The Mind Field by Blaze Ward Read Free Book Online Page A

long hallway, she could see more than two thirds of the ship. She added dimensions and schematics to the information she was displaying on Javier’s screen. To the right, the hatchway that probably led onto the bridge. At the rear, a huge, armoured bank–vault of a hatch. Obviously engineering. You wanted things going boom back there to stay back there.
    Someone had painted a really strange logo onto the wall a little forward of the crossway. At first, Suvi had dismissed it as art, but from here, it looked official, and kinda important.
    For fun, she locked her targeting brackets on the image and beeped Javier’s console extra loud. Through the tiny fish–eye lens he had installed on the control portable, she could see several people jump suddenly.
    Suvi giggled.
    She missed having access to Mielikki’s data banks. That thing looked like a symbol, but it was outside her current knowledge base. She would have to rely on the much–dumber computers running Storm Gauntlet to hopefully have an answer. Mielikki would have known instantly.
    She missed being a starship.
    A few moments passed. She watched the group consult. Guns came out. Javier apparently was arguing with them, but there was too much noise for the little microphone to wash it all out. And she didn’t want to listen to an argument today.
    Javier surprised everyone by walking away from the group and entering the boarding tube. She could hear him clomp up the walkway towards her, followed a few seconds later by the big woman, Sykora, and the rest. The profanities bouncing around in the cool air seemed interesting. She filed them away for future use. You never knew when they might be useful.
    Suvi watched Javier enter the ship through one of her cameras. She put his picture on his screen to say hello while the rest of her attention scanned the hallway.
    She could hear little radio emissions bouncing around the ether. Javier had never bothered to load cryptographic software onto the remote, so she couldn’t listen in to whatever conversation the strange ship was having with itself. It didn’t sound particularly exciting, from the strength and frequency of the transmissions.
    And Storm Gauntlet was WAY too stupid to be able to do something like that all by itself.
    How could humans get around the galaxy in a ship that didn’t think? I mean, sure, they had before good AI’s had come along. But still, she was way smarter and way faster, and rarely fat–fingered a control. Whatever.
    Javier stopped beside her, looked her in the eye with a smile, and cracked open the faceplate to his skinsuit. He took a shallow sniff, cold air being detrimental to organic lungs, and nodded.
    According to her readout, the air should smell acceptable. Boring, without all those complicated trace signatures that plants, and soil, and chickens gave off, but not lethal and not particularly uncomfortable. To someone accustomed to Storm Gauntlet , probably a breath of fresh air, literally.
    Humans were weird. But, hey, it paid the bills.
    “Aritza,” the big woman boomed, across the air and the radio, “what the hell do you think you are doing? This ship could be dangerous.”
    “Nope,” Suvi heard him reply with a chippy glibness. “Not with that.”
    He pointed at the logo as he spoke.
    It was a blue circle, reasonably thick, with a green ellipse painted across that. Overall, exactly fifty–two centimeters tall and fifty wide.
    It had been painted by a human, rather than an AI. AI’s were too fussy for that level of wobbliness.
    Okay, most AI’s. I might have done it in a lighter green, and added some sparkles to the paint. And maybe a few stars for effect. You know, ART.
    From her knowledge of human eyesight, it might appear to be a planet with rings. Weird looking rings, but rings. There were a lot of weird–looking things out there. She had been a galactic surveyor for years. She could testify.
    “What is that?” Sykora asked over the clamor as the rest of the boarding crew