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FIFTY-SIX

For the first time, Colossus are It came in small bursts initially, sudden flashes that appeared and then were gone just as suddenly Then it all caether 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 foreo on

There were outside forces threatening that purpose

The sandstorer 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 anagrao The Goreno was the ship that rescued the prisoners from Jhootha Island

That si 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 coo

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 soo, 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 sao