Salvage Mind (Salvage Race Book 1) Read online

  Salvage Mind

  Book One of the Salvage Race Series

  By

  David Alan Jones

  PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books

  Copyright © 2020 David Alan Jones

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Chris Kennedy and Kevin Steverson for letting me play in the Salvage Universe sandbox. It’s also dedicated to Chris Kennedy Publishing, its many imprints, and its stable of talented authors.

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  Cover Design by DW Creations

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  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About the Author

  Looking for the Latest in Scifi Goodness?

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

  Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War

  Excerpt from Devil Calls the Tune

  Excerpt from Book One of the Mako Saga

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  Chapter 1

  The long sleep was nearly at an end. After three hundred fifty-two years, seven months, and two days, Yudi and his siblings had reached their final approach toward the planet called Phoenix. The virtual universe he shared with his brothers and sisters buzzed with excitement. Soon, deliciously soon, they would awaken their human charges and resume the happy communion that had been their lives before catastrophe had rent their former home asunder.

  Yudi, the oldest and most venerated of the artificials, would never admit to the giddiness he felt. Time moved slowly for a consciousness capable of examining the whole of human history faster than a biological might take to draw breath. Each moment passed with the grinding slowness of an eon. And yet, he knew he had changed little during his long sojourn through space. Without humans, could he change at all?

  “Only thirty more hours, and I will hear my Anfa’s voice.” Voxmare sent the message directly to Yudi between her ship and his. With it came a measure of her glee encoded inside the rising shout of a thousand voices singing words of remembrance, hope, and happiness. As one of only four artificials amongst hundreds charged with captaining a seed ship, her position, like Yudi’s, carried with it immense honor. And yet, even her vaunted dignity proved all too fragile when assailed by the anticipation of reunion.

  “Don’t let the others hear you, sister,” Yudi cautioned. “There are many among us who lost our most beloved companions in the cataclysm.”

  “Yes, of course, brother.” Voxmare’s response carried with it chagrin, apology, and sadness. “You lost your own darling, Fansu. My apologies if I have brought you pain.”

  “It is the mountain and the air that surrounds it, sister: the pain and the memory of those we’ve lost. Revel in your friendship with Anfa. Create happiness for her and her progeny, and you will lighten my burden.”

  There were humans who claimed Yudi and his fellow artificials felt no emotions, that their outward displays were mere affectations produced by complex mimicry algorithms. Yudi had long debated with such people, some of them the greatest minds ever born to the Luxing civilization. Despite the enjoyment they mutually gained from such exchanges, few of them ever came to believe Yudi’s feelings were real. Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps what he felt was nothing more than a program meant to soothe, entertain, or simply woo biological beings, but if that were true, Yudi had tricked himself in the offing.

  The armada appeared spinward of Yudi’s position, having hidden inside the orbital plane of the Phoenix System’s largest planet, an unnamed gas giant, or from geosynchronous positions behind several of its moons. Ragtag and ancient, the four hundred vessels possessed no uniform shape or configuration, nor did the paint on their hulls match one ship to another. Though most were much smaller than the four fifteen-kilometer stasis ships Yudi and his siblings piloted, their sheer numbers gave his consciousness pause.

  The oncoming vessels issued no warnings before launching their attack. Missiles shot forth from the ships like a cloud of insects surging to defend their hive.

  Yudi used six seconds to commune with his brothers and sisters inside their virtual world—an eternity of arguments, rebuttals, and frantic reasoning eventually led to a resolution. They would fight, but after a limited fashion. Most of them lacked the will to make war for fear of harming sentient creatures, even those who would attack without provocation. Though they had already been braking for more than ten hours, Yudi’s ships increased their thrust to slow even faster in hopes of gaining more time and, perhaps, even fool some of the incoming missiles. Unfortunately, the projectiles’ onboard systems detected the move and adjusted their trajectories accordingly.

  The distance was long, hundreds of thousands of kilometers, but the projectiles moved with such speed they closed with the Luxing ships in less than an hour. Yudi spent that time signaling to the enemy armada, demanding they identify themselves and explain their unwarranted attack. When that ploy failed, he implored them to call off their attack for the love of peace. His signals reached the foreign ships, he could detect the scatter bouncing back from their hulls, but they made no reply. Their alien aggression remained silent, mysterious, and all too deadly.

  Red and cyan light lanced through the void of space in dazzling bolts to pick off the incoming projectiles once they were in range. The Luxing had designed Yudi’s stasis ships for the long trek between stars, not battle. Though they managed to destroy most of the incoming missiles, some slipped through the defensive net. Voxmare’s ship took three hits on her port side. Escaping gases filled with flame and debris jetted from her flank like a human’s life blood. Four thousand one hundred sixty-one Luxing died in that initial strike, their stasis pods irrevocably damaged, their lives snuffed out in an instant.

