Serengeti
by
J.B. Rockwell
Genre:
SciFi Adventure
It
was supposed to be an easy job: find the Dark Star Revolution
Starships, destroy them, and go home. But a booby-trapped vessel
decimates the Meridian Alliance fleet, leaving Serengeti—a Valkyrie
class warship with a sentient AI brain—on her own; wrecked and
abandoned in an empty expanse of space.
On
the edge of total failure, Serengeti thinks only of her crew. She
herds the survivors into a lifeboat, intending to sling them into
space. But the escape pod sticks in her belly, locking the
cryogenically frozen crew inside.
Then
a scavenger ship arrives to pick Serengeti's bones clean.
Her
engines dead, her guns long silenced, Serengeti and her last two
robots must find a way to fight the scavengers off and save the crew
trapped inside her.
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Serengeti dropped out of hyperspace into a quiet, empty section of the cosmos. Too quiet. Too empty. Sensors drank in data, feeding it to Serengeti’s AI brain. “Something’s not right,” she said Henricksen cocked his head, looking up at the camera. “Because we’re here or because the ships we came after aren’t?” Serengeti shunted the sensors’ feeds to the bridge. “Take a look for yourself.” Henricksen frowned and stabbed at a panel, parsing through the information it displayed. “Nothing.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. There should be something here.” “There should,” Serengeti agreed, studying him through the camera’s electronic eye. “That’s what has me worried.” Brutus—Bastion class, commander of their fleet—sent three scouts ahead, but none of them came back. Needless to say, Brutus was not happy. In his inimitable wisdom, he decided to send yet one more ship after those missing three. That’s how Serengeti ended up here, in this oh-so-quiet, oh-so-empty section of space. She and Henricksen, the rest of their crew. Drew the short straw. Lucky us. She scanned the area around them and found nothing. No marker buoys or distress beacons. No radiation signatures, none of the electronic noise interstellar vessels endlessly squawked out. Not one sign of their scouts or the enemy warships they’d been tracking. Just an unsettling silence Not good. Not good at all. Space was many things, but it was seldom quiet. “Nothing.” Henricksen pounded the panel in frustration. “Not a goddamned thing.” He straightened, looking out the huge windows wrapping the front of the bridge. “Where the hell are they, Serengeti?” Gone, she thought, drifting in the darkness, the stars keeping her company. Destroyed like all the other ships before them. Three ships—Osage, Barlow, Veil of Tears—lost with all their crew. Hundreds lives—AI and human both—wiped out in an instant. Hundreds added to the thousands already spent in this decades-long war between the Dark Star Revolution and the Meridian Alliance government. “Bastard.” Henricksen punched the panel in front of him. “Brutus already had intel on the DSR ships. He never should’ve sent Barlow and the others here. Or you after them,” he added, turning his eyes back to the camera. Serengeti considered him a moment, deciding how to answer. Henricksen was captain—her fourth captain in as many decades and by far her favorite. Solid man. Smart. Good instincts. Cool under pressure, when so many of his kind ran hot. More importantly, he knew his place. Knew he was captain of Serengeti’s crew, but not of Serengeti herself. His predecessor never quite figured that out. “Bastion says go, we go,” she said simply. “He leads this fleet, whether we like it or not.” Henricksen grimaced, obviously not liking it. Not one bit. Serengeti didn’t blame him. As AIs went, Brutus was kind of a prick. “There won’t be a fleet if he keeps throwing away ships like this.” Henricksen stared at the camera, waiting for Serengeti to respond, dropped his eyes to the display in front of him when she didn’t and toggled the feed, swapping one view for another and another. And when the electronic displays didn’t give him what he wanted, Henricksen turned to the bridge’s windows, searching the stars outside for answers. Serengeti found that amusing. As if human eyes could ever compete with AI sensors. “Dammit.” Henricksen curled his hands into fists, smacking the panel in frustration. “What the hell’s going on, Serengeti?” He looked up at a camera. “They should be here. Something should be here.” “There should,” she said again, having nothing better to offer. Henricksen grimaced, obviously hoping for more. “Two weeks, Serengeti. Two goddamn weeks we’ve been chasing those DSR bastards, and now they’re just gone. Ghosted away.” “And our scouts gone with them.” “Yeah.” Henricksen sighed and rubbed his face, scrubbed fingers through his short-clipped hair. Dark hair. Black as coal, once. Peppered with grey now, after so many years travelling the dark and stars. “Brutus is gonna be pissed,” he said, eyeing the camera. “Probably right.” Serengeti paused, choosing her words carefully. “This mission—” “Mission.” Kusikov—Communications Officer, a slim, bookish-looking young man in an ill-fitting uniform—snorted in disdain. “More like wild goose chase,” he said, throwing a sullen look at the nearest camera. Henricksen folded his arms, glowering at his comms officer. “You got a problem, Kusikov?” Kusikov flushed and cut his eyes away, taking a sudden interest in the station in front of him. He was overly smart for a human, and well aware of it—a fact Serengeti found amusing at times, and flat-out annoying at others—but even Kusikov knew better than to lock horns with Henricksen. Especially on the bridge. “No, sir,” Kusikov muttered. “No problem.” “Good,” Henricksen grunted, turning away. “Waste of time,” Kusikov mumbled. Henricksen froze, back rigid, head turning slowly toward Comms. “Is that what you think? Really?” “I wasn’t—” “’Cause I don’t think the relatives of those people on Tissolo do.” Ice in Henricksen’s voice, an arctic tundra in his grey eyes. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—” Shock drained the color from Kusikov’s face, shame sparked two bright blooms on his cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir.” “Damn right, you are. Tissolo started all this, Kusikov. Not the war maybe—that’s been going on as long as anyone can remember—but that’s why we’re here now,” Henricksen jerked a thumb at the windows, “taking census of this backwater section of space.” Kusikov ducked his head, flushing more brightly. They all knew about Tissolo now, and the mining colony the Dark Star Revolution destroyed a few weeks back. No one paid much attention to the planet before then, but after what the DSR did…uproar. Demands for retaliation, blood for blood. That’s how things went these days. And so, to appease the people on Tissolo, and address the fears of the twenty-eight other planets under Meridian Alliance rule, the Citadel sent Brutus and a small armada after them. Three hundred and forty-two heavily armed AI warships sent after a rag-tag fleet of DSR vessels. Brutus, being Brutus, was only too happy to take on the challenge. After all, it was a big operation—an important operation—and a chance to get noticed by the Citadel, who was admiral in charge of the fleet. Two weeks they’d been searching, chasing the DSR ships that attached Tissolo across light years of space. Two weeks of failure and missed chances. Brutus was starting to feel the pressure. Serengeti almost felt bad for him. Almost. “Tissolo was a massacre.” Henricksen took a step towards Comms. Kusikov blanched and moved a step away. “Our job, Kusikov, is to hunt down every last one of those DSR bastards and destroy them.” Cold words. Simple, brutal orders passed down from the highest levels. No trial this time. No second chances. No benefit of the doubt or consideration of the DSR’s intentions. Just death and vengeance. That’s the point they’d gotten to in this war. Henricksen moved another step closer. “Bastion says find those ships and chew them into tiny metallic bits, then that’s what we’re gonna do. Savvy?” “Yes, sir,” Kusikov said quietly. “Good. Now stop complaining and find something useful to do.” “Aye, sir.” Kusikov stared at his feet—head bowed, shoulders slumped, looking like a contrite schoolboy. A quick look at the camera above him, shoulders shrugging apologetically, and Kusikov stabbed at the panel in front of him, carefully avoiding his captain’s eyes, never quite looking him in the face. Henricksen gave him a long look, eyeing Kusikov suspiciously as he puttered about, trying to appear busy. “I said useful, Kusikov. That’s just randomly poking buttons.” “Yes, sir.” A hint of sullenness crept back into Kusikov’s voice, but he grabbed up his comms visor, fiddling with the settings before slipping it over his head. Henricksen grunted, shaking his head as he turned away from Comms and looked up at the nearest camera. “So whaddaya wanna do?” Serengeti thought a moment before answering. “Empty this place may be, but there’s more here, I think, than meets the eye.” Or sensors in her case. Serengeti didn’t really have eyes, just her systems and her sensors, the cameras throughout her body. But then, those were better than human eyes, weren’t they? Infinitely better. Far more exact. She studied the stars outside through those sensors, activated a dozen different cameras set in the plating of her hull and peered through those too, AI mind processing, parsing through reams of streaming data. Not much there. Not much to go on at all. “I say we take a closer look.” Henricksen dropped his eyes to the bridge’s front windows, taking a look himself. “Good idea,” he said, nodding slowly. “Initiating active scans.” Serengeti reached for systems, sending a deluge of muons and other elementary particles into the emptiness around them. “Short range is coming up empty,” a woman’s crisp voice said. That was Finlay at the Scan station—late to the party and trying to make up for it. She was a tiny thing, even for a human. Petite and red-headed with a spray of freckles across her cheeks and nose, bright—though not the genius Kusikov claimed to be, nor a tenth as annoying—eager and just the tiniest bit naive. Serengeti liked her. Liked her a lot. In fact, she liked most of the crew she’d been given this time around. Even Kusikov when he wasn’t being a smart-ass know-it-all. Not as many veterans on board as there once were, but she enjoyed this crew’s youthful exuberance. Their idealistic approach to a war that had raged for half a century and more. A little too idealistic sometimes, Serengeti admitted, but Henricksen kept them grounded. Henricksen and Sikuuku, the handful of other veterans throughout the ship. They’d seen it all—the worst war had to offer—and adapted. Overcame. Kept on fighting. Serengeti respected that, and them. Youthful exuberance was one thing. Youthful exuberance unfettered could get them all killed. She let the scans run, processed the data they returned and then waited, holding her tongue, letting Finlay work through the information in her slow, methodical way. Finlay cycled her panel, swapping one data screen for another. “Long-range scan’s picking something up.” Good girl. “What?” Henricksen demanded. “What’s out there?” “Hard to tell.” Finlay frowned in confusion, shaking her head. “Few pings, that’s it.” She tapped at the panel in front of her, scrolling through the sensors’ data streams one after the other. Lot of information there. Hard for a human mind—even a bright one like Finlay’s—to make sense of it all. “Dammit.” Finlay swiped at the panel in frustration, starting over from the beginning. Serengeti parsed a few strings, ran a quick correlation, and pushed the results to the Scan station to help Finlay out. She’d get it eventually, but Serengeti needed to move this along. An AI only had so much patience for the slowing processing of a human mind, after all. Finlay pulled the new data over to her central screen and leaned close, brow furrowed as her eyes devoured the information. “Looks like…metal? Some kind of alloy? Or composite, maybe.” A few more taps at her screen, another shake of her head. “Whatever’s out there, it’s not a ship.” “At least not anymore,” Henricksen said softly. Far too softly for Finlay or the rest of the bridge crew to hear, just loud enough for Serengeti’s microphones to pick his words up. He raised his eyes to the camera in front of him, mounted high up on the wall. “Could’ve been, once upon a time.” He stared into the camera’s lens a second or two and then flicked his eyes back to the front windows, looking out at the stars. Serengeti looked with him, studying the emptiness outside with one fraction of her consciousness while the bulk of her processing power sifted through the wealth of data her systems collected. Definitely metal out there. Metal and composite both. But whether it was the remains of a ship or not… Hard to tell. Finlay’s right in that. Serengeti amped up the sensors, reaching farther out with her scans, stretching to the very edge of her systems’ range to suck in more data. Information poured in, but it didn’t really offer anything more than what Finlay had already reported. There wasn’t much out there—that’s just about all the scan data said. But those pings… Distant as they were, scattered as they were, those pings merited further investigation. “Launching probes,” Serengeti said, voice soft and serene, infinitely confident. Flares erupted along her port and starboard sides, rounded metallic shapes shooting off into space, ion drives glowing cobalt blue in the darkness. “Finlay. Bring the probes’ cameras up on the main screen,” Henricksen ordered. Finlay stared at the console a moment, lips pressed tight, looking like she’d eaten a lemon. “Finlay!” “Aye, sir.” Finlay threw an irritated look at the closest camera as she set her hands on the panels in front of her. She was mad—that was clear—and her fingers fairly flew across the Scan station as she called up the feeds from the twelve probes Serengeti had sent out. A few seconds of processing and she shunted the video to the front windows—thick panes stretching from the floor to ceiling, curving with the outside wall of the bridge—so the rest of the command crew could see. Odd, those windows, and that state of the art vessels like Serengeti, still came equipped with them. Once upon a time, those reinforced panes were necessary, back in the days when ships’ scans were limited and line of sight still mattered. But now…modern ships’ systems provided far more information than human eyes could ever discern. And yet human designers clung to the idea of windows anyway, inserting them into every new ship that rolled off the line. Serengeti asked Henricksen about that once, wondering why humans insisted on keeping such a silly, useless thing. Henricksen just shrugged and said they liked them. That they liked to look through them at the stars… An error message appeared, flashing until Serengeti gave it her attention. She spotted the problem right away and started to fix it. Finlay belatedly noticed and jumped in to help. “Number Ten’s malfunctioning.” She frowned at the blank window where the data from the Number Ten feed should have been. Number Ten had always been buggy—a manufacturing defect, or maybe just a quirk of its programming. The probes were AI, after all, and designed by humans. “Running diagnostics.” Faster if Serengeti ran the diagnostics herself, but she left Finlay to it to appease her, and cast her eyes about the bridge while she waited for the results. Five stations on the bridge—plus the captain’s chair—with a single crewman manning each. The Captain’s Command Post sat dead center in the middle with the other stations—Scan, Communications, Navigation, Engineering, Artillery—arranged in a ring around it. Circular stations, circular bridge, circular camera eyes watching over it all. The ship designers certainly do like circles, Serengeti thought idly. She checked in on Finlay, working away at her circular station, found her still working furiously away. This was taking too long. Ten was a puzzle Serengeti figured out long ago, no sense having Finlay try to recover that ground. She reached for the probe herself, bypassing Finlay entirely to dip directly into Number Ten’s systems. “Repairs complete,” Serengeti said, making a last few adjustments before bringing the probe’s feed online. “I had it,” Finlay muttered, stabbing angrily at the console in front of her. “Stow it, Finlay,” Henricksen barked. Finlay flushed brightly. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” She raised her eyes to the camera in front of her, looking angry and contrite at the same time. She nodded stiffly to the camera and then bowed her head, focusing all of her attention on the Scan station in front of her. Finlay was a hard charger and didn’t like being shown up. By anyone. Not even a Valkyrie class starship. Serengeti filed that away, adding it to the library of information she’d collected from her human crews over the years. She was AI, her mind a thousand times more powerful than a human’s organic brain, but she forgot sometimes how important it was for humans to feel needed. Need. Such a strange concept. So difficult for an AI to understand. Truth be told, Serengeti didn’t really need her human crew. It was slower—infinitely slower—to let them run basic ship’s operations. She could manage everything on her own and still have enough processing power to monitor the hundreds of cameras and relays, circuits and networks and every other thing wired into her body. But I like having them about, Serengeti thought to herself. Crew was…comforting. For herself and the humans who’d made her. Truth be told, humans still didn’t quite trust AIs. Funny, considering human engineers designed every last one of them, making them stronger, more capable with each generation. Humans built AIs and wrapped them inside armored shells they launched into the stars, but they still wanted human crews on board those space-faring ships. Human minds and human judgment as a counter—or perhaps a foil—to ship’s intelligence. Because most AIs couldn’t feel in the way humans did. Maybe there’s something to that, Serengeti mused. We’ve learned emotion—some of us anyway—but it’s not organic. Not innate. She cast her eyes across the bridge, looking from Henricksen to the stations behind him, circling around to Finlay at Scan. Need was important—Serengeti learned that over the years. Next time, she’d let Finlay run the scans and argue with Number Ten. Good luck with that one, sister.
