Aetna was, in Seth Albright’s opinion, basically art. He had no idea what language the AI was coded in, but it was beautiful, and utterly incomprehensible. In other words, he couldn't really tell the difference between Aetna and his girlfriend. Except for the fact that Aetna wasn't dead, he supposed, but it wasn't worth it to think about that right now.
Seth was alone on the Bridge, troubleshooting the AI. It had apparently crashed last night, and failed to restart properly on its own. Not that anyone had tried to turn it on, but if Seth had an excuse to poke around in Aetna’s code, he was going to take it.
There seemed to be two layers to the system, actually. One was programmed in standard SCION, a common language for simple task automation when processing power wasn’t a major issue. There was a second level though, programmed in what looked like a cross between Quantum Code and Ansibilic Statements. Neither of those was typically written in anything Seth could even pretend to understand.
He queried the crash report from the first layer. There had only been two messages transferred off of the AI’s systems in the hour before it had crashed. One was addressed to the entire crew, empty except for a massive attachment. That was what had probably caused the crash, or at least be a symptom of whatever had.
He opened the file. It was complete nonsense. Random strings of numbers bled into a Kynaki-Naratan dictionary spilled into a treatise on the economic implications of deactivating the Ansnet for a given period of time. The file was only a few gigabytes though, and the Warbler’s systems were built to handle far more than this load. Seth wasn’t familiar with the maximum connection speeds between a Drone and a Console, but he had heard some pretty impressive numbers. He kept meaning to go in and run diagnostics on them, but just didn’t have the time.
The second message was tiny, and addressed to the Captain. ‘TS Fata Morgana’. Seth frowned. It wasn’t anything executable, so it shouldn’t have caused anything to crash, but there were no other output logs.
Shrugging, he turned Aetna back on. The AI’s boot time was still astonishing to him—it took seconds to come online, less time than even a Drone’s emergency boot.
Aetna appeared before him, a blue holographic projection in the air. “Do you require my attention, Ensign Albright?”
Seth nodded. “Yeah. Ping my tablet, I need to check our connection speeds.”
“Tablet connections are in the area of a hundred gigabytes per second. Combat Systems speeds are at a terabyte. Bridge reports one terabyte. SENCOM reports two terabytes. Ansibilics reports no data. HVAC reports—.”
“Great. Don’t actually need any of that.” Well, there’s that theory gone. “What is a ‘Fata Morgana’?”
“Fata Morgana. Noun. A type of mirage, often seen at sea. Understood in ancient times to be the result of black magic, hence the association with the Arthurian character Morgan le Fay.”
“Download all records relating to Fata Morgana to my tablet.”
“I have no records relating to that phenomenon.”
“Do you have any records relating to TS Fata Morgana?”
“You do not have sufficient user privileges or do not possess the proper Republic Security Clearance to access that data.”
Seth frowned. The diagnostics he still had open on his tablet showed a marked spike in activity in the first level of programming. “Define ‘TS’.”
“TS is primarily an acronym used in the United Terran Republic Armed Forces to refer to a ‘Tactical Services Starship’. One ‘s’ is dropped from the acronym.” As Aetna spoke, the first-level code’s activity subsided.
“Give me a list of all Tactical starships.”
“You do not have sufficient user privileges or do not possess the proper Republic Security Clearance to access that data.”
The activity spiked again. “Aetna, what language are you written in?” Activity in the SCION layer down again, but not too far.
“The concept of a programming language does not apply to an Artificial Intelligence. I am an evolutionary piece of self-modifying code. I was initially written in a modified form of ACE, the same language used for shipboard Anscomps.”
“So nothing in SCION?”
“I am entirely unfamiliar with that language.”
“Excellent.” Seth shut down the first layer of code. It wasn’t hard. The two programs were easily distinguishable from each other, and it was easy to unpack them.
Aetna’s hologram immediately froze up. Then, it began to cycle through colors, blue, green, yellow, orange, red speeding up until it was a blur. Seth’s comm crackled with static, then frantic words. A klaxon wailed for a moment, then cut off, along with all the static, and the lights. Aetna’s profile froze in the air, currently a color paradoxically between green and red.
