for us that the station seemed to have functional eyes and ears again. So we'd at least be able to talk to other people while we plunged to our deaths.

The core problem remained.

I wanted to get the drum we'd torn out inside. Ben and Shinshay could plug into it and see if it had taken instructions from some other place on the station, or if it was just a time-bomb in computer form.

Unfortunately, answering that question would have to wait.

Because the station's maneuvering thrusters kicked on.

The difference between a ship and a space station, or 'platform' as they were sometimes called, was fuzzy. Any modern version of either would include both a fusion reactor and what was quite possibly one of the oldest pieces of Adept tech out there: a helium generator.

Old fashioned spaceships carried a stockpile of gas that got superheated from the reactor and ejected out the drive cone with explosive force—resulting in just about as much thrust as you could want.

But a stockpile of gas could run out, and with old alien computers, the constantly declining mass of a ship actually became a bit of a problem to keep track of. Not a big one, but still.

So, as Adeptry became better understood, one of the first forays into attempts to mimic Adeptry with machinery was literally just designed to create gas. As far as Adeptry goes, it quite literally didn't get simpler.

Nowadays, ships and stations didn't bother carrying a stockpile of reaction mass. They just carried a hunk of Adept tech roughly the size of a mini-fridge that could produce several hundred kilograms of quasi-helium every second.

Firing on cylinders, they got even better, because when a ship was under thrust, the reaction mass didn't need to keep existing once it was propelled out the back of the spaceship. So what helium the generator did create didn't need to last very long at all.

But the most common distinction between a ship and a station was the fusion reactor and helium generator being connected. In ships, they were connected. In stations, they weren't.

Stations still needed helium generators though, because even an immobile station needed to give off regular bursts of thrust to correct its orbit and maintain its orientation.

We must have kicked the hornets' nest by tearing out the drum interfering with the comms. Because every maneuvering jet on the top half of the station suddenly started firing.

Our clock was already measured in hours, and if we accelerated any more…

The thrusters cut off as quickly as they came on.

<Sorry!> Ben called. <That was us.>

<You got the thrusters working?> I asked.

<The wrong ones,> he said. <But it let us see which nodes—forget exactly why—you need to get to the far side of the station. One of the compromised nodes overriding the thrusters is outside.>

I looked at Sid.

<Can you get this inside without me?>

<The Jack is closer,> he said.

I materialized a cable and strap around the drum before handing it off to Sid.

This was dangerous, splitting up? We'd come outside without ordinary precautions like safety lines and redundant air. If something went wrong—if anything went wrong, Sid could die.

<Nora!> I shouted. <Sid is coming up to you. If he floats off into space, I'm blaming you.>

She sent me a confirmation, and that would have to be good enough for now.

I jetted off the station, flipping so that the length of the cylinder stretched overhead.

<Navigate for me, Ben> I called.

Shinshay actually responded though.

<You're looking for two nodes,> they said. <The first is outside, second one is inside. Outside is going to be a circuit junction box about twenty meters below…do you see a small rectangular airlock? It'll be for maintenance, not people.>

Airlocks came in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but I had picked up on the difference for the Yigown station.

<Blinking orange lights> I asked.

<Y-yes? Yes!> they said.

<Found the airlock, where to?>

<Orient yourself 'moon-down', and the panel will be roughly twenty meters below the airlock, five meters laterally. But be careful, it's recessed into the gap between inner and outer hulls.>

I frowned.

The directions were pretty specific, but it was still a convoluted path to access the panel. Given the location Shinshay described, I didn't have a direct path. I needed to get between the station's inner and outer hulls first and then navigate back to the point.

<Ben! I need you to get Caleb blueprints,> Shinshay said. <I can't navigate for him well enough just verbally.>

It was an anxious twenty second delay while I impotently scoured for a way through the hulls before Ben got me the file I wanted.

Psionics enabled three-dimensional real-time mapping.

So. Freaking. Cool.

Getting even a partial psionic blueprint of the station instantly let me figure out my route, both to the exterior panel, and where the second one was inside the airlock.

But it also showed me how I'd missed the easy access hatch by not looking closely enough. The section of the outer hull was already recessed compared to its surrounding, but the hatch to get between hulls was also recessed. I'd moved past it twice without seeing the divot in the surface.

I almost couldn't believe that it was secured with an electronic pad.

With no time to wait for a code, I blasted my way through the hatch with my Adeptry—triggering an alarm of some kind, no doubt. But, who cared right now?

<I've got the panel, what am I doing?> I asked.

<There's a rectangular unit with two blinking lights,> Ben said. <You need to pull all the wires out of it except the one in the first secondary port—>

<[Hangonhangon,]> I said. <I've got two 'rectangular units'. Slow blue blinking lights or fast red—>

<The bigger one,> Ben said. <It's like the size of a [paperback].>

That was the slow blue lighted unit.

