Price of a thousand bles.., p.39
Level Seven, page 39
LEVEL SEVEN
WILLIAM LEDBETTER
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
LEVEL SEVEN
Text Copyright © 2025 by William Ledbetter.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author and publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Holly Lyn Walrath. Cover design by Audible, used with permission.
Published by Interstellar Flight Press
Houston, Texas.
www.interstellarflightpress.com
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-953736-40-6
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-953736-41-3
CONTENTS
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Interstellar Flight Press
CHAPTER 1
At three hundred and forty meters long, the asteroid had been one of the smallest on Abby Gibson’s list of those located in the main belt, but as she edged the Jackalope closer, the behemoth rock filled their screens with soft grays peppered by stark black shadows. They eventually parked the ship fifty meters above a crater that spread across the rock’s entire minor axis.
“I’m amazed whatever hit here didn’t just rip the asteroid in half,” Nora said. “The impact generated enough heat to turn the crater floor molten.”
Abby chewed her lip and nodded. “That’s probably why we’re getting such a powerful uranium signature. This rock isn’t nearly big enough for true planetary differentiation, but maybe the heaviest metals at least separated a bit.”
“I hope so. That’ll make extraction faster,” Violet said from her station in the equipment bay. “And speaking of which, I’m ready to rock and roll down here.”
“Wait!” Nora said. “I’m coming down to help you.”
Nora unbuckled, shoved upward from her seat, and rebounded from the bulkhead at the perfect angle to shoot through the hatch. Abby grinned at how quickly Nora had adapted to life in space. During the year that had passed since they had escaped the Kilburnite takeover of Earth, they had all spent a great deal of time in microgravity.
“We’re almost ready to launch the drones,” Mortimer said inside her head. He was an independent AI and Abby’s biad partner, living on a biological substrate in the meninges layers of her brain. Since their creator had freed the AIs to reproduce, Mortimer had made copies or extensions of himself at will and deleted them just as quickly. It had been confusing at first, trying to talk individually to the copies that lurked throughout the ship’s electronics, running repair bots, checking system diagnostics, and performing hundreds of other tasks. Level fives—and level sixes like Mortimer and Archie—had changed in that year since they were freed. They were able to become diffused or focused, freely flowing, separating, and merging as needed or desired.
Only when Abby started thinking of them all as parts of the same whole did it get easier. And she liked Mortimer’s new abilities. They gave her instant access to information, and she could control the ship with no more than a word.
Archie was the other independent AI on board. He had originally been Violet’s biad partner, but when it became evident that Violet’s brain structure was prone to hemorrhages due to latent effects of the Blue Blood virus, Archie had moved to Violet’s wife, Nora. Violet retained instantaneous communication with Archie and Nora, so they called it a triad, but Abby suspected the change had traumatized her more than she admitted.
“We’re ready,” Archie said from the second drone. “We’ll hang back above the surface of the asteroid and observe as your fancy mining machine does all the work. Perfect lazy job for me.”
“Ha,” Abby said. “Launch.”
Two rapid-fire thumps marked the drone departures, and a small screen lit up with colored trajectory arcs and number columns.
Abby looked around the empty command cabin, then sighed and hugged herself. “I don’t think Violet really needed any help.”
“No,” Mortimer said. “I suppose, like most couples, they just enjoy spending time together.”
Abby switched on the camera feed for the equipment bay and watched the two women talking, teasing, and smiling. The couple had asked if she wanted to join their little family unit and be a third partner in the marriage, but Abby had declined. She was pretty sure the offer had been made more out of pity than a true desire for her companionship. Still, they made a good crew for her ship, the Jackalope, even though they still refused to wear the awesome uniform coverall Abby had designed. Nora insisted on wearing her usual all-white clothes that contrasted beautifully with her dark skin and hair, while pale, freckled Violet wore a ratty old Pink Floyd T-shirt, baggy shorts, and no shoes. They were an odd pair but good people.
Icons flashed on the screen, indicating that the two observation drones were in position.
“Okay, Violet,” Abby said. “You have control of the ship. Do your thing.”
A hatch opened, exposing the mobile part of the Xolotl mining unit to space. The carriage holding the extraction head exited the Jackalope, then started its controlled descent to the asteroid, pulling power, data, and ore-collection lines along behind it. Violet sat at a console built into the part of the Xolotl unit that remained on the ship, controlling the remote head directly.
Abby chewed the inside of her lip, trying hard not to interfere. Violet knew far more about the Xolotl system than she did, and with help from Archie and Nora, they would manage just fine. But they only had one of the homemade units, and it was fragile. The science had been developed by the University of Texas at El Paso back in the twenties, but evidently, none of the original production units had survived Killday. So, based on two published papers and a schematic on the internet, they had made their own.