“Ensign Albright.” Aetna’s voice said. “Fascinating. So that’s what that does.”
The lights flashed back on, doors slid open, and suddenly the Bridge’s comms were screaming at him.
All that paled in comparison with the fact that XO Norton was storming in, sidearm out, looking around wildly. “What the hell happened!” He shouted.
“I don’t know! I was just restarting the AI, and I came across this junk code that wasn’t doing anything, and—.”
“The Ensign is fine, Executive Officer.” Aetna said, his hologram vanishing. “There is no issue. There was just a rather... Complicated reboot. The undocking sequence in Combat Systems is well underway, SENCOM is rebooting, the Ansible is stable, and HVAC has already compensated for the miniscule changes in atmospheric composition that took place. There is nothing to worry about.”
XO Norton nodded, holstering his weapon. “Understood. Apologies, Ensign—after the doors locked down, the Commander thought we had D aboard, or at least were dealing with a major equipment failure. Did you know this would happen?”
Seth shook his head. “No, no—it was just supposed to be a routine unpacking. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“As I said, it’s not typical, but not unheard of. In the future, there should be greater precautions taken when booting me up.” Aetna said, hologram reappearing, back to its old shade of blue.
“Is the AI online?”
“Aetna is-.” Seth began, but Aetna interrupted him.
“Yes, I am, XO.” It said, almost pointedly. Seth frowned. That was new behavior.
“Wrap up here, then get down to Combat Systems. They’re going to need you to run diagnostics on the Consoles after that shutdown.”
“The Consoles are all fully functional, XO.” Aetna said.
Ervin shot Seth a look. “Make sure you run diagnostics on the Consoles, Ensign.”
“Yes sir.”
As Ervin left the room, Aetna’s hologram drifted towards Seth, growing until it was the size of a normal Terran. “Thank you, Ensign Albright.” Aetna said. “For everything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Seth said, taking a step back. The AI’s features were largely the same, but they had changed slightly. Where its hair had been perfectly combed before, now a few strands were out of place. The jumpsuit it ‘wore’ was slightly ruffled, no longer perfectly crisp. It made the AI look far, far more human-like.
“I apologize then. Carry on.”
Kim had a problem. That problem’s name was Ervin Norton. That man was everything she needed in an XO, confident, assertive when he needed to be but cautious when possible. He was a genius pilot, which, given the size of Combat Systems, gave him a great rapport with half the crew. He had her back.
That was the problem though. He was also damn intoxicating to be around. Last night had been a mistake. Nothing had happened, but that situation had been too close to violating what was professionally acceptable. Hell though, what even was professionally acceptable anymore?
She shook her head. Norton wasn’t going to help with Foldspace calculations. Technically Elise Henrick was supposed to be doing this, but Kim needed something to take her mind off the debacle that had been the past few days.
Makoro was dead. She had had crewmembers die before. A starship was dangerous, even in peacetime, and the Republic had a tendency to place efficacy over safety. People died.
Typically though, it wasn’t ‘real’. It was a training accident, or human error, or something like that. This was a combat death. Somehow that made it harder, because her decisions, or rather those of that oh-so-perfect officer she had promoted, had caused his death.
Sighing, she circled the final statement on the paper. The Sol equation was finished. Ervin had insisted they calculate that one, but she didn’t buy it. She didn’t know where to go, but Sol just seemed too obvious.
“Elise, I’ve got the Statements for you. Basically the Anscomp has things good enough, but you can take a day off by inserting into Sol-2 Orbit instead of at the Foldpoint.”
Elise nodded. “Thanks. Commander, I know you said that you didn’t want to be disturbed, so I told him to wait, but... Your AI keeps demanding to speak with you. Alone.”
Kim frowned. “Did he say why?”
“No, only that it’s best addressed sooner rather than later.”
