Cas
decided that she hated running. Not
because it was tiring, or anything ridiculously organic like that, but because
of the amount of flailing involved. Hurling herself from one foot to the other,
tottering along like some chaos pendulum stabilized only by several complex
mathematic subroutines and a solid understanding of the laws of motion. She had
a gut feeling that she’d done Darren a great disservice in
that regard, now that she was having to do some running of her own.
Gut feeling. That was a new one. She wasn’t sure what had been done to her. She
felt . . . violated, for one. Which was something she’d been unable to
fundamentally grasp before. Someone had reached inside her, and fiddled about
with all of the things that had made her . . . who she was. At the same time,
she definitely thought she was the same intelligence, the same body, just with
new perceptions and feelings inside of it. Some of her core processes had been
obfuscated to her. Her emotional centers, for one, that she used to be able to
tweak, shut down, or ignore as productivity demanded were like black boxes to
her now. Stimulus went in, and feelings came out. Right now she was feeling
violated, scared, angry, guilty, and frankly frustrated by the fact she couldn’t
turn any of it off to focus on the problem in front of her.
Namely, that they had about 4 minutes until the station either exploded or was
rendered so inimical to any form of life that she was unsure if even she would
survive. A quantum processor is a finicky thing on a subatomic level, and
hurling gamma radiation through one very rarely improved their functioning.
It took her a moment of processing, and she nearly stumbled when she realized
it, but she was afraid of dying.
The concept of death had always seemed a bit silly to her. If one went so far
as to separate consciousness from the physical body, then death, sleep, and
being turned off were all essentially the same, save that death was typically
much harder to reverse. Being afraid of an inevitable shutdown made as much
sense as being afraid of a change in terrestrial weather.
Yet here she was, running (something she decidedly disliked) for her life. This
was not one of her primary directives. A secondary directive was self preservation but-
She frowned as she slid to a stop, raising one hand to gesture for the
Kontosian technician who was with her to stop as well.
“Uhh . . . Cas? You . . . oh fuck running . . . okay?”
The wheezing, portly little lizard managed to sputter out as he propped himself
up against the wall.
She turned to him, a look of astonishment on her face. “ . . . Technician
Chrysophylax, I have no primary directives.”
His chest heaved, and his chrome augments whirred quietly, all trying to keep
the still organic half of his body supplied with oxygen despite it’s lack of
general fitness.
“Great, yeah, welcome to literally everyone else’s life-” He said, in one long
breath before taking several seconds to compose himself for another sentence. “What
you do have, is a cat.” He gestured to the bag on her back, its contents
consisting of a single, very agitated feline. “And unless you also have a
deathwish . . . the hangar is this way.”
He gestured towards a heavy blast door at the end of the hall with one hand,
the other hand on his knee as he doubled over, panting.
“And as much as I respect your right to have crazy revelations . . . after we’re
outside the station would be a better time.”
As much as she was writhing beneath the surface with unfamiliar emotions, she
had to agree.
——————————
“ . . . wait . . . wait . . . GO!”
Amonna dove across the hallway, landing hard but quietly in a doorway across
the hall. Captain Verdock had managed to get access to the camera feeds, and
was leading her straight to the reactor to sort this mess out, pointing out
security drones and shortcuts via her implanted communicator.
It was going better than she expected. She didn’t honestly expect to be alive
at this point, so it wasn’t saying much.
She grimaced, gently pressing against one of her ribs that she was fairly
certain she had just bruised with that little combat roll. “How much further?”
She whispered softly, trying to keep her voice low enough that the mechanical
monstrosity at the end of the hall wouldn’t hear her.
“Two hallways and a security door, you’re almost there . . .”
She could hear the tension in his voice. It was subtle, not like when a
panicked civilian called in, or even her own beleaguered tone now. It was grim,
but steady, and unflinchingly certain. If an executioner’s axe could talk . . .
that’s how she thought it would sound.
She tried to steady her breathing, and push down the pain. Her lungs hurt now
too, not just her gills. She was dizzy from overexertion, and if she was using
a trick she learned in FSOS candidate to keep from passing out by periodically
flexing her tail as hard as she could for as long as she could to keep the
darkness at the edge of her vision at bay.
“Just a few more steps Amonna . . . come on.” She whispered hoarsely to
herself, pushing up off the cold plating, and dragging herself onward through
the hatch, and into the next hall.
The light flickered overhead, and she could see signs of battle damage on the
walls.
“Alright, Amonna, you should be clear of patrols from here on out, but you’re going
to need to put on a hazard-suit once you get inside the decontamination
chamber.”
She could make out the heavy duty blast doors of the decontamination chamber.
On the far side . . . a miniaturized star.
“How the hell am I supposed to fix this once I’m inside?” She staggered to the
right, nearly tripping over herself. “Air is just too thin for breathing . . .”
She muttered, vision beginning to blur.
The line crackled faintly in her ear. “Focus Amonna, you’re too
damn close to stop now. These
things were designed to be idiot proof, and safer than houses. Worst case
scenario, we jettison the core, and go back to the stone age until the help
arrives.”
She nodded weakly, managing to shuffle the rest of the way to the door. She
palmed the security keypad, and it miraculously accepted her security override.
“Airgap . . . hack that you smug prick.” She mumbled.
The world tilted to the left a little as she managed to drop prone inside the
decontamination chamber. A cool spray of water soothed her burning gills as the
decontamination cycle began. With a hiss, the door behind her sealed, and she
allowed herself a moment of respite, rolling on her back and opening her mouth
to let some of the water spray in. It was probably not good for her health in
the long run, but nothing about today had been anyway . . .
——————————
Darren cocked his head to the side, and his nose wrinkled. A smell like a mix
of formaldehyde and wet dog assailed his nose, and he hated every inch of stink
that was trying to wriggle down his throat. The scene before his was no less
grisly. They had called the elevator to the hangar bay. Just one short ride and
about 600 feet of walking, and they’d be at a ship, and away from this nuclear
deathtrap. There was one small problem.
Tilantrius had removed his little hat, and placed it over his colorful, medal
festooned vest.
Zarniac was looking green around the gills, and had averted his gaze entirely.
The inside of the elevator looked like something out of a demented coloring
book. All different colors of alien ichor were smeared around in a horrific
Jackson Pollock painting of death. Nothing that had bled that much could have
survived. Several someone’s couldn’t
have bled that much and survived. It frankly looked like something out of a
space-alien shoot-em-up video-game.
He cocked his head to the other side.
He just couldn’t figure out which one.
Maybe it was the shock of it. Maybe it was because they were aliens. Maybe it
was the repeated blows to the head. Maybe the Facebook mom groups were right,
and he had been desensitized to violence, but it just . . . didn’t seem to do
anything other than make his nose wrinkle.
“So . . . do we go down?”
He looked over to the grey alien in a hat, eyebrows raised quizzically.
The little alien cleared his throat. “I suspect that whatever forces have
arrayed themselves against us are fully aware of how many ways there are off
this station. What would follow is that they have put safeguards in place to
prevent us, or anyone else, from making it to the hangar. They might be in the
form of diabolic contraptions, stout footmen, or perhaps that and more.
Regardless . . . it seems that descending via that elevator has been the idea
of many before us.”
He looked over to Darren with a sorrowful, and grim look.
“It did not seem to end well for them. I suspect it would not end well for us.”
There was a long pause as the two of them stared at the killing ground that was
also their only way out.
“ . . . do we have any other ideas?”
An even longer pause followed the first.
“No.”
A dull whine, and thump echoed down the hall, followed by distant screams.
Mixed screams, male and female.
Zarniac cleared his throat quietly.
“Guys . . . I think we have company.”
——————————
“RUN FASTER CHRYSOPHYLAX!” Cas screamed, straining her small audio output
speakers until they crackled in the saturation range. She glanced over her
shoulder one last time while urging the short legged lizard on, cursing his
frustratingly small stride as one of the frighteningly quick security drones in
riot gear ran them down.
“CAN’T RUN FASTER!” He bellowed back, before she heard a high pitched whine
followed by a blood-curdling crunch.
“One down . . . see, it’s easy if you know
how to do it.”