When the carriage bumped down near the center of the massive crater, four guns fired harpoon anchors past the dust layer and deep into the rock, cinching the unit tight to the asteroid. As the mining head came to life, sweeping electrodes slowly back and forth across the surface, high-voltage arcs shattered first the regolith and then rock into electrically charged molecular particles. Then the electromagnetic collection system sorted the materials and sucked them up the tube to the ship.
“Wooooo,” Violet yelled. “It’s working! We’re mining with lightning! Initial spectrometry shows more uranium on the left side, so once we have a shaft, we’ll twist in that direction and try to follow the vein.”
Abby exhaled a shaky breath, unaware she’d been holding it. She watched the graphically enhanced camera feeds from the two AI-controlled drones as spidery legs deployed behind the mining head, transferring locomotion from the support carriage to the unit itself and pushing the electrode head ever deeper into the shaft.
“Going to full power,” Abby said.
The little machine was an electricity hog, and most of the lights in the ship flickered off, leaving the control room bathed in the eerie glow from display screens. Abby tried to relax and be patient, but it was tough.
While the command staff on Uptown Station—humanity’s only large outpost beyond Earth—had not been able to lend her any small nuclear reactors from their severely limited stock, they had given her the resources she needed to go mine enough uranium to build her own. Owen, the station’s leader, insisted that if Abby’s experiment worked, it would benefit everyone, but she suspected, on some level, they were merely humoring her. Still, she didn’t want them to regret their trust in her.
Her screen showed the stark landscape below in contradictions. Bright and black, beautiful and ugly. All of which mirrored Abby’s thoughts. For most of her childhood, she had longed to be in space. The TV shows and movies made it seem thrilling, dangerous, and glamorous—which was true to an extent, though perhaps the best description might be exciting tedium.
As the mining head burrowed deeper into the asteroid, clouds of dust belched from the hole and rapidly began to obscure the camera views. The drones shifted around for better observation angles but eventually switched to infrared to cut through the haze.
“I think we’re going to need to redesign the collection system,” Violet said. “Spectrometry shows there is actually uranium in that dust, and we’re losing it.”
“I noticed,” Abby said.
“We have an anomaly,” Mortimer said.
“A problem with the Xolotl?”
“No. I’ve detected a large, fast-moving object. It doesn’t appear to be on an intercept course but will still pass within approximately nine hundred miles of our position. And it is very strange. I only see it in the visual spectrum with our optical telescope. Nothing on radar.”
The hairs on Abby’s arms stood up. Was there an undertone of alarm in Mortimer’s comment? “Another asteroid or comet, maybe?”
“Most likely, but if so, it’s previously unrecorded and should show up on radar. I think we need to send the two drones we already have outside to intercept and check it out.”
“Will they have enough fuel?”
“Yes, but only for a one-way trip. They’ll have to burn their tanks dry in order to get up to intercept velocity.”
Abby chewed at her lip and looked at the rendezvous diagram Mortimer had loaded onto her screen. “Do you think this is important enough to waste two drones?”
“I do.”
“Okay. Send them.”
After the initial excitement of Mortimer’s mysterious discovery and the mining machine’s first deployment, Abby grew increasingly bored and fidgety. Watching Nora and Violet banter in the equipment bay without her only made the feeling worse, so she clicked over to look at her messages. There was only one new thing from Uptown Station that day. A good-luck note from Matt. She sighed and closed the window without reading it. Then, something occurred to her as she sat up straight in her harness and opened it again. The date stamp said June 12. It was Julio’s birthday.
“Mortimer, do we have the movie Alien in our entertainment files?”
“Of course.”
“Play it for me. On a side screen.”
Since they were about ten years old, Abby and Julio had always gotten together on their birthdays for a movie or TV series marathon. She didn’t really have time to watch an entire season of The Expanse or Star Trek, but a movie would be perfect as she waited. As the creepy music started and the title formed line by line on the screen, she cinched her harness tighter and settled in to watch one of Julio’s favorites.
Twenty minutes later, she could no longer see the screen because of the tears that kept clumping up in her eyes. They wouldn’t flow in zero-g, and her sleeve was already wet from wiping them.
“Just turn it off, Mortimer,” she finally said. “Even this movie isn’t fun without Julio’s snarky comments.”
“I’m sorry,” Mortimer said and killed the movie. “And I was so looking forward to Ash telling them they didn’t know what they were dealing with.”
