Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship by A. C. Hadfield Page B

least redundant phrases and saved them to your smart-screen. It appears that Orbital Forty was destroyed, and not by the Axis Combine.”
    Kingsley nodded and checked his smart-screen. His devices had taken a beating during his years on the planet. Despite being sixty-five years old, his cybernetic heart kept him ticking along as well as someone a third his age.  
    The screen on his left forearm, however, was crazed with scratches, mostly from clambering about on the planet’s surface, looking for resources. Although it was never habited, it had been the grounds for a battle during the Century War. Kingsley had, over the years, found enough debris and parts to build out his HAB.  
    The computers that he used to listen in on the Salus Sphere’s communications were actually vestan quantum units. He had cracked the encryption and reprogrammed them for his own uses. They would surely be ancient artifacts these days compared to what the CW and the Axis Combine had developed, but for him, and his experiments, they were all he needed.  
    With those he had created a brand new kind of self-learning AI, the code of which now ran his coterie of companions, of which Squid was one, and although he never said so, in order to avoid any tensions between his creations, Squid was his favorite. It was as close to the loyalty of a dog as he would get.  
    Sure, it didn’t play fetch with as much enthusiasm or lick his face, but with its articulated tentacles, it could play a mean game of skillion and was helpful in maintaining the HAB. The harsh conditions of Minerva, including its dry, frigid winters, meant there was always something that needed fixing, and to better use his talents elsewhere, Kingsley had delegated those tasks to his mechanical crew members.
    Kingsley slouched into his favorite chair in front of his single screen salvaged from his old human-made attack ship. It was so old it didn’t even have holographic capacities, meaning he had to squint at the printed display. He synced the smart-screen on his forearm to the larger display and read through some of the CW chatter.  
    As he scanned the rumors and surprise, he thought back to his friend Beringer. Back in the day, before Kingsley exiled himself, he and Beringer used to talk and dream about the Atlantis ship. “What if it was real?” Beringer had posited. “Imagine what we could learn from it, what cultures and technology it would hold.”
    They had guessed, based on the few snippets of sightings and reports, that the ship was likely thousands of ST years old. Which meant its creators were likely ancient, given the reported technical abilities of it.  
    In the intervening twenty years of peace, there’d been fewer and fewer sightings and reports, making Kingsley less excited about the prospect of it being real. He had resigned himself to rationalizing it as a folktale, a space legend.  
    But now there was this sudden explosion of communications and the destruction of Orbital Forty.  
    “It’s not the damned horans, is it, Squid?” Kingsley said, rubbing his bony hand across the stubble on his chin. “Perhaps they’ve developed some kind of stealth technology.”
    “The odds aren’t likely, sir,” Squid said. “Besides, we’ve been tracking Axis movements and none were in the vicinity of Orbital Forty. Even if they had somehow developed wormhole technology, we would have noticed a sizeable ship on the move.”
    “Indeed. But Atlantis ship rumors aside, I don’t like how the Axis Combine forces are massing around the Sphere. It seems to me that war is imminent once again.”
    “Will they come for you, sir?” Squid said as it hovered to the pile of papers and used its tentacles to arrange them in neat piles for later reading and filing.  
    “Who?”
    “The Commonwealth, of course. If war breaks out, won’t they need your help? It is your combat-AI protocols their destroyers use, is it not?”
    Kingsley shrugged and downed the rest of his bitter