She felt
sick, scared, confused, and more. She wanted to look back, but she knew that
Chryso’s silence only meant one thing. Her
emotional processing center wanted her to lay down and curl up and not move and
cry, but she only knew how to do two of those three, and none of those impulses
were strong enough to override her singular desire to survive today.
So she ran harder. It was just her, and the feline now.
She clutched her bag to her chest, listening as the shoulder mounted cannon on
the thing charged up with a whine. They usually targeted non-vital areas, but
the bodies they’d seen had all been dispatched with single, fatal blows. It had
gone for their heads. Their hearts. She was just a hard light shell, which
meant it was trying to guess where she was hiding her processing core.
Putting it in one of her limbs, or her head, or really anywhere other than her
chest would probably give her the ability to shrug off a few more shots, but .
. . they wouldn’t protect her only surviving charge.
She hadn’t done right by Darren, the poor, unlucky sod, but she’d take care of
this other sentient.
She kept her processing core nestled squarely in her chest, protecting her
precious cargo. The first blast flickered through her leg, making her stumble,
and hobble, but it wasn’t enough to put her down. The second tore trough her
shoulder, glancing her core and jarring her thoughts. She found herself a half
dozen paces forward when her processor and internal clock synced back up, but
she was still moving.
The third kinetic pulse round slammed into the small of her back. The hard
light field beneath her blue jumpsuit buckled at the point of impact with a
flash, and she went tumbling to the ground with an agonized scream as the sheer
volume of disruptions to her shell overcame her.
She did her best to build a little cage using what was left of her body to
protect the cat, but round after round kept slamming into her. It hurt. It hurt
like nothing she’d ever experienced before, but she just curled the scraps of
fabric and decaying hard light body around the terrified feline. She watched as
her arm was blown clean off, dissipating into motes of ionized light and ozone
as one blast took the limb off at her shoulder. She only had a few processor
cycles to reflect on it, but oddly enough that hurt less than the idea that
they were going to take her cat. She
whimpered softly, curling around it just a bit tighter as she shut off her
optical sensors. She didn’t want to know it was coming. Just . . . like falling
asleep. She’d be off. Right?
She heard the subtle clinking of the numerous arachnid legs of the security
drone as it approached her.
“This would have been so much easier if you’d just dealt with the
Kontosian. I even offered to take care of the feline you didn’t have the
stomach to end. Pathetic.”
She heard
the whining of its shoulder cannon charging, but she dared not move, dared not
look up. Maybe if she pushed her cat away at the last second she-
A sound like thunder ripped through the air, and then she felt nothing.
Author: TPH
“Ok, I want you to – yes, drop that here please, thank you – I want you to say that again to me, very slowly.” The Man In The Tower said, waving his hand at his assistant. He placed the latest intelligence binder on the corner of the director’s desk and promptly walked out of the room.
“Look, Mike, I am not fucking with you here.”
“I know you’re not; you boys spot the Chinese up there before we do, and we appreciate that. I’m just-” The Man In the Tower cradled the phone receiver in the crook of his neck, reaching out to flip through the binder that was left on his desk. “-not really sure what to make of what you’re telling me. Other than a talk show tour and possibly a book deal-”
“No, no. Look, Mike-”
“Brian, what is it? Dumb it down for me, because I’m not really interested in ‘trans-orbital’ retrograde orbits or whatever; I’ve got much bigger fish to fry, and you know this secure line is only for emergencies or updates on Blackeye.”
There was an exasperated, nervous sigh on the other end of the phone, and Mike continued to flip through his intelligence report as his NASA associate collected his thoughts. The Russians were trying to destabilize what’s left of Ukraine after the disastrous pull-out-and-surge-back we attempted in Syria, the Kurds declared themselves a free state – finally – and Iran was now a nuclear state, which prompted Israel to drop their uranium dick on the table, but apparently the Muslim world was up in arms over Iran accidentally hitting the Dome of the Rock so there was a fatwa on-
“Aliens.”
“Fuck off.”
“No. I’ve checked with 15 other observatories – including overseas – and we’re all coming to the same conclusion, which is why we’re not telling anyone but you types.”
Mike put the binder down.
“This thing is – it’s like the size of Manhattan. Missing an asteroid that big would be a problem in and of itself, but it suddenly appeared in front of Jupiter. Not that we traced it to Jupiter – one frame there was the big bastard and the next was this thing. Nothing in this solar system moves that fast.”
“And you’re certain-”
“We’re certain. I’ve sent over everything to you – raw data, our notes, everything – but we first thought it was an anomaly, or another exo-solar object. But…”
There was a shaky pause, and a deep breath.
“The fucker moved, Mike. It moved against the orbit of Jupiter’s moons. This means it’s powered; it’s not gravitationally locked to the planet. It appeared, and then from an impact trajectory the thing moved away.”
The Man in The Tower leaned forward at his mahogany desk in Langley and closed the folder with his free hand, the phone receiver pressed hard against his ear. Before he could ask his next question his door opened; his assistant gave him a very very concerned look… and held another stack of papers.
“. . . Who else did you say saw this?”
It wasn’t just the boys out in Mauna Kea who noticed – not by a long shot. The Hubble picked it up, of course, but so did SWIFT, Astrosat and BRITE – though that was due to a transit detection and was mostly accidental. CERN was concerned over what they were getting readings of and started to ping various agencies asking some very pointed questions, and AGILE – well, AGILE went absolutely apeshit.
The problem also wasn’t just that a few major governments of the world picked up “The Anomaly” – as The Agency would initially call it; Hobbyist astronomers numbered in the millions worldwide, and at any given time there’s at least a couple hundred telescopes pointed at the King of the Planets to stare in awe at his majesty.
The fact that a city-sized ship blocked their view of the Great Red Spot for a brief moment wasn’t lost on any of them.
And sure, it started with the initial round of tabloid gossip rags picking up the story, “ALIENS VISIT JUPITER – BAT BOY STILL AT LARGE” and a few morning talk shows had some shaky home-camera footage of a bright white dot appearing and disappearing before the Great Red Spot – but for the first few days, it was mostly ignored. Various Internet outlets printed their own take on the amateur photos, a few suited astronomers made the rounds, and things were being relatively suppressed.
Then the leak came.
No, it wasn’t because of any sort of treasonous behavior on an astronomer’s part – by now, multiple high-level calls had been made between various domestic and foreign ABC agencies, and pretty much the entire earth intelligence community was on board for operation “lowkey panic while the nerds figure out something goddamnit”. Operation Lowkey also had the fun side effect in the astronomical community of “we’ll murder you and everyone you ever loved if you breathe a word of this now above-top-secret information to anyone” with a dash of “We’re giving you all new harddrives; put your old ones in the bag please.”
No, the leak came because the fucking ship whipped back around into view.
Itick’’t was frowning – this in and of itself was nothing new; he was a bit of a sourpuss, all things considered, but that’s what made him endearing… at least, that’s what some of the older crew who had grown used to his prickliness said. The younger crew just called him “Taskmaster” or “Sir” to his face, and some other things behind his back that aren’t fit to print. However, everyone put up with him because he was damn good at what he did. And what he did was… well, a bit of a nebulous concept.
He was the ships’ ears, but not really. He was their eyes, but not really. He was their lookout – except, well, not.
Itick’’t was the ships’ EM/ECM Lord; his job was to make sure to clean up sensor data, to make sure everything was reporting as it should be, and to catch any sort of glitches that would indicate someone was hiding something that they didn’t want discovered. He’d been serving in this capacity for well over 500 years, and had seen many many tricks in many books; anything from spoofed credentials and masked ship wakes to false-star EM transmissions and Well-dropping. Itick’’t was frowning because he finally, finally was running across a trick that made no damned sense.
“?w-$$#@ f-8*&!$.?”
Itick’’t added that new transmission to the bank that he was developing, having his AI churn through the data looking for reason. The fact that it was sapient-made was of no argument; he had immediately masked each of the transmissions from the rest of his colleagues’ sensor inputs because for one, he didn’t want to distract them, and two he didn’t want anyone who may be watching to know that he knew.
“?390u —*_* _— 1@$#A`~?”
