Free The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) by Phillip Nolte Page A

accomplished a fair amount on her first day out of the infirmary but the progress was not to come without a price. As she was heading down the corridor back to her quarters, she hit a mental and physical wall and suddenly felt an urgent need to lie down and get some rest. There was no sense in fighting the inevitable. She arrived at her quarters, peeled off the cranial net and flopped down on the bed where she fell asleep in under a minute.
     
    ***
     
    Carlisle was able to get back to researching the information from the drive after she had awakened from a two-hour nap and taken the time to head down to the Istanbul's galley and eat a substantial lunch. The beef Burgundy and mashed potatoes were excellent, if a little over the top for a lunch menu item, but word was that the Scrapyard was getting low on food. After returning to her quarters, she slipped the cranial net back on and went back over to lie down on the bed.
    Using the unique properties of the cranial net, s he closed her eyes and began to search through the files in the partial download. After selecting a file more or less at random, she pulled up several of the old decoding programs that had been developed by the Federation during the Succession War and ran the download against them. She was rewarded when the third one that she tried brought order to the otherwise incomprehensible symbols in the file. She tried to convert the entire download at once but found that the old decoding software would only process one file at a time. That would slow the decoding process down, but one file at a time was certainly better than no files at all!
    "Okay, Tamara," she said, talking out loud to herself, another of her personality quirks that made her seem rather strange to most people, "The final battle of the Succession War was in 2542. Maybe you should start looking for entries that are time stamped with that year."
    She did a search for the number 2542 and came up with multiple entries, over forty of them, in fact, and that was just in the portion of the file that was still decoding. In an effort to determine what the nature of the information extracted from the old drive was, she accessed one of the files in the first portion of the download. Within a minute, recognizable text began to appear on the virtual display she that was being generated in her mind's eye by the combination of wrist computer and cranial net. The program converted data at a rate that was only a little more rapid than the rate she could read at so she began reading while the software was still unencrypting the files.
    The date of th e entry she had selected was, coincidently, January 2, 2542, exactly fifty-seven years ago to the day. As she skimmed through the text, she couldn't help but be a little disappointed. It looked like she was viewing electronic versions of routine reports regarding normal shipboard affairs like who was standing watch and when they logged out and who had logged in to replace them. Mildly interesting stuff, but hardly planet shaking. She caught up to the translation program when the output stopped for a few seconds as the conversion software churned away on something with a much denser form of data in it. Whatever it was, it took the program almost a minute to decode it. Finally the software indicated that it had translated a video feed of some kind and asked her if she wished to view it. Carlisle eagerly accessed the video translation and requested that it be played.
    In the video feed was a rugged looking, athletic man of perhaps forty years of age, whose bushy blond hair was styled in the modified Mohawk style favored by the Veritian Brotherhood of Christ Resurgent. Carlisle knew from her previous researches that the derelict had been operated by the Veritian Brotherhood so this particular revelation didn't surprise her. The man swiveled his chair, turned his blue eyes to the video pickup and began speaking.
    What did come as a surprise to her was that he looked