The airlock system to the lab opened. They cycled through and Zabilla once again found herself looking at the cocoon with the realisation that she was starting to hate the thing. The avatar was already there. If indeed it had ever left.
‘There was another security breach last night. An attempt was made to gain access to the genetic files kept on base personnel,’ the avatar neunonically ’faced to them both. Dracup looked up, interested.
Zabilla wondered what possible interest security matters could have for her. Too late she realised that any conversation with an avatar was almost certainly monitored through its experiential ware by the Absolute. The automaton with the fixed face of beaten gold seemed to be staring at her. She should have said something loyal, explained her thoughts. Instead she was thinking that they should know that all she was interested in was solving the puzzle of the cocoon.
She knew that it had come from some sort of recently functioning Seeder craft. She knew that it was made from an incredibly tough biological material that shared characteristics with both bone and enamel. Initially she had thought that the name cocoon was misleading and that what she was dealing with was a kind of biological computer laced through the incredibly strong material, but one of the more invasive scanning procedures had pointed to it having a cavity of some sort inside. That was before they had to shut the procedure down, as according to the more passive scans they seemed to be adversely affecting the cocoon.
Brilliant, she congratulated herself. In more than a month of research, all she had managed to do was confirm that the cocoon was hollow. Though they also knew that it had some sort of internal power supply or store, again laced throughout the cocoon. If it was capable of drawing power from elsewhere then it was probably due to the complex entanglement effect that they had seen with other pieces of S-tech. If this was the case, then who knew what it was capable of?
They had tried introducing other forms of S-tech in attempts to interface with it. They had tried uplifted races’ versions of technology derived from S-tech, ’sect derivatives of Seeder tech from the Hive Worlds being the most sophisticated, and actual S-tech itself from the small collection of working xeno-archaeological finds present on Game. Even the smallest S-tech find was enough to turn a planet into a conflict-resolution world. There were graveyards of ships in some sectors of space that had come about due to similar space-borne finds. It was all to no avail. Like most modern nano- and smart-matter-based technology, S-tech was designed to be adaptable and have more than one use, but for some reason what they had did not seem compatible. Perhaps, like the Church, the Seeders had wanted to limit bridge capability. That suggested that the cocoon, or whatever was inside it, was a highly specialised application of S-tech.
Zabilla wished that she had a Church bridge-tech expert to torture but knew they were rarely allowed to leave the Cathedral, and when they did they were heavily protected. An Elite probably could have extracted one, but the Church had made it clear that any attempt to do so would lead to an immediate ban on the provision of bridge technology to the faction in question. There were rumours that one had escaped from the Cathedral but that its knowledge of bridge tech had been protected by some very dangerous and deeply implanted suicide routines. Any attempt to extract the information would result in the wiping of the tech’s mind followed by their death.
In short, she was attempting to reverse engineer something from a position of near-total ignorance. In fact, the clearest thing about her research so far was that the ability to create nth-level perversions was not going to help her.
The avatar was watching her again. She had been aware that Dracup and the avatar had been discussing the security of the facility over the secure ’face link. She had been standing there staring at the cocoon for ten minutes now.
‘Perhaps some kind of stimulus will help?’ the avatar suggested.
‘It would be a distraction,’ Zabilla answered in a more testy tone of voice than was generally considered wise when talking to a direct conduit to the Absolute.
An idea was beginning to form, but as ever the problem would be interfacing the cocoon with other forms of technology. What she hoped was that the cocoon understood its own purpose and would act accordingly. It was tenuous, but there was precedent for it with S-tech applications, particularly with biotech. There was a degree of intelligence in the alien flesh. Most likely nothing would happen, but the worst-case scenarios for what she had planned were catastrophic.
‘I have an idea,’ she told the avatar. ‘We need a ship with a bridge drive.’
Dracup turned to stare at her.
‘That is a bold request,’ the avatar said. ‘You are intending to try and interface a ship’s nav systems with the cocoon?’
‘If this cocoon holds the secret to bridge tech, then a nav computer is designed to interface with it.’
‘Except that ship nav systems have anti-tamper systems just like bridge drives.’ The Church provided both the nav systems and the drives. Both were intrinsic parts of the stranglehold the Church had on Red Space.
‘Yes, but if this is pure S-tech unmodified by the Church, then it shouldn’t have their countermeasures against tampering.’ Though it had remained pretty tamper-proof so far, she thought, but that could just be down to the nature of the forces it needed to survive to fulfil its purpose. ‘We won’t be tampering with the nav comp, just offering it another connection. The worst that can happen is we junk a bridge drive and a nav comp.’
‘No, the worst that can happen is that you succeed and open a bridge to Red Space, and the gravitational forces involved tear Pangea apart. Or perhaps you just decompress the entire planet and collapse the atmosphere.’
Zabilla looked pained. She had to admit that opening a bridge was her greatest fear due to the unknown interplay between the gravitational forces at play when opening a wormhole, and how that would interact with Pangea’s own gravity. All bridge drives had a fail-safe against bridging too close to planets. This was also the reason bridge points were always so far from planetary and stellar bodies. The Church had always warned of the catastrophic results of planetary bridge points. The comment about decompressing the planet, however, was sheer ignorance. Sadly, she thought that before she realised the Absolute would be monitoring her.
‘Would it perhaps be better to do it in space?’ she suggested.
‘Too much of a security risk. We would make ourselves vulnerable to attack by Consortium Elite.’
‘Seeder tech tends to be intuitive. I don’t think it would allow catastrophe.’
‘It is a lot to gamble on a guess.’
‘There’s some evidential basis for my guess, but I’ll be honest with you, I’m out of ideas. If you don’t want to do this then you may as well get Gilbert Scoular down here – perhaps he can make the cocoon look prettier.’ Assuming that Scoular had been cloned since I killed him, that is, Zabilla thought.
The avatar stared at her. Dracup did a good job of hiding his concern.
‘Very well,’ the avatar finally said. ‘The Absolute says that you play this Game well.’
Zabilla nodded. She didn’t even feel relief. If anything, she was more worried than she had been before. It was a desperate move to stay in the Game rather than anything approaching scientific method. She tried to suppress the feeling at the back of her mind that this was a searing indictment of just how irresponsible the Absolute was. It was willing to risk everything, all its people, the Game and itself on some pretty wild speculation.