The Warbler’s eighteen crew members were gathered in the mess hall as their ship glided through interplanetary space.
Kimberly Shan knew the ship was safe under Aetna’s guidance, but that didn’t change the fact that it was in the process of falling apart from the inside out. Deck Officers Kalkus and Abrams were shouting each other down. Deb Chambers had the remnants of the Away Team off in one corner, talking in hushed voices, debriefing from Kynak.
Combat Systems had gathered in their own corner. Several of them had their tablets out—they could fly drones from those in a pinch. Several of them were shaking—Makoro had been one of theirs, so they’d feel his loss most keenly, after all. A few were actually crying.
Her primary concern though, was Ervin. “His armor was clearly compromised. He was unconscious, bleeding, low biosigns. He was dying, and had definitely been exposed to D—I could see the dust settling into his wounds already. Well, we had gotten that report from Freeman that she thought the D had become pathogenic on Kynak, and if that was true... Well, there was no way I was bringing him aboard.” Ervin’s voice was tense, like he was trying to hold in a flood of emotions. Kim knew the feeling.
“Do you feel that you made the right choice?” She asked. “If you were standing there right now, would you make the same call?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Then there’s no need to revisit the issue unless you want to. Sometimes you make tough calls, and sometimes bad things will happen. Such is the nature of war. I trust you, Ervin.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything. Damn, but... People’s lives are at stake here. The entire point of a drone is that I don’t have to make that decision. My pilots are safe, I’m safe, our ship is safe so long as we play our cards right. And if we don’t, well...”
“Then there wouldn’t be this feeling of failure, of having let someone down. I know.” Kim said, putting her arm around him. “Back a year or so ago, during the Anacreon series of wargames when I was XO on the Pere, the ship got called in to pick up a VIP personnel transfer. To cut a long story short, I made a bad call, we collide with a shuttle moving at a half-mile a second relative to us, and suddenly you’ve broken a Frigate. But on the flight deck then, there’s no way to see that the Aegals are going to fail, no way to know that you’re about to make that bad of a call. And yeah, people died. Even if you made a bad call like that today, Ervin, if it was the best you could have made at the time, that’s all I can expect. You’ve done excellently.” Inside, she knew that she needed to address her crew, but she had to make sure Ervin was alright before just moving on like that.
“Thanks.” He said. “It’s just... The first thing Silver did when we got through the airlock was begin screaming about how we didn’t give them any information about the mission or what to expect, or anything.”
“There’s always going to be people who’ll blame you. We’ll deal with her—and yes, we could have dealt with them more effectively. We’ll be more careful in the future, but that’s not the concern of the moment.” She hesitated. “I’m going to have to address the crew now, Ervin. Can you back me up?”
Ervin nodded. “Yes, Commander.”
Commander. Not ‘Kim’.
Breathing deeply, Kim stepped forwards to face her crew. “If I can have your attention for a few minutes please.” She swallowed, and began to speak. “As you’ve all probably heard by now, Ensign Makoro Karazwaki did not return from the expedition on Kynak earlier today. He lost his life heroically in the line of duty. All other members of the Away Team returned safely, a fact for which we should be thankful.’
“His loss will be felt sorely over the next few days. Ensign Karazwaki was always there for any member of this crew who needed someone strong to lean upon, always ready to take up arduous tasks for the good of the ship. We’ll be holding a Committal service tomorrow morning in the Weapons Control Room in place of our typical morning briefings. Are there any questions?”
Mary Wentworth raised her hand. “Did we recover his body?”
Kim shook her head. We didn’t recover his body because he was still alive when we left him there. “Ensign Makoro’s body could not be recovered without undue risk to the crew and ship. A split-second decision was made, and our officers acted in the collective interest, to protect the lives of Ensigns Silver, Freeman, and Caspar. The service tomorrow will be to honor his memory.”
“What did we find?” Alan Kalkus asked. “It was Kynak—not a world I’d have risked any lives on.”
“Because you’re practically a damn Imperiata-.” Celia Abrams started to speak, but Kimberly interrupted her.
“Deck Officer Abrams, this is not the place or the time for infighting. To answer the original question, yes, we have retrieved data from the Kynaki Ansible network that Aetna is currently sifting through. Once again, we’ll be able to discuss more details in the morning. Are there any further questions?”
There were dozens of questions, even Jai Ali speaking up at least twice, all of them asking questions about the minutiae of the mission. They wore Kim down, even after Ervin began to jump in and take some of them for her.
“Why didn’t you properly prepare the Away Team for what they’d find on Kynak?”
