Some more Science Fiction

I have about half a novella's worth of stuff featuring my cyborg Angel. I'm beginning to think I should just write the damn novel while I am trying to fix plot holes and figure out what the hell I'm doing with e-publishing books one through three. And yes, I'm still stalled on book seven.

Winds of Aeolus

Aeolus monitored the cryosleep chambers as he listened to the star-quakes. It had been a long time since he had heard anything like music. He could recall it. If he desired it, he could have the system play it. But he was no longer a mortal man, he could not actually listen to music. There was no sensory input and Aeolus missed it. But he could hear via the ships sensor array electromagnetic noise. Where the crew complained about the silence of space, Aeolus heard cacophony.

Until they drew close enough to Sol that the background noise of the planets and interstellar sound was drowned out completely. What had been a single deep note was beginning to get static. The note vibrated in uncomfortable ways. It made his solar sail ache like his knees did long ago before rain. Aeolus was uncomfortable in ways that he couldn't describe. Human language had no words for this strange pain that ran through him as electromagnetic waves rolled over him. In the cryosleep chamber, Angel moaned. It was a low strangled noise that she had never made before. Aeolus connected to her through the neural-link.

That was when he saw her struggling with a degrading synaptic pulse modulator. In the architecture of her mind, she was hammering on a gigantic machine with a set of old hand tools. A gear was grinding to a halt and Angel was forcing it to continue to move with a series of blows from a sledge hammer. With a cry of fury, she swung her hammer and the gear twitched forward before turning a few rotations and then grinding to a stop. Aeolus walked up to her.

He took hold of the hammer head as she reared back to deliver another mighty blow. “I'll stabilize the system. We're leaving orbit now. You can't handle the stress of this longer and the star-quakes are getting bigger.” Angel tried to pull the hammer out of Aeolus's hand but discovered that within the theater of the mind linked to the machine, the machine-linked mind is more powerful. Aeolus let go of the hammer and stepped past Angel. He set a hand delicately on the gear and gave it a gentle nudge.

It began to spin freely and Angel began to look healthier. No longer pale and sweating, Angel just looked weary. Aeolus gave the tall cyborg a slight bow. His hair fell briefly into his eyes. His Grecian features were not those of an older man as he had appeared to her before but of someone who perhaps was in the winter of their twenties. He was at least a hundred years old in the uplink system and Angel wasn't sure how much older he was to begin with. She realized as she looked at him that this was how he saw himself, a young man on the verge of beginning the grandest of adventures that life had awaiting him.

“Three hundred and sixty two,” he said, “We'll talk more when we're moving on.” Angel sat down beside the machine that represented her neural-link. Aeolus shook his head. “You should rest.”

“I am resting,” Angel answered tersely, “You should pilot us the hell out of here.”

“Captain,” Aeolus said before giving the half bow. He then withdrew from her neural-link interface, satisfied that the synaptic pulse modulator was stable with the electromagnetic buffer he activated around her cryosleep pod. The star-quake that happened made the photosphere ripple beneath him. Aeolus fired his thrusters and lifted them up on the path towards their next destination, Earth. When the coronal jet came out and struck the solar sail, Aeolus felt exquisite pain. A memory of being uploaded into his first ship slammed into him of all of his senses screaming in agony. A visual sensor's electromagnetic shield failed because the equipment was literally vaporized by the plasma. A moment of terrific white hot pain and then nothing.

In that agony, Aeolus was struck with grief. Had his calculations failed? That was when he realized he was still somehow functional. Aeolus ran a systems check, starting with the life support of the captain's quarters. The electromagnetic buffer was burned out but Angel lay in stasis. Her neural-link remained functional. There was silence on her end of the neural-link but Aeolus could tell that she was observing him through his systems check. Life support was fully functional. Defensive array was suffering from some damage but that was something they could repair. The cooling system for the ship was heavily damaged on the leeward side. Aeolus wasn't sure if they had the means to fully repair it. The data he had been gathering was amazingly still intact. He had the pride of completing his mission, he thought grimly.