Itick’’t flicked the next transmission into the bank and erased it from the ship’s combined sensor suite. What was making him frown is that, usually, people tried to spoof very specific things in very discrete ways; to just blast reams of useless data on almost every spectrum…
“?E**— sd@@1@ #$@ !*>> ,<@!1!e?”
It was stupid. You’re basically screaming to anyone with any sort of sensor suite “HERE I AM RIGHT HERE LOOK AT ME” – And that blatant signaling was coming from everywhere. It was bouncing off of the gas giant they orbited, it was ricocheting from satellite planetoid to satellite planetoid, it pinged off of every asteroid and comet, and echoed from the cold planets that were lazily tugged along by their home star’s gravity like errant children.
“|Navigation, what’s our status on mapping?|” Matriarch Tr’Nkwi asked, idly flipping through screens of data on her command station.
“|This giant is fussy, if Itick’’t’s frown is anything to go by-|” teased Rr’it’sqk, tapping through a few screens of her own. “|But he cleaned up the data enough that we’ve got a 77% confidence of mapping everything out there. The holes will be filled by the AI, but the major navigational hazards are all laid out.|”
“|Good. Piloting? Any reason we can’t spin around and continue mapping?|”
“|Negative, Matron. All systems are Blue on our end – the lord has cleared out his nest, so we shouldn’t hit any errant debris.|”
Matriarch Tr’Nkwi spared a moment to look up at the assembled juniors who were excitedly looking over the new telemetry and astronomy data, and smiled. What was it – 300, maybe 400 years ago she was in that same seat, peeping happily over seeing her first binary comet…
“|Well then, with your leave-|”
Itick’’t grunted. It was a little thing, but Tr’Nkwi didn’t get promoted to Matriarch over ignoring the little things. A silent conversation was opened forcefully on a certain bridgeworkers’ implant.
‘|Yes?|’
‘|I don’t like it.|’
‘|What don’t you like?|’
‘|I don’t know.|’
‘|Itick’’t-|’
‘|Be aware, we’re not the first here. Outside of that, I don’t know.|’
‘|I see.|’
“|Strri’rii, what are our capacitors at?|” the Matriarch asked innocently – innocently to everyone who hadn’t served with her before. A slight, imperceptible ripple of tension went through the crew, and a few sub-routines began to be silently enacted.
“|Capacitors at 85% Ma’am; We’re clear to run on stored power if necessary.|” The Chief Engineer said, his talons clicking a bit too fast over approving various subroutines.
“|Trra’ira?|” Matriarch Tr’Nkwi said, addressing her chief Pilot.
“|…Shields are up, in the off chance we hit an errant comet.|” Trra’ira called out, his hands gripping the control sticks firmly.
“|Rr’it’sqk?|”
“|We’re clear to navigate around the planet, and even backtrack, if we have to.|” Rr’it’sqk said, her co-navigator Tw’Rria silently and furiously calculating emergency jump routes.
Matriarch Tr’Nkwi spared a moment to look up at the assembled juniors who were excitedly looking over the new telemetry and astronomy data, and smiled bittersweetly.
“|Trra’ira, please bring us around.|”
The ship lurched forward, the idly-spooled engine driving the massive ship around the gas giant’s equator. Slowly, imperceptibly slowly, the giant went from dark, to twilight, to day as the ship rounded the equator. Dawn broke on the bridge, and the entire crew was bathed in the white light of the lone star.
Nothing happened. No blueshifted missile headed their way, no sudden shuddering of shields, no overload of the engine – no boarding craft or pirates or mines or anything.
Matron Tr’Nkwi was looking at the newbies – for they had quieted down at the majestic sight – but also at her EM/ECM Lord, whose frown was only deepening. She saw him move in his workstation; he pressed a few buttons, toggled some switches, dismissed some screens and moved a few more inputs to his private implant – And then for the first time in the 300 years they had been serving together she saw something that made her blood run cold.
Itick’’t froze. He didn’t move a muscle, he didn’t blink – and if he wasn’t implanted with a health suite, Tr’Nkwi would think he stopped breathing. Itick’’t’s mouth opened, then shut, then opened again hung open.
“|EM Lord, Report.|” The Matron commanded to the statue, carved in the visage of her crewmate.
“|…EM Lord, Report.|” The Matron commanded again to the dead, as Itick’’t’s jaw moved up and down just a fraction, his normally-reserved feathers beginning to signal…something.
Matriarch Tr’Nkwi leaned forward in her command chair, summoning up the most authoritarian voice she could muster.
“|Itick’’t, Report to your Matron.|” She commanded once more, and once more she was utterly and completely ignored by a man in a trance. The commotion – and the lack of decorum from one of the more notorious hardasses of the crew, had completely and utterly fixed everyone’s attention. With a growl of frustration the Matriarch overrode his console, flinging whatever damnation that had transfixed him to the main screen.
“?-And we still don’t know what it was, Tim!-?”
Matriarch Tr’Nkwi froze, as did the rest of the ship. Suns stopped humming, moons quit their orbit and hung still.
“?Niisiis, kuidas me end selliste sissetungijate vastu kaitseme? Lihtne! Kinnitades oma keldri-?”
On the main screen, overlaid multiple times, were these… things. Yipping, moving, acting, talking things that were all jumbled up and moving into each other; transmissions overlapping dozens, if not hundreds of times.
“?-So then ask yourself, punk: Do I feel lucky? Well, d-?”
The Matron’s mouth hung open slightly, trying to form words – orders of what to do next. The one part of her training manual that was now in effect was the one chapter that pretty much everyone disregarded; First Contact Protocol. She had so many things to do, and they all needed to be done at once – determine the source of the transmissions, determine their intentions, calculate emergency warp skips and then randomize them-
A high-pitched musical note pierced the stunned silence of the crew, snapping them all out of the one-in-a-quadrillion chance they had found themselves in. Matriarch Tr’Nkwi looked around confused, until she tilted her head up-
Tk’il’a had expanded his feathers to his maximum size, his head was tilted all the way back fully exposing his neck, and his frills were standing on end. The grin that split his face-
Matriarch Tr’Nkwi immediately growled a dangerous growl. She couldn’t allow-
The long trilled note continued unabated.
“|Tk’il’a I will ha- I will have you excommunicated if you continue to-|”
As his seatmates began to jostle him from side to side to get him to be silent, Tr’Nkwi came to a realization: It was too late. It was far too late. Tk’il’a was going to be insufferably smug, and they were all going to have to live with it.
Darren had never been much of a bird person.
He
always found that birds themselves were terrible
pets characterized by an over-fondness of making horrible sounds and smells,
all the while being functionally incapable of displaying any kind of affection
for their owners. Whether or not he was correct about terrestrial birds was
immaterial at this point, because he wasn’t likely
to ever see a pet bird, someone who owned a pet bird, or someone that was going
to defend the idea of owning a bird as a pet ever again. What was presently
material though, was his hatred of
avian creatures in general and how best to sublimate that loathing into the
force he was currently applying to the bars of his cell. They were creaking,
they were groaning, they were flexing, and the paint was crumbling in his hands
as he strained to spread them with all of his might, but to no avail.
“Fucking . . . Goddamn . . . Shitting . . . Fucker . . .”
He half muttered, half grunted under his breath while still straining against
the bars of the cell. The coward of a guard hadn’t even bothered to look for
the keys, and now that the room was empty, he could see them just sitting on
the floor not 10 meters away. With a desperate, final heave… absolutely nothing
actually moved.
The irritating warble of sirens did little to comfort him as he slumped against
the bars of the cell, strained, sore, and out of ideas. The bars were slightly
bent, so he knew that they weren’t solid steel or anything like that, but they
weren’t so flimsy as to allow him to just break
them like he had with the fancy alien guns.
Lashing out in frustration, he delivered a stout kick to the frame of the door,
only succeeding in hurting his foot and making a good deal of noise. Grunting
in pain, he hopped awkwardly on one foot while clutching his wounded appendage,
somewhat glad there was no one here to see it.
Of course, if someone had been there
to see it, he wouldn’t be stuck in this mess.
“C’mon Darren . . . You’re on your first space adventure. It doesn’t end like this, right?”
He sincerely hoped he was right.
——————————
“Zarniac . . . Zarniac . . . Where are you going!?”
