Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

Now she was wishing for a calming agent, a way to slow her racing brain as she strode rapidly towards her lab. Dracup was next to her, and they were flanked by two heavily armed human guards, four security satellites – S-sats, better-armed and larger versions of the P-sats that some of the more modern and gauche players favoured as familiars – and their two morlock retainers/assistants. The morlocks were frighteningly human-looking, Zabilla had to say. Dressed in what were apparently fabricated copies of pre-Loss servant finery, they looked like small pale people with skin where their eyes should be. Despite their blindness, they never seemed to have any problem finding their way or assisting with often quite delicate procedures.

She was getting nowhere. The cocoon was resisting all but the most invasive means of investigation, and the most invasive means seemed to threaten some sort of self-destruct impulse or were simply so ruinous that they would harm it. What they were not doing was getting any closer to discovering the secret of bridging to Red Space.

It didn’t help that an avatar was there daily. She could feel its hollow, empty eyes on her as she worked, somehow disapproving. Her reports went directly to the Absolute.

They went through one security checkpoint after another, each more thorough and invasive than the last. Zabilla reflected that all her research was being conducted against a backdrop of one security breach after another. There had been a number of breaches – electronic, nano and, most worrying and the most effective so far, biotechnological. It was whispered that the Consortium almost certainly had people on the ground, and it seemed unlikely that the Church was not making some attempt to secure its bridge monopoly. The sophistication of the biotech attempts, however, pointed to the Living Cities on Pangea. The avatar had told her that more than one of the Monarchist systems’ Elites was within response distance if anything happened.

Zabilla and Dracup walked through the final security and anti-infection field. They had to retract and lock down their nano-screens before they were allowed in and then were assigned S-sats designed to project a sterile field around them. The lab was as nanite-free as any place could be made.

The airlock system to the lab opened. They cycled through and Zabilla once again found herself looking at the cocoon with the realisation that she was starting to hate the thing. The avatar was already there. If indeed it had ever left.

‘There was another security breach last night. An attempt was made to gain access to the genetic files kept on base personnel,’ the avatar neunonically ’faced to them both. Dracup looked up, interested.

Zabilla wondered what possible interest security matters could have for her. Too late she realised that any conversation with an avatar was almost certainly monitored through its experiential ware by the Absolute. The automaton with the fixed face of beaten gold seemed to be staring at her. She should have said something loyal, explained her thoughts. Instead she was thinking that they should know that all she was interested in was solving the puzzle of the cocoon.

She knew that it had come from some sort of recently functioning Seeder craft. She knew that it was made from an incredibly tough biological material that shared characteristics with both bone and enamel. Initially she had thought that the name cocoon was misleading and that what she was dealing with was a kind of biological computer laced through the incredibly strong material, but one of the more invasive scanning procedures had pointed to it having a cavity of some sort inside. That was before they had to shut the procedure down, as according to the more passive scans they seemed to be adversely affecting the cocoon.

Brilliant , she congratulated herself. In more than a month of research, all she had managed to do was confirm that the cocoon was hollow. Though they also knew that it had some sort of internal power supply or store, again laced throughout the cocoon. If it was capable of drawing power from elsewhere then it was probably due to the complex entanglement effect that they had seen with other pieces of S-tech. If this was the case, then who knew what it was capable of?

They had tried introducing other forms of S-tech in attempts to interface with it. They had tried uplifted races’ versions of technology derived from S-tech, ’sect derivatives of Seeder tech from the Hive Worlds being the most sophisticated, and actual S-tech itself from the small collection of working xeno-archaeological finds present on Game. Even the smallest S-tech find was enough to turn a planet into a conflict-resolution world. There were graveyards of ships in some sectors of space that had come about due to similar space-borne finds. It was all to no avail. Like most modern nano- and smart-matter-based technology, S-tech was designed to be adaptable and have more than one use, but for some reason what they had did not seem compatible. Perhaps, like the Church, the Seeders had wanted to limit bridge capability. That suggested that the cocoon, or whatever was inside it, was a highly specialised application of S-tech.

Zabilla wished that she had a Church bridge-tech expert to torture but knew they were rarely allowed to leave the Cathedral, and when they did they were heavily protected. An Elite probably could have extracted one, but the Church had made it clear that any attempt to do so would lead to an immediate ban on the provision of bridge technology to the faction in question. There were rumours that one had escaped from the Cathedral but that its knowledge of bridge tech had been protected by some very dangerous and deeply implanted suicide routines. Any attempt to extract the information would result in the wiping of the tech’s mind followed by their death.

In short, she was attempting to reverse engineer something from a position of near-total ignorance. In fact, the clearest thing about her research so far was that the ability to create nth-level perversions was not going to help her.

The avatar was watching her again. She had been aware that Dracup and the avatar had been discussing the security of the facility over the secure ’face link. She had been standing there staring at the cocoon for ten minutes now.

‘Perhaps some kind of stimulus will help?’ the avatar suggested.

‘It would be a distraction,’ Zabilla answered in a more testy tone of voice than was generally considered wise when talking to a direct conduit to the Absolute.

An idea was beginning to form, but as ever the problem would be interfacing the cocoon with other forms of technology. What she hoped was that the cocoon understood its own purpose and would act accordingly. It was tenuous, but there was precedent for it with S-tech applications, particularly with biotech. There was a degree of intelligence in the alien flesh. Most likely nothing would happen, but the worst-case scenarios for what she had planned were catastrophic.

‘I have an idea,’ she told the avatar. ‘We need a ship with a bridge drive.’

Dracup turned to stare at her.

‘That is a bold request,’ the avatar said. ‘You are intending to try and interface a ship’s nav systems with the cocoon?’

‘If this cocoon holds the secret to bridge tech, then a nav computer is designed to interface with it.’

‘Except that ship nav systems have anti-tamper systems just like bridge drives.’ The Church provided both the nav systems and the drives. Both were intrinsic parts of the stranglehold the Church had on Red Space.

‘Yes, but if this is pure S-tech unmodified by the Church, then it shouldn’t have their countermeasures against tampering.’ Though it had remained pretty tamper-proof so far, she thought, but that could just be down to the nature of the forces it needed to survive to fulfil its purpose. ‘We won’t be tampering with the nav comp, just offering it another connection. The worst that can happen is we junk a bridge drive and a nav comp.’