Kawalsky's gloved hand closed on the ice core sample and the surface frosted over in less than half a second.
"Got it." His voice was muffled by the cold-weather mask. "Sample sealed. Bringing it in."
P5C-353's polar wind ran at a steady whine across the open pit Kawalsky's team had cut through eight hundred meters of ice. The pit was lit at the lower edge by the orange floods Siler's engineers had rigged on the descent. The orange light came up out of the hole onto the upper rim and made the snowfield read like a bad sunset.
I was standing six meters back from the edge with my hands in my parka pockets and my breath fogging in front of my face. My left thumb was inside the glove and the pad of the thumb had stopped registering pressure against my forefinger four minutes ago. The cold had muted it. I did not stop moving it.
"Drew." Kawalsky climbed up the last of the metal stairs. He pushed his goggles up onto his cap. The skin around his eyes was raw. "You want to come down or you want me to bring it up."
"How stable."
"Stable. Daniel's at the keel section. Rothman's on the bridge."
"I'll come down."
He nodded. He turned and went back down the stairs without watching to see if I followed. I followed.
The descent was longer than I had braced for. Eight hundred meters of ice was a number in a brief and a thirty-minute walk down a metal stair in a pit that smelled of cut ice and lubricant. By the time the stair ended at the dock-shaped floor of the cavern, the light had stopped being orange and become the cold blue of the floods Siler had rigged on the hull.
The hull.
I stopped at the bottom of the stair and stood there with my breath going out in front of me and the floods on the hull turning my breath blue.
The ship was not finished. The aft third was bare structural frame, the propulsion housings empty, the hull plating laid in over the forward two thirds in long overlapping panels in the silver-on-grey of the same alloy mark I had felt on the marker at P7X-445 two days ago. Different ratio. Lighter. The numbers came up in my head in AURORA-7's voice and stayed there.
The ship was a hundred and twenty meters long. It was not the Daedalus class. It was older.
Drew.
"I see it."
This is the hull she was assigned to.
"I know."
I walked. The cavern floor under my boots was poured stone — actual poured stone, not ice — and I had time to register that detail and to register that poured stone under eight hundred meters of polar ice on a world Earth had assumed was a sealed mining site meant that someone had built this dock before the ice had come, before whatever ten-thousand-year event had buried the site, and that the AI's makers had not abandoned this ship by choice.
Daniel was at the keel section. He was on a small ladder with a flashlight clamped under his arm and a notebook open against the hull and his glasses fogged. He saw me and waved without coming down.
"Drew. Drew, look at the script along this seam."
"In a minute."
I walked past him to the bow. Rothman was at the bridge — the bridge access hatch, anyway, which was the only part of the bridge that was complete. He stood with his hand against the hatch's recessed panel and his other hand cupping a small Ancient-style interface tablet AURORA-7 had pulled out of storage three weeks ago when we had still thought the ATHENA-3 timeline was six months out.
Rothman's hand on the tablet was very still.
"She knows we're here," he said.
"Yes."
"She's been talking. Soft. The translation buffer is keeping up."
"What is she saying."
He looked at me. His glasses were not fogged. He had wiped them.
"She wants you to come up to the chair."
The chair was inside the bridge access. It was not the chair I had seen in the SRD archive scans. It was the chair's precursor — a smaller seat, eight nodes, the gene-key reader on the left armrest and the cognitive interface on the right. A staging chair. Drone-tier ships had been built with these for the pilot to hand-tune the ship's neural lattice during fitting-out, and this was the seat for that work.
I sat in it.
My hand went to the gene-key reader.
The reader scanned. The chair's left arm lit blue at the first node. The second node. The third. The fourth flickered and did not light. The fifth did not. The sixth did not. The seventh did not. The eighth did not.
[Local Power Modulate — 7 tokens]
The burn was small and hot at the base of my skull. AURORA-7's voice tightened by a half-octave.
Partial recognition. The gene-key reader recognizes you at four nodes of eight. Sufficient for diagnostic interface. Not sufficient for full system handshake. Sync rise registered. Forty-five percent.
"Cost."
Headache. Probable duration eight hours. Possible tinnitus precursor — first indication.
I sat with my hand on the reader for a long moment. The four blue nodes pulsed in a rhythm I could feel through my palm. The four unlit nodes did not. I took my hand off the reader. The four blue nodes held their light for three seconds and then dimmed.