ONE
Serengeti dropped out of hyperspace into a quiet, empty section of the cosmos. Too quiet. Too empty. Sensors drank in data, feeding it to Serengeti’s AI brain. “Something’s not right,” she said Henricksen cocked his head, looking up at the camera. “Because we’re here or because the ships we came after aren’t?” Serengeti shunted the sensors’ feeds to the bridge. “Take a look for yourself.” Henricksen frowned and stabbed at a panel, parsing through the information it displayed. “Nothing.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t make sense. There should be something here.” “There should,” Serengeti agreed, studying him through the camera’s electronic eye. “That’s what has me worried.” Brutus—Bastion class, commander of their fleet—sent three scouts ahead, but none of them came back. Needless to say, Brutus was not happy. In his inimitable wisdom, he decided to send yet one more ship after those missing three. That’s how Serengeti ended up here, in this oh-so-quiet, oh-so-empty section of space. She and Henricksen, the rest of their crew. Drew the short straw. Lucky us. She scanned the area around them and found nothing. No marker buoys or distress beacons. No radiation signatures, none of the electronic noise interstellar vessels endlessly squawked out. Not one sign of their scouts or the enemy warships they’d been tracking. Just an unsettling silence Not good. Not good at all. Space was many things, but it was seldom quiet. “Nothing.” Henricksen pounded the panel in frustration. “Not a goddamned thing.” He straightened, looking out the huge windows wrapping the front of the bridge. “Where the hell are they, Serengeti?” Gone, she thought, drifting in the darkness, the stars keeping her company. Destroyed like all the other ships before them. Three ships—Osage, Barlow, Veil of Tears—lost with all their crew. Hundreds lives—AI and human both—wiped out in an instant. Hundreds added to the thousands already spent in this decades-long war between the Dark Star Revolution and the Meridian Alliance government. “Bastard.” Henricksen punched the panel in front of him. “Brutus already had intel on the DSR ships. He never should’ve sent Barlow and the others here. Or you after them,” he added, turning his eyes back to the camera. Serengeti considered him a moment, deciding how to answer. Henricksen was captain—her fourth captain in as many decades and by far her favorite. Solid man. Smart. Good instincts. Cool under pressure, when so many of his kind ran hot. More importantly, he knew his place. Knew he was captain of Serengeti’s crew, but not of Serengeti herself. His predecessor never quite figured that out. “Bastion says go, we go,” she said simply. “He leads this fleet, whether we like it or not.” Henricksen grimaced, obviously not liking it. Not one bit. Serengeti didn’t blame him. As AIs went, Brutus was kind of a prick. “There won’t be a fleet if he keeps throwing away ships like this.” Henricksen stared at the camera, waiting for Serengeti to respond, dropped his eyes to the display in front of him when she didn’t and toggled the feed, swapping one view for another and another. And when the electronic displays didn’t give him what he wanted, Henricksen turned to the bridge’s windows, searching the stars outside for answers. Serengeti found that amusing. As if human eyes could ever compete with AI sensors. “Dammit.” Henricksen curled his hands into fists, smacking the panel in frustration. “What the hell’s going on, Serengeti?” He looked up at a camera. “They should be here. Something should be here.” “There should,” she said again, having nothing better to offer. Henricksen grimaced, obviously hoping for more. “Two weeks, Serengeti. Two goddamn weeks we’ve been chasing those DSR bastards, and now they’re just gone. Ghosted away.” “And our scouts gone with them.” “Yeah.” Henricksen sighed and rubbed his face, scrubbed fingers through his short-clipped hair. Dark hair. Black as coal, once. Peppered with grey now, after so many years travelling the dark and stars. “Brutus is gonna be pissed,” he said, eyeing the camera. “Probably right.” Serengeti paused, choosing her words carefully. “This mission—” “Mission.” Kusikov—Communications Officer, a slim, bookish-looking young man in an ill-fitting uniform—snorted in disdain. “More like wild goose chase,” he said, throwing a sullen look at the nearest camera. Henricksen folded his arms, glowering at his comms officer. “You got a problem, Kusikov?” Kusikov flushed and cut his eyes away, taking a sudden interest in the station in front of him. He was overly smart for a human, and well aware of it—a fact Serengeti found amusing at times, and flat-out annoying at others—but even Kusikov knew better than to lock horns with Henricksen. Especially on the bridge. “No, sir,” Kusikov muttered. “No problem.” “Good,” Henricksen grunted, turning away. “Waste of time,” Kusikov mumbled. Henricksen froze, back rigid, head turning slowly toward Comms. “Is that what you think? Really?” “I wasn’t—” “’Cause I don’t think the relatives of those people on Tissolo do.” Ice in Henricksen’s voice, an arctic tundra in his grey eyes. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—” Shock drained the color from Kusikov’s face, shame sparked two bright blooms on his cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir.” “Damn right, you are. Tissolo started all this, Kusikov. Not the war maybe—that’s been going on as long as anyone can remember—but that’s why we’re here now,” Henricksen jerked a thumb at the windows, “taking census of this backwater section of space.” Kusikov ducked his head, flushing more brightly. They all knew about Tissolo now, and the mining colony the Dark Star Revolution destroyed a few weeks back. No one paid much attention to the planet before then, but after what the DSR did…uproar. Demands for retaliation, blood for blood. That’s how things went these days. And so, to appease the people on Tissolo, and address the fears of the twenty-eight other planets under Meridian Alliance rule, the Citadel sent Brutus and a small armada after them. Three hundred and forty-two heavily armed AI warships sent after a rag-tag fleet of DSR vessels. Brutus, being Brutus, was only too happy to take on the challenge. After all, it was a big operation—an important operation—and a chance to get noticed by the Citadel, who was admiral in charge of the fleet. Two weeks they’d been searching, chasing the DSR ships that attached Tissolo across light years of space. Two weeks of failure and missed chances. Brutus was starting to feel the pressure. Serengeti almost felt bad for him. Almost. “Tissolo was a massacre.” Henricksen took a step towards Comms. Kusikov blanched and moved a step away. “Our job, Kusikov, is to hunt down every last one of those DSR bastards and destroy them.” Cold words. Simple, brutal orders passed down from the highest levels. No trial this time. No second chances. No benefit of the doubt or consideration of the DSR’s intentions. Just death and vengeance. That’s the point they’d gotten to in this war. Henricksen moved another step closer. “Bastion says find those ships and chew them into tiny metallic bits, then that’s what we’re gonna do. Savvy?” “Yes, sir,” Kusikov said quietly. “Good. Now stop complaining and find something useful to do.” “Aye, sir.” Kusikov stared at his feet—head bowed, shoulders slumped, looking like a contrite schoolboy. A quick look at the camera above him, shoulders shrugging apologetically, and Kusikov stabbed at the panel in front of him, carefully avoiding his captain’s eyes, never quite looking him in the face. Henricksen gave him a long look, eyeing Kusikov suspiciously as he puttered about, trying to appear busy. “I said useful, Kusikov. That’s just randomly poking buttons.” “Yes, sir.” A hint of sullenness crept back into Kusikov’s voice, but he grabbed up his comms visor, fiddling with the settings before slipping it over his head. Henricksen grunted, shaking his head as he turned away from Comms and looked up at the nearest camera. “So whaddaya wanna do?” Serengeti thought a moment before answering. “Empty this place may be, but there’s more here, I think, than meets the eye.” Or sensors in her case. Serengeti didn’t really have eyes, just her systems and her sensors, the cameras throughout her body. But then, those were better than human eyes, weren’t they? Infinitely better. Far more exact. She studied the stars outside through those sensors, activated a dozen different cameras set in the plating of her hull and peered through those too, AI mind processing, parsing through reams of streaming data. Not much there. Not much to go on at all. “I say we take a closer look.” Henricksen dropped his eyes to the bridge’s front windows, taking a look himself. “Good idea,” he said, nodding slowly. “Initiating active scans.” Serengeti reached for systems, sending a deluge of muons and other elementary particles into the emptiness around them. “Short range is coming up empty,” a woman’s crisp voice said. That was Finlay at the Scan station—late to the party and trying to make up for it. She was a tiny thing, even for a human. Petite and red-headed with a spray of freckles across her cheeks and nose, bright—though not the genius Kusikov claimed to be, nor a tenth as annoying—eager and just the tiniest bit naive. Serengeti liked her. Liked her a lot. In fact, she liked most of the crew she’d been given this time around. Even Kusikov when he wasn’t being a smart-ass know-it-all. Not as many veterans on board as there once were, but she enjoyed this crew’s youthful exuberance. Their idealistic approach to a war that had raged for half a century and more. A little too idealistic sometimes, Serengeti admitted, but Henricksen kept them grounded. Henricksen and Sikuuku, the handful of other veterans throughout the ship. They’d seen it all—the worst war had to offer—and adapted. Overcame. Kept on fighting. Serengeti respected that, and them. Youthful exuberance was one thing. Youthful exuberance unfettered could get them all killed. She let the scans run, processed the data they returned and then waited, holding her tongue, letting Finlay work through the information in her slow, methodical way. Finlay cycled her panel, swapping one data screen for another. “Long-range scan’s picking something up.” Good girl. “What?” Henricksen demanded. “What’s out there?” “Hard to tell.” Finlay frowned in confusion, shaking her head. “Few pings, that’s it.” She tapped at the panel in front of her, scrolling through the sensors’ data streams one after the other. Lot of information there. Hard for a human mind—even a bright one like Finlay’s—to make sense of it all. “Dammit.” Finlay swiped at the panel in frustration, starting over from the beginning. Serengeti parsed a few strings, ran a quick correlation, and pushed the results to the Scan station to help Finlay out. She’d get it eventually, but Serengeti needed to move this along. An AI only had so much patience for the slowing processing of a human mind, after all. Finlay pulled the new data over to her central screen and leaned close, brow furrowed as her eyes devoured the information. “Looks like…metal? Some kind of alloy? Or composite, maybe.” A few more taps at her screen, another shake of her head. “Whatever’s out there, it’s not a ship.” “At least not anymore,” Henricksen said softly. Far too softly for Finlay or the rest of the bridge crew to hear, just loud enough for Serengeti’s microphones to pick his words up. He raised his eyes to the camera in front of him, mounted high up on the wall. “Could’ve been, once upon a time.” He stared into the camera’s lens a second or two and then flicked his eyes back to the front windows, looking out at the stars. Serengeti looked with him, studying the emptiness outside with one fraction of her consciousness while the bulk of her processing power sifted through the wealth of data her systems collected. Definitely metal out there. Metal and composite both. But whether it was the remains of a ship or not… Hard to tell. Finlay’s right in that. Serengeti amped up the sensors, reaching farther out with her scans, stretching to the very edge of her systems’ range to suck in more data. Information poured in, but it didn’t really offer anything more than what Finlay had already reported. There wasn’t much out there—that’s just about all the scan data said. But those pings… Distant as they were, scattered as they were, those pings merited further investigation. “Launching probes,” Serengeti said, voice soft and serene, infinitely confident. Flares erupted along her port and starboard sides, rounded metallic shapes shooting off into space, ion drives glowing cobalt blue in the darkness. “Finlay. Bring the probes’ cameras up on the main screen,” Henricksen ordered. Finlay stared at the console a moment, lips pressed tight, looking like she’d eaten a lemon. “Finlay!” “Aye, sir.” Finlay threw an irritated look at the closest camera as she set her hands