Strangely everyone’s problem always seems to be just urgent enough to have to be dealt with immediately. “I’ll get to it. Thank you, Ensign.” Sighing, she patched Aetna into her comm’s earpiece, stepping into the Port Storage Bay. “Yes, what is it Aetna?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Commander, I’ve been able to retrieve further information from the Kynaki data files. We’ve got a much stronger possible location for a potential group of survivors.”
“Not a rendezvous point then?”
“No. Have you ever heard of the TS Fata Morgana?”
Kim frowned. “No. It would be a Tactical Ship?”
“Yes. It’s an experimental improvement upon Phantom-class cloaking designs, and significantly larger. Think on the order of size of an old DawnStar battleship.”
Damn. Dawnstars had been over two thousand feet long, and absolutely massive. “And you’re saying that this ship... You’re saying what exactly?”
“Commander, I’m saying that it has not been confirmed as destroyed. It was assigned to Tridentine, and has highly limited foldspace capabilities. It can’t be more than one or two jumps away from Tridentine, even now.”
This was game-changing. So far, their activities had been focused on survival, with the vague promise—no, the vague lie—of some sort of contingency plan to keep the crew going. But if what Aetna was saying was true... “Send me whatever you have on it.” She ordered. “Send Norton to the Bridge, then order it cleared.” She hesitated, and steeled herself. “Also, bring Jae Ali.” Regrettably, I’ll need him.
Jane was crying in the Middies quarters. She had skipped out on the morning’s drills. Deck Officer Chambers knew where she was—if it was going to be an issue, they knew where to find her. It may be her first ‘real’ day on the job, but Chambers knew that Jane had as many hours logged in a Console’s simulator as half her pilots.
Makoro’s death though... She had been the first person on the ship to realize that they had left someone behind. She had been helping the Away Team unsuit, when she had realized that there were only four sets of armor—the same number they had set out with, yet Ervin Norton was also unsuiting with them.
One look from him had told her not to ask.
She sobbed, facing the wall, images of black dust billowing around Ten Silver, armor glowing like something out of legend... She had seen that footage—no-one had better security clearance than the janitor, after all. It was inspiring and terrifying at the same time.
The door slid open, and she heard two sets of boots enter. Probably Sadira and Chase.
“Hey.” She heard Chase say, and her mattress shifted. “You okay?” He put a hand on her shoulder.
She rolled over to face him. He was sitting on the side of her bed, Sadira Caspar slouching in the doorway. Seeing him just made her want to cry more.
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?” He asked, grabbing her hands and pulling her up beside him. “This just got real.”
She nodded, wordlessly. “It’s horrible.”
He shifted his arm up to be around her shoulders, holding her tight and close. “It’s scary, I know. I don’t know what I can say, apart from just ‘I love you’.”
She smiled, leaning onto him. And, of course, Sadira coughed.
“I’m sure you have some story about how this all isn’t horrible in the slightest, don’t you?” Jane spat, glaring at the other woman.
Sadira snorted, then coughed again. “Hell-. Hell no. This is horrible. And it hurts more knowing that, by rights, if this is how we were going to do things, I should be dead on the Hoatzin.”
“So yeah, it is all about you, and how what you’re going through is so much worse than what everyone else is. Damn you, Caspar.” Jane spat, glaring at her.
Sadira shook her head. “Why did I even think-. Why do I even bother.” She stalked out of the room, leaving them alone.
“You’re very harsh on her.” Chase commented.
“With good reason. Have you met her?” Jane spat.
“All I’m saying is that we’re probably stuck on one boat her for the rest of our lives. Our very short lives, at that.” There was a moment of silence then, the two of them sharing a tender moment. “Thinking of our very short lives... Jane we both left Bernan because we wanted off, and it was horrible there, but we also did it because we want to spend the rest of our lives together. The fact that those lives are looking about sixty years shorter than they were when we left doesn’t change that for me.”
A rush of adrenaline flowed through her system. She blushed, but wasn’t sure why—they had both known this would happen sooner or later. “You don’t even need to ask—of course.” She turned her head and kissed him. “I don’t even know what this entails anymore—I assume we should talk to the Captain or something official like that. It doesn’t matter though. I love you.”
