Andromeda Rising by Jay Allan

Author:Jay Allan [Allan, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B07P8JF7D2
Publisher: System 7 Publishing
Published: 2019-03-02T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Abandoned Imperial Station

Orbiting Zensoria, Osiron VI

Year 301 AC

“Hold.”

The single word rattled off the high ceiling of the vast room, stopping Andi in her tracks. Stopping all of her comrades.

Her hand went to her side again, to the pistol, ready to draw at any second. But she waited. She had no idea what was happening, but she knew the last thing any of them needed was some kind of fight they could avoid.

“Who are you?” It seemed Captain Lorillard agreed with her assessment. His voice was calm, controlled, even assertive. He’d challenged the command with a demand for information, and he’d delivered the words with a level of focused authority she doubted she could have matched.

“I am Intelligence Sigma-7684, first activated Imperial Year 8,525, uploaded to Station Zensoria Primus, Imperial Year 8,526.”

Andi stood, frozen, stunned at what she was hearing. She’d caught vague references to the old imperial dating system and calendar before, but nothing so clear and specific.

Was the empire really over eight thousand years old when it fell?

It was an amount of time she could barely comprehend. The three centuries since the Cataclysm had always seemed an eternity to her.

Andi watched and listened, in fear, but also in hypnotic fascination. The artificial intelligence—and, she knew, of course, that’s what it had to be—spoke naturally, a bit of formality in its speech patterns perhaps, but then it was a military installation. Even the Marine had spoken with a reasonably strict cadence in his voice, a brittleness to his manner of speech.

Not entirely unlike the machine speaking to them.

Or on the verge of threatening us…

Andi had dealt with many AIs, the first when she was sneaking into houses in the Heights to steal. She didn’t really understand the systems back then, but she’d developed enough familiarity with them to sidestep their defensive reactions, and even disable them once or twice. Later, of course, she’d become much more experienced with Nightrunner’s AI, and Sylene had taken her behind the curtain, so to speak, showed her how the thing worked, how its programming functioned.

None of the AIs she’d seen anywhere had been as natural-sounding as this one. She’d almost have believed there was a human being at the other end of the comm line, someone watching them, talking to them.

But that was not possible. The worlds of the Badlands were lifeless, save for small animals and insects encroaching on the remains of past human habitation. The Cataclysm had spared the Rim, if not from mass death and suffering, at least from total extermination. But the worlds closer to the galactic core, the ones that had been more populated and advanced, had fallen the hardest. The chance that Nightrunner’s crew had stumbled onto some kind of human survivor, three centuries after the Cataclysm was nil.

They were talking to a machine, and it was one they’d never seen the likes of before. Andi was at a loss as to how to proceed, and she was grateful she wasn’t in command.

“What should we call you?”

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