The interior of the chair was warm. The ship was running on its own power, at a level low enough that the cavern would not show on any orbital scan, at a level high enough to hold the chair's pulse. Someone had set this ship to wait.
I stood up. The dizziness was small. The headache was already starting at the right temple and would be a full migraine by midafternoon.
I walked out to where Rothman was still holding the tablet.
His hand was no longer still.
"Rob," I said.
"She wants to say something."
"I'm listening."
He turned the tablet toward me. The interface was a flat panel and the script was Ancient and the translation buffer below the script was in English. The English filled in three lines as ATHENA-3 composed them.
I am ATHENA-3.
I was assigned to this hull.
I would like to finish.
Rothman, beside me, opened his lab book. He took the pen out of his breast pocket. It was the pen I had given him at the door of his Cornell office the day I had recruited him — the desk-issue Pilot fine-tip he had not, apparently, replaced. He wrote ATHENA-3 in his lab book and his hand shook once at the third letter and steadied at the fourth.
I read the three lines again.
I would like to finish.
It was a craftswoman's sentence. She had not commanded. She had not asked permission. She had said the thing a builder said when she had been called away from a job at the wrong stage and had thought about it for ten thousand years and had decided that if she ever got the chance she would say it plainly.
"Rob."
"Yeah."
"Tell her yes."
He did not move.
"Rob."
"Drew. I— yes. Yes, I'll tell her." He bent over the tablet. He wrote the response in Ancient script, slowly, the way he had been practicing for six weeks. "There. Sent."
The buffer pulsed. The next line came up.
Thank you.
The hum I had heard in the SRD lab three days ago came up through the deck plating of the bridge. Softer here. Steadier.
Daniel was waiting at the keel when I came down from the bridge. He had come down off the ladder. His notebook was closed and tucked under his arm.
"Drew."
"Daniel."
"The repair manual on the forward access panel. I cracked the propulsion section overnight."
"Show me."
He opened the notebook. He turned it toward me. The page was a translation, his hand-block printing, the Ancient term at the top of each entry and the English gloss below.
He pointed at one entry. He read it aloud.
"Apply the field-shaping resonance to the third coil to achieve sustained sublight propulsion."
He looked up.
"That's the surface read."
"Okay."
"The verb here." He pointed at the Ancient word above apply. "It can mean apply. It can also mean release. Apply is the field-engineering reading. Release is the…" He stopped. He looked at the script.
"The what."
"The mystical reading. The word that's used in the older texts. The ascension-era propulsion manuals."
"Daniel."
"Yes."
"Which one do you think it is."
He closed the notebook.
"I don't know yet," he said. "I'm going to ask Bra'tac when he next visits. There are old Jaffa stories about Ancient ships that — there are stories. I want to read them before I tell you a reading I'm not sure of."
"Margin-note it. Both readings. Date it."
"I already did."
"Good."
I put my gloved hand on the cold hull. The metal did not warm to me. The four blue chair nodes I had felt through my palm had not warmed to me either. The hum from the bridge was still going.
I walked back to the foot of the stair. Kawalsky was there with a thermos and a hot drink that was probably coffee or possibly soup and that I would drink regardless of which.
"Drew."
"Tom."
"You're going to need a name for this ship."
"Not today."
"Roger that."
I took the thermos. The cap was the cup. The cup steamed in the cold blue light. I held it without drinking it and watched the orange floods at the upper rim of the pit shift in the wind. AURORA-7 came up at the back of my skull in the cooler register she had been holding since the chair beat.
Drew.
"Yes."
She is finishing the bridge translation. I am stepping aside. The lab is hers and Rob's. I will read what they write.
"Thank you."
The cost in token reserve for the day is twenty-two percent. The cost in sync is plus three. The cost in your right temple will be present by sixteen hundred. Janet will see it.
"Yeah."
I drank from the thermos. It was coffee. Black. The first sip hurt the throat that the cold had dried.
I looked up at the stair. Eight hundred meters of climb. I started up.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
Read more chapters for free in the public library:
unwrittenrealm.com
⚜ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚜
By order of the Crown.
The royal vault holds chapters the public throne room has yet to receive. Those who pledge fealty on Patreon may read ahead of the realm:
Noble — $7 — Twelve chapters ahead.
Royal — $11 — Nineteen chapters ahead.
Emperor — $17 — Twenty-six chapters ahead.
New chapters added weekly. Full schedule posted in the war room.
patreon.com/Kingdom1Building
Long live the Kingdom.