Beyond the Sun by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Author:Bryan Thomas Schmidt [Schmidt, Bryan Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625792082
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2013-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

In Simon C. Larter’s action packed tale, a freelancer and his trusty A.I. respond to a distress call from an isolated colony ravaged by indigenous beasts, only to discover the situation is far from what they’d expected. Remember, future colonists, ignore warnings at your own risk!

INNER SPHERE BLUES

SIMON C. LARTER

no matter how you analyzed them, messages were fuzzy near the galactic center. Always. Didn’t matter how many cycles you dedicated to decoding, minimizing noise, static gusted through communications like Jovian wind, blurring them and only ever allowing half the story through, if you were lucky. At least Yu Chen was lucky more often than not.

He paused and straightened when the ping sounded in his earpiece, letting the crowbar drop to the rock-strewn surface of the asteroid. It fell slowly in the low-grav, bounced lazily, settled. ‘Go ahead,’ he thought.

Another ping, followed by a burst of static, then the message. Chen listened, watching the slow wheel of the system’s central star as the asteroid executed its ungainly, wobbling orbit, before cueing the transmission once more, and then a third time. Grace repeated the sub-aural tags as the communication replayed: Keywords: colony, life-form, aggressive, assistance, rewards.

Chen ran it through again, then bent to pick up the crowbar. ‘Run the diagnostics one more time. Compensate for mag interference and G-bend,’ he thought.

As if I hadn’t done that already? Grace said. They said AI developed a distinct personality after a few years in service. It figured he’d gotten the snarky one. Maybe he brought it out in people. Or computers.

“Do it again,” he said aloud. “And this time compare and correlate with the transmission from M20-1617-Delta. I don’t want a repeat of that fiasco.”

Grace sounded irritable. I did that, too. What, no trust?

‘Just run another analysis,’ he thought. ‘Normalize and report on all potential errors and their probabilities.’

If a computer could roll its eyes, Grace would have been straining her ocular muscles. Understood.

The computation would have been done in microseconds, but, as an advanced AI, Grace knew when to keep silent. Chen bent to pick up the crowbar, muttering silent imprecations, and applied himself once more to the task of breaking the drill bit loose from the metallic deposit in which it was jammed. Robotics had allowed for wonderful advances in innumerable fields, but there was still no substitute for plain old elbow grease in some situations.

I heard that, Grace said.

Chen snorted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.