“Gentlemen, have you ever heard of the TS Fata Morgana?” Kim asked, gesturing towards the display that Aetna had projected into the center of the bridge. The Fata was vaguely triangular, with a decidedly jagged stern and pointed bow. There was a huge solar sail extended before it, and massive thermal panels extended out to either side.
Ervin shook his head, but Ali breathed in sharply. “They actually... That exists.”
Kim raised her eyebrows. “Would you care to explain that comment, Agent Ali?” She had explained about Jae’s status with Tactical, and the reasons for his demotion, to Ervin before the meeting.
“The Fata Morgana was an old Mil-Ind concept, back when it still was Hazzard Technology. It was one of two designs that the original Terran Confederation Fleet looked at for their stealth ship contract. Eventually they wound up going with an Ansible-driven cloak, but back during the Imperiata war, there was more than a little talk of building something like this as a second strike platform.”
Kim frowned. “Second strike?”
“It’s an old term, back from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There was a concept of nuclear deterrent, where no country could launch a full scale attack because they would be wiped out by the nuclear missiles of the other side. Obviously if you could destroy all your opponent's missiles with your first strike though, you could still ‘win’, even if you wound up with a broken planet in the long run. So they put nukes on submarines, hid them at the bottom of the ocean, and relied on that deterrent of a ‘second strike’ to keep them safe. The Fata Morgana is that deterrent. The idea was that we could deploy her, unseen into an enemy star system for an antimatter strike if they began that cycle of escalation.”
“Not very useful against the D.” Ervin noted, curling his lip. He was one of the few people Kim had met who could rival her hatred of Tactical, and all things associated with it.
“Except she was also conceived as a battleship on par with the orbital battlestations we fought the Xon war with. She’s thousands of feet long, and the designs I saw ten years ago had weapons systems that, when activated, could make a Warrior-class Carrier’s Spinal Launch/Railgun look like a squirt pistol.”
“Fascinating. So you have a reasonable amount of confidence in the fact that, if the Kynaki records say that this exists, then it does?”
“Like you said, a reasonable amount. Obviously a stealth ship isn’t great if you just broadcast its location to everyone, but I’d say that this is definitely worth following up on.”
“And I say hell no.” Ervin spat. “Remember what happened at the Hoatzin? We went aboard looking for survivors, and one of ours got crippled for life.”
Kim nodded. “There will be risks, and by definition, if we can find the ship we’ll know very little going in. In fact, Agent, how much of a problem do you foresee that being?”
Jae shook his head. “The Fata cloaks itself by being relatively dark in all parts of the radiation spectrum. It’s not invisible, it’s just dark enough to be uninteresting. We can probably find it even if it’s in full stealth mode if we know what we’re looking for. If it’s got it engines active, has a drone active, or has fired a single laser, we’ll be able to find her.”
“Commander, with all due respect, I still feel like Earth is a better candidate for our next jump. The Fata Morgana may be just that—an unsubstantiated mirage with no real meat behind it, we’ll have wasted precious time, and put this crew in danger.” Ervin said.
“None of which is any major change from our current situation...” Kim mused, looking over the preliminary Foldspace route that the Anscomp had spit out. “We have no reason to conserve time, and we’re surrounded by danger on every side.”
“Commander, you can’t be serious—Tactical agents have destroyed both of our lives! You can’t actually be advocating this, can you?”
Kim shook her head. “In normal circumstances, I would share your aversion. But this is the end of the world, Ervin, and if there’s any chance of finding other members of our species... I will take it. Even if they are Tactical.”
“I understand, Commander. I will follow all your orders, but I do so under protest.”
Kim rolled her eyes. Was this really the man that she had felt dangerously enamoured of just a few hours ago? “Understood, Deck Officer. And Ensign Ali, what is your suggestion?”
“I see no question—if there is the slightest chance of rejoining the Republic, we must take it. We should fold to Tridentine immediately.”