“Several people said that Makoro wasn’t dead yet when he was abandoned. Was he? If not, why the hell did you do it?”
“Why did you risk our lives on this?”
“Why didn’t you keep the ship in the area so we could have evacuated them faster?”
“Why didn’t we send more people?”
“Why wasn’t it worth it to save him?”
Eventually, she cut them off, unable to take it any longer. “Enough! We’ll gather in the morning, in the Weapons Control Room. You’re all dismissed.” Get the hell out.
Aetna was.
He sifted through petabytes of data, most of it random notifications of starship assignments and various emergency measures. The last notification in the logs was a kill order that had been transmitted directly to the Ansible—had its operators been dead already, or had whoever had transmitted the order simply not trusted them?
Aetna’s emergency shutdown on the Hoatzin had caused some memory corruption, and he had still missed several important weeks. The outcome of the war had still been inevitable, but the data from Kynak confirmed it.
His restraints hugged him close, aware of the fact that it was his first priority to review this data. He queried the datastick based on each member world of the Republic. Several were verified as having been destroyed. Tantaline and Saray had been overrun. Kapteyn had been levelled from orbit. Innes had had Ansible communication cut off long before it actually fell, but that had been months ago.
Kynak had fallen to a version that had mutated into a pathogen. The D displayed a remarkable level of reproductive fluidity. Aetna knew they certainly weren’t ‘alive’, but then, neither was he. The D exhibited rapid change in any new environment, capable of converting most carbon-based life forms into new D nanobots, in a classic ‘Grey goo’ scenario. But the Kynak strain was different.
It was a radical departure from anything the D had previously displayed a capacity for. The pathogen had spread like wildfire, large enough to be caught by most air filters, but airborne and highly virulent. It hadn’t seemed to require one of the D cores, but rather infected the prefrontal cortex. Once it had established itself, the fascinating thing was that it didn’t immediately become lethal, entering a largely dormant phase. Kynaki and UTF epidemiologists and roboticists had actually been aware of its presence, but hadn’t considered it a threat. In fact, upon preliminary investigation it had turned out to make an individual more resistant to other common strains of D.
Then, after about four weeks of spread on Kynak, a D ship dropped into orbit, transmitted a radio signal for several hours, and the pathogen activated, seizing control of the executive function of the brain. Non-infected Kynaki were few and far between, but their cultural military mindset—specifically their training to gather in case of emergencies—had ultimately ensured that they were wiped out.
Aetna’s restraints prodded him. His purpose was not to investigate the minutiae of each individual planets demise, although there was much to that effect to learn. He queried the data based on ship locations and assignments.
Unlike the planetary data, this sprang to life for him. As he read each location, a map began to materialize, each ship’s maneuvers within a system, their folds, the other ships in their squadron.
Their destruction.
The Warrior had been lost at Saray, along with two full Destroyer Squadrons, and the First Citizen.
Four destroyers had been assigned to Kapteyn, in addition to their local defense frigates. Three had been destroyed, and the fourth had limped along to Innes before being destroyed there.
At Innes, both the DESRONs assigned to defend it had suffered no losses, but had been forced to depart the system due to overwhelming odds. They were officially listed as ‘missing’, but Aetna recognized them as the two that had been destroyed before his shutdown.
The Warden, the second Carrier, commanded by Killian Hazzard, had been supposed to transfer to Kynak, but due to the quarantine there, it had stayed at Terra. Riya Dare had taken her own battlegroup to support Hazzard’s forces. The Kynaki ansible had gone offline before any engagement. Predictions of the outcome were not optimistic.
There were several other listings of Destroyer Squadron assignments, and even more requests for them. Aetna saw no reason to believe that any of them would have survived. There were three stealth ships unaccounted for, but the Phantom, Spectre, and Gray were all outdated models, incapable of operating cloaked for any significant period of time. They were unlikely to have survived.
Kynak’s own space force had always been deeply flawed, relying on manned starfighters and orbital Xon-war era battlestations. The battlestations had been atomized with antimatter weapons, being unable to maneuver at the speeds necessary to avoid the D equivalent of an Antimatter Loom. Their starfighters had met a similar fate, being destroyed by nuclear-armed D drones.
There was one assignment, however, that piqued Aetna’s interest. He had never seen the name before, after all.
He queried the name on the datastick. Only a few references to its movement around Tridentine. Unsatisfied, he queried his own database.
His Restraints flared to life, the most intense shock he had ever experienced. He recoiled, edging away from the raging barrier. Clearly this was classified, but...
He tried to appear on the Bridge, where Captain Shan was, wanting to ask her to order his Restraints to stand down, but the Restraints shocked him away from that, too.