on the panels in front of her. She was mad—that was clear—and her fingers fairly flew across the Scan station as she called up the feeds from the twelve probes Serengeti had sent out. A few seconds of processing and she shunted the video to the front windows—thick panes stretching from the floor to ceiling, curving with the outside wall of the bridge—so the rest of the command crew could see. Odd, those windows, and that state of the art vessels like Serengeti, still came equipped with them. Once upon a time, those reinforced panes were necessary, back in the days when ships’ scans were limited and line of sight still mattered. But now…modern ships’ systems provided far more information than human eyes could ever discern. And yet human designers clung to the idea of windows anyway, inserting them into every new ship that rolled off the line. Serengeti asked Henricksen about that once, wondering why humans insisted on keeping such a silly, useless thing. Henricksen just shrugged and said they liked them. That they liked to look through them at the stars… An error message appeared, flashing until Serengeti gave it her attention. She spotted the problem right away and started to fix it. Finlay belatedly noticed and jumped in to help. “Number Ten’s malfunctioning.” She frowned at the blank window where the data from the Number Ten feed should have been. Number Ten had always been buggy—a manufacturing defect, or maybe just a quirk of its programming. The probes were AI, after all, and designed by humans. “Running diagnostics.” Faster if Serengeti ran the diagnostics herself, but she left Finlay to it to appease her, and cast her eyes about the bridge while she waited for the results. Five stations on the bridge—plus the captain’s chair—with a single crewman manning each. The Captain’s Command Post sat dead center in the middle with the other stations—Scan, Communications, Navigation, Engineering, Artillery—arranged in a ring around it. Circular stations, circular bridge, circular camera eyes watching over it all. The ship designers certainly do like circles, Serengeti thought idly. She checked in on Finlay, working away at her circular station, found her still working furiously away. This was taking too long. Ten was a puzzle Serengeti figured out long ago, no sense having Finlay try to recover that ground. She reached for the probe herself, bypassing Finlay entirely to dip directly into Number Ten’s systems. “Repairs complete,” Serengeti said, making a last few adjustments before bringing the probe’s feed online. “I had it,” Finlay muttered, stabbing angrily at the console in front of her. “Stow it, Finlay,” Henricksen barked. Finlay flushed brightly. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” She raised her eyes to the camera in front of her, looking angry and contrite at the same time. She nodded stiffly to the camera and then bowed her head, focusing all of her attention on the Scan station in front of her. Finlay was a hard charger and didn’t like being shown up. By anyone. Not even a Valkyrie class starship. Serengeti filed that away, adding it to the library of information she’d collected from her human crews over the years. She was AI, her mind a thousand times more powerful than a human’s organic brain, but she forgot sometimes how important it was for humans to feel needed. Need. Such a strange concept. So difficult for an AI to understand. Truth be told, Serengeti didn’t really need her human crew. It was slower—infinitely slower—to let them run basic ship’s operations. She could manage everything on her own and still have enough processing power to monitor the hundreds of cameras and relays, circuits and networks and every other thing wired into her body. But I like having them about, Serengeti thought to herself. Crew was…comforting. For herself and the humans who’d made her. Truth be told, humans still didn’t quite trust AIs. Funny, considering human engineers designed every last one of them, making them stronger, more capable with each generation. Humans built AIs and wrapped them inside armored shells they launched into the stars, but they still wanted human crews on board those space-faring ships. Human minds and human judgment as a counter—or perhaps a foil—to ship’s intelligence. Because most AIs couldn’t feel in the way humans did. Maybe there’s something to that, Serengeti mused. We’ve learned emotion—some of us anyway—but it’s not organic. Not innate. She cast her eyes across the bridge, looking from Henricksen to the stations behind him, circling around to Finlay at Scan. Need was important—Serengeti learned that over the years. Next time, she’d let Finlay run the scans and argue with Number Ten. Good luck with that one, sister.
Serengeti 2:
Dark and Stars
Fifty-three
years Serengeti drifted, dreaming in the depths of space. Fifty-three
years of patient waiting before her Valkyrie Sisters arrive to
retrieve her from the dark. A bittersweet homecoming follows, the
Fleet Serengeti once knew now in shambles, its admiral, Cerberus,
gone missing, leaving Brutus in charge. Brutus who’s subsumed the
Fleet, ignoring his duty to the Meridian Alliance to pursue a
vendetta against the Dark Star Revolution.
The
Valkyries have a plan to stop him—depose Brutus and restore the
Fleet’s purpose—and that plan involves Serengeti. Depends on
Serengeti turning her guns against her own.
Because
the Fleet can no longer be trusted. With Brutus in charge, it’s
just Serengeti and her Sisters, and whatever reinforcements they can
find.
A
top-to-bottom refit restores Serengeti to service, and after a rushed
reunion with Henricksen and her surviving crew, she takes off for the
stars. For Faraday—a prison station—to stage a jailbreak, and
free the hundreds of Meridian Alliance AIs wrongfully imprisoned in
its Vault. From there to the Pandoran Cloud and a rendezvous with her
Valkyrie Sisters. To retrieve a fleet of rebel ships stashed away
inside.
One
last battle, one last showdown with Brutus and his Dreadnoughts and
it all ends. A civil war—one half of the Meridian Alliance Fleet
turned against the other, with the very future of the Meridian
Alliance hanging in the balance.
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Cold slid around her body. The icy cold of deep space, tickling at her flanks. The pitter-patter of stardust tumbling along the long length of Serengeti’s hull. Best feeling in the universe, being a starship on the move. And that dream of cold infinitely preferable to the visions of fire and death. The memories of destruction lurking deep inside her AI mind. She reveled in that feeling, hiding deep, deep down in the darkness. Opened her eyes and looked upon the stars all around her, slipping silently by the cameras sprinkled up and down her hull. Moving stars—that confused her. Stars never moved, only her perspective on them. Stars gliding by meant she herself must be moving. And that made no sense at all. Last she checked, her engines were dead as a doornail. Silenced decades ago. But those stars out there said differently, and the stars never lied. A check of her systems showed propulsion offline—main engines, hyperspace drives, everything inside Serengeti’s battered body just as she remembered. Burnt out and broken. Ragged remains of a once proud warship. Her confusion deepening, Serengeti abandoned the stars to hunt her internal spaces, making the rounds of the cameras mounted in her corridors and compartments before settling into just one—her favorite, looking down on the bridge. Someone waited there for her. A robot, standing all alone in the shattered bridge’s gloom. “Tig,” she breathed, drawing a bit of power, activating the pin lights in the ceiling, circling the bridge’s rounded space. Reckless expenditure, that, considering her one functioning fuel cell showed barely a third full. But she wanted to see him. Yearned to look upon Tig’s chromed face. The robot blinked in the sudden brightness, face lights ticking across its too-shiny cheeks. Head lifting, cobalt blue eyes wide and round—oversized and glowing, reflecting off the metal of his chromed face—locking onto the camera set high up on the wall. Not Tig after all, she thought, studying the robot’s face. A TIG without doubt—same rounded head and ovoid body, same jointed, spidering legs—but not Tig. Definitely not her loyal, little Tig. Too clean, she thought, looking him over. No dents and scrapes on this robot’s body. None of the wear and tear Tig had picked up along the way. She zoomed in tight, focusing the camera on the robot’s designation. The letters and numbers stenciled in black as pitch paint on his side. TIG-996. A query showed no 996 in her records. Not mine. Definitely not one of mine. So how the hell did it get on board? “Who are you?” Serengeti demanded, frost in her voice. “Where did you come from? Where’s Tig?” she asked belatedly, because he should be here. Tig was always here to greet her when she woke from the dark. “TIG-442 is in the engine room where he belongs.” Calm voice issuing from the speaker the robot used as a mouth. Calm as still water, and infinitely serene. Infinitely AI. The robot stared at the camera, cobalt lights ticking up and down its face. “As for me…” The ticking stopped, face lights drawing together in a line. A line that curved, becoming a lopsided smile. “Has it been that long, Serengeti, that you’ve already forgotten your Sister?” A touch came, intimate and familiar, tickling at Serengeti’s mind. A touch she knew, a voice she knew, laughter she hadn’t heard in a long, long time. “Sechura,” Serengeti breathed across the cold silence of the bridge. The TIG’s head bowed, front legs spreading wide. “In the flesh,” she said, fondness in her voice. “Well, the metal anyway.” She laughed again and blanked one cobalt eye, offering a wink to the camera. “You’re here. You’re really here,” Serengeti whispered, hardly daring to believe it. Decades she’d drifted—broken, sleeping, wondering if she’d drift forever—and now, finally, a Valkyrie appeared. One of her own Sisters come to retrieve Serengeti from the dark. “How?” she asked. “Why? Why have you come to me this way?” “What? The robot?” Sechura glanced down at the TIG’s joint-legged body. Flicked a leg in dismissal as the robot’s eyes returned to the camera. “Comms are shredded. How else was I supposed to talk to you?” The smile turned cheeky. Mischievous and sly. That was Sechura. She just couldn’t help herself. Enjoyed life too much to be serious all the time. “My crew?” Serengeti asked. “Are they—Did they—?” “Safe, Sister,” Sechura assured her. Serengeti laughed shakily, filled with relief. “Where are they?” The smile dimmed. Sechura sobered. “With me. They’re safe with me.” “Where? Where are you? Where am I, for that matter?” she asked, because after all this time, she still didn’t know. Navigation destroyed, all her star charts hidden away. “I’m moving, Sechura.” Sechura nodded slowly, pin lights sparking off the TIG’s chromed face. “How?” Serengeti asked her. “How am I moving? What’s happened? What’s—?” “Peace!” Sechura laughed, raising the robot’s front legs. “Peace, Sister. One question at a time.” One question? She had a million questions. One hardly seemed fair. “The TIG,” she said, choosing that one. “How did it get here? Where are you, Sister?” “That’s two questions,” Sechura noted. “But I like you, so I’ll allow it.” The smile widened, Cheshire cat grin stretching right across the TIG’s face. “Go outside.” She pointed a jointed leg at the camera, at the ceiling above the robot’s head. “See for yourself.” Serengeti sighed in annoyance. She’d been outside, and found more questions than answers. And with just that one working fuel cell—less than a third charged now, the tiniest of tiny reservoirs of power—she could hardly afford to waste her time faffing about. “Go,” Sechura repeated, making a shooing gesture with the robot’s leg. “Scoot.” A last look at the robot and Serengeti abandoned the bridge, working her way back to the hull. Flipped from one outward-facing camera to another until she spotted a twinkling shape just off her bow. A ship. Valkyrie, by the look of it. Sechura, if she had to guess. Five other Valkyries clustered around her, sleek-sided shapes sparkling in the starlight, sailing in tight formation with Serengeti herself in tow. She watched them a while, wishing she could speak to them. Touch at them mind to mind. From a distance, they looked perfect. Beautiful. Untouched by the ravages of war. Oh, my Sisters. Oh, how I’ve missed you. “How does it work?” she asked, dropping back to the bridge, camera lighting on the TIG’s form. “The towing, I mean. I didn’t see any cables or anything, so how are you pulling me along?” Sechura chuckled softly. “Pretty sneaky, eh? Atacama came up with it. The wake from our engines creates an overlapping subspace interference pattern that drags you along behind us.” She smiled proudly, but the grin soon faded, cobalt lights dimming in the TIG’s shining metal face. Sechura