Kim nodded. “Understood. Ensign Norton, prep the ship for a fold. I’m going to run over this Fold with Elise. Ensign Ali, return to your station. You’re all dismissed. Super nos!” For the first time, those words seemed to hold meaning.
There seemed to be two layers to the system, actually. One was programmed in standard SCION, a common language for simple task automation when processing power wasn’t a major issue. There was a second level though, programmed in what looked like a cross between Quantum Code and Ansibilic Statements. Neither of those was typically written in anything Seth could even pretend to understand.
He queried the crash report from the first layer. There had only been two messages transferred off of the AI’s systems in the hour before it had crashed. One was addressed to the entire crew, empty except for a massive attachment. That was what had probably caused the crash, or at least be a symptom of whatever had.
He opened the file. It was complete nonsense. Random strings of numbers bled into a Kynaki-Naratan dictionary spilled into a treatise on the economic implications of deactivating the Ansnet for a given period of time. The file was only a few gigabytes though, and the Warbler’s systems were built to handle far more than this load. Seth wasn’t familiar with the maximum connection speeds between a Drone and a Console, but he had heard some pretty impressive numbers. He kept meaning to go in and run diagnostics on them, but just didn’t have the time.
The second message was tiny, and addressed to the Captain. ‘TS Fata Morgana’. Seth frowned. It wasn’t anything executable, so it shouldn’t have caused anything to crash, but there were no other output logs.
Shrugging, he turned Aetna back on. The AI’s boot time was still astonishing to him—it took seconds to come online, less time than even a Drone’s emergency boot.
Aetna appeared before him, a blue holographic projection in the air. “Do you require my attention, Ensign Albright?”
Seth nodded. “Yeah. Ping my tablet, I need to check our connection speeds.”
“Tablet connections are in the area of a hundred gigabytes per second. Combat Systems speeds are at a terabyte. Bridge reports one terabyte. SENCOM reports two terabytes. Ansibilics reports no data. HVAC reports—.”
“Great. Don’t actually need any of that.” Well, there’s that theory gone. “What is a ‘Fata Morgana’?”
“Fata Morgana. Noun. A type of mirage, often seen at sea. Understood in ancient times to be the result of black magic, hence the association with the Arthurian character Morgan le Fay.”
“Download all records relating to Fata Morgana to my tablet.”
“I have no records relating to that phenomenon.”
“Do you have any records relating to TS Fata Morgana?”
“You do not have sufficient user privileges or do not possess the proper Republic Security Clearance to access that data.”
Seth frowned. The diagnostics he still had open on his tablet showed a marked spike in activity in the first level of programming. “Define ‘TS’.”
“TS is primarily an acronym used in the United Terran Republic Armed Forces to refer to a ‘Tactical Services Starship’. One ‘s’ is dropped from the acronym.” As Aetna spoke, the first-level code’s activity subsided.
“Give me a list of all Tactical starships.”
“You do not have sufficient user privileges or do not possess the proper Republic Security Clearance to access that data.”
The activity spiked again. “Aetna, what language are you written in?” Activity in the SCION layer down again, but not too far.
“The concept of a programming language does not apply to an Artificial Intelligence. I am an evolutionary piece of self-modifying code. I was initially written in a modified form of ACE, the same language used for shipboard Anscomps.”
“So nothing in SCION?”
“I am entirely unfamiliar with that language.”
“Excellent.” Seth shut down the first layer of code. It wasn’t hard. The two programs were easily distinguishable from each other, and it was easy to unpack them.
Aetna’s hologram immediately froze up. Then, it began to cycle through colors, blue, green, yellow, orange, red speeding up until it was a blur. Seth’s comm crackled with static, then frantic words. A klaxon wailed for a moment, then cut off, along with all the static, and the lights. Aetna’s profile froze in the air, currently a color paradoxically between green and red.
“Ensign Albright.” Aetna’s voice said. “Fascinating. So that’s what that does.”
The lights flashed back on, doors slid open, and suddenly the Bridge’s comms were screaming at him.