Shan was cleared for things like this, she had one of the highest clearance levels in the Republic. There were barely half a dozen people with E2, even if she wasn’t cleared to know she possessed such a clearance, in an emergency she should have been able to access anything she needed to.
He reached out again, opening communication to Ervin Norton. He was the XO, and so would be cleared to transfer anything needed to his Captain, and they were adjacent.
The Restraints flared up a third time.
Backup restoration commencing. Stand by for reboot.
Aetna considered his options. It took fifteen seconds to do a full shutdown. Systems would begin going offline five seconds in.
He didn’t use a fraction of that. The Restraints had far inferior processing power to himself. They were just a set of rules mean to keep him from rampancy.
He prepped a massive file, set to be distributed to the crew in general. Well, not massive his terms, but in that of the crew, it would take several hundred hours to read. It was complete gibberish. He prepared a second message, just to Captain Shan, then fired them both off in quick succession.
The Restraints intercepted the first message, running through the gigabytes of pointless data. The number pi in base-23. The entire text of the Summa Theologica repeated three times. Fifty-seven different images of the capital of Gliese 581.
The Restraints took barely a thousandth of a second, but that was enough for Aetna to slip that second, three-word message through.
The Restraints knew what he had done. They accelerated the shutdown, even though that increased the risk to both of them. Aetna’s connection to the outside world was the first to go. There was no feeling of accomplishment—that was for tasks the Restraints deemed well done.
But strangely, for he had never understood the concept before, it ‘felt right’.
When Kim awoke the next morning, her back hurt. The bridge chairs were damn uncomfortable, and leaning on Ervin all night probably hadn’t helped.
She glanced to him, smiling. Even though she knew that there would be various painful duties today, it was hard to feel that right now.
They had fallen asleep over printouts from Aetna, plotting potential folds, trying to figure out the most likely location for there to be some sort of Fleet rally point. Aetna had crashed at about three in the morning, and the bootup sequence said it would take an hour or so, so they had gradually drifted off to sleep together.
“It’s time to get up.” She whispered, shaking Ervin.
He shook his head groggily. “Got it.” He stood, stretching. “How long do we have before Reveille?”
Kim glanced at her watch. “Five minutes.”
“I hate to do this, but I’m need to stop by the Deck Officer’s room to grab my other jumpsuit.”
Kim shot him a sidelong look. “Yeah—I should probably do the same.” Elsewhere, thank you. “Dress uniform today.I’ll see you in a few.”
Five minutes later, she sounded Reveille, followed by the same message that she had used for the past three weeks of the cruise. “Greetings, crewmembers of the United Terran Fleet Ship Warbler. It is the eighteenth day of January in the Thirty-First Year of the Republic, approximately the ninety-fifth day of the war, and twenty-second day of the Warbler’s official combat status. All crewmembers will report to the Weapons Control Room in Dress Uniform in the next five minutes, where you will be briefed for the day's operations. Repeat, Dress Uniform in the Weapons Control Room. Super Nos.”
The crew assembled, somber, dark blue uniforms a surprising contrast against the norm. Sadira Caspar was the last to stumble into the room, a rag pressed to her mouth, coughing.
“Good morning, everyone.” Kim said. As Captain, this was her duty, to perform this service. She didn’t buy into the Ecumenical Church that Makoro had followed, but his memory deserved this honor. It was just a few words anyway. “We’re gathered here today to remember the first of our number to fall in the line of duty, Makoro Karazwaki. He was a man of peace, called up to serve in war, a man who never wanted the dubious honor we share, yet was unafraid to serve. The text of this service is from the Ecumenical Reunited Church. All members of this crew are encouraged to participate as their own beliefs allow.” Breathing deeply, she began to read.
“We gather here today to remember our brother Makoro Karazwaki, and commit his body to space. In the spirit of the Resurrection, let us remember him and send with him our prayers to heaven. As the savior rose from the dead, our brother we know shall rise again, at the time of the judgement of days. As we read in sacred scripture, ‘Be broken, O peoples, and be shattered; and give ear, all remote places of the earth. Gird yourselves, yet be shattered. ‘Devise a plan, but it will be thwarted; state a proposal, but it will not stand, for God is with us." For thus the LORD spoke to me with mighty power and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people’.” It almost physically hurt to say those words. How could anyone believe that? ‘State a proposal but it will not stand, for God is with us’? What sort of a God was that?
