“Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ravana.
“Yes and no. If there was a fault it would give us something to look for.”
Ravana lowered her sleeping cat to the floor and sat down in her co-pilot’s seat. The ship was berthed in the shuttle bay at Dockside. All she could see through the flight-deck windows, beyond the beak-like sonic shield generator that formed the nose of the aptly-named Platypus, was the graffiti-riddled concrete of the hangar walls.
“I wonder why she didn’t invite me?” she asked suddenly.
“Who?”
“The Maharani. We brought those people back from Ascension so she could talk to them in person, but it was me who saw the men take the Raja away.”
“That woman is trouble,” Quirinus retorted, returning his attention to the console. “My advice is to stay clear and not get involved. It will only end in tears.”
“All they did was find that spaceship,” Ravana mumbled, swinging her legs in a sulk. “Anyone could have done that.”
“The ship was here and we never saw it,” he pointed out. “Wak’s had a robot probe scanning the surface of the asteroid since yesterday looking for the other side of that hole you saw but as far as I know has found nothing.”
Ravana did not reply. Behind her words was the frustration of someone rapidly outgrowing all that life on the hollow moon could offer her. Her father had hoped that co-piloting the Platypus would offer a respite, but their trip to Newbrum had awakened her to the reality that Ascension was not just a place to trade but also a world of cities where people felt part of the interstellar spread of humanity. In contrast, the inhabitants of the Dandridge Cole were outcasts who used the hollow asteroid to hide from civilisation. She wondered if this was what her father wanted for his daughter.
“We need to talk about your future,” Quirinus said suddenly, surprising Ravana. It was as if he had read her mind. “I think it would do you good to see more of the five systems. How do you feel about leaving to study in Newbrum or Bradbury Heights? Or further afield even,” he added. “There’s a fantastic engineering academy in Hellas.”
“Go to university on Mars?” Ravana’s dark eyes shone. “Or maybe even Earth!”
“If you don’t mind carrying twice your weight around, why not!” Quirinus smiled. “You complained about your aches and pains for months after we came to live here and the hollow moon’s gravity is only a bit more than that on Yuanshi.”
“Don’t you want me to stay here and help you crew the Platypus?”
“You’re old enough now to think about making plans of your own.”
“Yes, but to leave here,” murmured Ravana. “To leave you…?”
“My life is not your life,” Quirinus told her. “You have your own future to think of.”
They were interrupted by the sound of hands and feet scampering along the crawl tunnel. Moments later, Zotz’s ginger mop bobbed through the hatch to herald his arrival at the flight deck, his progress hampered by the bundle of cloth he held in his hands. While Ravana and her father still wore the flight suits they had donned for the trip to Newbrum, Zotz wore one of his father’s laboratory coats with the sleeves rolled back. It was clearly too big for him, but what drew Ravana’s eye was that he seemed to be once again wearing part of a birdsuit beneath, though she could not recall ever seeing him fly. Zotz was a strange boy who took after his Canadian father in many ways. His mother was away on family business in Welsh Patagonia and Ravana knew he was missing her dearly, not that he would ever admit it.
“I’ve found it!” Zotz declared. He dropped what he held to the floor. Ravana’s cat awoke with a start and went to sniff cautiously at the smelly bundle.
“That was quick,” remarked Quirinus.
“He can move like lightning when he wants to,” said Ravana, smiling. “He reminds me of the big bats you see flitting through the trees by the lake.”
“The flying foxes?” Zotz grinned. “They are pretty cool.”
He carefully peeled back the layers of cloth to reveal the untidy ball of wires and components within, then stood back in triumph. Ravana got up from her chair and regarded the mangled mess with some bemusement.
“What exactly are we supposed to be looking at?” she asked.
“It’s the AI circuit from a toy spider my dad gave me years ago,” said Zotz. “It was made in Peng Lai, Taotie. I took it apart to have a look at its brain.”
“A toy spider?” Ravana shuddered. “I can’t think of anything worse.”
Zotz drew their attention to a small metal capsule, no more than three centimetres square, at the centre of the nest of cables. The lid of the capsule had been crudely prised free and inside they could see a blob of what looked like green mould.
Quirinus peered at the circuit. “So you have a destructive streak. Don’t all boys?”
“The organic AI chip,” Zotz said irritably, pointing at the blob. “See? It’s all squidgy, just like the weird growth infecting your ship.”
“My ship is not infected!” retorted Quirinus.
“It does look similar,” Ravana admitted. “Is it really organic? Alive, I mean.”
“Not exactly,” said Zotz. “It’s a cluster of vat-grown brain cells on a semiconductor base. These chips are a lot cheaper than quantum processors but are smart enough to control simple things like AI toys, food molecularisors and the like.”
“And the Platypus?” asked Quirinus thoughtfully, glancing towards the console.
“Where was the ship built?” asked Zotz. “Dad told me this sort of technology is common in the Epsilon Eridani system.”
“She came from the Lan-Tlanto shipyards,” Quirinus told him, giving the console an affectionate pat. “That was back when they actually built spacecraft on Ascension. However, she’s had a whole load of repairs and upgrades over the years and I think the AI unit did come from an old Taotie-class interstellar tug that had been broken up for spares. We took the ED drive from the same ship, as I recall.”
“So the Platypus AI unit is also a green blobby thing?” asked Ravana, wonderingly.
Quirinus plucked a screwdriver from the tool box. “Let’s see, shall we?”
Turning to the console, he reached into the mass of wiring behind the facia and pulled the green tendrils away from where they were wrapped around the metal case of the AI unit, a box half a metre square and almost the same in depth. The screws securing the cover came free easily and moments later he was gazing intently into the unit’s metal skull.
“Odd,” he said at last. “Very odd indeed.”
Leaving the cat to eat the dismantled remains of the toy spider, Ravana and Zotz peered over Quirinus’ shoulders to look for themselves. The AI’s metal case was filled by a spherical green mass that had a texture not unlike that of a plant, yet with brown streaks that looked eerily like veins. Like the writhing snakes upon the head of Medusa, a dozen or more thick stems sprouted out of the AI brain and on through the cable outlet, before splitting into the tendrils they had seen reaching throughout the ship. The swollen central green pod had grown across the surrounding circuit boards, swamping the row of data sockets where the ship’s wiring loom connected with the AI unit.
“Is it supposed to look like that?” asked Ravana.
“Err, no,” Quirinus admitted. “Definitely not.”
“The brain has grown tentacles!” Zotz gasped in awe.
Quirinus put down the screwdriver and took a small pair of cutters from the top of the tool box. He reached behind the console again, positioned the blades around a small tendril offshoot, then squeezed the cutters closed.