Halo_ Ghosts of Onyx - Eric S. Nylund [49]
She toweled the perspiration off her face and then checked her film badge. She'd live, at least, for the next few moments.
She pushed off the bulkhead and free-floated onto the bridge.
The Beatrice's command center had been designed, or rather redesigned, by its former owner, rebel Governor Jacob Jiles, for comfort rather than efficiency. Every surface save the displays was curved and padded with cream-colored calfskin. The captain's chair had massage and temperature controls—even a ridiculous feature: a cup holder.
Dr. Halsey checked on Kelly. She had strapped Kelly into the first mate's chair to keep her from drifting away. A line ran into an input port on the interior elbow joint of her MJOLNIR armor, pumping dermacortic steroids to help her regenerate the burns that covered 72 percent of her body… and enough nar-colytive sedatives to keep her unconscious until she was needed.
"I'm sorry, you would have never come on your own," she said. "Spartans are attracted to suicide missions like moths to flames. But this is much more important than any military solution."
Dr. Halsey pushed away and drifted to the Beatrice's computer control. Her laptop was attached to the multiinterface port, and the infiltration protocols had almost finished wiping the ship's primitive security lockouts.
She plugged a sandwich of memory crystal and processor boosters into her laptop. These components she had appropriated from what was left of the Gettysburg's gutted AI core.
She then withdrew a pea-shaped chip from her lab coat. This was not from the Gettysburg. She gingerly set the chip into her laptop's auxiliary reader port. A tiny spark lit and lifted off her computer's two-by-two-centimeter holographic projector.
"Good afternoon, Jerrod."
"Good afternoon, Dr. Halsey," the spark replied in a formal British voice. "Although technically according to my internal chronometer it is morning."
"There have been a few temporal anomalies since we last spoke," she said.
"Indeed? I look forward to the explanation, ma'am."
"So do I," she murmured.
After an alien artifact and combat in warped Slipstream space had distorted space-time. Dr. Halsey wasn't so sure precisely what time line she belonged in. Quantum paradoxes that once seem a quaint mental exercise were now a part of her reality.
"How may I be of service?" Jerrod asked.
Dr. Halsey smiled at the simple AI. Although she often thought of Jerrod as a toy, it was a fully functional micro-AI. The experiment had been initially to see how long a budding smart AI would last in a constrained processor-memory matrix. The theoreticians at Sydney's Synthetic Intellect Institute calculated its life span to be a matter of days. Jerrod, however, had fooled the experts at the "Double S.I." It had rapidly
grown but then stabilized within its pea-sized cell of memory-processor crystal.
Jerrod would never be a tenth as brilliant as a real "smart" AI like Cortana, nor even as smart as a traditional "dumb" AI of unlimited proportions. But he had a spark of creativity and spunk, and despite the stuffy butler persona he had adopted, she liked him.
Jerrod had one other feature uniquely suited for Dr. Halsey's purposes: portability. Other AIs required an institute, a starship, or at the very least a full set of MJOLNIR armor to function.
"Diagnostics on the Beatrice's systems, please," Dr. Halsey said. "Then correlate the data slice downloaded from Cortana's memory core and prepare for analysis. Execute a database search on stellar coordinates input into the NAV system; expand search parameters within five light-years of origin."
"Stand by, ma'am. Just have to dust off the old circuits. Working…"
"And a little Debussy, please," she said. "Les Sons et les par-fums tournent dans l'air du soir."
Jerrod's mote of light shrank to a pinpoint