Shadow Core - The Legacy (10 page)

The drones split into groups and began to securely latch onto key locations of the ship's hull. One by one signalling back to the Zenith that they were ready to begin retrieval. And moments after the last drone reported in, the docking tube interconnecting both ships suddenly detached and began retracting. Effectively stranding the Icarus crew.

At that very moment Jude was reading through every scrap of info she could find. She still hadn't found the location of the ship's master computer but she was making progress.  

Her visor was displaying the status of several of the Zenith's systems: the ones she had managed to tap into so far. Suddenly, one of the systems flashed red as the display updated, catching Jude's attention. And as she focused in on it, to see what had happened, her heart nearly skipped a beat. The docking tube had auto disconnected!

“What?” Jude screamed in a panic.

She ran towards the airlock to check that the Icarus was still there, rushing to the nearby view-port window and hoping the information on her visor was wrong. But what she saw nearly floored her.

The docking tunnel was indeed being retracted. And she could also see several objects stuck to the Icarus's hull that were flaring up like engines as the ship was slowly being pulled out of position.

“Not good! Not good!! Not good!!!” She all but screamed as she typed into her Echo, trying to connect to the Icarus through the normal comms channels. But the ship wasn’t responding.

“Shit! Kade's gonna kill me!” She said as she powerlessly stared out of the window, seeing the Icarus being pulled out of her line of sight, towards the front end of the Zenith.  

Jude shouted into her intercom, “Kade!”

“Kade! Answer me dammit!” She tried once again, but wasn’t getting a reply.

Jude started to panic. Not only was she stranded but she couldn’t contact her sister.

She went over her suit's systems again and again, trying to figure out what was wrong, but her Echo unit was showing that her suit was in perfect working order. Her sister just wasn't responding.

The Sleeper

Just as all seemed lost, Jude heard a gentle voice coming out of thin air, telling her not to worry.

She looked around the empty room but couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from and feared that she had finally lost her mind.

“Calm down,” said the woman's voice.

“Calm down? Calm down! I am freaking calm! What the hell is going on?” Jude asked as she looked frantically around the room.

“Your visor,” the woman’s voice said calmly.

“What?” Jude realised that her head gear was still on, and in her panic she hadn't realised the voice was coming from the speakers.

“Lower your visor and you will be able to see me,” the voice said.

Jude hesitated for a moment, wondering what was going on, but slowly lowered her visor and then tried looking around the room once again. And right there, next to her, was a woman wearing casual wear from a bygone era, with a streak of red down the right side of her short blonde hair and the most intense blue eyes that Jude had ever seen.

The woman didn't say anything, she just gave Jude a gentle reassuring smile.

“Who...” Jude started to say as she raised her visor, seeing that there was no-one actually in front of her. “How?” She asked, lowering her visor again.

“You have some interesting toys,” the woman said as she pointed at Jude's system breakers that were still anchored to the floor on the far side of the room.

“You're projecting your image through my breakers?” Jude asked in disbelief. “I didn't know they could do that... and I built the things,” she said, dumbfounded.

“Like I said... nice toys.” The woman smiled.

Jude shook her head, trying to clear it of excessive questions and calm herself and then looked at the woman with renewed focus.

“Where's our ship? Who are you?” Jude asked.

“I'm moving it to docking bay one, it was not safe to leave it outside. And my name is Nexus.”

Jude was in shock, her mouth stuck open as all the pieces of the puzzle slammed into place inside her mind. There had been something familiar about this ship, but it was only now that she realised what 'it' was. This was the ship from the stories which had captured her imagination and fuelled her obsession with technology. And standing in front of her was the very essence of her lifelong obsession.

“Nexus? The AI!” Jude asked, almost giddy.
“Is this what my sister's been searching for all this time? Grandpas stories... they were true!”

“I didn’t realise I was famous and I want to hear how it is you know about me, but first let me put your mind at ease,” Nexus said reassuringly.

A large virtual display suddenly appeared in mid-air next to Nexus, showing an image of the Icarus as it was being towed through space.

Jude watched quietly as she saw two extremely large doors in the forward section of the Zenith open, revealing a large internal docking bay that was ready to receive the Icarus.

“As you can see, your ship is safe and sound. You can find it in docking bay one once you're ready to depart,” Nexus said.

“What? Oh... sure,” Jude said a bit absent minded. She was still in shock at seeing Nexus.

“Wait. My sister! Why can't I get in contact with her?” Jude asked.

“According to internal sensors she's in deck 10. That entire section is heavily shielded. Normal communications equipment doesn’t work in there. I can connect you if you wish, but there are a few things we should talk about first.”

Elsewhere on the ship...

Kade and Nick were standing before a set of heavily reinforced double doors, the first sign of serious security they had come across since boarding the Zenith. It was true that every single door they had seen could be locked, but they hadn’t come across one that could stand up to a determined boarding party, until now. Kade had actually started to wonder if this ship had any internal security at all, though she couldn’t rule out the possibility that the bulk of the Zenith's security systems were hidden from view.

As Nick examined the door, Kade couldn't help but wonder just what was so important about this room, compared to all the others they had walked past so far, that would warrant such reinforcements.

Nick was hovering his right hand over different sections of the door while staring at the Echo unit on his left forearm. The display showing the results of the scan he was conducting with the sensors embedded in his space suit.  

The reinforced double doors were solid, so much in fact that whatever was on the other side would probably survive should the rest of the section suffer from explosive decompression. It was a shelter.

