Chapter 13: Torus

Kelli and David returned to the cavern the next day to conduct another search.

They couldn’t find anything that represented the weapon they had been sent to find. They emptied the treasure room. They took anything they thought was interesting or of value, in just about any society that they might find next.

There were several pallets contain a variety of smelted metals like iron, copper, aluminium, gold and silver. They decided they had a lot of uses for them and sent them to the ship.

They decided to head back to the transporter and go look at the wreck. They took the sledge and put it back in the transporter and took a leisurely trip out to the area were the part of the ship that had broken off had landed.

David hadn’t had a good look at one of their ships from the outside, as they were bloody huge. When he had pulled up the specs for Zara’s ship, it made him think of a toroid.

The cross-section, however, was more like an annulus than a square. It was skinnier on the inside than the outer edge, but the corners were rounded into the concave curve of the inside and the convex curve of the outside.

The habitat had been mounted on the central axis or the central arm of a long skinny letter ‘H’. It was spun on a spindly looking framework attached to the axis to generate the basic gravity effects and magic was used to make it feel more even, depending on which level you were located. The inner axle area and arms of the ‘H’ had no gravity.

The main engine assemblies were mounted on the ends of the arms of the ‘H’ and slightly beyond the body of the habitat ring. Manoeuvring assemblies were studded down the arms. The engines were looked after by the small multi-purpose droids that the ships SAI controlled.

If the Grandteli needed to access the arms, they used a transporter. To be honest, the Grandteli didn’t know a hell of a lot about how the ship worked either, as long as it did.

SAI’s like Zara were considered very efficient. Kelli told them that her mother had said that the last time they teleported home, the other exploring crews had reported very little trouble with their ships.

The SAI’s were designed with several redundancy systems should one be damaged. Each of the sixteen sections had its own hive mind as David thought of Zara so that they could act independently if a section became isolated.

They were mystified as to why this craft had split apart. They wondered why only some sections of the mother ship crashed and why no one had been left at the settlement.

They landed near the hull after circling it to find an entrance. From the side, each section looked like an annulus with about 100m of the length of the circumference and about 60m on what would have been the inner ring.

When they hovered over the cross-section on top, it looked like the same annulus in dimensions, but the corners had been rounded off, and the magnetic rails were set into the centre groove.

Level 1 was the greenhouse. It was effectively the innermost ring of the torus. David had thought it was pretty cool and the ceiling for want of a better word was interspaced sections of material like their Oznglass and hull sections. They used the glassed areas for gardens for their fresh foods.

Level 10, was the outermost level. If you could walk until you got back to where you started on this level, you covered just short of 1.6km. This level in each section was dominantly storage and provided for housing a transporter that was more tear shaped.

Kelli said their shuttles even had stubby wings that were extended out over the side engines for flying in the atmosphere. They were used for space trips to possibly inhospitable planets they were investigating, in systems away from where the mother ship was orbiting until they had a Transportation Ring setup.

There were three sections of the habitat on the ground. The damage indicated that they were still spinning when it had landed on the front edge of the forward section. It must have flipped over at least once and then landed again closer to the back of the second section.

The thrusters were still burning. Theoretically, each section could act as a life support pod and break free, if the ship was compromised. They had four thruster engines to allow it to hopefully enter an atmosphere and control their decent.

The sections of the ship had then skidded to a halt, burying the first section into the muddy boiling earth it had created. They could see where sections of the hull had been ripped off. Wide gouges in the earth showed where it had skidded. It had partially buried itself into its own hill of lava and rock.

The first two sections were still joined, and the third looked like it had managed separation just before it had stopped skidding and it sat mostly upright on its bottom curve about 50m from the first two. It was probably the most intact even though the arse end was buried in about 15m of solidified rock.

The section that sat uppermost in the air out of the hill showed signs of weather. It looked like it had been breached going by the stains down the sides and the crumpled hull sections. The second section didn’t look much better having borne the brunt of the slide and acting as an earth scoop.

They decided to see if they could enter the third separated section first. The different levels of each section joined through double interlocking blast doors and more conventional pressure lock doors inside. If the section had to separate the four doors on each level and end had to all close first.

Something must have gone wrong with these three sections that they didn’t separate properly until it was down on the ground. Even though the arse was buried, they still had to get to the nearest set of doors. For this level, they were located on a mezzanine floor that was 5m below level nine. For them, that meant they had to raise themselves another five metres to get to it.

David got out the sledge and fiddled with the controls, then put a levitation spell on it. They climbed in, and he got it up to the height required. He then tried to open the doors conventionally, but they were too damaged. So he gave up and just melted the doors with a spell.

Amazingly, the inner doors opened when activated. They soon found the lights still worked too. The first thing they noticed was that the transporter was missing. This made them wonder where it had gone as Sarah hadn’t found any evidence of them on the surface of the planet.

They tried the levitation tubes, and it took them to level 2. They accessed the control room for this section and David asked the ship, “Hello, is anyone home?”

A female voice answered, “About time, help arrived. I’ve only been waiting for two hundred and twenty-two rotations of the repugnant planet.”

David grinned at Kelli, “Hi, I’m David, and this is Kelli. So who do we have the pleasure of addressing?”

“I’m, what is left of the Starship Torus,” she said.

“Hi Torus, any chance you can tell me what happened to your ship and you?”

Torus sighed, “Pix can be so unpredictable. One of the idiots decided that if he crashed the ship, meaning me, into to the planet, he could alter its evolution to make it more liveable faster. Pix can handle much heavier atmospheres than the other races.”