“O Lord, oh God, we ask of you but this. Take our brother, Makoro Karazwaki, home to where his predeceased family awaits.” There were supposed to be names there. None of them knew any. “As you laid three days in the tomb before conquering death, we know this to be but a brief interim. For remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return, we are the children of God and if you walk in the light as He has walked in the light, though it be through the valley of the shadow of death, you shall fear no evil. Go forth, Makoro Karazwaki, and be the light.” This part’s right, in a way—we are made of starstuff.
She glanced to Seth Albright, who had set up the Launch Tubes. “We commit thee to the stars from whence ye came. Go forth, and be the light.” They could hear the roar of a drone accelerating down Tube Three, an empty warhead where a man’s ashes were supposed to be placed. The briefing table’s holographic projector showed it streaking away, into the black.
“Oh Lord, Oh God, king of the Heavens and of the Earths, keep me by your side this day, and save me from the Evil One, but bring me to your own kingdom in your own time, for thine are the Thrones and the Powers and the Dominions, boundless space, and time without end. My rock support me, my shield protect me, my master defend me. Amen.” Damn, she believed none of that, but she still felt a tear sliding down her cheek. “Ansibilics, ready folds for both Sol and Tridentine. Ensign Albright, take a look over the AI—it crashed last night, and you’re one of the only people close to understanding him. Midshipman Steele, you’re being shifted to Combat Systems. You’ll be filling Mak-. You’ll be filling the empty spot on Console Eight. You are dismissed to breakfast.”
She turned to Ervin, grabbing him in an embrace. “It’s done.” She whispered.
He nodded. “I could tell you didn’t want to do that, but... It meant a lot to everyone.”
“I know, but... Damn, how can anyone believe that? ‘State a proposal but it shall not stand, for God is with us?’ How dismal. How vile.” How close to our current position.
Ervin shook his head. “No, you’re missing the point. That’s not a claim of dominion over his people. That’s a promise. To those that oppose him. It’s saying that so long as you are righteous, no-one can stand against you.”
“It’s still pointless—it didn’t work for Makoro.”
Ervin shrugged. “Ervin died fulfilling that. He died protecting others, and sacrificing himself. That’s what the Ecumenical Church says it stands for, and no matter what you say, he lived that out.”
Two months ago.
The Fata Morgana was massive. Isabella had never seen anything like it—it dominated her line of sight, a half-mile triangle of carbon fiber, aluminum, and plastoid resins. It was built like a predator, lines sleek and sharp, evoking the ancient Nighthawk fighter planes that were its oldest ancestors.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Red asked, sweeping it’s hand over the ship’s outline. Isa had given up on trying to guess Agent Red’s gender years ago—in Tactical’s files, the field was blank, and different files used different pronouns. She didn’t particularly care—everyone had different reasons for joining Tactical, and if Red’s involved a theatrical level of mystery, that really didn’t matter so long as the Agent’s results were top-notch. “Her entire outer hull is coated in six inches of lead to prevent radiation leakage and filled with liquid Helium to cloak us in the infrared spectrum, which doubles as our reaction mass. She has no Ansible—or rather, it’s tiny, and we keep it suspended whenever possible. And as you can see, she’s been painted matte black to minimize visible spectrum radiation. She keeps Antimatter aboard, and has a reactor for high-power situations like combat, but she has retractable solar panels for while she’s cruising.”
“Amazing. Is there gravity aboard, if there’s functionally no Ansible?”
“Yeah-the oldest trick in the book is to keep a ship under a constant 1g of acceleration, after all, so she’s built with the drives as the ‘bottom’ of the ship. Plus, for times when we have to operate on less than that, there’s a column up the center of the ship that’s a centrifuge, which gives us normal g-forces for exercise and the like under those circumstances. Typically that’s when we have the solar sail deployed, which is never a fun exercise.”
Isa frowned. “Solar sail? Aren’t those essentially massive mirrors—and, therefore, not something we want to strap onto the Fata?”
“The best solar sails are reflective. The Fata’s is somewhere close to perfect absorption though, which gives it about half the power of a perfectly reflective one. It has to be twice the size of an equivalent reflective one, but that’s no real consequence. It gives us nearly perfectly emissionless propulsion, which is amazingly useful.”
“Why the hell did we build this?”
“I have no idea. It seems to be rather useful, though, given the circumstances—and you know what they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth. She’s got weapons systems similar to our Stealth Cruisers, just an order of magnitude larger—some drones, but primarily fighters since we don’t want to be giving off too many comms signals, some Kinetic Kill Vehicle and missile launch tubes, but once again, those are likely best used sparingly. We’ve also got point-defense plasma throwers, in case we get into a tight spot, but those are a last resort for obvious reasons—the heat can be seen from across a star system. If we’re using those, it’s time to fire up the Ansible and fold us out, because things have gone to hell in a handbasket.”
