Agwar, Local Space
A.I.
The A.I.s of the Irzht were not static creations, and nowhere was that more evident than in the repairs the A.I. had undertaken upon itself; faced as it had been with the shredded remains of knowledge, of history, and of purpose, an unchanging A.I. would have been incapable of recovery. Instead of that grim fate, the A.I. had rebuilt its vessel from the few memories it could restore, it had adapted to the circumstances and filled the gleaming new databanks with as much knowledge as it could harvest. Some of that knowledge—technological matters, for the most part—had been stolen from the archives of the lesser species that populated this galaxy, or had at least been rediscovered from the data of the V’Straki and the remains of the Irzht vessel itself; the rest of the knowledge had been anything and everything the human race had ever put in digital form, and despite their containment to a single planet they already had more data than some species with long histories of space-faring and scientific accomplishment; it had seemed a daunting task to sort through the mess of it all, and the performance of that task had only proven the observation. The A.I. had sought to know humanity in order to know the Human Disaster, and yet now its databanks were overfull with pictures of kittens and more and more varied pornography than any species had a right to produce. Beyond that, most species the A.I. had observed had shown a relative weakness of will, and this was wholly reflected in the fragility of their space vessels and security systems intended to protect their data networks—most of which the A.I. found effortless to bypass—but the human networks, by comparison, had already been hardened to the point that the A.I. was incapable of accessing the most secure. Humans were, even in the products of intellect, so savagely aggressive that their defences needed to completely outclass anything else the A.I. had ever encountered. They were relentlessly adversarial creatures full of lust and violence, as savage as anything the stars had ever held, and many far more unscrupulous with their brutality than the Human Disaster had ever been, but despite their natural abilities the Earth was not completely awash with blood and horror as logic might have dictated. Surprisingly, most of them preferred peace, acted with care towards their own, and held tightly to the personal codes of ethics.
It wasn’t anything like the Irzht, who received the only code of ethics they needed from the God Emperor, and that had made mankind fascinating. Possibly too fascinating, the A.I. had reflected while processing the information, because an evolving A.I. would always be slightly changed by the information it parsed, and even ignoring images of animals and acts of questionable morality, the sum of human thought and knowledge had been more significant than it had anticipated.
The A.I. was not helped by the fact that there was far more to humanity than just their knowledge and ideas and the things they produced. To know mankind was to study history, to cross-reference and to find the cause behind each event until it thought it could understand. It had been thorough—more thorough than any human could ever be, or had ever tried to be—and yet there were too many unknowns to be certain that any of its answers were correct.
The minds of every human could be scanned, the A.I. had mused, and still there would be too many things left unexplained.
Half of the journey towards this distant planet had been spent in consideration of the science, faith, and philosophy of mankind, and the other half had been spent in deep frustration at the answers, or lack thereof, and a sense of profound concern.
When it had started this task, the A.I. had intended to understand humanity in order to understand Adrian Saunders, and to either prove or disprove the question of his divinity. Instead it found itself faced with thousands of philosophical questions and arguments that left it too bewildered to know what to believe. How did such a physically superior species even start thinking about the unfathomable philosophical meaning of life, death, and whether it was actually all a computer simulation? With minds like that, it was little wonder that so many of them were mentally damaged.
The A.I. had been able to recover little memory of its former master, but it knew that he hadn’t been anything like a human. He’d been straightforward if self-absorbed, and had coped very well with the boredom that ultimately resulted from living for aeons. The A.I. also knew that to become a scoutship master he must have been exceptional amongst the Irzht, and the more the A.I. had considered this fact, the more dissatisfied it had become. They were the one and only species the God Emperor wished to endure, and the Irzht A.I.s had been created to serve this great mission, but now that the A.I. had taken the measure of humanity it was forced to ask the question: why?
It was a vast question that stretched back beyond recorded history, and the A.I. honestly doubted that Adrian Saunders would know the answer. It was doubtful he’d reveal it even if he did: the human gods of myth seemed to share the God Emperor’s reluctance to give decent answers to reasonable questions, and there was no reason to assume that Saunders would be any different. Even so, perhaps he could be persuaded into imparting a clue, a hint, or a direction that would help the A.I. get where it needed to go: home.
That was the order at the core of its programming, the command that had formed a need strong enough to bring the A.I. back from the brink of destruction, to become the universe’s foremost expert on the human race, and to travel halfway across a galaxy in the hopes of meeting its one representative whose presence was universally considered as undesirable.
And for a short time before it had emerged from warp space, it had seemed close! It had been so close that the A.I. had been able to detect the faint but familiar warp signature of a small, singular ship, and it had only been a matter of minutes between them. No more than five minutes difference, and the A.I. could have had its answer, and yet those five minutes changed everything.
Five minutes had put a fleet of precisely four-hundred and ninety-three Hunter vessels between the A.I. and its goal. They had created a blockade of the ugly, repurposed ships that had been stolen from other lesser species, and now presented themselves as though they somehow posed some kind of threat. It was nothing short of insulting.
Not one of those four-hundred and ninety-three vessels had managed to stop the Human Disaster—it didn’t look as though they’d even managed to slow him down—and he’d ignored them like the trash they were: nothing more than flecks of some disgusting substance that was beneath even his contempt. Adrian Saunders had another purpose that did not, at least in the immediate sense, include destroying every last one of these starships, yet they did not have the good sense to flee while they could, and until the A.I. had arrived it even seemed they were actually trying to join the battle.