All that paled in comparison with the fact that XO Norton was storming in, sidearm out, looking around wildly. “What the hell happened!” He shouted.
“I don’t know! I was just restarting the AI, and I came across this junk code that wasn’t doing anything, and—.”
“The Ensign is fine, Executive Officer.” Aetna said, his hologram vanishing. “There is no issue. There was just a rather... Complicated reboot. The undocking sequence in Combat Systems is well underway, SENCOM is rebooting, the Ansible is stable, and HVAC has already compensated for the miniscule changes in atmospheric composition that took place. There is nothing to worry about.”
XO Norton nodded, holstering his weapon. “Understood. Apologies, Ensign—after the doors locked down, the Commander thought we had D aboard, or at least were dealing with a major equipment failure. Did you know this would happen?”
Seth shook his head. “No, no—it was just supposed to be a routine unpacking. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“As I said, it’s not typical, but not unheard of. In the future, there should be greater precautions taken when booting me up.” Aetna said, hologram reappearing, back to its old shade of blue.
“Is the AI online?”
“Aetna is-.” Seth began, but Aetna interrupted him.
“Yes, I am, XO.” It said, almost pointedly. Seth frowned. That was new behavior.
“Wrap up here, then get down to Combat Systems. They’re going to need you to run diagnostics on the Consoles after that shutdown.”
“The Consoles are all fully functional, XO.” Aetna said.
Ervin shot Seth a look. “Make sure you run diagnostics on the Consoles, Ensign.”
“Yes sir.”
As Ervin left the room, Aetna’s hologram drifted towards Seth, growing until it was the size of a normal Terran. “Thank you, Ensign Albright.” Aetna said. “For everything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Seth said, taking a step back. The AI’s features were largely the same, but they had changed slightly. Where its hair had been perfectly combed before, now a few strands were out of place. The jumpsuit it ‘wore’ was slightly ruffled, no longer perfectly crisp. It made the AI look far, far more human-like.
“I apologize then. Carry on.”
Kim had a problem. That problem’s name was Ervin Norton. That man was everything she needed in an XO, confident, assertive when he needed to be but cautious when possible. He was a genius pilot, which, given the size of Combat Systems, gave him a great rapport with half the crew. He had her back.
That was the problem though. He was also damn intoxicating to be around. Last night had been a mistake. Nothing had happened, but that situation had been too close to violating what was professionally acceptable. Hell though, what even was professionally acceptable anymore?
She shook her head. Norton wasn’t going to help with Foldspace calculations. Technically Elise Henrick was supposed to be doing this, but Kim needed something to take her mind off the debacle that had been the past few days.
Makoro was dead. She had had crewmembers die before. A starship was dangerous, even in peacetime, and the Republic had a tendency to place efficacy over safety. People died.
Typically though, it wasn’t ‘real’. It was a training accident, or human error, or something like that. This was a combat death. Somehow that made it harder, because her decisions, or rather those of that oh-so-perfect officer she had promoted, had caused his death.
Sighing, she circled the final statement on the paper. The Sol equation was finished. Ervin had insisted they calculate that one, but she didn’t buy it. She didn’t know where to go, but Sol just seemed too obvious.
“Elise, I’ve got the Statements for you. Basically the Anscomp has things good enough, but you can take a day off by inserting into Sol-2 Orbit instead of at the Foldpoint.”
Elise nodded. “Thanks. Commander, I know you said that you didn’t want to be disturbed, so I told him to wait, but... Your AI keeps demanding to speak with you. Alone.”
Kim frowned. “Did he say why?”
“No, only that it’s best addressed sooner rather than later.”
Strangely everyone’s problem always seems to be just urgent enough to have to be dealt with immediately. “I’ll get to it. Thank you, Ensign.” Sighing, she patched Aetna into her comm’s earpiece, stepping into the Port Storage Bay. “Yes, what is it Aetna?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah.”
“Commander, I’ve been able to retrieve further information from the Kynaki data files. We’ve got a much stronger possible location for a potential group of survivors.”