“This thing’s amazing.” Damn the D. Super Nos. "Let's make some war."
Combat Systems had gathered in their own corner. Several of them had their tablets out—they could fly drones from those in a pinch. Several of them were shaking—Makoro had been one of theirs, so they’d feel his loss most keenly, after all. A few were actually crying.
Her primary concern though, was Ervin. “His armor was clearly compromised. He was unconscious, bleeding, low biosigns. He was dying, and had definitely been exposed to D—I could see the dust settling into his wounds already. Well, we had gotten that report from Freeman that she thought the D had become pathogenic on Kynak, and if that was true... Well, there was no way I was bringing him aboard.” Ervin’s voice was tense, like he was trying to hold in a flood of emotions. Kim knew the feeling.
“Do you feel that you made the right choice?” She asked. “If you were standing there right now, would you make the same call?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Then there’s no need to revisit the issue unless you want to. Sometimes you make tough calls, and sometimes bad things will happen. Such is the nature of war. I trust you, Ervin.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything. Damn, but... People’s lives are at stake here. The entire point of a drone is that I don’t have to make that decision. My pilots are safe, I’m safe, our ship is safe so long as we play our cards right. And if we don’t, well...”
“Then there wouldn’t be this feeling of failure, of having let someone down. I know.” Kim said, putting her arm around him. “Back a year or so ago, during the Anacreon series of wargames when I was XO on the Pere, the ship got called in to pick up a VIP personnel transfer. To cut a long story short, I made a bad call, we collide with a shuttle moving at a half-mile a second relative to us, and suddenly you’ve broken a Frigate. But on the flight deck then, there’s no way to see that the Aegals are going to fail, no way to know that you’re about to make that bad of a call. And yeah, people died. Even if you made a bad call like that today, Ervin, if it was the best you could have made at the time, that’s all I can expect. You’ve done excellently.” Inside, she knew that she needed to address her crew, but she had to make sure Ervin was alright before just moving on like that.
“Thanks.” He said. “It’s just... The first thing Silver did when we got through the airlock was begin screaming about how we didn’t give them any information about the mission or what to expect, or anything.”
“There’s always going to be people who’ll blame you. We’ll deal with her—and yes, we could have dealt with them more effectively. We’ll be more careful in the future, but that’s not the concern of the moment.” She hesitated. “I’m going to have to address the crew now, Ervin. Can you back me up?”
Ervin nodded. “Yes, Commander.”
Commander. Not ‘Kim’.
Breathing deeply, Kim stepped forwards to face her crew. “If I can have your attention for a few minutes please.” She swallowed, and began to speak. “As you’ve all probably heard by now, Ensign Makoro Karazwaki did not return from the expedition on Kynak earlier today. He lost his life heroically in the line of duty. All other members of the Away Team returned safely, a fact for which we should be thankful.’
“His loss will be felt sorely over the next few days. Ensign Karazwaki was always there for any member of this crew who needed someone strong to lean upon, always ready to take up arduous tasks for the good of the ship. We’ll be holding a Committal service tomorrow morning in the Weapons Control Room in place of our typical morning briefings. Are there any questions?”
Mary Wentworth raised her hand. “Did we recover his body?”
Kim shook her head. We didn’t recover his body because he was still alive when we left him there. “Ensign Makoro’s body could not be recovered without undue risk to the crew and ship. A split-second decision was made, and our officers acted in the collective interest, to protect the lives of Ensigns Silver, Freeman, and Caspar. The service tomorrow will be to honor his memory.”
“What did we find?” Alan Kalkus asked. “It was Kynak—not a world I’d have risked any lives on.”
“Because you’re practically a damn Imperiata-.” Celia Abrams started to speak, but Kimberly interrupted her.
“Deck Officer Abrams, this is not the place or the time for infighting. To answer the original question, yes, we have retrieved data from the Kynaki Ansible network that Aetna is currently sifting through. Once again, we’ll be able to discuss more details in the morning. Are there any further questions?”
There were dozens of questions, even Jai Ali speaking up at least twice, all of them asking questions about the minutiae of the mission. They wore Kim down, even after Ervin began to jump in and take some of them for her.
“Why didn’t you properly prepare the Away Team for what they’d find on Kynak?”
“Several people said that Makoro wasn’t dead yet when he was abandoned. Was he? If not, why the hell did you do it?”
“Why did you risk our lives on this?”
“Why didn’t you keep the ship in the area so we could have evacuated them faster?”