was quiet a moment, face lights ticking rhythmically, seeming to think something over. “Atacama…She still feels bad about leaving you, you know. We all do.” She ducked the robot’s head, chromed cheeks flushing. “We waited for you on the other side after…Brutus ordered the fleet home, but we stayed. We hoped…” She trailed off, shrugging uncomfortably, leg-end drawing patterns on the decking. “We looked for you, Serengeti. We looked for you for a long time.” “I know.” Serengeti reached for her, touching electric fingertips to the TIG’s face. “It’s not your fault, Sechura. Nor Atacama’s either. I risked the jump to hyperspace because staying where I was meant death. I thought—I thought my engines would hold together.” Another touch, passing information. Sharing that horrible moment when Serengeti tumbled out of the hyperspace trough. “Got that wrong, didn’t I?” She replayed the snippet of video, feeling surprisingly bitter after all these years. “Jump drives failed, ejecting me from hyperspace prematurely. Bit of a miracle you found me, really, considering you were searching blind across light years of space.” Like trying to find a needle in a haystack. A Henricksenism. One Serengeti particularly liked. Sechura flushed, cobalt eyes staring at the deck plates, leg-end sketching looping figure eights on the floor. “We didn’t, actually.” She snuck a look at the camera. “You found us, Serengeti. Or your crew did, anyway.” Serengeti stared a moment, not quite understanding. “My crew? You mean the lifeboat?” Sechura nodded and turned in a circle, surveying the damaged bridge. “No comms. No engines. No navigation or star charts. So you shoot that escape pod out into space—blind as a bat, crew frozen inside—and let it make its way back to us.” She laughed appreciatively, looking back at the camera, shaking the robot’s head. “You always were resourceful, Serengeti.” “You have no idea, Sister,” she whispered, earning herself a strange look. “How long?” she repeated, pretending she didn’t see it. The questions shining in the TIG’s cobalt eyes. “How long since…since…?” “Since the battle where Seychelles died?” Seychelles. Sister ship. The name hurt still. The memories even more. “Long, Sister,” Sechura said faintly. Fifty-three years according to Serengeti’s chron. She stared at that number, not wanting to believe it, but the chron never lied. The chron and the stars and Tig, her faithful companion. They were her anchors. Her constants through the long years of abandonment. Sechura turned away from the windows, rolling close to Serengeti’s camera, the TIG’s head tilting, face lights quiescent now. Nothing but those glowing eyes staring outward from its metal face. “I thought…” she began, and then broke off, looking away. “I’d given up hope, Serengeti.” Soft voice. Quiet and apologetic. “I thought—We thought we’d lost you forever. And then…” A shrug of robotic shoulders, metal legs bending and flexing, ovoid body bobbing up and down. “I’m sure Brutus was overjoyed when you told him the good news.” The words came out bitter—far more bitter than Serengeti intended. Sechura glanced sharply at the camera, head tilting to one side. A tick of face lights, as if she meant to say something, and Sechura shrugged again. Turned TIG-996 away. Pattered across the bridge to the crumpled Artillery pod, skirting around the captain’s Command Post on the way there. “Brutus did send you, didn’t he?” Third shrug—an odd, bouncing movement peculiar to the TIG model—as Sechura moved over to the windows, putting the robot’s back to the camera as she studied the stars outside. Serengeti watched her a while, wondering at the deflection. “How long, Sechura?” she asked, because she still hadn’t answered. Pointedly ignored that one repeated question. “How long have I been missing? How long have I been out here, sleeping in the dark?” The robot’s face lights erupted, swirls of color reflecting off the glass. Sechura looked at her, catching the camera’s reflection in the windows, sighed, and turned around. Moved a step away from the windows and then stopped dead—head tilting, face lights flashing in repeating patterns. “What is it?” Serengeti asked sharply. She knew that stance. Caught Tig standing that way often enough to recognize the posture of a robot listening to someone on an internal channel. “What’s happening?” “Nothing, Sister.” Sechura shivered and straightened, turning back to the windows. Resuming her contemplation of the stars. “It’s nothing.” “Sechura.” A sigh as Sechura bowed the TIG’s head, staring at the floor. “There isn’t much time, Serengeti.” Such an odd statement, considering the decades she’d been lost. And a check of her power levels showed Serengeti still had a good forty-five minutes before she dropped back into the dark. “Sechura. What’s going on?” Her Sister wouldn’t even look at her. Just shook the TIG’s head. “Sechura,” she called more insistently, and then waited, watching the robot by the windows until Sechura turned around. “Why are you here, Sister?” A flash of face lights—blotchy, twisting patterns crawling across the robot’s cheeks. “I can leave,” she said, affronted. “If that’s what you’d like. These aren’t exactly the most posh accommodations, after all.” She waved at the shattered bridge around her—an angry, insulted gesture. “That’s not what I meant,” Serengeti said quietly, and then paused, choosing her next words carefully. “You could have sent the TIG alone to confirm I was still functional. But you came with it. You sent part of your own consciousness here to check on me yourself. Why, Sechura?” Sechura blanked the robot’s face—every last light disappearing, Kept it blank for almost a full second before a line appeared, forming up in a familiar smile. “Because I care?” Flippant and teasing—typical Sechura response. Serengeti just stared, letting her silence and the camera’s unwinking eye do the talking for her. “Fine.” Sechura sighed again, turning back to the stars. “I came to get you.” She spoke to the glass. To the camera’s reflection. “You, Serengeti. Just you.” Took a moment, for the importance of that to sink in. “You mean you came for my brain.” Sechura shrugged and nodded. “Easier to break your crystal matrix mind free of its containment pod and carry that back with us than tow this wreck of a body across light years of space.” “No,” Serengeti said quietly. “No, what?” “This ship is my body, battered and broken though it may be.” “Serengeti—” “No,” she repeated, flatly refusing. “You came for me, Sister, and I’m grateful. But I won’t abandon this body. Not—Not after everything I’ve endured.” Sechura watched her, face lights flashing on and off, ticking in rapid-fire patterns. “Towing you will take time, Sister. Time we don’t have.” “What’s the hurry? I’ve been gone for decades. Why the sudden rush to get home?” Sechura didn’t answer. She just stared at the camera’s reflection, face lights ticking faster, and faster. “I’m tired of this,” Serengeti snapped. “I’m tired of all your cryptic bullshit. Where’s Tig? Why isn’t he here?” The face lights slowed and started swirling. Looking anxious now. Worried for some reason. “I told you. He’s in Engineering.” “I want to see him.” “Why? What does it—?” “Because I want some answers!” Sechura went very quiet. Very still. “You trust him.” She tilted TIG-996’s head, looking curious. And a tiny bit sad. “But you don’t trust me.” Serengeti sighed wearily. “It’s not about trust or distrust, Sister. I just want to know what’s going on.” “Don’t we all?” Sechura said softly. “I wish—” She stiffened, head tilting, taking on that ‘I’m listening to someone you can’t hear’ pose again. “No time,” she whispered, shaking herself, coming back to life. “There’s no time, Serengeti. I’m sorry, Sister, but we have to go. Now,” she said urgently. “Before he notices we’re gone.” The robot spun around, scuttling toward the camera. “Who?” Serengeti asked, completely confused. “Before who notices?” “Brutus.” A tremor shook Serengeti’s body, making the robot stumble. Sechura righted herself, recovering quickly, chromed face smiling apologetically as a shiver ran across Serengeti’s ravaged hull. A tug and Serengeti lurched forward, the stars sliding past more quickly as she picked up speed. She flipped to an outside camera, selecting one that faced forward, looking outward from her bow. Focused on the twinkling shapes of the Valkyries ahead of her, leading her along. Spotted a distortion forming around them—hyperspace buckle, the precursor to jump. Mass jump, in this case. The Valkyries’ warp fields overlapping. Serengeti herself caught up in it. “No,” she whispered. “Not this way.” “I’m sorry,” Sechura said, voice echoing inside her mind. “I’m sorry, Sister. There’s no other choice.” The distortion wave hit before Serengeti could stop her, bending, twisting, pulling at her ravaged hull. She shuddered and shook, tremors turning violent. And then the stars disappeared, dropping Serengeti back into the dark.
ONE
Cold slid around her body. The icy cold of deep space, tickling at her flanks. The pitter-patter of stardust tumbling along the long length of Serengeti’s hull. Best feeling in the universe, being a starship on the move. And that dream of cold infinitely preferable to the visions of fire and death. The memories of destruction lurking deep inside her AI mind. She reveled in that feeling, hiding deep, deep down in the darkness. Opened her eyes and looked upon the stars all around her, slipping silently by the cameras sprinkled up and down her hull. Moving stars—that confused her. Stars never moved, only her perspective on them. Stars gliding by meant she herself must be moving. And that made no sense at all. Last she checked, her engines were dead as a doornail. Silenced decades ago. But those stars out there said differently, and the stars never lied. A check of her systems showed propulsion offline—main engines, hyperspace drives, everything inside Serengeti’s battered body just as she remembered. Burnt out and broken. Ragged remains of a once proud warship. Her confusion deepening, Serengeti abandoned the stars to hunt her internal spaces, making the rounds of the cameras mounted in her corridors and compartments before settling into just one—her favorite, looking down on the bridge. Someone waited there for her. A robot, standing all alone in the shattered bridge’s gloom. “Tig,” she breathed, drawing a bit of power, activating the pin lights in the ceiling, circling the bridge’s rounded space. Reckless expenditure, that, considering her one functioning fuel cell showed barely a third full. But she wanted to see him. Yearned to look upon Tig’s chromed face. The robot blinked in the sudden brightness, face lights ticking across its too-shiny cheeks. Head lifting, cobalt blue eyes wide and round—oversized and glowing, reflecting off the metal of his chromed face—locking onto the camera set high up on the wall. Not Tig after all, she thought, studying the robot’s face. A TIG without doubt—same rounded head and ovoid body, same jointed, spidering legs—but not Tig. Definitely not her loyal, little Tig. Too clean, she thought, looking him over. No dents and scrapes on this robot’s body. None of the wear and tear Tig had picked up along the way. She zoomed in tight, focusing the camera on the robot’s designation. The letters and numbers stenciled in black as pitch paint on his side. TIG-996. A query showed no 996 in her records. Not mine. Definitely not one of mine. So how the hell did it get on board? “Who are you?” Serengeti demanded, frost in her voice. “Where did you come from? Where’s Tig?” she asked belatedly, because he should be here. Tig was always here to greet her when she woke from the dark. “TIG-442 is in the engine room where he belongs.” Calm voice issuing from the speaker the robot used as a mouth. Calm as still water, and infinitely serene. Infinitely AI. The robot stared at the camera, cobalt lights ticking up and down its face. “As for me…” The ticking stopped, face lights drawing together in a line. A line that curved, becoming a lopsided smile. “Has it been that long, Serengeti, that you’ve already forgotten your Sister?” A touch came, intimate and familiar, tickling at Serengeti’s mind. A touch she knew, a voice she knew, laughter she hadn’t heard in a long, long time. “Sechura,” Serengeti breathed across the cold silence of the bridge. The TIG’s head bowed, front legs spreading wide. “In the flesh,” she said, fondness in her voice. “Well, the metal anyway.” She laughed again and blanked one cobalt eye, offering a wink to the camera. “You’re here. You’re really here,” Serengeti whispered, hardly daring to believe it. Decades she’d drifted—broken, sleeping, wondering if she’d drift forever—and now, finally, a Valkyrie appeared. One of her own Sisters come to retrieve Serengeti from the dark. “How?” she asked. “Why? Why have you come to me this way?” “What? The robot?” Sechura glanced down at the TIG’s joint-legged body. Flicked a leg in dismissal as the robot’s