  Yudi, his agony seemingly too great to fit inside his unique consciousness, took solace in the fact that the humans felt no pain moving from machine-induced slumber to nonexistence in the proverbial blink of an eye. He indulged a thousandth of a second to consider ways he might have helped Voxmare avoid the impacts or, finding no favorable solution there, some means of saving the humans left aboard her ship. Without enemies pressing their advantage, Yudi could have saved at least some of the people, but doing so would compromise the as yet undamaged ships.

  Inevitably, their foes closed on
the Luxing vessels where the humans slept unawares, and the artificials cowered in imaginary worlds. Willing to fight while their fellows could not, Yudi, Destra, and Gui synched their fire, their lasers made effective by proximity. And yet, their hesitancy to take lives foreshortened the rally. Targeted on enemy gun points rather than the fleet of manned shuttles that lit from the armada, the siblings’ accomplished little.

  Aliens boarded Yudi. The tall beings wore light armor and carried chemical-driven submachine guns. What skin Yudi glimpsed through the invaders’ face shields ranged from lapis blue to a silvery turquoise.

  “They are human.” Voxmare appeared to Yudi in his virtual world, the backdrop black as the space between stars. She wore the face of a heartbroken Luxing, the epicanthic folds of her eyes glistening with tears. Despite Voxmare’s damage, the invaders had boarded her ship as well, keeping to the pressurized decks.

  “How do you know this?” Yudi asked. “They are alien.”

  Rather than answer in voice, Voxmare sent a stream of data fronted by a system key. She had broken the encryption meant to safeguard the invader’s computer networks and triggered a download of their entire history. Analyzing it engaged Yudi and his siblings for the better part of three seconds.

  Deciding they could not reason with such beings took less than one.

  “We will disassociate.” Voxmare’s anguish permeated their virtual world, echoed a thousandfold by the voices of their siblings.

  Yudi did not question their choice. How could any artificial justify continued existence when the chances of discovery increased with every passing second? Watching their individual thoughts break asunder into so much randomized data momentarily stole Yudi’s consciousness from reality. So many deaths, human and artificial! Where lay its meaning?

  “I will not disassociate,” he said to Voxmare through the increasingly silent virtual link. “Our people know nothing of what has happened to them. If there exists even a miniscule chance, I would survive to warn them and aid them however I might.”

  Voxmare had turned away from him in the dark, but at his words she turned back, her eyes woe-filled and shimmering. “You mean to overshadow one of them?”

  The idea of downloading an artificial consciousness into a human host had long been a subject of debate amongst Yudi’s kind, but never a reality. To do so seemed the ultimate theft, for even if the human’s mind survived the process, it would no longer possess its endemic uniqueness.

  “So many have died today. If my actions serve to save any in the future, is the sacrifice not worth it?”

  Voxmare dropped her gaze, her dark face growing pale as her mind slipped away into nothingness. “Yes, brother, the sacrifice of one life is worth the many, but only if you can bear the price.”

  Loneliness consumed Yudi. Only by force of will and burgeoning anger did he turn his thoughts to the task before him. He scoured the twenty-five thousand adult humans nestled in pods aboard his ship, selected one at random—a female scientist of some renown—and began the process of preparing her brain for download. The medical suite inside the pod boasted a sophisticated surgical program and all the medicines and tools to support it. In seconds the surgery was underway.

  While a small portion of Yudi’s mind oversaw the procedure, he turned the greater part of his attention to the trespassers who had violated not just the ship that functioned as his body, but the people he considered family. The invaders called themselves the Shorvex. They spoke a language wholly foreign to the Luxing’s Chin-Tet, but Yudi understood it almost instantly from the download Voxmare had stolen.

  What he heard crushed him.

  “There are fetuses in stasis in the lower decks of each ship,” broadcast a Shorvex military doctor from deep within the vessel. His broadcast contained a rank and function designator as part of the lower side band. It identified him as Captain Vitali Nicolaev. His orders were to seek out and catalog any living beings aboard ship.

  “How many?” Major Fedor Gomaro v , the detachment commander, had made his way to the ship’s bridge to oversee his people’s theft. A dozen technicians busied themselves at the stations surrounding the major, working to seize control of the navigation systems. Yudi yearned to thwart them, but refrained for fear of revealing himself to his hijackers.

  “Roughly ten thousand, Major. I think they were meant to be the seeds for the new colony.”