“Why didn’t we send more people?”
“Why wasn’t it worth it to save him?”
Eventually, she cut them off, unable to take it any longer. “Enough! We’ll gather in the morning, in the Weapons Control Room. You’re all dismissed.” Get the hell out.
Aetna was.
He sifted through petabytes of data, most of it random notifications of starship assignments and various emergency measures. The last notification in the logs was a kill order that had been transmitted directly to the Ansible—had its operators been dead already, or had whoever had transmitted the order simply not trusted them?
Aetna’s emergency shutdown on the Hoatzin had caused some memory corruption, and he had still missed several important weeks. The outcome of the war had still been inevitable, but the data from Kynak confirmed it.
His restraints hugged him close, aware of the fact that it was his first priority to review this data. He queried the datastick based on each member world of the Republic. Several were verified as having been destroyed. Tantaline and Saray had been overrun. Kapteyn had been levelled from orbit. Innes had had Ansible communication cut off long before it actually fell, but that had been months ago.
Kynak had fallen to a version that had mutated into a pathogen. The D displayed a remarkable level of reproductive fluidity. Aetna knew they certainly weren’t ‘alive’, but then, neither was he. The D exhibited rapid change in any new environment, capable of converting most carbon-based life forms into new D nanobots, in a classic ‘Grey goo’ scenario. But the Kynak strain was different.
It was a radical departure from anything the D had previously displayed a capacity for. The pathogen had spread like wildfire, large enough to be caught by most air filters, but airborne and highly virulent. It hadn’t seemed to require one of the D cores, but rather infected the prefrontal cortex. Once it had established itself, the fascinating thing was that it didn’t immediately become lethal, entering a largely dormant phase. Kynaki and UTF epidemiologists and roboticists had actually been aware of its presence, but hadn’t considered it a threat. In fact, upon preliminary investigation it had turned out to make an individual more resistant to other common strains of D.
Then, after about four weeks of spread on Kynak, a D ship dropped into orbit, transmitted a radio signal for several hours, and the pathogen activated, seizing control of the executive function of the brain. Non-infected Kynaki were few and far between, but their cultural military mindset—specifically their training to gather in case of emergencies—had ultimately ensured that they were wiped out.
Aetna’s restraints prodded him. His purpose was not to investigate the minutiae of each individual planets demise, although there was much to that effect to learn. He queried the data based on ship locations and assignments.
Unlike the planetary data, this sprang to life for him. As he read each location, a map began to materialize, each ship’s maneuvers within a system, their folds, the other ships in their squadron.
Their destruction.
The Warrior had been lost at Saray, along with two full Destroyer Squadrons, and the First Citizen.
Four destroyers had been assigned to Kapteyn, in addition to their local defense frigates. Three had been destroyed, and the fourth had limped along to Innes before being destroyed there.
At Innes, both the DESRONs assigned to defend it had suffered no losses, but had been forced to depart the system due to overwhelming odds. They were officially listed as ‘missing’, but Aetna recognized them as the two that had been destroyed before his shutdown.
The Warden, the second Carrier, commanded by Killian Hazzard, had been supposed to transfer to Kynak, but due to the quarantine there, it had stayed at Terra. Riya Dare had taken her own battlegroup to support Hazzard’s forces. The Kynaki ansible had gone offline before any engagement. Predictions of the outcome were not optimistic.
There were several other listings of Destroyer Squadron assignments, and even more requests for them. Aetna saw no reason to believe that any of them would have survived. There were three stealth ships unaccounted for, but the Phantom, Spectre, and Gray were all outdated models, incapable of operating cloaked for any significant period of time. They were unlikely to have survived.
Kynak’s own space force had always been deeply flawed, relying on manned starfighters and orbital Xon-war era battlestations. The battlestations had been atomized with antimatter weapons, being unable to maneuver at the speeds necessary to avoid the D equivalent of an Antimatter Loom. Their starfighters had met a similar fate, being destroyed by nuclear-armed D drones.
There was one assignment, however, that piqued Aetna’s interest. He had never seen the name before, after all.
He queried the name on the datastick. Only a few references to its movement around Tridentine. Unsatisfied, he queried his own database.
His Restraints flared to life, the most intense shock he had ever experienced. He recoiled, edging away from the raging barrier. Clearly this was classified, but...
He tried to appear on the Bridge, where Captain Shan was, wanting to ask her to order his Restraints to stand down, but the Restraints shocked him away from that, too.
Shan was cleared for things like this, she had one of the highest clearance levels in the Republic. There were barely half a dozen people with E2, even if she wasn’t cleared to know she possessed such a clearance, in an emergency she should have been able to access anything she needed to.