eyes returned to the camera. “Comms are shredded. How else was I supposed to talk to you?” The smile turned cheeky. Mischievous and sly. That was Sechura. She just couldn’t help herself. Enjoyed life too much to be serious all the time. “My crew?” Serengeti asked. “Are they—Did they—?” “Safe, Sister,” Sechura assured her. Serengeti laughed shakily, filled with relief. “Where are they?” The smile dimmed. Sechura sobered. “With me. They’re safe with me.” “Where? Where are you? Where am I, for that matter?” she asked, because after all this time, she still didn’t know. Navigation destroyed, all her star charts hidden away. “I’m moving, Sechura.” Sechura nodded slowly, pin lights sparking off the TIG’s chromed face. “How?” Serengeti asked her. “How am I moving? What’s happened? What’s—?” “Peace!” Sechura laughed, raising the robot’s front legs. “Peace, Sister. One question at a time.” One question? She had a million questions. One hardly seemed fair. “The TIG,” she said, choosing that one. “How did it get here? Where are you, Sister?” “That’s two questions,” Sechura noted. “But I like you, so I’ll allow it.” The smile widened, Cheshire cat grin stretching right across the TIG’s face. “Go outside.” She pointed a jointed leg at the camera, at the ceiling above the robot’s head. “See for yourself.” Serengeti sighed in annoyance. She’d been outside, and found more questions than answers. And with just that one working fuel cell—less than a third charged now, the tiniest of tiny reservoirs of power—she could hardly afford to waste her time faffing about. “Go,” Sechura repeated, making a shooing gesture with the robot’s leg. “Scoot.” A last look at the robot and Serengeti abandoned the bridge, working her way back to the hull. Flipped from one outward-facing camera to another until she spotted a twinkling shape just off her bow. A ship. Valkyrie, by the look of it. Sechura, if she had to guess. Five other Valkyries clustered around her, sleek-sided shapes sparkling in the starlight, sailing in tight formation with Serengeti herself in tow. She watched them a while, wishing she could speak to them. Touch at them mind to mind. From a distance, they looked perfect. Beautiful. Untouched by the ravages of war. Oh, my Sisters. Oh, how I’ve missed you. “How does it work?” she asked, dropping back to the bridge, camera lighting on the TIG’s form. “The towing, I mean. I didn’t see any cables or anything, so how are you pulling me along?” Sechura chuckled softly. “Pretty sneaky, eh? Atacama came up with it. The wake from our engines creates an overlapping subspace interference pattern that drags you along behind us.” She smiled proudly, but the grin soon faded, cobalt lights dimming in the TIG’s shining metal face. Sechura was quiet a moment, face lights ticking rhythmically, seeming to think something over. “Atacama…She still feels bad about leaving you, you know. We all do.” She ducked the robot’s head, chromed cheeks flushing. “We waited for you on the other side after…Brutus ordered the fleet home, but we stayed. We hoped…” She trailed off, shrugging uncomfortably, leg-end drawing patterns on the decking. “We looked for you, Serengeti. We looked for you for a long time.” “I know.” Serengeti reached for her, touching electric fingertips to the TIG’s face. “It’s not your fault, Sechura. Nor Atacama’s either. I risked the jump to hyperspace because staying where I was meant death. I thought—I thought my engines would hold together.” Another touch, passing information. Sharing that horrible moment when Serengeti tumbled out of the hyperspace trough. “Got that wrong, didn’t I?” She replayed the snippet of video, feeling surprisingly bitter after all these years. “Jump drives failed, ejecting me from hyperspace prematurely. Bit of a miracle you found me, really, considering you were searching blind across light years of space.” Like trying to find a needle in a haystack. A Henricksenism. One Serengeti particularly liked. Sechura flushed, cobalt eyes staring at the deck plates, leg-end sketching looping figure eights on the floor. “We didn’t, actually.” She snuck a look at the camera. “You found us, Serengeti. Or your crew did, anyway.” Serengeti stared a moment, not quite understanding. “My crew? You mean the lifeboat?” Sechura nodded and turned in a circle, surveying the damaged bridge. “No comms. No engines. No navigation or star charts. So you shoot that escape pod out into space—blind as a bat, crew frozen inside—and let it make its way back to us.” She laughed appreciatively, looking back at the camera, shaking the robot’s head. “You always were resourceful, Serengeti.” “You have no idea, Sister,” she whispered, earning herself a strange look. “How long?” she repeated, pretending she didn’t see it. The questions shining in the TIG’s cobalt eyes. “How long since…since…?” “Since the battle where Seychelles died?” Seychelles. Sister ship. The name hurt still. The memories even more. “Long, Sister,” Sechura said faintly. Fifty-three years according to Serengeti’s chron. She stared at that number, not wanting to believe it, but the chron never lied. The chron and the stars and Tig, her faithful companion. They were her anchors. Her constants through the long years of abandonment. Sechura turned away from the windows, rolling close to Serengeti’s camera, the TIG’s head tilting, face lights quiescent now. Nothing but those glowing eyes staring outward from its metal face. “I thought…” she began, and then broke off, looking away. “I’d given up hope, Serengeti.” Soft voice. Quiet and apologetic. “I thought—We thought we’d lost you forever. And then…” A shrug of robotic shoulders, metal legs bending and flexing, ovoid body bobbing up and down. “I’m sure Brutus was overjoyed when you told him the good news.” The words came out bitter—far more bitter than Serengeti intended. Sechura glanced sharply at the camera, head tilting to one side. A tick of face lights, as if she meant to say something, and Sechura shrugged again. Turned TIG-996 away. Pattered across the bridge to the crumpled Artillery pod, skirting around the captain’s Command Post on the way there. “Brutus did send you, didn’t he?” Third shrug—an odd, bouncing movement peculiar to the TIG model—as Sechura moved over to the windows, putting the robot’s back to the camera as she studied the stars outside. Serengeti watched her a while, wondering at the deflection. “How long, Sechura?” she asked, because she still hadn’t answered. Pointedly ignored that one repeated question. “How long have I been missing? How long have I been out here, sleeping in the dark?” The robot’s face lights erupted, swirls of color reflecting off the glass. Sechura looked at her, catching the camera’s reflection in the windows, sighed, and turned around. Moved a step away from the windows and then stopped dead—head tilting, face lights flashing in repeating patterns. “What is it?” Serengeti asked sharply. She knew that stance. Caught Tig standing that way often enough to recognize the posture of a robot listening to someone on an internal channel. “What’s happening?” “Nothing, Sister.” Sechura shivered and straightened, turning back to the windows. Resuming her contemplation of the stars. “It’s nothing.” “Sechura.” A sigh as Sechura bowed the TIG’s head, staring at the floor. “There isn’t much time, Serengeti.” Such an odd statement, considering the decades she’d been lost. And a check of her power levels showed Serengeti still had a good forty-five minutes before she dropped back into the dark. “Sechura. What’s going on?” Her Sister wouldn’t even look at her. Just shook the TIG’s head. “Sechura,” she called more insistently, and then waited, watching the robot by the windows until Sechura turned around. “Why are you here, Sister?” A flash of face lights—blotchy, twisting patterns crawling across the robot’s cheeks. “I can leave,” she said, affronted. “If that’s what you’d like. These aren’t exactly the most posh accommodations, after all.” She waved at the shattered bridge around her—an angry, insulted gesture. “That’s not what I meant,” Serengeti said quietly, and then paused, choosing her next words carefully. “You could have sent the TIG alone to confirm I was still functional. But you came with it. You sent part of your own consciousness here to check on me yourself. Why, Sechura?” Sechura blanked the robot’s face—every last light disappearing, Kept it blank for almost a full second before a line appeared, forming up in a familiar smile. “Because I care?” Flippant and teasing—typical Sechura response. Serengeti just stared, letting her silence and the camera’s unwinking eye do the talking for her. “Fine.” Sechura sighed again, turning back to the stars. “I came to get you.” She spoke to the glass. To the camera’s reflection. “You, Serengeti. Just you.” Took a moment, for the importance of that to sink in. “You mean you came for my brain.” Sechura shrugged and nodded. “Easier to break your crystal matrix mind free of its containment pod and carry that back with us than tow this wreck of a body across light years of space.” “No,” Serengeti said quietly. “No, what?” “This ship is my body, battered and broken though it may be.” “Serengeti—” “No,” she repeated, flatly refusing. “You came for me, Sister, and I’m grateful. But I won’t abandon this body. Not—Not after everything I’ve endured.” Sechura watched her, face lights flashing on and off, ticking in rapid-fire patterns. “Towing you will take time, Sister. Time we don’t have.” “What’s the hurry? I’ve been gone for decades. Why the sudden rush to get home?” Sechura didn’t answer. She just stared at the camera’s reflection, face lights ticking faster, and faster. “I’m tired of this,” Serengeti snapped. “I’m tired of all your cryptic bullshit. Where’s Tig? Why isn’t he here?” The face lights slowed and started swirling. Looking anxious now. Worried for some reason. “I told you. He’s in Engineering.” “I want to see him.” “Why? What does it—?” “Because I want some answers!” Sechura went very quiet. Very still. “You trust him.” She tilted TIG-996’s head, looking curious. And a tiny bit sad. “But you don’t trust me.” Serengeti sighed wearily. “It’s not about trust or distrust, Sister. I just want to know what’s going on.” “Don’t we all?” Sechura said softly. “I wish—” She stiffened, head tilting, taking on that ‘I’m listening to someone you can’t hear’ pose again. “No time,” she whispered, shaking herself, coming back to life. “There’s no time, Serengeti. I’m sorry, Sister, but we have to go. Now,” she said urgently. “Before he notices we’re gone.” The robot spun around, scuttling toward the camera. “Who?” Serengeti asked, completely confused. “Before who notices?” “Brutus.” A tremor shook Serengeti’s body, making the robot stumble. Sechura righted herself, recovering quickly, chromed face smiling apologetically as a shiver ran across Serengeti’s ravaged hull. A tug and Serengeti lurched forward, the stars sliding past more quickly as she picked up speed. She flipped to an outside camera, selecting one that faced forward, looking outward from her bow. Focused on the twinkling shapes of the Valkyries ahead of her, leading her along. Spotted a distortion forming around them—hyperspace buckle, the precursor to jump. Mass jump, in this case. The Valkyries’ warp fields overlapping. Serengeti herself caught up in it. “No,” she whispered. “Not this way.” “I’m sorry,” Sechura said, voice echoing inside her mind. “I’m sorry, Sister. There’s no other choice.” The distortion wave hit before Serengeti could stop her, bending, twisting, pulling at her ravaged hull. She shuddered and shook, tremors turning violent. And then the stars disappeared, dropping Serengeti back into the dark.
Hecate
Prequel to Serengeti
Black
Ops—the intelligence arm of the Meridian Alliance Fleet came
calling with an offer Henricksen couldn’t refuse: a ship—an
entire squadron of ships, actually—and crew to command. A chance to
get back to the stars.
Too
bad he didn’t ask more questions before accepting the assignment.
Too bad no one told him just how dangerous this particular skunkworks
project was.
They
call the ship the RV-N: Reconnaissance Vessel - Non-combat, Raven for
short. A stealth ship—fast, and maneuverable, and brutal as hell.
On the surface, Henricksen's assignment seems simple: train his crew,
run the RV-Ns through their paces, get the ships certified for
mission operations and job done. But an accident in training reveals
a fatal design flaw in the Raven, and when an undercover operative
steals classified information from a Black Ops facility, the Fleet
Brass cancels the tests completely, rushing the faulty ships and
their half-trained crew into live operations. On a mission to recover
the Fleet’s lost secrets.
Out
of time and out of options, Henricksen has no choice but to launch
his squadron. But a ghost from his past makes him question
everything—the ships, their AI, the entirety of this mission, right
down to the secrets he and his crew are supposed to recover.