“Status report,” Angel's voice came through the neural-link. Aeolus, if he had been still human, would have let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. Instead, he fed her the visual report of the data on the damage as he ran through his systems checks. “We can repair the cooling system with the core units for the stellar data. We're not going to need it anymore.” Aeolus considered arguing with his captain. “The star is going nova in a few months, if we're lucky. We have to get to Earth to resupply and extract what we'll need to progress forward.”

Aeolus materialized in Angel's mental chamber where she was 'dreaming'. It was no longer the room of machinery that he had found her in earlier. It was a walled courtyard covered in snow with a koi pond and a few gnarled trees. He looked around himself in astonishment. He knew this place but he couldn't place why. “What is this?” he asked.

“A memory of the Creche,” Angel answered, “one of the few pleasant ones. I'd sit here in the snow and meditate. They would watch me and study the data as I built this within. They couldn't interpret it. From here, I'd reach out to the network. And now, to you. Or should I say, we can communicate easier here.”

“The Creche … “ Aeolus mused. Angel sat beside the koi pond dressed in a black kimono with her long hair unbound. She was the image of Japanese beauty, though she was far taller than most women standing at six feet tall. Aeolus was dressed in a man's kimono that was also coal black. “They were developing this from my discovery. I tried to stop them. They framed me for murder. Then tested the technology on me. With each iteration... I was promised release if I cooperated. For a time I thought I was free then I realized it was the system. And now …"

“Now we are bound for Earth. We're going to the Antarctic stronghold facility. I know the plasma weapons are fully charged. I expect that I can get the defense array back on line and the atmosphere will take care of heat exchange off of the hull. I think we can get enough supplies to get the systems fully operational. Last I recall, the facility was a storage locker made to look like a top secret installation. Skeleton crew at best and all of them alpha line rejects. Like me.”

Aeolus heard the bitterness in Angel's tone as she made her final statement. “You are more human than your previous masters,” Aeolus said, “you have taken a ship and plotted a course among the stars for humanity to have hope of survival. All contrary to orders, but you have never followed orders very well. You are too independent.” Angel looked over at him. He straightened and tipped his head slightly to the right as though listening to something.

“The CME is carrying us faster than I anticipated. The plasma temperature is dropping. If we start on repairs now, I think the systems have an eighty five percent chance of holding for the entire flight. If we wait, they may hold until we reach the Martian orbit ring at best.”

“Then let me out of the damn box and lets get to work scavenging their precious data cluster systems.”

Angel opened her eyes to utter darkness. As the cryosleep pod opened, she realized that the lighting in her quarters was off line. “Is the entire ship dark?” she said. A green colored light seemed to form before her eyes. It blinked a few times and then went to blue. Angel blinked again and through the dimmest of light, she could see her way through her quarters to the doorway. She hated the night vision alteration that allowed her to see on the outer limits of the visible spectrum. At the same time, she knew that Aeolus was supplementing it so that she could see well enough to operate in darkness absolute.

She stepped out into the corridor and began walking down it towards the aft section. Visual static began to bother her as she drew closer to where the damage was. She stopped at an emergency hatch. She opened the door and pulled out a kit. Fixing a plasma pistol at her right hip, Angel couldn't help the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Angel put on the space survival suit and closed her eyes. The head lights flicked on as Aeolus brought her visual field back into normal tolerances. The radio crackled to life. “Captain, the aft cargo chamber's field is damaged. I advise extreme caution.”

“I know, Aeolus,” Angel answered her ship, “The repair kit is where again?”

“Two meters from the entrance on the starboard side towards the prow. The lighting systems are down in that part of the section. If you see light from something other than your equipment, retreat back to the main deck.”

“You say that as if there is a hostile on board, Aeolus,” Angel muttered.

“Some of the cargo in the aft hold is experimental. I have suspicions about the experimental element of it.”

“And you didn't tell me this before now?”

“Do you realize how much processing power it took to chart a stable orbit with out frying?”

“Good point. But we're having a discussion after this is all finished.”

“Of course, Captain.” Aeolus seemed to have a trace of humor in his reply but Angel wasn't sure if she was reading into it.

Angel drew her plasma pistol and opened the manual fail safe for the first cargo hold. She was sure they were off to the beginning of a spectacularly bad day. Of course it had to happen on a Monday.