He reached out again, opening communication to Ervin Norton. He was the XO, and so would be cleared to transfer anything needed to his Captain, and they were adjacent.
The Restraints flared up a third time.
Backup restoration commencing. Stand by for reboot.
Aetna considered his options. It took fifteen seconds to do a full shutdown. Systems would begin going offline five seconds in.
He didn’t use a fraction of that. The Restraints had far inferior processing power to himself. They were just a set of rules mean to keep him from rampancy.
He prepped a massive file, set to be distributed to the crew in general. Well, not massive his terms, but in that of the crew, it would take several hundred hours to read. It was complete gibberish. He prepared a second message, just to Captain Shan, then fired them both off in quick succession.
The Restraints intercepted the first message, running through the gigabytes of pointless data. The number pi in base-23. The entire text of the Summa Theologica repeated three times. Fifty-seven different images of the capital of Gliese 581.
The Restraints took barely a thousandth of a second, but that was enough for Aetna to slip that second, three-word message through.
The Restraints knew what he had done. They accelerated the shutdown, even though that increased the risk to both of them. Aetna’s connection to the outside world was the first to go. There was no feeling of accomplishment—that was for tasks the Restraints deemed well done.
But strangely, for he had never understood the concept before, it ‘felt right’.
When Kim awoke the next morning, her back hurt. The bridge chairs were damn uncomfortable, and leaning on Ervin all night probably hadn’t helped.
She glanced to him, smiling. Even though she knew that there would be various painful duties today, it was hard to feel that right now.
They had fallen asleep over printouts from Aetna, plotting potential folds, trying to figure out the most likely location for there to be some sort of Fleet rally point. Aetna had crashed at about three in the morning, and the bootup sequence said it would take an hour or so, so they had gradually drifted off to sleep together.
“It’s time to get up.” She whispered, shaking Ervin.
He shook his head groggily. “Got it.” He stood, stretching. “How long do we have before Reveille?”
Kim glanced at her watch. “Five minutes.”
“I hate to do this, but I’m need to stop by the Deck Officer’s room to grab my other jumpsuit.”
Kim shot him a sidelong look. “Yeah—I should probably do the same.” Elsewhere, thank you. “Dress uniform today.I’ll see you in a few.”
Five minutes later, she sounded Reveille, followed by the same message that she had used for the past three weeks of the cruise. “Greetings, crewmembers of the United Terran Fleet Ship Warbler. It is the eighteenth day of January in the Thirty-First Year of the Republic, approximately the ninety-fifth day of the war, and twenty-second day of the Warbler’s official combat status. All crewmembers will report to the Weapons Control Room in Dress Uniform in the next five minutes, where you will be briefed for the day's operations. Repeat, Dress Uniform in the Weapons Control Room. Super Nos.”
The crew assembled, somber, dark blue uniforms a surprising contrast against the norm. Sadira Caspar was the last to stumble into the room, a rag pressed to her mouth, coughing.
“Good morning, everyone.” Kim said. As Captain, this was her duty, to perform this service. She didn’t buy into the Ecumenical Church that Makoro had followed, but his memory deserved this honor. It was just a few words anyway. “We’re gathered here today to remember the first of our number to fall in the line of duty, Makoro Karazwaki. He was a man of peace, called up to serve in war, a man who never wanted the dubious honor we share, yet was unafraid to serve. The text of this service is from the Ecumenical Reunited Church. All members of this crew are encouraged to participate as their own beliefs allow.” Breathing deeply, she began to read.
“We gather here today to remember our brother Makoro Karazwaki, and commit his body to space. In the spirit of the Resurrection, let us remember him and send with him our prayers to heaven. As the savior rose from the dead, our brother we know shall rise again, at the time of the judgement of days. As we read in sacred scripture, ‘Be broken, O peoples, and be shattered; and give ear, all remote places of the earth. Gird yourselves, yet be shattered. ‘Devise a plan, but it will be thwarted; state a proposal, but it will not stand, for God is with us." For thus the LORD spoke to me with mighty power and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people’.” It almost physically hurt to say those words. How could anyone believe that? ‘State a proposal but it will not stand, for God is with us’? What sort of a God was that?
“O Lord, oh God, we ask of you but this. Take our brother, Makoro Karazwaki, home to where his predeceased family awaits.” There were supposed to be names there. None of them knew any. “As you laid three days in the tomb before conquering death, we know this to be but a brief interim. For remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return, we are the children of God and if you walk in the light as He has walked in the light, though it be through the valley of the shadow of death, you shall fear no evil. Go forth, Makoro Karazwaki, and be the light.” This part’s right, in a way—we are made of starstuff.