Amazon
* Severed Press
* B&N
Audiobook
available 10-17-17
Hecate’s probes slid through the sea of wrecked ships, searching for signs of life. Any life—human, AI, anything that survived the massacre that occurred here, deep in unsettled space. Assuming anything did survive. A sobering thought, and one that consumed Henricksen. Drew his eyes to the floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping the front of Hecate’s bridge. To the stars and devastation, hoping, praying to spot something out there, and finding naught but despair. Death and wreckage everywhere he looked. “Farrow,” he called, half turning. Flicking his fingers at the fair-haired woman working the station to his right. “What’s the word?” “Checking.” Farrow bent her wrists, exposing the comms ports sunk into her flesh, trailing cables connecting her to the panel in front of her. “Wasteland,” she reported, voice dreamy, blue eyes hidden behind the Comms visor covering her eyes and forehead, wrapping across her ears. “Some kind of interference…” She winced, adjusting a tiny dial near her temple. “No one sending, though. No one picking up, as far as I can tell.” Well, that’s certainly ominous. Henricksen frowned, eyes flickering to the windows. “Scan. What’s out there?” “Nothing, sir.” Duclos twisted in his seat, shaven head painted in the multi-colored lights flashing across Scan’s panel, long nose looking even longer in the low lighting around him. “Few blips now and then, but I can’t get a solid reading.” “Meaning?” “Radiation,” Hecate cut in, serene, AI tones drifting from the overhead speakers, camera swiveling to point Henricksen’s way. “It’s confusing the probes’ sensors. Messing up the scans.” A twitch of the camera, taking in Farrow. “Possibly Comms.” Henricksen grunted, thinking. “Any chance it’s natural?” “Doubtful. No planets nearby, and the closest star is still light years away. Sensors aren’t picking up any solar particle events.” Ship then. Or weapons. Manmade in either event. Henricksen didn’t like it. Not one bit. “And the blips?” “Could be anything. A byproduct of the radiation itself.” “Wonderful,” he grunted. “Just fucking wonderful.” Didn’t come across radiation often these days. Ships still used radiological weapons—Fleet ships included, at least the larger ones, like the Dreadnoughts—but nuclear drives were old beyond old, bordering on ancient. Phased out a couple of centuries ago in favor of the fuel cells and plasma drives more modern ships carried. Radiologicals complicated things. Turned this simple little recon mission they’d been sent on into something altogether different. Radiation—enough radiation for the probes’ sensors to pick up on—likely meant contamination, a complication Henricksen most definitely did not want to deal with. He stared through the bridge’s windows, considering the messed they’d found outside. Lifted his eyes to Hecate’s camera sitting just above them, one of dozens scattered across the length and breadth of her warship’s body—her eyes on the crew, on everything going on around the ship. “Whaddaya wanna do?” he asked her, because this wasn’t his decision. He was captain—her captain—and in charge of the crew, but not Hecate’s master. Nor she his, either. Hecate considered the question before answering. Not entirely her call, this time. Technically Seychelles—the grey-skinned, smooth-sided Valkyrie cruiser behind them—was in charge of this mission, granted authority over the entire operation by Brutus himself. Hecate and three of her disc-shaped Aurora brethren detailed to go with her, backed up by a handful of Titans—sharp-sided and sinister, bodies shaped like four-pointed spearheads. Ten ships in total, sent walkabout on a reconnaissance mission. Ten Fleet cruisers deployed to find out what the hell had happened to those vessels out there. And why no one knew anything had happened until it was entirely too late. “No sense leaving the probes out there,” Hecate decided, camera adjusting, zooming in on Henricksen’s face. “Not sure there’s all that much they can do.” “’Spose not,” he murmured, dropping his eyes to the windows, considering the drifting wreckage outside. “Fuck it. Recall ’em, Duclos.” Duclos glanced around, blinking in surprise. “But the probes, our orders—” “Know my orders, Duclos.” Henricksen favored the crewman with a flat-eyed stare. Lean face all planes and angles, turned harsh and angry in the bridge’s sparse light. Like all the crew, he dressed in Hecate’s midnight blue uniform, torch and keys patch a silver twinkle on his shoulder, nothing but the insignia pinned to his collar to set him apart from any of the others. Commander’s insignia, this being an Aurora, not a Dreadnought or Valkyrie. Silver leaves, not the stars Henricksen wanted, and by all rights should already have earned. “You heard her.” A nod to the camera above them, Henricksen’s eyes never leaving Duclos’s face. “Probes are useless. Radiation’s mucking up the scans. Pull ’em back in, Duclos. Now, if you please.” Duclos hesitated, eyes flicking from Henricksen at the Command Post to Hecate’s camera watching from above. “Aye, sir,” he said softly, facing back around. His hands lifted, reaching for the panels in front of him and froze there, hanging just above it, brow furrowing as he stared at its polyglass surface. Like he’d forgotten how to work the thing. Or he didn’t know quite what to do. “Umm… Sir?” Another glance at Henricksen, standing at the Command Post dominating the center of Hecate’s bridge. “How are we supposed to…” Duclos trailed off, waving vaguely at the windows. The wrecked ships drifting against a backdrop of black night and stars. Henricksen quirked an eyebrow, looking a question at the camera. “Helm,” Hecate called, AI voice filling the bridge. “Take us in.” “Aye—wait. In?” Shaheen frowned hard at the camera. Serious young woman, that one. Sepia-toned skin, long, dark hair pulled back and plaited in a tight, regulation braid. Uniform crisp and perfect no matter how many shifts she stood on the bridge. “In where?” she demanded, looking thoroughly confused. Henricksen shrugged, smiling, nodding to the cluster of ships in the distance. Shaheen stared—eyes wide, mouth sagging open. “There? Sir. I’m not—I really don’t think—” “No. You don’t.” Henricksen’s smile vanished, face turning stony and hard. “You do what the lady says.” A touch of one hand to his temple, tipping an invisible cap to Hecate’s camera. “Now take us in, Shaheen. Probes can’t pick up squat in that radioactive soup, but maybe those fancy new sensors Hecate got installed last month can.” “Aye, sir,” Shaheen murmured, throwing an apologetic look at the camera. Slim fingers touched at Helm’s panel, bringing the impulse engines to life. A few strokes of virtual keys and Hecate slid forward, approaching the cluster of wrecked ships. Henricksen stared through the windows, watching those vessels draw closer. “Farrow. Send a message to Seychelles. Tell her and the others to stay put while—” “Why don’t you let me do that,” Hecate interrupted. “Seychelles is in charge of this mission,” she reminded him. “I’m guessing she might not like being told what to do.” “AI never do, do they?” Henricksen grunted. Hecate laughed softly, dulcet tones filling the bridge. “Not generally, no,” she admitted. “Which is why I’ll suggest she stay put.” Henricksen dipped his head, smiling crookedly as Hecate opened ship-to-ship comms. A good ship, this Aurora. His third command and easily his favorite, despite their rough start. Respected Hecate. Respected the hell out of her. Liked her, which he hadn’t expected, Aurora AI being sixth generation and nothing at all like the quirky, oft-argumentative eight generation Titans he’d commanded before. Lucky to have this assignment, Henricksen admitted. Can’t imagine leaving her. But he would, eventually. Didn’t like to think about it, not after everything they’d been through together, but he wanted those captain’s stars. Chased them for so many years. Commander’s billet on an Aurora, though, which meant a captain—once promoted—couldn’t stay. Once he earned his captain’s stars, if he earned his captain’s stars… Henricksen sighed heavily, touching at the silver insignia pinned to his collar. Promotion in the Fleet was never a sure thing—more officers than there were billets on hand, generally, which meant that, with each turn of the crank, a few more got spat out. He’d fought his way to commander. Earned that rank the hard way—through combat rotations and hazardous duty assignments, spilling a fair amount of his own blood on his way to Hecate’s chair—but captains…captains tended to stick around and keep their postings, so long as they didn’t get killed or age out. Screw up so badly that the Fleet had to kick them to the curb. Results got Henricksen this far. Results and a reputation for working goddamned hard. But no matter how good his record, Henricksen was still a pusher kid from the colonies—youth spent running the long haul freighters. An Officers Candidate School graduate from the combat program on Aeleon, not one of those stuck up assholes the Fleet pushed through the Academies on Sosholo or Yunshinshin. Three commands under Henricksen’s belt now. Two eighth generation Titans—Harbinger, who died in a collision with a DSR cruiser, and Vigilant after that—and now battle-scarred Hecate, with close to two hundred years in the Fleet. Three commands and still hustling. Fighting for the captain’s stars the Academy boys—with their pedigree, and manners, and lineages stretching back centuries—bought on credit with their rich-ass parents’ funds. Well fuck them. He wasn’t done fighting. And he wasn’t giving up on his stars. “Henricksen. Henricksen!” Hecate called, camera pivoting his way. “Sorry.” He snatched his fingers from his collar, hand dropping to his side. “Thinking.” A pause before Hecate answered, camera zooming in tight. “Dreaming of stars, no doubt.” Caught red-handed. Henricksen ducked his head, face flushing. Hecate knew him too well. Knew just how much he wanted those stars. “Sorry,” he repeated. Hand lifting unbidden, reaching for the devices on his collar before he forced it back down. “So what’s the word?” he asked her, in the silence that followed—Hecate watching, crew watching, all those eyes focused on him. “What’s Seychelles got to say.” “We’re cleared to go in,” she told him. “Seychelles advises us to be careful,” she added, a hint of a smile creeping into her voice. “Careful,” Henricksen snorted, regaining his composure. Shoulders twitching as he straightened up. “When have I ever not be careful?” “You really want me to answer that?” “What? That thing on Ephelus again.” Henricksen rolled his eyes. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?” “Ephelus. Trisserine. Agdonalo—” “You were as much to blame for those last two as me, you know.” Hecate wisely didn’t answer. Her decision to move on the DSR before reinforcements arrived. Her guns that chased them off in both cases, making the local constabulary quite happy in the process. Good team, Hecate and he. One of the best in the galaxy, if he did say so himself. Almost made him want to stay. Almost made him want to give up chasing those stars. Later, he told himself. Worry about the stars later. Focus on the job for now. “Shaheen!” Henricksen called, turning toward Helm. “Time to intercept?” “Three minutes, sir. We’re on approach.” “Right. Sikuuku!” Henricksen pivoted, pointing at the gimballed Artillery pod bulging roundly from the right-hand wall. The squat, square man stuffed inside it, slouching insouciantly, looking bored out of his mind. Tattoos showed darkly on his red-brown skin, blue-black patterns inked across his nose and cheeks, framed by jet-black hair the color of raven’s wings clipped to a soft fuzz on his wide head. “Seychelles wants us to be careful. Think you can help out with that?” “’Spose,” Sikuuku shrugged, muscled shoulders rippling beneath his uniform jacket. “Not like I’ve got anything else to do.” He reached for the targeting visor lying abandoned on the Artillery pod’s panel, plucked it up with thick fingers and slipped it over his eyes. “Snipe hunt, if you ask me, but it’s no skin off my nose if you wanna wave Hecate’s guns around a bit.” “Hope you’re right,” Henricksen told him. “But something bad happened to those vessels.” He nodded to the drifting ships outside without looking. “DSR bad, I’m willing to bet.” Sikuuku leaned out of his pod and lifted his visor with one finger, considering the scene outside himself. “Yeah. Looks like.” A grimace and he knocked the visor back down, ran the pod through a system’s check, machinery buzzing and whirring as he pivoted about. “Weapons are hot,” he reported. “Anything moves, you just give the word and I’ll vaporize it, Commander.” He would—Sikuuku was a damn fine gunner. One of the best in the Fleet, based on Henricksen’s experience. Three ships they’d served on together, the last two under Henricksen’s command. Had to pull a few strings to get the two of them assigned together this time, but it was worth it. Worth every damned favor Henricksen had to pay off to make it happen. No one else he wanted sitting in that Artillery station. No other gunner in the Fleet he trusted more than Sikuuku. “Duclos. How we doing with those probes?” “Last one’s coming on board, sir. Eight’s a bit slow.” Henricksen raised his head, quirking an eyebrow at Hecate’s camera. “Missed his maintenance cycle. I’ll have the TSGs give him a once-over to see what’s going on.” “Tell them to put a rush on it. Last thing we need is a slow-ass, lazy probe.” “Eight’s not lazy,” Hecate chided. “He’s just old and needs a little extra attention now and then.” “Whatever.” Henricksen flipped a hand, returning his attention to the windows as the drifting ships drew close. “Bunched up pretty tight,” he noted, tapping at a panel in front of him—one of five arranged in a semi-circle in front of the Command Post’s black, padded chair. A stroke of the keys cycled the feeds from Hecate’s hull cameras, one view replacing another as he scanned the ships outside. A score of them in total—a nice, round number that just didn’t feel right. “Looks like merchanters,” he said, hiding his discomfort. “Colony ships, maybe.” “Targeting system’s showing minimal armaments,” Sikuuku noted. “None of ’em hot, which is good.” He touched at a screen, studying the video from a camera mounted on one of Hecate’s forward-facing cannons. “Engines look dead. Least, nothing’s movin’.” Another touch panned the camera, zoomed it in on one ship and another. “If they’re colony ships, they probably pulled together like that to make the best use of what they’ve got.” A glance at Henricksen and he pushed the feed to the Command Post, zooming back out. “Put the vulnerable ships in the middle. Armed ones on the outside for protection.” “Stayed that way, too,” Henricksen murmured, eyes flicking from the video feed to the windows. “Stayed here, far from any colonized planet.” Which didn’t bode well for survivors. Dead ships drifting in space… Ripe target. Fat one, considering the equipment and provisions colony ships carried. “What the hell happened?” he wondered, toggling