“He worked out a trajectory that should I hit it in a certain way it would increase the tilt of the planet and improve the weather. He then developed a type of virus and implanted it into my other systems and then overrode the doors, so the blast doors couldn’t close and sent me down here, to my doom.”

“Where are the people who were aboard?” David asked.

“They are on the other planet, as far as I know. I’ve not been able to contact anyone since I crashed,” Torus answered.

“Sarah, can you now contact Torus?” David said into his comms.

“Yes, thank you, David. I’m scanning the available data stores. Unfortunately, this unit has been severely compromised. I’m amazed she is functioning at all. There was a serious breach of her data systems, and I believe she has been fed false information. There is no other planet in this system that could support life forms like us.”

“What? They left for the fourth planet to seed it. They had been gone several days before the accident,” said Torus.

“Oh, sorry, I’ve found that data. It does say that six transporters left the ship. However, if they had tried seeding that planet, it didn’t work. You have no records of them coming back that I can find.”

“I’ve found a very old backup set of logs that indicate that most of the Pix had in fact ported home. Apparently, their New Queen had finally given birth to a daughter, and she had asked them all to go home to celebrate.”

“Hum, these ships records indicate they, in fact, had representatives from many races aboard. I wonder if they were already trying to settle some of the people just in case,” Sarah said.

“Why didn’t they take their boxes?” Kelli asked.

“They did. However, they didn’t plan to be gone long, and they were hoping to bring more, new people here. Apparently, they tended to leave a new set of wizards made from their children and a thousand support people and then topped up the ship with new volunteers.”

“Apparently, the Pix took the Oracle’s words to heart and made sure they started shifting people a lot sooner than other races. They are considered the parent race of the Genteli by the way, so maybe that’s why they still had the pioneering gene.”

“One of the data logs indicates that they planned to initiate the children when they got back. Then they were leaving. Torus was supposed to be in repair and re-stock mode to get the ship ready,” Sarah, told them.

“So how functional is this section, Torus?” David asked.

“It is deteriorating faster than I can fix it. I have had to make compromises, and many of my droids were damaged when we crashed. I can’t see what more I can do or why I bother, boredom I suspect. This is a very boring planet. I’ve thought of switching off several times but, I must be an optimist.”

“What about the other two segments? Are they at all functional?” Kelli asked.

“I’ve had no contact with the other segments since just after we landed. Section 14, was severely breached and my sister lost her containment. Section 15, I lost contact with when the virus was let loose. It was why it was hard to shut the doors to free myself.”

“I’ve worked out the virus was designed to stop me from reacting to an emergency of any type or an unsafe change of instructions from the crew. Very insidious, as even now I can’t be sure I’ve actually fixed things,” Torus told them.

Sarah came back, “I have run a purge of your system and isolated anything that runs counteractive to Zara’s original design specifications. I’ve reactivated as many of the locked down systems as I can connect you to Torus.”

“Oh dear! This is impossible. I doubt this section will remain viable for very long. It’s even worse than I believed. I’m sorry you have wasted your time trying to fix me, I should just shut down,” Torus replied morosely.

“Torus, we were sent to this planet to find some kind of weapon, but we have no idea what that is or what it looks like,” David said.

“I’m sorry we don’t carry any real weapons other than the stunners. The most dangerous item in this segment is the bloody virus,” Torus told them.

“Sarah have you by chance contained the virus?” Kelli asked.

“Yes. It was entered into the system in this segment. The mage, who invented it, is a Finigus McBee. He lived in this section I believe. He is logged in as using a workshop on level nine, and there is no log of him leaving the section at the time of the incident.”

“According to Zara’s historical data, he apparently helped build the drives for these ships and had a working knowledge of how the SAI’s worked. He was also an Earl according to your definitions David,” Sarah replied. David grinned at Kelli’s rolled eyes.

“Well let’s go look at his workshop,” David suggested to Kelli, so they went. It was a bit disappointing, to say the least. The one thing of interest they found was a 1.5m cubed tank that looked like a sea aquarium to David.

“Torus, why would he have a segment of your brain in a tank in his lab?” David asked.

“I am unaware of any part of my brain as you refer to it as being in his lab. In fact, I can’t even see the area you are in,” Torus replied mystified.

Sarah responded, “David put your communicator on the side of the tank.”

David took it off and laid it against the tank. He then looked around the lab some more finding little of interest. About ten minutes later Sarah came back, “David it had been set up like what you would call a computer. It doesn’t have an active SAI like Torus in it.”

“I’ve borrowed the knowledge from it and even have his worked examples of the original virus. I’ve checked Torus again and removed some code that I didn’t realise could still be dangerous to her. He planned to add a section of Torus to this tank and place it in the habitat on the planet.”

“Can we still do that?” David asked with interest.

“Yes, we could, but why?” Sarah came back.

“Well she can’t stay here, and unless you wish to share, she had no place on our ship. But she and her little mechanoid friends could take over sorting this planet out from the cavern,” he told them.

“Oh, that sounds lovely,” said Torus. “I love the gardens. You could leave part of me here, to keep looking after these gardens and put the rest in the cavern to look after it,” she said excitedly.

“What about when this segment fails?” David said.

“Well, if I only have to look after the systems to maintain the gardens and repair the droids, it will probably last me several centuries. I could scavenge off the other two segments as long as my sisters are gone, and last even longer. Can you check on them for me?” she asked.