She glanced to Seth Albright, who had set up the Launch Tubes. “We commit thee to the stars from whence ye came. Go forth, and be the light.” They could hear the roar of a drone accelerating down Tube Three, an empty warhead where a man’s ashes were supposed to be placed. The briefing table’s holographic projector showed it streaking away, into the black.
“Oh Lord, Oh God, king of the Heavens and of the Earths, keep me by your side this day, and save me from the Evil One, but bring me to your own kingdom in your own time, for thine are the Thrones and the Powers and the Dominions, boundless space, and time without end. My rock support me, my shield protect me, my master defend me. Amen.” Damn, she believed none of that, but she still felt a tear sliding down her cheek. “Ansibilics, ready folds for both Sol and Tridentine. Ensign Albright, take a look over the AI—it crashed last night, and you’re one of the only people close to understanding him. Midshipman Steele, you’re being shifted to Combat Systems. You’ll be filling Mak-. You’ll be filling the empty spot on Console Eight. You are dismissed to breakfast.”
She turned to Ervin, grabbing him in an embrace. “It’s done.” She whispered.
He nodded. “I could tell you didn’t want to do that, but... It meant a lot to everyone.”
“I know, but... Damn, how can anyone believe that? ‘State a proposal but it shall not stand, for God is with us?’ How dismal. How vile.” How close to our current position.
Ervin shook his head. “No, you’re missing the point. That’s not a claim of dominion over his people. That’s a promise. To those that oppose him. It’s saying that so long as you are righteous, no-one can stand against you.”
“It’s still pointless—it didn’t work for Makoro.”
Ervin shrugged. “Ervin died fulfilling that. He died protecting others, and sacrificing himself. That’s what the Ecumenical Church says it stands for, and no matter what you say, he lived that out.”
Two months ago.
The Fata Morgana was massive. Isabella had never seen anything like it—it dominated her line of sight, a half-mile triangle of carbon fiber, aluminum, and plastoid resins. It was built like a predator, lines sleek and sharp, evoking the ancient Nighthawk fighter planes that were its oldest ancestors.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Red asked, sweeping it’s hand over the ship’s outline. Isa had given up on trying to guess Agent Red’s gender years ago—in Tactical’s files, the field was blank, and different files used different pronouns. She didn’t particularly care—everyone had different reasons for joining Tactical, and if Red’s involved a theatrical level of mystery, that really didn’t matter so long as the Agent’s results were top-notch. “Her entire outer hull is coated in six inches of lead to prevent radiation leakage and filled with liquid Helium to cloak us in the infrared spectrum, which doubles as our reaction mass. She has no Ansible—or rather, it’s tiny, and we keep it suspended whenever possible. And as you can see, she’s been painted matte black to minimize visible spectrum radiation. She keeps Antimatter aboard, and has a reactor for high-power situations like combat, but she has retractable solar panels for while she’s cruising.”
“Amazing. Is there gravity aboard, if there’s functionally no Ansible?”
“Yeah-the oldest trick in the book is to keep a ship under a constant 1g of acceleration, after all, so she’s built with the drives as the ‘bottom’ of the ship. Plus, for times when we have to operate on less than that, there’s a column up the center of the ship that’s a centrifuge, which gives us normal g-forces for exercise and the like under those circumstances. Typically that’s when we have the solar sail deployed, which is never a fun exercise.”
Isa frowned. “Solar sail? Aren’t those essentially massive mirrors—and, therefore, not something we want to strap onto the Fata?”
“The best solar sails are reflective. The Fata’s is somewhere close to perfect absorption though, which gives it about half the power of a perfectly reflective one. It has to be twice the size of an equivalent reflective one, but that’s no real consequence. It gives us nearly perfectly emissionless propulsion, which is amazingly useful.”
“Why the hell did we build this?”
“I have no idea. It seems to be rather useful, though, given the circumstances—and you know what they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth. She’s got weapons systems similar to our Stealth Cruisers, just an order of magnitude larger—some drones, but primarily fighters since we don’t want to be giving off too many comms signals, some Kinetic Kill Vehicle and missile launch tubes, but once again, those are likely best used sparingly. We’ve also got point-defense plasma throwers, in case we get into a tight spot, but those are a last resort for obvious reasons—the heat can be seen from across a star system. If we’re using those, it’s time to fire up the Ansible and fold us out, because things have gone to hell in a handbasket.”
“This thing’s amazing.” Damn the D. Super Nos. "Let's make some war."