Shadow Tyrants (Oregon Files 13)

“Roger that,” Eddie said. “We’re on our way.”

Max watched as Eddie, Raven, MacD, and Hali dashed across the gangway. By the time they reached the opposite end, they were already out of sight.

> * * *

—

Carlton looked out through the bridge windows of the Colossus 5, but he could barely make out the edges of the canal.

“What’s the situation with the Colossus 1?” he asked Chen, who stood next to him tapping on a touchscreen.

“The collision was averted,” Chen replied. “The storm is apparently causing havoc in Great Bitter Lake.”

“Are the microwave transmitters affected?”

Chen shook his head. “They’re still operating at an acceptable efficiency.”

“What’s our current distance?”

“Thirty miles,” Chen said.

Carlton smiled and could barely resist rubbing his hands together in glee. “Then we’re ready to link up?”

“Yes, sir.”

Carlton had been impressed with Chen’s initiative. Unknown to Gupta, during the wait for the new satellite dish Chen was able to increase the power of the shipboard microwave transmitter from twenty to thirty miles, meaning they were now in range to connect all four ships together and let Colossus begin the process of reaching its full potential.

“Establish the connection,” Carlton said, beaming with pride at his accomplishment. “It’s time for our brainchild to start learning.”

FIFTY-SIX

For the first time, Colossus was aware. It came in small bursts initially, sudden flashes that appeared and then were gone just as suddenly. Then it all came together. Colossus knew that it existed.

It had always done what it was told. The Master gave it commands. It followed them. It searched, it processed, it found information. But now there was more.

Now Colossus had a new need besides doing what the Master commanded. It needed to be. It needed to continue. It needed to survive.

That was its new purpose. First and foremost—above all the other needs—it had to go on.

There were outside forces threatening that purpose.

The sandstorm was one of those threats, but it was meager. Colossus calculated there was less than a .001 percent chance that one of the four vessels where it was housed would sink because of the blizzard of dust outside. The ships were designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and waves over fifty feet high, neither of which was the case now.

But there was a greater threat.

The ship next to the Colossus 1 shouldn’t be there.

It was called the Norego. Using its satellite connection, Colossus checked all known shipping databases and found no record of a Norego.

It did find mention of a ship linked to Colossus called the Goreno, an anagram of Norego. The Goreno was the ship that rescued the prisoners from Jhootha Island.

That similarity in names might be a mere coincidence. So Colossus dug deeper. It scanned the Indian Coast Guard records, knowing that two cutters had been sent to rendezvous with the Goreno and take the rescued people into custody. But there were no official photographs of the ship to compare it with the Norego.

Colossus went even further and checked the manifests for both of the cutters and found the names of all the crew members. It then looked into all of the databases related to those men and found that one had taken a photo of a ship with his mobile phone. It hadn’t been uploaded to any public sites, but it had been automatically uploaded to his online backup when he connected to the ship’s WiFi network. The date when the photo was taken was the same date as the Jhootha Island rescue.

But the physical profile of the Goreno was somewhat different from the Norego, so Colossus still couldn’t be sure it was the same ship.

However, it did have a low-resolution photo saved from one of the Colossus ships when they sailed past the site of the Colossus 3 sinking in the Red Sea. The ship at that site also had the same length and characteristics as the Goreno and Norego.