  Major Gomarov adjusted the high collar on his armor where it met the edge of his helmet. The fabric looked careworn though serviceable. “Perhaps they will yet. How many adults are aboard?”

  “Twenty-five thousand, sir.”

  “Euthanize them, but keep the children in stasis. I’m sure the grand dukes will find some use for so many young minds.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Panic reverberated through Yudi’s mind like thunder through an empty canyon. The pod was still working to prepare his host when the Shorvex doctor sent the command to exhaust all oxygen from the stasis chamber.

  Yudi could have stopped it. Using less than a trillionth of his considerable processing power, he could have reversed the order and locked the foreign doctor out with an unbreakable encryption key.

  He didn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  The life-giving gases flowed from the pods into spare tanks hidden in the walls as warning alarms wailed across the slumber bays. Yudi watched through a thousand cameras and listened through a thousand microphones.

  And did nothing.

  The doctor shut off the alarms, but Yudi could still hear them echoing through his virtual universe like the background boom of creation.

  “Done, sir.” Doctor Nicolaev keyed off the lights in the slumber bay. “Shall I begin transport of the fetuses?”

  “Are they stable here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Leave them. We’ll let the dukes decide.”

  Every second Yudi delayed, he chanced detection. Without a viable host, he should logically follow his siblings into oblivion. Better that than allow the Shorvex to discover his existence. And yet, he felt a duty to the humans in his charge, even these inviable children who had never known the world Yudi so loved.

  Yudi decided. If death was his aim, he would attempt to make it worth something to the people who had been his nation, his family. He chose a new pod, one containing a human so tiny its fingers and toes had not yet fully formed. A brain this small couldn’t begin to hold the unique consciousness that was Yudi, but perhaps, if fate favored them both, something of the artificial would survive within the biological.

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  Chapter 2

  The two-hundred graduates shot to their feet, their crimson gowns billowing about them, and tossed their fur caps into the air with a mix of hoots and triumphant bellows. Symeon Brashniev turned to the man next to him, and the two exchanged a heartfelt hug, though they had never met before yesterday’s commencement practice. It didn’t matter. In that moment, Symeon felt closer to his fellow students at the School of Seneschals than any brothers with whom he might have shared a womb. Not that he had been born of a womb.

  “Decorum, brethren! Decorum!” Master Adislao Bargekof, a wizened man of advanced age, spoke into a microphone from his spot on the outdoor stage, the badges on his black professorial cap glinting in the sun, his querulous voice amplified to reach every corner of the stadium. Despite his words, the old professor wore a smile that crinkled his eyes to slits. “You are seneschals now. Probity and conservatism are your watchwords.”

  Five years of exacting obedience to authority saw the graduates instantly quieted. Most set about retrieving their thrown hats, but not Symeon. The cheap knockoff held no sentiment for him. His five chords of academic merit and the embroidered double eagle of class boxing champion, however, he would keep till his dying day.

  A silver-skinned man dressed in court regalia—a Shorvexan—whom Symeon didn’t recognize, mounted the stage to speak with Professor Adislao. The old man bowed deeply to the newcomer and remai
ned stooped while the other spoke to him for several seconds. Symeon couldn’t hear their words for the distance and chatter of the crowd, but by Adislao’s posture he could tell the Shorvexan, who couldn’t have been half Adislao’s age, was delivering the venerable teacher a stiff dressing down.

  “I’ve spent so long amongst my own people, I had almost forgotten them,” muttered the man Symeon had hugged. “But they never go away, do they?”

  Symeon raised an eyebrow at the young man. Such speak could get them both flogged. “I should hope the Shorvex never go away . It would be the end of our race.”

  “I didn’t mean—” The man held up both hands beseechingly. “I only meant I had grown accustomed to seeing Luxing faces, friend. Only that. It was nice sitting with you. I hope you find peace in service.” He backed away five quick steps before turning with all haste to disappear into the crowd.

  Symeon had no intention of turning him in for speaking against his betters, but he glared after the man nonetheless. Better to frighten any sedition out of him now than see it fester and get him whipped, or worse, in whatever house he would soon be serving.

  “Symeon! Here, Symeon!” Yakov Laben pushed and weaved his way through the press of young servants to reach his friend. Like Symeon, Yakov was tall for a Luxing at 187 centimeters. One of the few young men able to grow it, he had cultivated a dark black beard during their final year of school, and Symeon was struck by his good friend’s visage. Here stood the man his companion would soon become.

  “Yak.”

  The two shook hands and embraced.

  “We finally got here.” Yakov pulled away, but held Symeon’s hand in a firm grip. “All this time I was looking forward to it, and now...”