There was a small display by the doors, embedded in the corridor wall. It was another old fashioned physical display interface, one of the older models which had been very popular several centuries ago. You didn't see many of them around anymore but some niche manufacturers still swore by them to this day.

“A key-code lock? How quaint.” Kade smiled as Nick finished up his scan of the doors.

“It may be old fashioned, but it's certainly effective. I can't see a way to override it,” Nick said as he looked over the scan results again.

“It was worth a shot, I suppose it wouldn't be much of a security door if it could be easily opened,” Kade said, not really surprised at the outcome.

“True, but now what? You think that code you used before would work here?”

“Worth a try,” Kade said as she tried typing the code into the interface, but no letters or numbers were being accepted. The interface was completely unresponsive to her touch.

“So... a broken security door?” Nick asked.

“Maybe,” Kade said as she removed her space suit gloves, putting them in her utility pouch, and then she tried entering the code again.

This time around the code appeared on the display as she typed, but the green interface turned red as soon as she finished. The code hadn't worked.

“Well, the good news is that it's not broken. The bad news is that the code doesn’t work,” Kade said with a disheartened look as she reached into her utility pouch, to get her system breaker, accidentally touching her grandfather's sphere in the process.

Kade felt disoriented. Her vision had gone dark. It was like all her senses had been turned off at the same time. Before her was a wall of impenetrable darkness, all-encompassing and absolute.

Just as she was starting to wonder what had happened, she suddenly found herself walking down a corridor, but she had no control over her actions.

She recognised the hallway, she was on the Zenith, deck ten, heading towards section two. And as she reached the door she instinctively typed in the access code, but her hands were not her own, they were bulky and unrefined; they were the hands of a man.

The door opened and she stepped inside. A man in a white lab coat was waiting for her across the room, standing by a large cylindrical glass chamber.

In her mind she knew him, and yet she didn’t. His name, his purpose, his character, all these things she felt she knew, and yet she could recall none of it. It was as if her mind was not her own. She felt confused as events played out around her.

“Are you ready Toby?” The unknown man asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” she heard herself answer with a voice not her own and then realised she recognised it. He sounded younger, but it was her grandfather!

“No heroics, understand? Get in, scout out the area and report back. This is our last trip into that accursed system. Once we link up with the remaining survivors we'll escort them safely back to Lux. Leave any fighting to us, understand?” The man asked in a friendly tone.

“Don't worry about me, I can handle it,” she said instinctively, in a calm and collected male voice, but inside she felt anxious. Afraid of what was to come, but not knowing what it was.

“OK, step inside the chamber and...”

Kade felt as if she was blacking out again, all her senses going dark once more, causing a momentary sense of disorientation.

She was back, unharmed but utterly confused.

  Her mind was her own again, and she was in full control of her body. But the experience of feeling trapped in someone else’s body, unable to act, had left her a little shaken. She had never experienced anything like it before. And she wondered just what was she, or he, so anxious about anyway? Was the stress finally getting to her?

Whatever she had experienced didn't feel like a dream, it seemed closer to a long lost memory, and she could still clearly recall the door code.

She paused for a moment as her finger approached the control interface, wondering if the code would actually work. Having experienced such a realistic hallucination was cause enough for concern but what would it actually mean if what she saw turned out to be real and the code worked, she wondered.

One way or another she had to know, so she typed the code into the door control, the double doors sliding open, revealing the sleeper room beyond.

“Well, that was weird. First you space out and ignore me, and then you just open the door. Not that I’m complaining, but how did you know the code?” Nick asked.

“I spaced out? For how long?” Kade asked, clearly concerned at having experienced a loss of time.

“Don’t know for sure, a few seconds maybe? I was asking you if we should call Jude up here to hack the door but you weren’t paying any attention. You just kept staring at the door controls. Why?”

“No... no reason,” Kade replied. Concerned about what had just happened.

“So... how did you know the code?” Nick asked again.

“Lucky guess?” Kade replied, not knowing exactly how to explain it, or even if she should.

“An alpha numeric, ten digit long, lucky guess?” Nick asked, not looking particularly amused at the joke.

“It could happen,” Kade said sheepishly. “It's just highly unlikely,” she said without conviction.

“You seriously expect me to believe that?” Nick asked as they stepped into the darkened room.

“How about... I saw it in a vision?” Kade asked.

“Fine! Don’t tell me,” Nick said dismissively.

Kade couldn’t help but smile slightly at Nick's reaction, she wouldn’t have believed it either.

She was instinctively heading towards the chamber she had seen in her vision, just before she returned to reality, when the lights in the room came on.

Kade froze. The room looked just like in her vision. She was happy that she hadn’t gone completely insane yet, but on the other hand the question remained. What, exactly, had she just experienced?

“Are these sleeper pods?” Nick asked, breaking Kade out of her pensive state.

Nick was standing next to a row of pods, looking around at their status displays. The walls of the room were lined with them, but they were all empty.

“Looks like this pod was the only one that was active up until a while ago,” he said as he tried to operate the pod's touch controls, to no effect.

Remembering what Kade had done just moments before, Nick took off his gloves and tried again, but the controls still didn’t react to his touch.

Frustrated, he put his gloves back on and resumed searching the room.

“I found him!” Kade said while standing by the controls of the chamber.

The chamber walls seemed to be made of glass, but it was completely opaque, changing to a semi-transparent surface as Kade touched the controls.

They could see the general outline of a shape inside the chamber, but not much more.

Kade fiddled with the controls, trying to call up useful information, but the system was refusing all attempts at access so all she had to go on was the basic information on the display.