Archaea Read Online Free PDF Page B

edge he needs to find slipspace points even earlier.
     
    *****
     
    Maybe I was reacting emotionally.  A weapons specialist is about as level-headed of a profession as it gets, and emotions really shouldn't be part of the process. 
    All the same, I left the meeting with my head spinning, hardly able to organize my thoughts. I couldn't believe the captain allowed that techlord to launch something like that on this ship!
    I forced myself to calm down, to think clearly, consistently, and work the problems I have in front of me, and not worry about what might happen if Pauli's nightmare awakens.  
    Forget the fact we'd be isolated in the vastness of cold, dark, empty space - forget even the fact that we would (if Gene did his job right) be hurtling along a t speeds we could hardly imagine. What terrified me the most, was that we might also have a revenant intellect (that we might not be able to control or even understand) glimpsing (maybe staring) through quanta at future data we couldn't even conceptualize.
    And it would have control over my gun!
    Okay, so it's not mine, as such, and to be honest, it wasn't even a gun yet. It was all the parts and pieces of what could be a gun, all shiny and clean, tweaked and fretted over like the fine piece of machinery it was - but when it became a gun, it would be slaved into the fire-control routines of the core, and ultimately under the control of Pauli's project.
    What would we do, if it decided that firing that gun might run counter to some plan it may have hatched, from mutated logic or some strange loop added by bad code. Would we have control? Would we be able to trust this... program, with our existence?
    I needed to look into machining some pretty solid, mechanical controls and safeguards, something that the captain would be able to use as an interlock, or safety. For that matter, I should also remember to bring this up with Gene. He will definitely need a similar system for lockout on the Archaea's throttles.
    In the meantime, I needed to take a look at what we had left to test. We had some anomalous frequencies in our phase amplifiers the last time we ramped up, and I think I may have isolated the component to blame, but I needed to ramp up again with telltales running throughout the amps to make sure.
    One thing leads to another, a strange harmonic here, might cause an oscillation there, and before you know it, petawatts worth of coherent beam energy is bathing what remains of this sector of space. My primary goal was to not let this happen.
    My friends always wondered why I enjoyed this work, when it clearly terrifies me to the core of my being. I explained to them that the feeling of terror, the thrill of the unknown, the taste of uncontrollable panic – these are the things that make my job worth doing. It doesn't hurt to know that if anything were to go wrong, it would be over quite literally before I knew it.
    Of course, that was one aspect of Janis I really liked. If Janis were in charge of the various safeties and systems on this ship, Pauli thought it might be possible for her to know what was going wrong the instant beforehand, and 'pre-act' (as Pauli called it) to save us.
    On the other hand, if she did scram – how would we know it was to save us from being flash fried, and not simply because she didn't want to be a party to the destruction of some poor, defensless planetoid?
    I was probably more paranoid than usual, and definitely too emotional. I needed to keep my game face on, and work the problem at hand. Our port-side repeater turret was showing a torsional wobble tracking between azimuth 230 and 235, and it wasn't going to fix itself.
    I had barely begun the search for the necessary tools I needed to work on the turret armature, when Captain Smith floated aft from the bridge deck.
    "Shorty, I hate to bother you... but I've been thinking..." he trailed off and looked over at the windings on the phase amplifiers for a bit.
    "Captain?" I prodded, gently. It