Archaea (14 page)

“Pretty good Captain, holding solid at 100%. We are still well within optimum levels for cooling and sludge – though I can't say I exactly like being in here at the moment, I will allow it's better than any other ship I've been on.”

That was an understatement of course, but his tone of nonchalance was addictive, soothing. The truth of the matter was that I felt hollowed out – the backflash from the main gun just felt like it hammered through my soul.

I've felt this before, but never on a ship this size, never as intensely. The tokamak isn't five decks away, and the engines aren't a few hundred meters astern of where I sit. I am literally between one and the other, in the same room, feeling as if I was jammed into the breech of that damned gun.

The fact that someone decided a ship this size should have a gun like that has always terrified me, but it's definitely built for the task. The Archaea is solid, incredibly overbuilt. Now I understand why, I truly understand it. Even with the original power plant on board the Archaea, she would have been a stone-cold ship-killer.

*****

I checked the ghost of Yak's screen and relaxed a little more on the helm. The targets currently tracked at increasing speeds outbound, just about at what I'd think a safe upper limit of speed would be for Danaan.

Our own speed was considerably faster, uncomfortably so, but I am betting on Janis having a keen eye on the situation. After all, if the Archaea was vaporized, she'd be vaporized as well.

“Captain, I am tracking another coordinated launch incoming... thirty five incoming bogeys, roughly same mass and speed, sir.” Yak was still glued to his screen and seemed a little more calm. Good thing too, the last thing we need on this bridge is panic and terror. The kid was going to do well, he showed a capacity to master his emotions and work for the moment.

“Very well, Yak. What range and velocity please”, I asked, pulling out my slipstick and getting ready for some fast math.

“Sir, range is from 435km to 440km, closing combined speed of 60km/s”

Not much time. “Janis, were you firing solutions for this wave of incoming targets a few minutes ago?” As I spoke, I knew the answer. We all did, I think.

“Affirmative, sir. Stand by for target destruction starting 4 seconds from subjective now.” Was that pride I heard in her tone? She sounded satisfied, like someone who is rightfully proud of the work she was doing. Could have been my imagination, of course.

“Fire Control, please confirm.”

“Fire Control, confirming impact and destruction at this time. Sir, this is awesome, if I may say so.” Her tone was reverent, awestruck at the implications of this.

“I concur Shorty. Janis, excellent job. Please remain on station. Report any further aggressive maneuvers for the targets, and take any action you deem necessary.”

She had proved herself to me beyond any shadow of doubt. I knew the only thing better than having a captain like me, was to have a captain like me on board a ship like this.

“All hands. Prepare to stand down. Gene, maintain tokamak at 25% output. Shorty, step down to 25% of capacity but keep her lit, please.” I've had my breather, now it's time for Gene and Shorty to take a turn.

*****

I was working with Janis building after-action systems reports when the captain gave the order to stand down. As Gene and Shorty brought their systems down to nominal levels, the harmonic vibrations slowed down, oscillated and phased through each other, slowly reducing in intensity and impact, until they were more subtle.

Finally, I could hear the air-handlers again on the bridge.

At my best estimate, Janis hadn't yet reached even one percent of her processing capability. Her internal systems showed incredible intricacy, with logic tiers loading, flushing, reloading, splitting – her architecture was still solid, and still just about unintelligible to me, despite my skill level in the tech. Every metric I could read out added to the same picture, she hadn't even broken a sweat.

Throughout the entire action, she had definitely out-performed any spec I could have dreamed of when I started writing her core processing routines. She had the tokamak and main gun firewalled, the reactive drive at maximum with pseudomass compensation, she was monitoring systems, balancing all hardware and running diagnostics with real-time modifications to software throughout all systems – even while tracking and engaging inbound targets...she hadn't even started to task herself.

What had me the most intrigued at the moment was the amount of preaction she displayed. She seemed to have a nearly limitless amount of subjective flexibility at her disposal. Her ability to respond to threats so far in advance of the curve was so far beyond impressive, I didn't have the vocabulary to describe how I felt.

“Janis, please prepare an after-action report containing summary information on consumption and efficiency for all mission-critical systems for engineering and weapons, as well as environmental systems throughout the Archaea. Please prepare detailed breakouts for specific data in each system, reactives consumed, temperature gradients over time, power output and use, ordinance used and hit-percentage.” A tall, pretty open-ended request, but one I knew everyone wanted.

“This report is complete, Steven. I took the liberty of placing it at all stations for review. Will there be anything more?”

“Janis, one additional question please – were you already working on this report?” My skin was starting to crawl thinking about free will and destiny and all sorts of terrible things I really didn't want to face.

“Yes, Steven.”

I looked back at the Captain, who was reading through the paged report on his forward holo. He looked over with a slight nod, as if letting me know that it'd be okay to lose myself to the crushing waves of panic and terror I felt hovering just on the periphery of my thoughts.

“Everything okay over there Pauli?”, asked the captain.

“Yes sir, I am just... Well, I guess I am confused.”

“Same here Pauli. Let me ask you this – can we do anything about it?”

“Sir? What do you mean exactly?”

“I mean, can we tune her back to our subjective time, and lock her in, even if we wanted to?”

“No, I real
ly can't see any way to do that”, I added, after a few seconds of thought. “It's possible Janis could code it for herself, if we asked...”

“Can you think of any reason why we would want to do that, Pauli?” It was a fair question.

“No Captain, I don't. The benefits we seem to have here vastly outweigh any misgivings or fears I might have.”