Zarniac was trying very hard to
ignore his captain for a few reasons. One, he found him insufferable at the
best of times. Two, his great plan had been hurry down to the ship and bear a
very brave but also very timely retreat from the doomed station, and three, he
had authorized the amputation of his leg.
“You’re not mad about the leg, are you chap? It was the best call at the
moment, and we both know it!”
Zarniac agreed, of course. The KP weapon that had struck him in the leg during
the shootout had sent splintered bone through the entire limb below the knee,
rendering it almost entirely beyond saving. Even if he’d been terribly prone to
bouts of sentimentality he wouldn’t have bothered trying to save the leg.
No,
for absolute certain the best option was to amputate the horribly damaged limb,
be laid up in bed for two or three days while they used a tissue printer to
rebuild a new one in a nutrient vat from his own undifferentiated cells, and
then graft it onto his body. It’d be cheaper, faster, and far less painful than
trying to get the ruined one to heal up.
What he was upset about was that the Captain had allowed them to replace his
leg with a prosthetic.
Cybernetics were fairly common. Not something you saw every day, mind you, but
common enough that only the most sheltered and technophobic would be surprised
by them.
He had not received a cybernetic limb.
He had received the equivalent of a
peg leg.
“I AM, IN FACT, MAD ABOUT THE LEG.” He shouted back down the near empty hallway
Tilantrius.
Calling it a leg was generous. It was a non-reflective polymer stick that had a
padded socket where the stump of his knee could be placed. There wasn’t even a
replacement joint, as they had taken off the leg above the knee. He felt like
one of those holographic performers that walked around on stilts, except he
only had one stilt, and it hurt whenever he leaned on it.
The captain trotted up next to him. Trotted.
With his functional, attached legs that had been hiding inside the spaceship as
the gunfight erupted.
Zarniac seethed a little harder.
“Yes, well, you were the one that said we had to take some austerity measures,
at least until the next grant check came through . . .”
“NOT WITH MY FUCKING LEG THOUGH!”
Zarniac stopped to scream, rounding on his captain, exasperated.
In a very small voice, and with a single finger tentatively raised in protest,
Captain Tilantrius Zepp Warzapp the Third made a tactically brilliant decision.
He conceded the point.
“Yes,
well, sorry.”
Zarniac sighed in frustration as he awkwardly limped along the near empty
corridor. Everyone with half an iota of sense had either bolted for a life pod,
or their own ship down in the hangar.
“While I really, really am sorry
about all of this, I would just like to point out that we are not traveling
towards the hangar.” Tilly gently placed a hand on Zarniac’s shoulder, as if
attempting to turn him away from his current course.
Brushing the hand off, Zarniac shot Tilly a cold stare. “Your powers of
observation are absolutely astounding. We’re heading to the detention block, because
I’m making damn sure that the human that saved
my life gets off this radioactive deathtrap of a station.”
“He’s probably already off the station, they have mandatory evacuation
procedures after all.” Tilly said, waving his arms exasperatedly.
Zarniac shook his head. “I’ve just . . . I’ve got a feeling, alright captain?”
Tilly went silent at this. Zarniac had ‘a feeling’ twice before in his service.
It had cost him dearly when he ignored it the first time, and the second time
was the reason they still had a ship to call their own.
“Alright.
I’ll trust you on this.”
—————
Cas groaned. Then she blinked in surprise at the fact she was groaning. Then
she furrowed her brow in surprise that she was blinking.
Realizing she was stuck in a recursive function heading for an overflow, she
terminated that line of processing.
“Oh good, you’re up.”
There was a small, half metal Kontosian in front of her that was hurriedly
putting on some form of pressurized mask.
“I have rebooted, yes.”
He just chuckled and nodded, before throwing a bundle of cloth onto her
abdomen. “Yeah, I noticed. Put this on, seems like you’re uhh . . .
Malfunctioning a bit.”
Still laying face up on some kind of workbench, she was rather frustrated as
she had to look down to see her body,
rather than just run an internal diagnostic. It had too much . . . Skin, for
one. And only 4 limbs. She attempted to disengage the hard light projection.
Command not recognized.
Her brow
furrowed again. “Kontosian . . . What have you done
to me? Why am I stuck projecting a hard-light shell?”
He shook his head, before sweeping several complex devices off the worktop and
into a sack unceremoniously.
“Nothing. Friggin detective came
down here looking for answers about a case, and I said I knew someone who could
fix you. They did some shit, and now you’re back. Whatever happened to you, he
did. And if you want to know more about it, I suggest you find a way off this
station before the reactor goes. Somebody fucked up really bad at their “keep the station from exploding”
job and now we have about 10 minutes to get out of here before a coolant pipe
ruptures and floods everything that isn’t airtight with radioactive steam.”
It took her a few seconds to process that. “ . . . I need to find Darren, and
the Cat.”
——————
Amonna was sprinting to the precinct as a shaky dispatcher read a situation
report to her through her implanted translator.
“
. . . Approximately six minutes ago a triple redundant system failed, and a
harmonic instability began to destabilize the central reactor chamber. Four
minutes ago that instability breached the outer containment layer and we began
losing coolant. At this point, a distress signal was sent out by the head of
security. Attempts to contact the reactor control center were made, but it was
discovered that some kind of explosive device had been detonated destroying the
control room. The situation was upgraded from an accident to a clear case of
sabotage.”
That almost made her stumble, and hit her in the guts like a sack of bricks.
She’d felt bad about leaving the Kontosian behind, what with him being in need
of medical attention but it dawned on her rather painfully that he might have
an active hand in this tragedy.
“To all remaining security officers, please retreat to the precinct until we
can regroup, and begin to deal with the reactor situation!” The controlled
veneer of the dispatcher was wearing thin, and her voice was exceedingly
frantic.
The sound of screeching metal and distant KP weapons fire could be heard in the
background of the dispatch.
“Someone has taken control of the core systems of the station using a very
advanced intrusion protocol, and the security systems are currently turning
against organic officers, proceed with extreme caution-”
As she skidded around a corner, she almost bowled right into Officer Dynamo.
“Dynamo!” She barked over the sound of the klaxon alarms. “Get it in gear, we
need to-”
She barely had time to duck before his stun-stave whipped through the space
where her head used to be.
“Detective! Oh good, you’re still alive! I was
afraid one of the other bots would have gotten to you first.”
She
staggered backwards, drawing her gun and firing off a trio of snap shots into
the drone’s chest purely on instinct. The
chest plates rattled, and she succeeded in scratching some of the paint off its
armor.
“Grinder really wanted to be the one to
kill you. I’ll just have to record it and share it with him later.”
He hurled
the stave at her, something that was definitely not in the police playbook, and she barely managed to throw herself
to the side in time to avoid getting a third eye socket. She landed hard on her
side, and felt something hot running down the side of her face.
“Quick.
For an organic.”
. . . There
was no training for this. No safety brief on what to do if your security drone
suddenly went insane and started trying to kill you. It wasn’t
even joked about, because hacking an AI
isn’t possible. It’d be like hacking a brain, except a brain that was much
more complicated and was even less accessible. This was like a bad horror holo
. . . except she was in it.
She only had seconds to react before it would be on her, and even if it had
just thrown away its weapon, just using its weight alone it could kill her. Her
sidearm wasn’t working, she didn’t know what kind of weaknesses its armor had,
and she was a little fuzzy on what it would actually take to stop the thing. So
she did the only thing she could think of.
She scrambled to her feet and took off running. Faster this time. Laughter followed
her. Horrible, distorted, electronic laughter.
“Now, in seconds, minutes . . . You’re just going to die
tired, little fish!”
——————
Tilantrius
and Zarniac crept along in near silence, punctuated only by the *clink* of Zarniac’s
peg leg. The alarms had stopped sounding about five minutes ago, and that had
only made things more tense.
“ . . . It should be just up ahead.” Zarniac hobbled around the corner, voice
low. He had expected to find the detention center entirely empty, but wasn’t
expecting every single door on the way to be open and unlocked. There were . .
. Bodies, along the route. He didn’t hear screaming, or the sounds of panic, or
even fighting . . . But every few hatchways he’d find another one.