<Okay. Pull all the wires except…?>

<There's a large primary port at the bottom—the short side oriented closer to the inner hull. You need to pull whatever's connected there. But there's also six or eight secondary ports along one side of it. You need to pull all of those too except the first one of those.>

<Yank the primary, and all the secondaries but one…> I said, busying myself doing just that.

<Make sure whatever you leave plugged in is in the first of the secondary ports,> Shinshay reminded me.

<How do I know which one's first?>

<It'll be closest to the large primary port.>

<[Gotcha].>

<Anything else in this panel?>

<No—actually, yes. Slag the regulator. Small grey cube with the eight lights—>

<It's toast,> I said, crushing the piece in my glove.

<That's it. Get inside,> Ben said.

<Moving.>

While I jetted back outside the station's hull, I turned some of my attention upward, trying to pick out whatever Nora and my ship's crew were discovering up there.

One question we hadn't answered yet was exactly which AI was orchestrating the attack on the station. The drum Sid and I found was a favorite of SPARK, but it was more than likely CENSOR or ENVY knew that.

Identifying the culprit would make it easier to deduce the purpose of the attack. So far we were in the dark on exactly why this space station needed to be dropped out of the sky.

I clawed open the manual override on the airlock and slid inside. I crossed into the gravity-covered portion of the station once again, and the airlock hissed back to livable air pressure.

I didn't waste a second dematerializing my spacesuit and replacing it with indoor clothing. I even pulled my hair into a ponytail and materialized a hair tie.

I got the feeling I was going to have to keep moving fast for the immediate future.

The panel I was heading for inside the station actually matched with the one I'd accessed outside. But that meant I needed to go down three decks from where the airlock admitted me, and I didn't want to wait for elevators.

It was a dumb decision, but I pulled open the elevator doors and jumped directly into the shaft.

Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

Magnetizing myself to the side, I slid down to the deck I wanted and started prying the doors open when I heard a noise rushing up below me.

I didn't bother looking.

Flattening myself against the door, I jammed one of my hands between the doors. I wedged an inch or two. Enough for my foot to get a hold and start prying the doors open with my whole body.

I slipped through the opening with way too little room to spare.

Air rushed past my back as I stumbled out before two very bewildered looking maintenance rak.

One of them opened their mouths to ask me a question, but I was already moving.

<What am I doing at the inside panel?> I asked.

<Removing the memory cards,> Shinshay said. <We think they're compromised, and if we yank them, it should default to asking other nodes for prompting instead of the other way around.>

<Just the memory cards?> I asked.

<Yep. Three little square ones, should be on the right, wired to the motherboard port—>

I yanked open this panel too, finding exactly the little square cards in question. I knew just enough computer science to know that I couldn't damage the surrounding hardware if the goal was to get this node asking others for directions.

So I took the careful seconds to thumb the metal securements out of the way, properly snatching each card from its slot without breaking anything.

<Got the cards,> I said. <Crush em, or keep em?>

<Keep,> Shinshay and Ben said.

<Bring them here,> a new voice added. One of the station engineers.

<Yeah. Do that,> Shinshay agreed.

I headed back toward the same elevator bay I'd recklessly slid down. Waiting for it would be faster this time.

<Sid, you inside?> I asked.

<Onboard the Jack,> he said. <My suit?>

<Yeah, just making sure,> I said, recouping that mass.

<Nora, are you finding anything worthwhile up there?> I asked.

<Yeah,> she reported. <It's not a rocket. It's a ship.>

<What?>

<Yeah—sorry, I'm talking to station customs and records at the same time. Your crew is pretty sure this ship is the one that delivered most of the raw materials for the remodeling, but there's no record of it actually leaving the station.>

<That's not wholly unheard of,> I pointed out. <Lots of ships are modular so they can be halfway cannibalized.>

<This isn't that,> Nora said. <There's a travel record of the ship leaving, but there's no matching entry in the station mass record.>

<So in the remodel, it got grafted into the hull?> I asked.

<Yeah. And it gets worse. The welding work?>

<It was done by machine,> I guessed.

<Yep. Too regular. Too consistent.>

<Wonderful,> I scowled.

The ship had stayed. And it had brought a whole bunch of mass and hardware that had never left. A smaller ship and that wouldn't have been concerning, but given the size of the drive plume we'd seen earlier?

This was not a small ship that had been cannibalized and fused to the station's hull.

It could have carried half the mass needed for the station's remodel all by itself. Add in multiple trips? After one of which, it never left?

All that mass had stayed here.

That meant just one thing.

<Nai, Tasser, all crew watch out,> I warned. <There's a virtual certainty there's bots on this station.>