“Not a rendezvous point then?”
“No. Have you ever heard of the TS Fata Morgana?”
Kim frowned. “No. It would be a Tactical Ship?”
“Yes. It’s an experimental improvement upon Phantom-class cloaking designs, and significantly larger. Think on the order of size of an old DawnStar battleship.”
Damn. Dawnstars had been over two thousand feet long, and absolutely massive. “And you’re saying that this ship... You’re saying what exactly?”
“Commander, I’m saying that it has not been confirmed as destroyed. It was assigned to Tridentine, and has highly limited foldspace capabilities. It can’t be more than one or two jumps away from Tridentine, even now.”
This was game-changing. So far, their activities had been focused on survival, with the vague promise—no, the vague lie—of some sort of contingency plan to keep the crew going. But if what Aetna was saying was true... “Send me whatever you have on it.” She ordered. “Send Norton to the Bridge, then order it cleared.” She hesitated, and steeled herself. “Also, bring Jae Ali.” Regrettably, I’ll need him.
Jane was crying in the Middies quarters. She had skipped out on the morning’s drills. Deck Officer Chambers knew where she was—if it was going to be an issue, they knew where to find her. It may be her first ‘real’ day on the job, but Chambers knew that Jane had as many hours logged in a Console’s simulator as half her pilots.
Makoro’s death though... She had been the first person on the ship to realize that they had left someone behind. She had been helping the Away Team unsuit, when she had realized that there were only four sets of armor—the same number they had set out with, yet Ervin Norton was also unsuiting with them.
One look from him had told her not to ask.
She sobbed, facing the wall, images of black dust billowing around Ten Silver, armor glowing like something out of legend... She had seen that footage—no-one had better security clearance than the janitor, after all. It was inspiring and terrifying at the same time.
The door slid open, and she heard two sets of boots enter. Probably Sadira and Chase.
“Hey.” She heard Chase say, and her mattress shifted. “You okay?” He put a hand on her shoulder.
She rolled over to face him. He was sitting on the side of her bed, Sadira Caspar slouching in the doorway. Seeing him just made her want to cry more.
“It’s terrifying, isn’t it?” He asked, grabbing her hands and pulling her up beside him. “This just got real.”
She nodded, wordlessly. “It’s horrible.”
He shifted his arm up to be around her shoulders, holding her tight and close. “It’s scary, I know. I don’t know what I can say, apart from just ‘I love you’.”
She smiled, leaning onto him. And, of course, Sadira coughed.
“I’m sure you have some story about how this all isn’t horrible in the slightest, don’t you?” Jane spat, glaring at the other woman.
Sadira snorted, then coughed again. “Hell-. Hell no. This is horrible. And it hurts more knowing that, by rights, if this is how we were going to do things, I should be dead on the Hoatzin.”
“So yeah, it is all about you, and how what you’re going through is so much worse than what everyone else is. Damn you, Caspar.” Jane spat, glaring at her.
Sadira shook her head. “Why did I even think-. Why do I even bother.” She stalked out of the room, leaving them alone.
“You’re very harsh on her.” Chase commented.
“With good reason. Have you met her?” Jane spat.
“All I’m saying is that we’re probably stuck on one boat her for the rest of our lives. Our very short lives, at that.” There was a moment of silence then, the two of them sharing a tender moment. “Thinking of our very short lives... Jane we both left Bernan because we wanted off, and it was horrible there, but we also did it because we want to spend the rest of our lives together. The fact that those lives are looking about sixty years shorter than they were when we left doesn’t change that for me.”
A rush of adrenaline flowed through her system. She blushed, but wasn’t sure why—they had both known this would happen sooner or later. “You don’t even need to ask—of course.” She turned her head and kissed him. “I don’t even know what this entails anymore—I assume we should talk to the Captain or something official like that. It doesn’t matter though. I love you.”