Abby laughed, but even Mortimer’s terrible attempts at humor didn’t help. “What is Julio doing today?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Mortimer said. “I’ll try to make contact with my agents when we get back into range of Earth’s communications satellites and update you on his status as soon as I can.”
A lump formed in her throat. She hadn’t spoken to Julio since he’d decided to stay with the Kilburnites when she left Earth. They’d grown up talking to each other almost every day. For fifteen years, he’d always been there. They’d grown even closer during the terrifying period when the Aggregate was trying to kill them, but something had broken in Julio when the Kilburnites kidnapped him. Then Abby had decided to let Mortimer live in her brain, and it had been too much for Julio. When Mortimer suggested following her friend around with nanoscale robotic spies, she reluctantly agreed. Creepy, but at least some contact. The reports were something, at least, but could never replace Julio’s advice and support.
“I guess I made my choice and should be happy with it,” she said, sopping up the remaining tears with her sleeve.
“But you didn’t make a choice between me and Julio,” Mortimer said. “When you decided to enter a biad with me, you did it to save him. You had no idea he would react the way he did. He was the one who made a choice not to be with you because he couldn’t accept what you’d done.”
“Yeah, but the result is the same. I just—”
“Wait.” The speakers on the wall crackled to life. “We’re getting some strange signals from the drones.”
“Come in, Jackalope . . . read . . .” Archie’s voice said.
Abby toggled the comms mic. “You’re garbled, Archie. Can you boost your signal?”
“. . . something strange . . .” Mortimer’s voice said from the second drone. “. . . systems . . .”
A loud feedback whine filled the channel, then abruptly stopped.
“We’ve just lost the video and data stream from both drones,” Mortimer said. Then, a second later, he added, “And they’ve both disappeared from radar. We are, however, seeing what looks like two small debris fields.”
She sat up straight in her seat, straining against the harness. “What? Did . . . did they hit the thing?”
“No, they were still nearly seventy miles away from the anomaly.”
Abby’s mind was racing yet oddly empty at the same time. What could possibly do that to both probes at the same time?
“Could they have collided with each other?”
“Highly unlikely with AIs controlling each drone,” Mortimer said. “And the last radar track showed three hundred feet of space between them.”
Cold, icy dread settled in Abby’s stomach. Could this have been an attack?
“The anomaly is changing course slightly,” Mortimer said, putting telemetry and trajectory charts on her screen. “Track is continuing to change. It looks like the object is attempting a close flyby of our location.”
Abby’s heart felt as if it were trying to leap from her chest, and her hands began to shake. “What . . . I mean . . . Did the drones send any video through before we lost the data stream?”
“Only a fuzzy blob at the edge of their visual range. They didn’t have telescopes or long-range cameras since they were designed for close-in work.”
“Ummm . . . what the hell is happening?” Violet said from the Xolotl bay. “Archie said we lost contact with the drones.”
“We’ve lost all traces of both,” Mortimer said. “No transponder, nothing on the radio or radar.”
For several seconds, no one spoke. Then, the ice ball in Abby’s stomach drove her to action. “How much time until that object gets within a hundred miles?”
“It’s hard to get accurate estimates using only optical, but my guess is thirty-one minutes.”
“Violet? How long to disengage and reel in the Xolotl unit?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
“Cut it loose,” Abby said.
“But we spent a month building that—”
“We can come back for it later. Cut it loose now!” Abby yelled. “Use the emergency cable disconnect. Then come up here and buckle in. We have to get out of here fast.”
She glanced at the exterior camera feed long enough to see the cables and hoses that had been attached to the ship’s bay floating freely toward the asteroid before they disappeared into the dust cloud. She closed the hatch and looked back at the tracking screen. The icon for the anomaly was coming ever closer.
“Can we outrun this thing if it decides to give chase?”
“Yes,” Mortimer said just as Nora and Violet clattered through the hatch and bounced to their acceleration couches. “But it’s already moving at high speed, and we’re relatively stationary. While our enhanced nuclear electric drive is very efficient, it builds speed slowly, so we would need to accelerate away from the object at our maximum of two point three gs for six hours in order to get ahead of it and then pull away. Of course, that assumes it doesn’t have the ability to abruptly increase speed.”
She was just about to order the execution of that plan when she glanced at her crew. Nora was behind Violet, shaking her head and pointing to Violet with one hand and her own head with the other. At first, Abby didn’t understand. Then she remembered Violet’s risk for sudden brain hemorrhages. Extended two-g acceleration could kill her.
Abby nodded minutely, then subvocalized her concerns to Mortimer and turned her attention back to the screen. The anomaly kept coming closer, and she couldn’t run. It felt like a trap closing. Her throat was dry, and she had trouble getting enough air, until she had an idea.