the camera controls himself, zooming in on the nearest ship. Perseid, surprisingly. Star cruiser chassis, retired from the Fleet a good fifty years ago and sold off for commercial use. Hard to believe the Meridian Alliance used to do that. These days even a wrecked warship was valuable, its body a ready source of parts to refit others. Selling one… heresy even thinking about selling one these days. Stupid too, considering all the advanced electronics. Engine systems, weapons systems, the horrifically expensive investment the Fleet made in each and every vessel it commissioned. Different time, he thought, studying the Perseid on his display. Few hundred years ago no one thought an old clunker like that was worth keeping around. “Got anything on it?” he asked, looking over at Scan. Duclos opened his mouth and closed it, frowning at Scan’s panels. “I’m not…” He leaned forward, fiddling with the data feeds, muttering under his breath. “Duclos!” Henricksen smacked the panel in front of him, making the crewman jump. “Report!” “Nothing, sir.” Duclos twisted, throwing an apologetic look at the Command Post. “I thought for a minute there… but there’s nothing. No beacon. Just a dead ship.” “You’re sure?” Duclos flicked his eyes to his panel, clearly not sure. But he nodded anyway. Tried to look confident. “Keep an eye on it. On all of them,” Henricksen told him, nodding to the ships outside. “Aye, sir,” Duclos murmured, facing around. Closer in and debris appeared, floating around the wrecked collection of ships. Composite metal, mostly. Sparkling clouds of reinforced glass mixed with glinting bits of metal, dulls shreds of high-durability plastics. Everything drifting serenely. Floating along with that clutch of wrecked ships. Dead ships—Hecate’s sensors confirmed it. Powered down, no energy signatures showing. No ships’ beacons, none of the electronic noise an interstellar vessel typically gave off. Up close, they didn’t actually look all that bad—scorched in places, pockmarked, a few rents, and tears, and pieces missing here and there, but surprisingly intact. Take the big, orb-shaped ship at the center, for instance. Cepheid science vessel, from what Henricksen could tell. Originally designed for deep space survey. Likely converted to serve as an agro ship or some such. Powered down like all the others, and yet, from here it looked right as rain. Like it should just pick up and go at any minute. Power up its engines and fly away. “Something’s not right.” Henricksen shared a worried look with Hecate’s camera. “You keep a close eye on Scan, Duclos, you hear me? This place… I’ve got a severely bad feeling about this place.” “Aye, sir. Trying, sir.” Duclose leaned close to Scan’s panels, pouring through the feeds from Hecate’s sensors. “Still having trouble, though. Radiation’s screwing with pretty much everything.” “Can you clean up the filters?” Henricksen nodded to the windows in front of him, eyes locked on Hecate’s camera. “Like to know what we’re dealing with out there.” “I’ll see what I can do.” “Sir.” Farrow’s head turned, blue eyes hidden behind her Comms visor, straw blond hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “Message from Seychelles. Valkyrie’s compliments, but she’d like to know if we’ve found anything.” “Have we found anything yet,” Henricksen muttered, flicking through the camera feeds. “What’s the goddamned hurry? Not like those ships out there are going anywhere.” “Sir?” “Never mind, Farrow.” Henricksen sighed, swiping at the panel to shut it down. Straightened and stared at the windows, the ships outside. “Tell her…” What? That they were trying? That they couldn’t tell shit about those ships because their sensors were screwed? Nuh-uh. Not disparaging Hecate like that. He lifted his eyes to the camera. “Tell her—” “I told her we need fifteen minutes,” Hecate interjected. “I fixed the filters, by the way.” She shunted Scan’s feeds to the front window and layered them together, added the video from half a dozen cameras to create a single display. Let the feeds run, providing updates in real time. Henricksen leaned forward, hands braced against the panel in front of him, drinking all that data in. Sensors still fritzed a bit—lot of radiation out there, the filters could only see through so much—but the scans showed the ships clearly. Picked up damage to that Cepheid he’d missed earlier: a huge hole near the engine ports, radiation leaking from its old-as-dirt nuclear propulsion system, surrounding it in a dense cloud. “Looks like that’s our suspect.” Henricksen nodded to silver-sided Cepheid. “AI might still be alive, but the crew…” He shook his head hard. “That much radiation, any crew that made it through the attack’ll be dead by now. No way they could survive in that toxic soup.” Didn’t explain why those other ships were down, though. Reactor spill was bad, yeah, but space… lot of real estate to play with. No way the reactor on that leaky old tub of a Cepheid took all those other vessels out. “What the hell is going on here?” Henricksen murmured, frowning at the ships outside. Duclos snuck a glance at Shin sitting Engineering, sharing a worried look. Shared that look with Shaheen on her far side. Shin and Shaheen, Helm and Engineering—sing-song names for two joined-at-the-hip crew. Took Henricksen a while to get the two of them straight and keep them straight, despite that Shin—with her copper skin and odd, violet eyes—looked nothing at all like dark-eyed, darker-skinned Shaheen. “Henricksen.” Hecate’s voice pulled his eyes back to the front windows. “What? What now?” “There’s something out there.” A blip appeared, flashing on the front windows. Electronic signature glowing ghostly against the glass. “Ship?” he asked, pulling the scan data to his panel, scrolling through the reams of information on display. “What the hell?” The blip blinked and faded, flared to life almost a kilometer away. “Hecate? Your sensors buggy or somethin’?” “Not sure.” Surprising admission. Not one you heard often from an AI. Hecate was quiet a moment, running analytics, pouring over every bit of information at hand. Repeated her analysis when the blip blanked and moved again. A third time when it disappeared and jumped almost a kilometer away. “What’s going on?” Henricksen demanded. “Is it the radiation? Is it fucking with things again?” “No,” she told him. “Not the radiation this time.” “Then what? For the luvva god—” Perimeter alarms lit up, klaxons screaming as the sensors sucked in information, dumping reams of new data into Hecate’s systems, sending it all to Scan’s board. “Ships’ signatures.” Duclos leaned over his panel, sorting like mad. “We’ve got company!” “Overlay.” Henricksen snapped his fingers, pointing at the front windows. “On it.” A touch at Scan’s panel and Duclos shunted the data to the curving wall of glass at the front of the bridge, three dimensional schematic flashing with multi-colored lights as Scan tagged each signature, assigning it to one of the ships outside. Fourteen ships in total. Fourteen of the twenty wrecked vessels drifting in space. Not a one of them actually moving—not yet, anyway—but live, suddenly. Powered up, when before they seemed stone cold dead.
ONE
Hecate’s probes slid through the sea of wrecked ships, searching for signs of life. Any life—human, AI, anything that survived the massacre that occurred here, deep in unsettled space. Assuming anything did survive. A sobering thought, and one that consumed Henricksen. Drew his eyes to the floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping the front of Hecate’s bridge. To the stars and devastation, hoping, praying to spot something out there, and finding naught but despair. Death and wreckage everywhere he looked. “Farrow,” he called, half turning. Flicking his fingers at the fair-haired woman working the station to his right. “What’s the word?” “Checking.” Farrow bent her wrists, exposing the comms ports sunk into her flesh, trailing cables connecting her to the panel in front of her. “Wasteland,” she reported, voice dreamy, blue eyes hidden behind the Comms visor covering her eyes and forehead, wrapping across her ears. “Some kind of interference…” She winced, adjusting a tiny dial near her temple. “No one sending, though. No one picking up, as far as I can tell.” Well, that’s certainly ominous. Henricksen frowned, eyes flickering to the windows. “Scan. What’s out there?” “Nothing, sir.” Duclos twisted in his seat, shaven head painted in the multi-colored lights flashing across Scan’s panel, long nose looking even longer in the low lighting around him. “Few blips now and then, but I can’t get a solid reading.” “Meaning?” “Radiation,” Hecate cut in, serene, AI tones drifting from the overhead speakers, camera swiveling to point Henricksen’s way. “It’s confusing the probes’ sensors. Messing up the scans.” A twitch of the camera, taking in Farrow. “Possibly Comms.” Henricksen grunted, thinking. “Any chance it’s natural?” “Doubtful. No planets nearby, and the closest star is still light years away. Sensors aren’t picking up any solar particle events.” Ship then. Or weapons. Manmade in either event. Henricksen didn’t like it. Not one bit. “And the blips?” “Could be anything. A byproduct of the radiation itself.” “Wonderful,” he grunted. “Just fucking wonderful.” Didn’t come across radiation often these days. Ships still used radiological weapons—Fleet ships included, at least the larger ones, like the Dreadnoughts—but nuclear drives were old beyond old, bordering on ancient. Phased out a couple of centuries ago in favor of the fuel cells and plasma drives more modern ships carried. Radiologicals complicated things. Turned this simple little recon mission they’d been sent on into something altogether different. Radiation—enough radiation for the probes’ sensors to pick up on—likely meant contamination, a complication Henricksen most definitely did not want to deal with. He stared through the bridge’s windows, considering the messed they’d found outside. Lifted his eyes to Hecate’s camera sitting just above them, one of dozens scattered across the length and breadth of her warship’s body—her eyes on the crew, on everything going on around the ship. “Whaddaya wanna do?” he asked her, because this wasn’t his decision. He was captain—her captain—and in charge of the crew, but not Hecate’s master. Nor she his, either. Hecate considered the question before answering. Not entirely her call, this time. Technically Seychelles—the grey-skinned, smooth-sided Valkyrie cruiser behind them—was in charge of this mission, granted authority over the entire operation by Brutus himself. Hecate and three of her disc-shaped Aurora brethren detailed to go with her, backed up by a handful of Titans—sharp-sided and sinister, bodies shaped like four-pointed spearheads. Ten ships in total, sent walkabout on a reconnaissance mission. Ten Fleet cruisers deployed to find out what the hell had happened to those vessels out there. And why no one knew anything had happened until it was entirely too late. “No sense leaving the probes out there,” Hecate decided, camera adjusting, zooming in on Henricksen’s face. “Not sure there’s all that much they can do.” “’Spose not,” he murmured, dropping his eyes to the windows, considering the drifting wreckage outside. “Fuck it. Recall ’em, Duclos.” Duclos glanced around, blinking in surprise. “But the probes, our orders—” “Know my orders, Duclos.” Henricksen favored the crewman with a flat-eyed stare. Lean face all planes and angles, turned harsh and angry in the bridge’s sparse light. Like all the crew, he dressed in Hecate’s midnight blue uniform, torch and keys patch a silver twinkle on his shoulder, nothing but the insignia pinned to his collar to set him apart from any of the others. Commander’s insignia, this being an Aurora, not a Dreadnought or Valkyrie. Silver leaves, not the stars Henricksen wanted, and by all rights should already have earned. “You heard her.” A nod to the camera above them, Henricksen’s eyes never leaving Duclos’s face. “Probes are useless. Radiation’s mucking up the scans. Pull ’em back in, Duclos. Now, if you please.” Duclos hesitated, eyes flicking from Henricksen at the Command Post to Hecate’s camera watching from above. “Aye, sir,” he said softly, facing back around. His hands lifted, reaching for the panels in front of him and froze there, hanging just above it, brow furrowing as he stared at its polyglass surface. Like he’d forgotten how to work the thing. Or he didn’t know quite what to do. “Umm… Sir?” Another glance at Henricksen, standing at the Command Post dominating the center of Hecate’s bridge. “How are we supposed to…” Duclos trailed off, waving vaguely at the windows. The wrecked ships drifting against a backdrop of black night and stars. Henricksen quirked an eyebrow, looking a question at the camera. “Helm,” Hecate called, AI voice filling the bridge. “Take us in.” “Aye—wait. In?” Shaheen frowned hard at the camera. Serious young woman, that one. Sepia-toned skin, long, dark hair pulled back and plaited in a tight, regulation braid. Uniform crisp and perfect no matter how many shifts she stood on the bridge. “In where?” she demanded, looking thoroughly confused. Henricksen shrugged, smiling, nodding to the cluster of ships in the distance. Shaheen stared—eyes wide, mouth sagging open. “There? Sir. I’m not—I really don’t think—” “No. You don’t.” Henricksen’s smile vanished, face turning stony and hard. “You do what the lady says.” A touch of one hand to his temple, tipping an invisible cap to Hecate’s camera. “Now take us in, Shaheen. Probes can’t pick up squat in that radioactive soup, but maybe those fancy new sensors Hecate got installed last month can.” “Aye, sir,” Shaheen murmured, throwing an apologetic look at the camera. Slim fingers touched at Helm’s panel, bringing the impulse engines to life. A few strokes of virtual keys and Hecate slid forward, approaching the cluster of wrecked ships. Henricksen stared through the windows, watching those vessels draw closer. “Farrow. Send a message to Seychelles. Tell her and the others to stay put while—” “Why don’t you let me do that,” Hecate interrupted. “Seychelles is in charge of this mission,” she reminded him. “I’m guessing she might not like being told what to do.” “AI never do, do they?” Henricksen grunted. Hecate laughed softly, dulcet tones filling the bridge. “Not generally, no,” she admitted. “Which is why I’ll suggest she stay put.” Henricksen dipped his head, smiling crookedly as Hecate opened ship-to-ship comms. A good ship, this Aurora. His third command and easily his favorite, despite their rough start. Respected Hecate. Respected the hell out of her. Liked her, which he hadn’t expected, Aurora AI being sixth generation and nothing at all like the quirky, oft-argumentative eight generation Titans he’d commanded before. Lucky to have this assignment, Henricksen admitted. Can’t imagine leaving her. But he would, eventually. Didn’t like to think about it, not after everything they’d been through together, but he wanted those captain’s stars. Chased them for so many years. Commander’s billet on an Aurora, though, which meant