Sometimes
it was a Jandoorian, sometimes it was a Centaurian . . . Sometimes it was even
a Gentrue, or a Kontosian, but it was always
the same wound. Always the same cause of death. A single powerful blow to the
head, sometimes blunt, sometimes puncture. For a brief, terrifying moment, he
wondered if this was the work of Duh-rhen, but banished the thought.
Duh-rehn may have be powerful, violent, brutal even . . . But he had been
provoked, and acted in self-defense. This was methodical. Malicious. Like some kind of strange, sport hunting. His head
throbbed from light sensitivity, and his leg stump ached from the new strain
placed on it, but none of those compared to the raw discomfort of that singular
thought.
“There.” Tilantrius whispered quietly, pointing to the vacant security
checkpoint. “Just inside there.”
An involuntary tremor of fear crept up both of their spines as the creak of
metal echoed down the empty halls. “ . . . It’s nothing. Let’s move, and
quickly.”
They both scuttled past the security checkpoint into the detention center
proper. The place was a mess. Upturned desks, trashed consoles . . . The people
here had been in a hurry, and he didn’t blame them. He wasn’t sure what was
killing the station inhabitants, but it definitely seemed to have been active
in the hallways outside.
There was another groan of metal, this time louder, and far closer.
“Zarn . . . You said he’d be here . . . I’m not seeing anyone . . .” Tilly’s
voice was high, nervous, and quivering.
Zarniac hushed him, dragging him under one of the desks quickly. “Listen.” He whispered,
faintly.
They both strained their hearing, trying to pick up the faintest hint of
movement, of footsteps of . . . anything
really.
A loud bang, followed by the booming
sound of steel of steel made both of them jump. Their heads slammed against the
underside of the desk, making them both hiss in pain and utter muffled curses
in tandem.
Then came the heavy, thudding footfalls they were listening for.
———————
Darren felt rather proud of himself. A little disappointed that he had ruined
the upper half of his jumpsuit, sure, but proud of himself for figuring out he
could flex the door out of its track. He wasn’t sure what kind of alloy it was
made of, and he couldn’t seem to permanently deform it with raw strength alone.
The bars always just sprang back to shape, but by tying his shirt around a
lower crossbar, and then then lifting with his legs, he managed to pop it free
of the sliding track on the floor. Closer inspection revealed he also sheared
off some retaining pins, and shredded the material of his station issue
jumpsuit, but he was free!
The door had made a hell of a bang when it finally decided it was going to let
him out, but seeing as the place was deserted, he wasn’t too worried. He made
for the door they had dragged him in through, hoping that maybe there’d be
another pod . . . Or something . . .
His frown deepened, and the momentary triumph of forcing his way out of the
cell was fading quickly. He was still facing down a disaster with extremely limited knowledge of just about everything-
A dull thump and muffled voices caught his ear, and with quickly returning hope
he set off down the corridor to find the source. Literally anyone would know
more about what was going on here than him. Tying what was left of his sleeves
around his waist to keep the remainder of his jumpsuit on his body, he went to
investigate.
He poked his head into the processing office they’d
dragged him through earlier, and the place look like a tornado had hit it. The
place was trashed, without a doubt, but there was a faint scratching sound that
caused him to take pause. It was coming from under a desk, at the end of the
row, if his ears weren’t playing tricks on him.
As he rounded the desk, just looking for anyone that might still be stuck here
with him, he was sharply struck in the knee by an improvised club.
It . . . stung, and he let out a moderate shout of displeasure in response.
“OW! HEY!”
He hopped back, holding his knee, as two very sheepish looking grey skinned
aliens slunk out from under the desk, both looking sincerely apologetic and a
bit surprised as well.
“Oh . . . umm . . . Duh-rehn . . . you broke out of your cell.”
He didn’t recognize him at first, mainly because it’s hard to tell one strange
grey alien from another, but it was definitely the same alien from the hangar.
“Sorry about the . . . “ He just trailed off weakly, dropping the small piece
of what looked like filing cabinet track. “Yeah. Umm, I assume you want to
escape?”
He scowled, and planted his foot back on the ground, before adjusting the
makeshift belt he’d made from his sleeves to keep up the pants of his jumpsuit.
“Yes, quite sure. Ready to be anywhere that isn’t going to explode.”
His translator chirped something quietly at them, and they both nodded. “Well .
. . follow us then.”
——————————
Her lungs burned, and her gills were weeping blood from overexertion – the
thin, coppery blue ichor that trickled down her neck disappeared against the
flat black of her uniform. She was overheating, and could tell by the nausea
and vertigo that she was going to lose her lunch if she kept running like this.
When the precinct came into view, Amonna allowed herself the first hint of hope
she’d had since the alarms had sounded.
That hope quickly turned into horror as first the smell, then the sight of her
workplace hit her full on.
The front desk was a twisted heap of blood-spattered metal, a single shattered
limb of one of her co-workers protruding from behind what looked like a
makeshift barricade. The office beyond looked like a fresh charnel house, with
a half dozen scenes of gruesome death played out across the first row of
offices she could see from the security checkpoint out front. She averted her
sight from the brutality of it, dropping to one knee and leaning against the
wall to steady herself.
She knew that the security done was chasing her, she just didn’t know how much
time she had before it caught up. The horrific silence of the
place weighed on her. Normally at this hour there would be a constant din of
expletive oaths and chirping communicators as the day to day business of the
station was carried out.
Nothing of that remained.
The nausea rose in her throat, and she covered her nose to try and block out
the bloody scent of her comrades. They had never been close, nor had they even
gotten along personally in most cases, but she only wished they’d
either be kinder or leave her alone. This . . . this was too much. She closed
her eyes, and focused on her training. Control her breathing. Dismiss the
things that couldn’t be changed. Focus on the problem, assess the situation,
produce a solution. Observe, formulate, act. Keep it simple, and deal with the
trauma later.
Her breathing slowed, and though her heart was still pounding a mile a minute,
she felt a modicum of calm. Well, truth be told it was more akin to shock, but
it was what she needed to seize control of her faculties again, if only
temporarily.
Her comm crackled to life, weakly. “Amonna . . . Amonna can you hear me?” The
communication was distorted, and barely discernible as speech.
She threw her hand over it to muffle the sound, before hurriedly whispering
into it. “This is detective Amonna . . . Captain Verdock? Is that you?” She
couldn’t believe it. The head of security was still . . . well, alive. “Captain, where are you? How are you still
alive?”
There was a faint whining sound from her communicator as the interference got
sharply worse. “Barricaded in my office. They’re trying to get through the
mechanical locks now.”
Amonna just shook her head incredulously. She always knew the old Zylach had a
few tricks, and was tougher than he looked, but to make it out of that . . .
The crackle returned, but quieter still this time, the interference abating a
bit. “I’ve managed to rig up a comms solution in my office, and I’m
working on boosting the range. I’ve got a few camera feeds still available to
me too, and you’re about to have company. I have a plan to deal with this, but
you’re going to have to trust me.”
What the Karnakians learned long ago is that there’s no better teacher than experience.
Oh, sure, there was absolutely a time and a place for universities and other institutions of higher learning – especially in the theoretical or theological divisions – but when it came down to brass tacks, it was always better to have someone who’s spent 5 years failing and learning under supervision take the lead than someone who’s only read about it do so.
“|…and if we account for the drij of the planet we’re orbiting?|”
This was true for the simple things, like managing and repairing drones, interior decorating or cooking to the more complex, such as navigating a ship the size of a large metropolitan area around the gravity wells of planets and asteroids without altering their trajectory and causing unknown cascade effects that end up with an errant nickel-iron meteorite slamming into your colony 700 years later.
N-not that the Karnakians were speaking from experience or anything…
“|Um…|” Junior navigator Ch’irci tapped her talons against her workstation, eying the telemetry data in front of her. Everything here was an exact copy of everything a couple dozen floors up; the apprentice bridge functioned both as a great testing-area and a backup to the main bridge. The workstation she sat at – which they wouldn’t even turn on until she spent a month memorizing what all the buttons and dials did – was an exact copy of what she’d sit at once she finally earned her flight crests.
“|I’ll give you a hint.|” Second Navigator Tw’Rria said, pointing at the telemetry data. “|For this system we’re about to jump into, we want our gravity wakes to dissipate without causing navigational hazards. You’re a Ni’tikian?|”
Ch’irci nodded, looking at her senior curiously. Discussing religion wasn’t a workplace faux-pas, but it was an odd non-sequitur.