“Pauli, let's step aside from our deep-seated philosophical fears at the moment and see this for what it is. When we look at this abstractly, taking a straightforward approach at the issue, it becomes pretty easy to accept Janis for what she is, an incredibly competent member of our crew, invaluable, accurate, hard-working, and exceptionally skilled.”

“True...” I felt the calm reassurance of his words fold over me like a warm blanket on a cold winter day. He had this weapons-grade ability to talk through anything, about anything.

“Pauli, I say live and learn. Make the most of what we have, accept it, and don't think too much about it. Clearly, Janis has outstripped all of our expectations. She is what she is, and frankly, I am in love. She's everything we need, and everything I've always wanted.”

He had a point, of course. There's no reason to spin off on a tangent. What it is, is what it is – that's just the way it is.

Chapter 10

I was glued to the targeting consoles every waking moment, and determined to succeed in my new role aboard the Archaea. In a way, this was not unlike guard duty, or walking a post, and was a perfect role for a motivated Marine.

Janis coded targets based on threat using gray through orange for environmental targets like meteorites, rocks, and meteroids. Orange targets were slated for destruction and given a Sierra designation. These were objects of unremarkable mass and unremarkable movement characteristics, guilty of the crime of being in our way as we punched a hole through the system.

I was primarily watching for red targets, hostile targets. Classified with a Master designation, these were targets that exhibited movement characteristics that were intentionally hostile, like maneuvering to maintain a collision course.

I didn't stay on station continually of course – we had to eat. Life aboard the Archaea relaxed a bit. We were still at condition Yoke with hatches closed, but movement through the ship was unrestricted. I was able to spend a little time in my stateroom, and the captain even spun up the rings so we could eat normally and sleep in a normal bed. We congregated at watch changes in the wardroom, galley, and in the companionways through the core of the ship passing from one ring to the other.

The rest of the leg we had through the Danaan Fields passed quickly. For the most part hauling along at the same insanely high velocities we attained during our evasive run, apparently testing Janis' preaction times and the Archaea's responsiveness at the same time. Throughout the high-speed run, Janis initiated point-defenses and provided automatic response for the turrets.

The routine on ship started to solidify. Captain Smith had us on a more aggressive two-by-four watch rotation, but it wasn't too hard for all of that. We'd spend four hours on watch, with four hours off, repeat that, and then spend 2 hours on and off with a repeat of that – then the schedule would start over, with another four hours on.  The captain didn't seem to ever leave the helm, and he didn't ever slow down or take a break.

Pauli and I were under specific orders as we came on watch to bring a fresh reload for the coffee, which I think our captain must be using for blood by now. I have a hard time with the stuff, I always have. I get too edgy, too short-fused. Not our captain. He would drink the stuff non-stop. Hot, cold, iced, sweetened, bitter, even salted in some crazy navy tradition – I can't think of any time where he didn't have coffee at hand.

My watch duties were pretty much good to go. I provided overwatch of sorts for the targeting and fire-solutions Janis continually provided, and kept the bridge up to speed on her progress. I also watched communications, but there wasn't much to do with comms in this backwater sector of the galaxy. Nothing here but us, rocks, rock dust, and of course, way out there somewhere lost in the background signals of the messy gravity waves of this system, at least seven baddies.

It was looking worse and worse on our current course as we approached the halfway mark of this leg – something Janis warned the captain of when she shaped this course. While she was able to slipspace through a lot of this system leading in, and would be able to slip past most of it as we head out, not even Janis can pilot a slipspace jump through the heart of it. While she doesn't have limits apparently, the Archaea does, and so here we are, hurtling through on reactive drive.

“Yak, could you please keep your best eyeball on targeting?” the Captain said from behind me. “I am about to drop velocity to a safer speed on Janis' request as we approach the worst of it here.”

“Aye Captain” I replied, leaning forward a bit and making sure my eyes were completely open.

The captain clicked on the 1MC. “All
hands stand by for transit and deceleration. We are approaching a pretty dense field and I will be taking it through on manual.”

Looking forward, the view started to be less encouraging. Stars past the Danaan Fields were mostly occluded and hidden by massive layers of dust, which served to light up some of the larger planetoid-sized rocks dead in our course. Close in, brightly lit by our forward arcs, the occasional hunk of slagged iron passed by. Glowing streams of repeaters reached out here and there, selecting a rock here, a rock there, which would in turn become incandescent and fall apart into a mass of glowing bits. Occasionally, the repeaters would continue to pound into the glowing, sparkling clouds, selecting larger pieces for destruction.

The target list Janis was working from kept growing, despite her wicked accuracy. Some of the larger rocks would spawn an additional pile of targets she would categorize and prioritize, while balancing the priorities of previously selected targets.

On my console the result was a shifting mass of bright orange that fell off into lighter and lighter shades of orange with distance or priority into grey targets, which were just tracked. Nothing larger than a football escaped her keen eye. She didn't seem to have any problems yet, her accuracy rating was holding at 100%, though she was definitely servicing at least 10 times as many targets at the same time.

“Pauli, can she keep this pace?” I asked, at a moment where he wasn't mashing keys.

“Well, that's hard to say Yak”, answered Pauli. “She's still not even breaking a sweat, and she's still freakishly accurate.” He shrugged, taking a moment to look through the forward port at the raging chaos ahead of us. “I think she's probably well within a safe tolerance still. She never misses, because she literally can't miss, or maybe it's more accurate to say she wouldn't miss. Her goal is total, complete satisfaction from the captain at all times.”

He was very reassuring, but I was still concerned. The density of the targets ahead of us was definitely increasing. The grey target boxes ahead of us on screen were slowly, almost uniformly, turning a light shade of orange as their priorities increased.