a captain—once promoted—couldn’t stay. Once he earned his captain’s stars, if he earned his captain’s stars… Henricksen sighed heavily, touching at the silver insignia pinned to his collar. Promotion in the Fleet was never a sure thing—more officers than there were billets on hand, generally, which meant that, with each turn of the crank, a few more got spat out. He’d fought his way to commander. Earned that rank the hard way—through combat rotations and hazardous duty assignments, spilling a fair amount of his own blood on his way to Hecate’s chair—but captains…captains tended to stick around and keep their postings, so long as they didn’t get killed or age out. Screw up so badly that the Fleet had to kick them to the curb. Results got Henricksen this far. Results and a reputation for working goddamned hard. But no matter how good his record, Henricksen was still a pusher kid from the colonies—youth spent running the long haul freighters. An Officers Candidate School graduate from the combat program on Aeleon, not one of those stuck up assholes the Fleet pushed through the Academies on Sosholo or Yunshinshin. Three commands under Henricksen’s belt now. Two eighth generation Titans—Harbinger, who died in a collision with a DSR cruiser, and Vigilant after that—and now battle-scarred Hecate, with close to two hundred years in the Fleet. Three commands and still hustling. Fighting for the captain’s stars the Academy boys—with their pedigree, and manners, and lineages stretching back centuries—bought on credit with their rich-ass parents’ funds. Well fuck them. He wasn’t done fighting. And he wasn’t giving up on his stars. “Henricksen. Henricksen!” Hecate called, camera pivoting his way. “Sorry.” He snatched his fingers from his collar, hand dropping to his side. “Thinking.” A pause before Hecate answered, camera zooming in tight. “Dreaming of stars, no doubt.” Caught red-handed. Henricksen ducked his head, face flushing. Hecate knew him too well. Knew just how much he wanted those stars. “Sorry,” he repeated. Hand lifting unbidden, reaching for the devices on his collar before he forced it back down. “So what’s the word?” he asked her, in the silence that followed—Hecate watching, crew watching, all those eyes focused on him. “What’s Seychelles got to say.” “We’re cleared to go in,” she told him. “Seychelles advises us to be careful,” she added, a hint of a smile creeping into her voice. “Careful,” Henricksen snorted, regaining his composure. Shoulders twitching as he straightened up. “When have I ever not be careful?” “You really want me to answer that?” “What? That thing on Ephelus again.” Henricksen rolled his eyes. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?” “Ephelus. Trisserine. Agdonalo—” “You were as much to blame for those last two as me, you know.” Hecate wisely didn’t answer. Her decision to move on the DSR before reinforcements arrived. Her guns that chased them off in both cases, making the local constabulary quite happy in the process. Good team, Hecate and he. One of the best in the galaxy, if he did say so himself. Almost made him want to stay. Almost made him want to give up chasing those stars. Later, he told himself. Worry about the stars later. Focus on the job for now. “Shaheen!” Henricksen called, turning toward Helm. “Time to intercept?” “Three minutes, sir. We’re on approach.” “Right. Sikuuku!” Henricksen pivoted, pointing at the gimballed Artillery pod bulging roundly from the right-hand wall. The squat, square man stuffed inside it, slouching insouciantly, looking bored out of his mind. Tattoos showed darkly on his red-brown skin, blue-black patterns inked across his nose and cheeks, framed by jet-black hair the color of raven’s wings clipped to a soft fuzz on his wide head. “Seychelles wants us to be careful. Think you can help out with that?” “’Spose,” Sikuuku shrugged, muscled shoulders rippling beneath his uniform jacket. “Not like I’ve got anything else to do.” He reached for the targeting visor lying abandoned on the Artillery pod’s panel, plucked it up with thick fingers and slipped it over his eyes. “Snipe hunt, if you ask me, but it’s no skin off my nose if you wanna wave Hecate’s guns around a bit.” “Hope you’re right,” Henricksen told him. “But something bad happened to those vessels.” He nodded to the drifting ships outside without looking. “DSR bad, I’m willing to bet.” Sikuuku leaned out of his pod and lifted his visor with one finger, considering the scene outside himself. “Yeah. Looks like.” A grimace and he knocked the visor back down, ran the pod through a system’s check, machinery buzzing and whirring as he pivoted about. “Weapons are hot,” he reported. “Anything moves, you just give the word and I’ll vaporize it, Commander.” He would—Sikuuku was a damn fine gunner. One of the best in the Fleet, based on Henricksen’s experience. Three ships they’d served on together, the last two under Henricksen’s command. Had to pull a few strings to get the two of them assigned together this time, but it was worth it. Worth every damned favor Henricksen had to pay off to make it happen. No one else he wanted sitting in that Artillery station. No other gunner in the Fleet he trusted more than Sikuuku. “Duclos. How we doing with those probes?” “Last one’s coming on board, sir. Eight’s a bit slow.” Henricksen raised his head, quirking an eyebrow at Hecate’s camera. “Missed his maintenance cycle. I’ll have the TSGs give him a once-over to see what’s going on.” “Tell them to put a rush on it. Last thing we need is a slow-ass, lazy probe.” “Eight’s not lazy,” Hecate chided. “He’s just old and needs a little extra attention now and then.” “Whatever.” Henricksen flipped a hand, returning his attention to the windows as the drifting ships drew close. “Bunched up pretty tight,” he noted, tapping at a panel in front of him—one of five arranged in a semi-circle in front of the Command Post’s black, padded chair. A stroke of the keys cycled the feeds from Hecate’s hull cameras, one view replacing another as he scanned the ships outside. A score of them in total—a nice, round number that just didn’t feel right. “Looks like merchanters,” he said, hiding his discomfort. “Colony ships, maybe.” “Targeting system’s showing minimal armaments,” Sikuuku noted. “None of ’em hot, which is good.” He touched at a screen, studying the video from a camera mounted on one of Hecate’s forward-facing cannons. “Engines look dead. Least, nothing’s movin’.” Another touch panned the camera, zoomed it in on one ship and another. “If they’re colony ships, they probably pulled together like that to make the best use of what they’ve got.” A glance at Henricksen and he pushed the feed to the Command Post, zooming back out. “Put the vulnerable ships in the middle. Armed ones on the outside for protection.” “Stayed that way, too,” Henricksen murmured, eyes flicking from the video feed to the windows. “Stayed here, far from any colonized planet.” Which didn’t bode well for survivors. Dead ships drifting in space… Ripe target. Fat one, considering the equipment and provisions colony ships carried. “What the hell happened?” he wondered, toggling the camera controls himself, zooming in on the nearest ship. Perseid, surprisingly. Star cruiser chassis, retired from the Fleet a good fifty years ago and sold off for commercial use. Hard to believe the Meridian Alliance used to do that. These days even a wrecked warship was valuable, its body a ready source of parts to refit others. Selling one… heresy even thinking about selling one these days. Stupid too, considering all the advanced electronics. Engine systems, weapons systems, the horrifically expensive investment the Fleet made in each and every vessel it commissioned. Different time, he thought, studying the Perseid on his display. Few hundred years ago no one thought an old clunker like that was worth keeping around. “Got anything on it?” he asked, looking over at Scan. Duclos opened his mouth and closed it, frowning at Scan’s panels. “I’m not…” He leaned forward, fiddling with the data feeds, muttering under his breath. “Duclos!” Henricksen smacked the panel in front of him, making the crewman jump. “Report!” “Nothing, sir.” Duclos twisted, throwing an apologetic look at the Command Post. “I thought for a minute there… but there’s nothing. No beacon. Just a dead ship.” “You’re sure?” Duclos flicked his eyes to his panel, clearly not sure. But he nodded anyway. Tried to look confident. “Keep an eye on it. On all of them,” Henricksen told him, nodding to the ships outside. “Aye, sir,” Duclos murmured, facing around. Closer in and debris appeared, floating around the wrecked collection of ships. Composite metal, mostly. Sparkling clouds of reinforced glass mixed with glinting bits of metal, dulls shreds of high-durability plastics. Everything drifting serenely. Floating along with that clutch of wrecked ships. Dead ships—Hecate’s sensors confirmed it. Powered down, no energy signatures showing. No ships’ beacons, none of the electronic noise an interstellar vessel typically gave off. Up close, they didn’t actually look all that bad—scorched in places, pockmarked, a few rents, and tears, and pieces missing here and there, but surprisingly intact. Take the big, orb-shaped ship at the center, for instance. Cepheid science vessel, from what Henricksen could tell. Originally designed for deep space survey. Likely converted to serve as an agro ship or some such. Powered down like all the others, and yet, from here it looked right as rain. Like it should just pick up and go at any minute. Power up its engines and fly away. “Something’s not right.” Henricksen shared a worried look with Hecate’s camera. “You keep a close eye on Scan, Duclos, you hear me? This place… I’ve got a severely bad feeling about this place.” “Aye, sir. Trying, sir.” Duclose leaned close to Scan’s panels, pouring through the feeds from Hecate’s sensors. “Still having trouble, though. Radiation’s screwing with pretty much everything.” “Can you clean up the filters?” Henricksen nodded to the windows in front of him, eyes locked on Hecate’s camera. “Like to know what we’re dealing with out there.” “I’ll see what I can do.” “Sir.” Farrow’s head turned, blue eyes hidden behind her Comms visor, straw blond hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “Message from Seychelles. Valkyrie’s compliments, but she’d like to know if we’ve found anything.” “Have we found anything yet,” Henricksen muttered, flicking through the camera feeds. “What’s the goddamned hurry? Not like those ships out there are going anywhere.” “Sir?” “Never mind, Farrow.” Henricksen sighed, swiping at the panel to shut it down. Straightened and stared at the windows, the ships outside. “Tell her…” What? That they were trying? That they couldn’t tell shit about those ships because their sensors were screwed? Nuh-uh. Not disparaging Hecate like that. He lifted his eyes to the camera. “Tell her—” “I told her we need fifteen minutes,” Hecate interjected. “I fixed the filters, by the way.” She shunted Scan’s feeds to the front window and layered them together, added the video from half a dozen cameras to create a single display. Let the feeds run, providing updates in real time. Henricksen leaned forward, hands braced against the panel in front of him, drinking all that data in. Sensors still fritzed a bit—lot of radiation out there, the filters could only see through so much—but the scans showed the ships clearly. Picked up damage to that Cepheid he’d missed earlier: a huge hole near the engine ports, radiation leaking from its old-as-dirt nuclear propulsion system, surrounding it in a dense cloud. “Looks like that’s our suspect.” Henricksen nodded to silver-sided Cepheid. “AI might still be alive, but the crew…” He shook his head hard. “That much radiation, any crew that made it through the attack’ll be dead by now. No way they could survive in that toxic soup.” Didn’t explain why those other ships were down, though. Reactor spill was bad, yeah, but space… lot of real estate to play with. No way the reactor on that leaky old tub of a Cepheid took all those other vessels out. “What the hell is going on here?” Henricksen murmured, frowning at the ships outside. Duclos snuck a glance at Shin sitting Engineering, sharing a worried look. Shared that look with Shaheen on her far side. Shin and Shaheen, Helm and Engineering—sing-song names for two joined-at-the-hip crew. Took Henricksen a while to get the two of them straight and keep them straight, despite that Shin—with her copper skin and odd, violet eyes—looked nothing at all like dark-eyed, darker-skinned Shaheen. “Henricksen.” Hecate’s voice pulled his eyes back to the front windows. “What? What now?” “There’s something out there.” A blip appeared, flashing on the front windows. Electronic signature glowing ghostly against the glass. “Ship?” he asked, pulling the scan data to his panel, scrolling through the reams of information on display. “What the hell?” The blip blinked and faded, flared to life almost a kilometer away. “Hecate? Your sensors buggy or somethin’?” “Not sure.” Surprising admission. Not one you heard often from an AI. Hecate was quiet a moment, running analytics, pouring over every bit of information at hand. Repeated her analysis when the blip blanked and moved again. A third time when it disappeared and jumped almost a kilometer away. “What’s going on?” Henricksen demanded. “Is it the radiation? Is it fucking with things again?” “No,” she told him. “Not the radiation this time.” “Then what? For the luvva god—” Perimeter alarms lit up, klaxons screaming as the sensors sucked in information, dumping reams of new data into Hecate’s systems, sending it all to Scan’s board. “Ships’ signatures.” Duclos leaned over his panel, sorting like mad. “We’ve got company!” “Overlay.” Henricksen snapped his fingers, pointing at the front windows. “On it.” A touch at Scan’s panel and Duclos shunted the data to the curving wall of glass at the front of the bridge, three dimensional schematic flashing with multi-colored lights as Scan tagged each signature, assigning it to one of the ships outside. Fourteen ships in total. Fourteen of the twenty wrecked vessels drifting in space. Not a one of them actually moving—not yet, anyway—but live, suddenly. Powered up, when before they seemed stone cold dead.
J.B.
Rockwell is a New Englander, which is important to note because it
means she's (a) hard headed, (b) frequently stubborn, and (c) prone
to fits of snarky sarcasticness. As a kid she subsisted on a steady
diet of fairy tales, folklore, mythology augmented by generous
helpings of science fiction and fantasy. As a quasi-adult she dreamed
of being the next Indiana Jones and even pursued (and earned!) a
degree in anthropology. Unfortunately, those dreams of being an
archaeologist didn't quite work out. Through a series of twists and
turns (involving cats, a marriage, and a SCUBA certification, amongst
other things) she ended up working in IT for the U.S. Coast Guard and
now writes the types of books she used to read. Not a bad ending for
an Indiana Jones wannabe...
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