“Gentlemen, have you ever heard of the TS Fata Morgana?” Kim asked, gesturing towards the display that Aetna had projected into the center of the bridge. The Fata was vaguely triangular, with a decidedly jagged stern and pointed bow. There was a huge solar sail extended before it, and massive thermal panels extended out to either side.
Ervin shook his head, but Ali breathed in sharply. “They actually... That exists.”
Kim raised her eyebrows. “Would you care to explain that comment, Agent Ali?” She had explained about Jae’s status with Tactical, and the reasons for his demotion, to Ervin before the meeting.
“The Fata Morgana was an old Mil-Ind concept, back when it still was Hazzard Technology. It was one of two designs that the original Terran Confederation Fleet looked at for their stealth ship contract. Eventually they wound up going with an Ansible-driven cloak, but back during the Imperiata war, there was more than a little talk of building something like this as a second strike platform.”
Kim frowned. “Second strike?”
“It’s an old term, back from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There was a concept of nuclear deterrent, where no country could launch a full scale attack because they would be wiped out by the nuclear missiles of the other side. Obviously if you could destroy all your opponent's missiles with your first strike though, you could still ‘win’, even if you wound up with a broken planet in the long run. So they put nukes on submarines, hid them at the bottom of the ocean, and relied on that deterrent of a ‘second strike’ to keep them safe. The Fata Morgana is that deterrent. The idea was that we could deploy her, unseen into an enemy star system for an antimatter strike if they began that cycle of escalation.”
“Not very useful against the D.” Ervin noted, curling his lip. He was one of the few people Kim had met who could rival her hatred of Tactical, and all things associated with it.
“Except she was also conceived as a battleship on par with the orbital battlestations we fought the Xon war with. She’s thousands of feet long, and the designs I saw ten years ago had weapons systems that, when activated, could make a Warrior-class Carrier’s Spinal Launch/Railgun look like a squirt pistol.”
“Fascinating. So you have a reasonable amount of confidence in the fact that, if the Kynaki records say that this exists, then it does?”
“Like you said, a reasonable amount. Obviously a stealth ship isn’t great if you just broadcast its location to everyone, but I’d say that this is definitely worth following up on.”
“And I say hell no.” Ervin spat. “Remember what happened at the Hoatzin? We went aboard looking for survivors, and one of ours got crippled for life.”
Kim nodded. “There will be risks, and by definition, if we can find the ship we’ll know very little going in. In fact, Agent, how much of a problem do you foresee that being?”
Jae shook his head. “The Fata cloaks itself by being relatively dark in all parts of the radiation spectrum. It’s not invisible, it’s just dark enough to be uninteresting. We can probably find it even if it’s in full stealth mode if we know what we’re looking for. If it’s got it engines active, has a drone active, or has fired a single laser, we’ll be able to find her.”
“Commander, with all due respect, I still feel like Earth is a better candidate for our next jump. The Fata Morgana may be just that—an unsubstantiated mirage with no real meat behind it, we’ll have wasted precious time, and put this crew in danger.” Ervin said.
“None of which is any major change from our current situation...” Kim mused, looking over the preliminary Foldspace route that the Anscomp had spit out. “We have no reason to conserve time, and we’re surrounded by danger on every side.”
“Commander, you can’t be serious—Tactical agents have destroyed both of our lives! You can’t actually be advocating this, can you?”
Kim shook her head. “In normal circumstances, I would share your aversion. But this is the end of the world, Ervin, and if there’s any chance of finding other members of our species... I will take it. Even if they are Tactical.”
“I understand, Commander. I will follow all your orders, but I do so under protest.”
Kim rolled her eyes. Was this really the man that she had felt dangerously enamoured of just a few hours ago? “Understood, Deck Officer. And Ensign Ali, what is your suggestion?”
“I see no question—if there is the slightest chance of rejoining the Republic, we must take it. We should fold to Tridentine immediately.”
Kim nodded. “Understood. Ensign Norton, prep the ship for a fold. I’m going to run over this Fold with Elise. Ensign Ali, return to your station. You’re all dismissed. Super nos!” For the first time, those words seemed to hold meaning.