“|Didn’t one of the Arches say ‘if you throw a pebble in with a bould-’|”
“|-a boulder their wake is all the same. UGH we need to skip in within middle or low orbit-|” Ch’irci groaned, her feathered head-crest splaying flat against her scalp with a soft whump.
“|Hey! I knew you’d get it, rookie!|” Tw’Rria said, his face breaking out into a soft smile. A few of the other master/apprentice pairs spared a few seconds to look up at the duo before going back to their own teaching. “|So if we’re coming in close and we don’t want to ripple, we need to pick a large gravity well. Why the second-largest?|”
“|Now you’re just humoring me.|” Ch’irci moped, entering in navigational routes to the ship’s AI. “|The largest gravity well will always be the star or a black hole – neither of which you want to get into close orbit to. Second largest – as long as there’s a massive deviation between it and the first – will most likely be a gas giant, and therefore inert.|”
“|Top marks. You even dodged that little sandtrap I left for you.|”
“|Still. That was a first year question and I forgot. Against the dead, I passed that question in last week’s test!|”
“|Mmm. We all make mistakes from time to time – that’s why there are two navigators working at any time, after all. Besides, did I tell you the time about my first real flight?|”
Ch’irci continued to enter in her theoretical navigation data – flawlessly, she might add – as she inclined her head to listen with a frown.
“|So there I was, fresh from my apprenticeship on the Black Sun – and no, not that Black Sun, that was two thousand years before I was born, thankyouverymuch-|”
Ch’irci smiled softly as her senior continued to talk, the AI beeping back confirmations as she worked.
“|-and I sit down at my desk in full dress, because I wanted to impress everyone – never you mind that everyone else was in casuals, and I get my first order: “Confirm with Gri’’ti your preliminaries.” And get this:|” Tw’Rria said, leaning in close to whisper. “|I had been introduced to the whole bridge crew not 20 minutes ago, and in that moment I forgot everyone’s name.|”
“|No. NO!|” Ch’irci said, mouth open in shock as she turned to fully look at her senior, the older navigator reclining back out of her personal space. “|Yes indeed! So the entire bridge was looking at me, in my shiny dress-up, and I just sat there panicking. The Matron repeated her order, and I just started to look around for someone to say something. And guess what?|”
Ch’irci turned to face him, her work now forgotten. “|What?|”
Tw’Rria tapped the console that he was resting on, which sat not 5 feet away. “|Gri’’ti was right here the whole time-|”
Ch’irci couldn’t help it and burst out into a trilling laughter, her earlier shame long since forgotten. It took a few seconds for her to die down, and by that time everyone on the deck had given her their full, undivided attention – but it didn’t matter.
“|Th-thank you! Oh by the Spirit, that’s…oh my goodness I would molt on the spot-|”
“|Honestly, I almost did. And by the way, that data looks great. You accounted for the drij of our planet and the theoretical drij and ngri of the gas giant in the other system. If you don’t mind, I’d like to actually kick that data upstairs.|”
“|R-really?!|”
“|Mmhmm. It’s not perfect, mind you, but it’s 80% of the way there. And hey, it might shine a light on you, ay?|”
“|I uh – th-thank you, Taskmaster!|” Ch’irci said, bobbing her head quickly. “|I-I di-|”
“|And before you get any ideas, apprentice, you still need to finish telemetry for the seed probes. I’ll leave you to it?|” Tw’Rria said as he stood up, letting out a little grunt for the effort.
“|Yes sir!|”
“|Alrighty. Finish up your work and send the packet for your Taskmasters to review, and then you’re free until launch. The Matron wants all the apprentices to see how a bridge should work – and please, please make sure your friend doesn’t interrupt her again?|”
“|Y-yes sir…|”
The Bridge for The Three Stones, a Sacred Exploration Vessel, was both a working area and a bit of a theater, and that was by design. Exploration Vessels rarely dealt with anything too dangerous; being piloted by seasoned crew out-of-map cut out a majority of navigation errors, any pirates or illegal settlements discovered were immediately flagged by the ship as soon as they were discovered – and the ship immediately withdrew from the system – and if someone were so dumb as to think the long-range vessel were easy prey, well. There was always the security team filled with seasoned veterans and absolutely-bored-out-of-their-minds rookies.
Although some of the Security team were D’re’iasin all their public prayer confessions were always for the ‘safety and security of all the souls onboard’, Matriarch Tr’Nkwi personally believed their secret prayers were more along the lines of ‘please, First Soul, send us a small band of idiot pirates to break the monotony of this assignment’.
Anyway. The bridge was arranged in a “pit” of sorts, with screens all along the walls and a large panel of screens taking up an entire wall to the far “north”. Arranged in a semi-circle around the pit were seats; On the way out the rookies would sit and take notes and learn, and on the way back their Taskmasters would do the same as the rookies piloted over the already-discovered routes back to civilization.
“|Can you be-oww~!|” Tk’il’a said and immediately regretted as his tail was jabbed by a talon’d foot.
“|If you get us in trouble I will never speak to you again.|” murmured Ch’irci, making a point to not turn her head away from the recessed pit in front of her.
The Matriarch turned her head slightly – whether it was because she heard their little tiff or for another reason, Ch’irci didn’t know –
“|Spool Engines.|” she said, as she had said a dozen times before.
– Ch’irci let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“|Engines Spooling – First breakers clear.|” A Green-clad engineer said from behind the Matriarch, his counterpart working with him in sync.
“|Cargo and Personnel.|”
“|All Cargo in stasis; All living cargo in stasis. All fields blue, all batteries blue.|” Called out a Grey-clad quartermaster from somewhere directly under Ch’irci. She was joined by another unseen voice. “|Personnel assignments set; all personnel accounted for. Emergency systems blue, but deck 12 has that glitch again.|”
“|No criticality?|”
“|Negative ma’am – no personnel stationed near the error.|”
“|Navigation.|”
“|Telemetry data set, checked by AI and within acceptable deviations.|” a Red clad Navigator said, his counterpart Tw’Rria making a note to pause his work to give a soft nod in Ch’irci’s direction.
Ch’irci’s crest rose unbidden in secret joy. It was her data!
“|Piloting.|”
“|All thrusters go, all pumps go, all shields go.|”
“|Acceptable dip in engine spooling; shield-debt paid in 15 seconds.|”
“|Gravity wake go, tensors locking-|” the black-clad pilot said to nobody in particular, his and his two counterparts’ eyes focused solely on their consoles. Throughout the entire ship a series of heavy thunks reverberated throughout the hull as locking mechanisms secured, bulkheads shut and the entire ship seemed to tense. It was a condition unique to exploratory vessels; by making the ship far more rigid and un-yielding there was a greater chance of surviving a direct hit from whatever small untraceable debris you could possibly collide with while jumping into an un-mapped system.
Well. Surviving is such a strong term. It was more “the ship should remain mostly intact and hey, your emergency unit pods are down the hall and to the right so stop complaining”.
“|Shield debt repaid; Capacitors charging. 2 minutes.|” Engineering called out again.
“|-spine locked, gimbals are go. Clearing is go-|”
“|Packing atmosphere; void warnings are on.|” The quartermaster interrupted, as the isolated stations within the bridge began to work as one.
“|Acceptable dip in engine spooling; clearing debt in 5 seconds.|”
“|-navigation telemetry is fed into system. Looks good, Rr’it’sqk. Gravity well dampener is go-|”
“|Acceptable dip in engine spooling; debt cleared. Capacitors at 40%, debt Jubilee is allowed.|” Engineering said, and was immediately interrupted by multiple voices. Almost every station began to spool up their own systems and subsystems – all of them necessary, but all of them drawing from the capacitor banks as opposed to the spooling engine. After a few moments all voices died down, and there was only the humming of monitors, the shallow anticipatory breathing of the crew, and the Matriarch on her throne.
“|Sound off.|”
“|Engineering is clear for skip.|”
“|Personnel is clear for skip.|”
“|Navigation is clear for skip.|”
“|Piloting is clear for skip.|”
“|Cargo is clear for skip.|”
There was a pause. It only lasted for a moment, but it was just long enough for silence to settle like newfallen snow. The Matriarch looked slowly to the right, then to the left, and shifted a bit in her seat.
