“Let’s go back the other way then,” Cup said. “We seen what there is to see.”
“Wait though,” I said. “Monono, could the active cistern be a shaking room?”
“A what, dopey boy?”
“One of the shaking rooms that goes up and down.”
“Oh, a lift! It could be, yes. But it could be anything. I’ve been trying to hack the ship’s mainframe ever since we got here, but every time I get close it throws up another firewall. So I can read data-flow, but I can’t tell you what the data is.”
I turned to Cup. “If it’s a shaking room, it might have one of them plates that lets us open it.”
Cup breathed out hard. “And if it’s a drudge? Or a drone?”
“How likely is it that one drudge would be awake when all the rest is sleeping?”
Cup throwed out her arms. “How likely is any of this?” I thought she was going to turn and go back, and I gun to say something else to convince her, but she speaked up first. “We go on then. But if we get out of here, I get to say what we do and where we go for the next ten years or so. Monono, which way is it?”
“The same direction you’re already going.” A picture of an arrow lit up on the DreamSleeve’s window, pointing where we needed to go.
Cup took the lead. She looked back just once to see if I was following, then picked up her stride. It was plain to see she was anxious to be gone out of this place.
We went through two more levels that mostly showed us nothing new. There was another herd of drudges that didn’t have no guns at all. They didn’t hardly have no backs neither. Instead their backs was bristling with thick spears as long as my stretched-out arm. Monono said they was most likely things called smart bombs. They would be fired straight up into the air, but then they would go their own way and seek out any enemies that was to be found, even if they was hiding behind a wall or in a stake-blind. Some of the bombs might have poison or sickness in them; others would just burst in jagged pieces or catch on fire.
By the time we come to where Monono was leading us, I was so sick and weary in my heart I felt like a poison bomb had already fell on me. I didn’t want to see no more of this army – and I hoped with all my heart there was a shaking room up ahead of us so we could make our way up to the deck. The thought of going back past everything we already seen was more than I could bear.
But when we climbed up the last set of stairs, we found ourselves in a place that was different. It had a wall, for one thing, and there was a door in the wall. The door was of metal, like everything else here. It was painted bright yellow, with nails or bosses hammered into it and signs of the before-times writ on it in red letters.
“What does it say?” I asked Monono.
“It says ‘technical staff and administrators only’.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Paul and Lorraine really don’t want you to go in there. And I think I know why. There’s a hyper-mega-giga-ton of data flowing behind that door. I think we’ve found the ship’s AI.”
“Was we still looking for it?”
“No. But if you really want to know what’s happening on this ship, I think this is your best chance of finding out.”
I turned to Cup. She shrugged her shoulders. “I think we was mad as hares in heat to come down here in the first place,” she said. “But we’re here now, and it’s your show. You do what you want to do, Koli.”
I had been halfway hoping she would try to argue me out of it. I wanted to see what was behind that door, but the stillness and dead quiet of this place – not to mention the sleeping army – was pressing on me like a weight. I would not of minded, now we was here, finding some different way to go. But there wasn’t no different way. There was only forward or back, and back didn’t lead nowhere at all.
“Take it slowly then,” Monono said. “One step at a time. And if I tell you to run away, don’t stand around and take a vote on it. Do it.”
I touched the opener to the door. Nothing happened.
“It’s waiting for an access code,” Monono said. “Give me a second or two. I’ll take a swing at it.”
The DreamSleeve made a noise that was kind of like lots of birds singing all at once – just lots of quick whistles and tweets with no gaps in between them. The sounds overlapped with their own echoes, getting louder and louder until I wanted to crouch down and cover my ears. However far away Paul and Lorraine was, it seemed like they had got to hear this din and come running. Or else the drones and drudges would wake up at last and come to get us.
“Is it working?” Cup asked.
“It will. I’ve disabled the cut-off so it can’t lock us out. It’s only a question of going through every possible permutation.”
There was more chirping and whistling. Then, when I had stopped hoping for it, I heard a click at last as the lock loosed itself. When I pushed the door with my hand, it opened and the lights come on inside.
After the big spaces we’d been walking through, the room that we was looking into now was very small indeed. Small, and almost empty. There was a chair, and there was a table.
Also there was tech, but the tech was not in the room. It was more like the tech was the room. The walls was made out of tech, being covered from floor to ceiling with all the switches and buttons and dials and windows and wires that tech oftentimes brings with it. And the tech was humming to itself, soft and deep. It was a sound you heard inside your bones.
I stepped into the room, slow and careful as Monono had bid me. The grease smell was less here, and there was another scent in the air that didn’t sit well with it. It was a scent of flowers, strong and sweet. I looked around to see if any flowers was there, and I seen a glass jug on the table, with flowers in it that was like dog roses only bigger and brighter. Next to the jug was a circle of silver metal, almost as thin as wire.
“What in the dead god’s Hell is this now?” Cup said, coming in behind me. She looked behind the door with her knife up and ready in case someone was hiding there. We both knowed Monono would of told us if anyone was in the room, but Cup wasn’t like to be content unless she had seen for herself.
“It’s the mainframe,” Monono said. “The core of Sword of Albion’s computer grid. It has to be.”
Cup crossed the room to take a look at the chair and the table. Then she took a step back from them, swearing a hard oath. “Koli, look at this!” She pointed at the arms of the chair. There was leather cuffs there, to hold someone’s hands and keep them still once they was put there. I couldn’t imagine what a chair like that would be used for. I only knowed I would not want to be the one to sit in it.
The DreamSleeve hummed and throbbed in my grip. It was like I had my hand on a pot lid, and the pot was full up with boiling, spitting water so the lid wouldn’t stay still. “It won’t open up,” Monono said in a tight voice. “If it’s waiting for a specific signal, it’s something I can’t fake. And the reason I couldn’t find it before is that it’s in standby mode. One of its sub-routines woke up when we first arrived – the one that took over my CPU – but there hasn’t been a peep since then. Every system on the ship is running on automatic. The AI doesn’t get involved at all.”