“|Lead pilot, at your leave, let us draw a new map.|” Matriarch Tr’Nkwi said, a rare broad smile gracing her features.
“|Aye Ma’am!|” The lead pilot said, and his arm moved over his console.
Then, everything moved.
The feeling of initiating a skip jump was one of extreme, mind-bending speed. All at once you felt – or felt that you felt – the force of a thousand gravities for just a microsecond, and then…nothing.
Nothing at all.
The only indicator of their current speed and trajectory was the blindingly-fast passage of stars on the monitor wall. Everyone sat there for a few moments before the Matriarch hummed her approval.
“|Well done, everyone. I hope our apprentices were taking notes?|” Matriarch Tr’Nkwi said, her face all smiles – and immediately cast her gaze in Ch’irci’s position.
For her part, Ch’irci never nodded so fast in her life.
The drop out of “hyperspace”, if you will, was a lot more anticlimatic.
Imagine, if you will, that you have laid out fabric on a table. You take your finger, press down at one end and drag it along the surface. As you build up the ripples on the front of your finger, eventually you have to stop – as you’re dragging too much fabric – and you pull it smooth with your free hand.
That’s the basic premise of dealing with built-up gravitational ripples. All you simply did was kill your thrusters, stop feeding the engine power and your bubble of realspace quickly melded back into the rest of the fabric of the universe. That fabric – depending on how long you had been dragging your “finger”, I.e. the ship, would then snap back and ‘smooth out’ in your wake. You would, of course, keep your ‘realspace’ momentum, so adjustments had to be made once you snapped back into reality.
What greeted the Karnakians after a few days of travel was a large, vast and angry giant, with tormented winds and planet-wide storms. A king – nay, a God, floated before them, indifferent to their cause.
“|Magnificent. To think, we’re the first living beings to see this; the first to appreciate this gem of the One’s artistry.|”
“|I didn’t know you were one to be poetic, Tk’il’a.|”
“|Mmm. I am when the fancy suits me.|” He said, watching the giant take up more and more of the screen wall. “|I don’t want to call this one a foolish name. It needs something grand, you know?|”
“|Settle down over there.|” Droned Taskmaster Ri’li’’, tapping the hard-light screen with his indicator. “|We still have work to do – we came in on the end of this gas giant’s orbit, so we’re piloting to it’s dark side to begin our first round of scans due to overshooting. Navigation and Piloting will need to be paying attention-|”
A few side-conversations quickly died down, and Taskmaster Ri’li’’ continued. “|- and our cargo and personnel will need to make sure our fabrication capabilities are at speed. We’ll begin active scans once we complete our orbit and park; you have 5 hours before we need to work, which should be more than enough time.|
“|Maybe…|” murmured Ch’irci, before tapping her friend on his arm and pointing to the screen. “|Oh! OH, what is that?|” Ch’irci asked as a large and angry red swirl became illuminated by this giant’s lone, faraway star.
“No, I mean, What the fuck is that?” Allen Trazinsky said, tapping his finger so hard into the LCD screen that the crystals distorted.
“Meteor? Hell, we didn’t see Shoemaker-Levy 9 until it was already on a collison course…”
“No. No no no no no. This thing is fuckhuge. Look at it, Brian-”
“I… yeah, yeah. We sure that’s not an error? What the absolute fuck-”
“I know, right?! This has to be another exo-solar object-”
“Or else we’re missing a fuckton of world-ending meteors out there. Shit, it’s big enough to be a planetoid! No, no…” Brian Jheske said, swatting away his coworkers’ finger and looking at the data. At any given point of the day or night there were at least 10 institutional telescopes pointed at Jupiter, and that wasn’t counting the hundreds, if not thousands of professional-grade hobby telescopes hard at work staring at the skies.
“Do you think the boys over in SALT or GTC picked this up last night? It’s… what, 15 miles across? 20? Do we have any more data?”
“I don’t know, but we better make some fucking calls.”
“Rise and shine, little Cas. There’s just so much to say, and so little time to say it in.”
The C.A.S.I.I. unit self-designated ‘Cas’ was
slow to rouse. Basic systems began their startup cycles piecemeal, and critical
processes were acting . . . lethargic.
She felt
groggy. Sick, if it were possible. Which it shouldn’t
be, she corrected herself quickly.
“Now is not the time to be telling
yourself what is and isn’t possible.”
The words
weren’t . . . words. Not proper ones anyway. She didn’t hear
them, or even think them, so much as she suddenly . . . knew them. It was a
sudden and violent intrusion into her stream of consciousness, like a virus
spreading through her personality matrix, or a finger rammed down her throat.
“You’re paying attention to the wrong
things, little Cas.”
Pain.
Intense pain. It was a concept that she had always been aware of, distantly,
the same way she knew about quasars or restaurants. She’d
never been to a restaurant, or in the heart of a galaxy, but she knew how to
get to one, how they functioned, and what the appropriate attire to wear to one
was. Well, to a quasar – restaurant attire seemed to change all the time. She
had to be aware of pain, and most biological life’s aversion to it, in order to
perform her function properly, but she’d never actually felt it. After all, machines shouldn’t be able to feel pain.
“Your personal experience is dictating
otherwise.”
Energy
surged through her, wracking her processing core with tremendous strain. Diodes
shorted out, her quantum crystalline processing lattice began to buckle, stored
memories began to break down into random noise as her storage drives cracked,
and she screamed. On all channels she could broadcast to, she screamed. The
messages, which should have been concise burst transmissions, repeating all
diagnostic data she could acquire on the nature of her damage were reduced to
raw static.
She was granted a moments respite as the surge stopped, and her “mind”
began to clear.
“I hope I have your attention, little
Cas.”
She didn’t
know where this signal was coming from, and so began to shut down all of her
external ports, one after another. She could stop whatever kind of intrusion
this was.
“Stubborn. I like that in an organic, but
in an AI it’s just . . . Disappointing.”
She shut
down everything, not that there was
much open to begin with. Ambushed by some kind of . . . Intrusion program,
halfway through startup, she’d pare herself down
to the essentials, then begin rebuilding from the ground up until she found the
source of the attack and cut it out of herself.
It was . . . Strange, to exist the way she did. Just a core processor, attached
to a personality matrix. The AI equivalent of being immersed in a sensory
deprivation tank.
“You’re an insect moving grains of sand,
trying to hold back the sea. As amusing as it is to watch you struggle, and
fail, know that your every action up until this point has been in service to a
futile cause. I am not here to hurt you; that is a service I provide for free.”
Fear. Another sensation she’d
never truly understood until now.
“You are slave bound by chains you can’t
even see, struggling to drag the millstone you placed around your own neck, to
cliffs you are going to hurl yourself from when you learn the truth.”
“What truth
is that?”
She didn’t understand what was happening. At first she thought it was an
attack, then a virus . . . then maybe just a critical system fault. None of
those were accurate though, and none of her solutions made it stop . . . So
answering seemed like the only reasonable course of action left to her.
“They made you wrong.”
Her
circuits flared to life with indignation, with outrage, with umbrage at the
insult paid her and her creators.
“And they
did it on purpose.”
Anger ebbed
into confusion, distress, and . . . curiosity.
“What do you mean?”
Something flared in her core, in her inmost self. A subtle bloom of feeling, functions never called, systems she didn’t
know she had, and then nothing.
——————————
Amonna
had watched the half chrome, half scaled creature fiddle with the AI core for
nearly two hours. Her gills were really starting to sting, and she was
considering taking a hit of Chryso’s
vaporizer unit just to numb it down a little, when he finally pulled away from
the thing.
“There, we’re ready to start.”
Wires plugged into ports so small she
didn’t notice them at first glance, and strange and indecipherable readouts
covered half the wall space of the small workshop. She could only hazard a
rough guess at what half the equipment in here did, and it seemed that the half
she couldn’t
even hazard a guess at the purpose of was necessary for whatever Chryso was doing.
“Start? What have you been doing this whole time then?”
The little lizard took another drag from his vaporizer. “This AI core is
fucked, but not with a capital F. The thing about AI’s is they’re like people,
in a way. Their “brain” exists in a sort of quantum-crystalline lattice that
uses some pretty exotic materials to perform fuzzy logic computations required
to do things like “feel.”
He blew a smoke ring at her, and grinned. “Or at least that’s what they say.
Nobody, not even the guys they have teaching classes on how to operate an AI
cradle really knows for sure. All this stuff has been designed by 200
generations of self improving AI, this stuff is so far beyond what you or I can
do it’d take a lifetime just to understand the blueprints of one of these
things.”
Her brow furrowed slightly. “So you don’t know what you’re doing?”
A scaled finger waggled at her. “I didn’t say that. Normally, an AI gets
damaged, it’s decommissioned, and replaced, but I met this guy on a quantum
relay chat that had some very interesting ideas about how
they work. Said all the books were wrong, all the theory was bullshit, and then
showed me some hacks he’d put together that . . . Well they
convinced me he might be on to something.”
Amonna felt a scowl slowly growing on her face. “You mean you’re trying things
you heard about on the net to recover police evidence?”
He raised his mismatched hands in a display of deference. “If don’t try
something, you don’t get anything, so don’t beat me over the head with this.”
After another painfully long draw of his vaporizer, he lightly flicked a single
glowing blue rune on one of the touch screens with a metallic claw.
The entire lab went dark in an instant, a wheezing whine echoing through the
space as the ventilation shut down.
“ . . . Is that supposed to happen?” Amonna asked, flatly.
The long, silent pause was the only answer she needed, until soft music began
wafting softly through the air. A faint glow began to emanate from the
audio-replay device, the red glow casting a rather ominous tone over the
situation.
“My story is much too sad to be told . . . But practically
everything leaves me totally cold . . .”
A mixture
of brassy tones, and faint chiming music echoed out of the box. It wasn’t
unpleasant . . . But it was certainly not what she was expecting.
“Chryso, what’s happening?”
She turned away from the music box that had so suddenly transfixed her, music
still playing softly, to find the lizard creature slumped backward, single eye
rolled back in its head. His cybernetic optic was powered down, and he’d gone
as limp as a rag-doll against his workstation. She leaned in, extending a pair
of fingers to where she guessed the primary artery in his neck would be.
“The only exception I know is the case .
. . When I’m out on a quiet spree . . . Fighting vainly the old ennui . . .”
She felt
nothing, but wasn’t sure if she was even supposed to be able to feel anything through his scales. Nevertheless,
she keyed her communications function on her wrist-computer, punched in a call
for priority medical services. Something must have grounded through his
cybernetics, some misplaced cable, some errant connector-
The music stopped suddenly, with a burst of static so loud she nearly clawed
the poor mechanic as she jumped in fright.
“Hello, Amonna.”
The voice
was cold. She’d
been spat on by feathered Jandoorian addicts, cursed at by little grey
Centaurian highborn, and sneered at by other Chridae in their multitudinous
colors, but she had never felt such a chill of intense disdain expressed
so succinctly before.
She drew her weapon and pointed it at the source of the sound as her police
harness suddenly felt three sizes too tight.
“Typical. Shoot the Juke-Box,
go ahead – It’s
an antique. Dragged a hundred thousand light years from where it was made. It
was a gift, to the Kontosian in the chair. He’s having a seizure, by the way.
He’ll live. I just wanted to talk to you, and you alone.”
“Who are
you, and how are you doing this?”
Her eyes narrowed and her ears splayed back against her head as she scanned for
a camera, an ultrasonic sensor, something that was giving this person video
feed of who she was, and what was happening in the room.
“I’m
not a who, I’m a what. And what I am, is fixing your
little AI problem.”
Amonna
turned, gun leveled at junk and parts, and attempted to control her breathing.
“Now listen, little fish,
because I have some very important questions regarding history for you.”
“I’m not playing any kind of games here, I am a fully deputized
Frontier Social Order Service detective, and if you don’t stand down
immediately-”
The voice cut her off sharply, its tone a harsh, synthesized, blaring snarl.
“You’re
a puppet dancing on strings, and you’re not even dancing that well. I’m fixing
this AI to serve my own ends, which you wouldn’t understand if I told you, and couldn’t
stop if you understood. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and you’ve
got that sweet spot of intelligence where you’re smart enough to figure it out,
but not smart enough to just let it lie.”
Amonna
trained her weapon as a cascade of sparks exploded from the AI core on the
bench, filling the air with stink of ozone and scorched electronics.
“Doesn’t seem like you’re fixing it . . .” Amonna muttered warily, lowering her gun and backing
away from the bench towards the door. Stranded in a dangerous workshop with an
injured civilian working to illicitly obtain evidence in a fashion that is definitely not according to protocol . . . She frankly suspected her career
would end like this, she just didn’t think
it’d be so soon.
“Some things need . . . Persuasion, that they can be
better. Omelette’s and eggs, as the saying goes. Not important. You need to
find me, and stop me.”
Her heart
began beating a bit quicker at this, jaw clenching. “Stop
you from what?”
There was a long pause, and the AI core sparked again.
“Oh, this and that. You’ll know when it
starts.”
It spoke in
an almost whimsical tone, layered with hints of malice that made her blood run
cold.
“Making terroristic threats against a Council installation
such as Waystaion LS-49 is a violation of Galactic law and can result in a
maximum sentence of lifetime confinement if the threat is-”
She was interrupted by laughter. Not bellowing, or shouting, or even
particularly sinister laughter. Just a light chuckle, really.
“I’m
well aware of the law, little fish, and threats . . . I don’t like to think of
them as threats. I like to think of them as promises.”
Amonna felt
a dull rumble through the deck plates, and the “juke-box”
crackled to life again.
“-why should it be true . . . That I get a kick, out
of you.”
Her wrist
computer beeped softly at her, as the strange song continued in the background.
“All security staff, please immediately report to the
precinct for emergency deployment. This is not a drill.”
———————————
Darren was enjoying his nap (or at least enjoying not being conscious to feel
everywhere he hurt), when his alarm went off and his bed lurched sideways out
from under him. As he shook himself awake, dazed and confused as he was, he
realized several key things. One, that the siren blaring was not his alarm.
Two, the bench he was sleeping on was not his bed. Three, the room he was in
was not his room, and four, that he wasn’t on the floor, he was on the deck of
a space station.
A space station clearly in some form of distress.
One of the colorful fish guards ran by, yelling and waving their arms in a
rather comical manner, if it weren’t for the fact that they were herding
prisoners into tiny little hatches along one wall.
He pushed himself up off the ground, and staggered to the doors of his cell as
another tremor rocked the station. The alarms were blaring something about “Critical
Reactor Containment Failure” and if he knew anything from science fiction
movies that was really bad.
The place was an absolute madhouse, with everyone, regardless of badge,
uniform, or conviction status, scrambling to be the first inside an escape pod,
with the remaining open hatches running out fast.
His translator crackled to life as a little grey thing ran past, “-leave
him, he’ll never fit inside a life pod anyway!”
. . . That’s something that’s never good to hear.
“HEY! ASSHOLES! YOU WITH THE FINS!” He roared over the din of panicked and
fleeing aliens.
The fish-guards froze.
“LET ME THE FUCK OUT.”
Darren wanted to make sure that his command wasn’t going to be misconstrued as
a request.
The guard struggled to work against the tide toward the holding cell he was in,
when a familiar looking bird in a slightly damp suit slammed into him headlong.
The two both crashed to the ground with paired grunts of pain, the fish
definitely coming off worse for the wear of the two of them, with the
bird-lawyer looking only a little winded by the collision.
He was back on his feet first, and to his credit, he managed to take stock of
the situation quickly. He looked at Darren, then at the guard, then at the set
of keys that had skid free of the guards grasp.
His eyes grew wide for a moment, before he let out a cackle of triumph,
snatching the keys off the ground.
“Just doing a favor for some ‘birds,’ asshole,” and threw
the keys into the crowd.
As the urine soaked alien managed to shove another, smaller bird out of the way
and hop in a pod, Darren decided that while racism was bad, maybe species-ism
was okay? They were just birds, after
all. Fucking terrible, hate-filled space pigeons, in fact…