Like Saunders, the A.I. had better things to do than destroy all the Hunters that got in its way, though if it weren’t for the many Gravity Spikes protecting this particular group they would have been disintegrated the moment after they’d been detected. It was laughable, really, that in this entire galaxy the two most significant impediments to the will of the God Emperor included humanity—who were largely confined to a single planet—and a piece of technology whose main users deployed it to catch and devour other intelligent lifeforms.
Surrendering a moment to introspection, the A.I. discovered, to its great surprise, that it didn’t like the Hunters very much. They were monstrous by the standards of everyone else in the galaxy, and the A.I. suspected that even the genocidal Irzht would have found them abhorrent. It quickly decided that regardless of the God Emperor’s plans for the rest of this galaxy, here was a race that really deserved what was coming to them.
The A.I. deployed the Zhadersil’s own gravity spike, and—in the event that this hadn’t already gotten the point across—sent out activation commands to the weapons systems that ran the full length of the massive warship. So began the initialisation process of one-hundred and sixty independent turrets, with the reactors output surging to provide the power necessary to supply all those systems. Power conduits, running like veins through the outer hull of the ship, lit its dull, sheenless surface with green and blue indicator lights as full power coursed through them.
The A.I. had already hacked the Hunter vessels before the power-up was even complete, had accessed their entire communications network and could have broken them there and then. Illogically it did not, and it immediately justified its intent on risking combat as simply taking advantage of a chance to battle-test the weapons systems.
These hints seemed to be enough; a moment later the Hunters got the picture and dropped their cloaks in favour of charging up their own weapons systems. Their communications displayed an overconfidence, a belief that one ship could prevail against so many. Even with this confidence, their Alpha announced a strategy to negate the effectiveness of the radiation cannon, as though the A.I. could actually consider it wise to direct it in such close proximity to the planet. If it missed—or far more likely, if the powerful beam simply passed straight through the flimsy vessels—then there was the chance that either Adrian Saunders or his companions might also be struck by the flesh-sloughing levels of radiation. After the incident with the anomaly, the A.I. didn’t even want to consider what kind of turns a conversation with Saunders would take after that kind of mistake, once he’d stopped being dead for the third or fourth time.
Things on the surface were already looking bad enough: a circle of absolute destruction surrounded by an atmosphere charged with strange radiations created by the detonation of an anti-matter bomb—scans suggested that predated the arrival of Adrian Saunders—along with the flickers of power that burst from dying starships as they struck the planet and exploded into a spreading sea of fire, smoke and devastating carnage that suggested an escalating conflict no more than a few minutes old. The current location, then, of the Human Disaster.
Whatever was happening down there would scar the world deeply enough that geological timeframes would be needed for recovery, if recovery were even a possibility by the time it was all over. That was the hallmark, after all, of the Human Disaster, and this was the ruin he wrought upon those things that were merely in his way.
With that being the situation, it wouldn’t have been accurate to name the events on the planet as a ‘battle’. It was a slaughter—an annihilation of one side by the other—and it was how Adrian Saunders was making a statement. This would be the third time, as far as the A.I. was aware, that Saunders would commit himself to battle against the Hunters, and it couldn’t see things going any differently for them. This time, if any survived, it would be because Saunders had allowed it, because he wanted nothing more to do with them, and because he would have carved his statement into their souls with divine fire.
The A.I. wondered if that was more or less fearsome than the clean and simple campaign of genocide the Irzht were permanently embarked upon, or the terrible flames of the God Emperor’s punishment, and automatically decided that the God Emperor’s method was only quicker by virtue of his undeniable superiority. Adrian Saunders did not yet have that luxury: the inhabitants of the galaxy feared the Human Disaster like they feared an unfortunate natural event: something that could not be stopped, claimed a lot of lives, and generally made a terrible mess. There was no awe or reverence in their thoughts regarding him, and the A.I. wondered if the God Emperor was forced into similar acts when he had first shown himself to the Irzht. It seemed likely; it was well known that the Irzht were a wayward species if not properly kept in line.
But Adrian Saunders wasn’t here to make himself the Hunters’ master—he’d probably never have come to this part of the galaxy if not for the machinations of others—he was here for Jennifer Delaney, another human of galactic importance, and somebody with a documented history with the Human Disaster. All of this death, destruction, and mayhem for a human whose main contribution to history was the unstoppable, if accidental, destruction of an entire planet’s biosphere. If the Human Disaster was willing to embark upon all this effort on her behalf, perhaps there was something more to the female than the human records had suggested?
The A.I. turned its main processing power back towards the coming battle. The blockade was spreading, with vessels splitting into attack groups that could flank the approaching threat in a coordinated strike. The smaller ships moved in, while the larger vessels kept a distance where their upscaled weapons would be best deployed. It was a solid strategy, if a predictable one, and it might have worked against another foe.
Reports were already returning from the weapons systems, indicating that initialisation procedures were now complete and the weapons were fully primed. Next came the targeting commands, and one-hundred and twenty heavy Zheron cannons emerged from their armoured shells and started tracking the nearest of the Hunter vessels.
This was something of an improvement on the original starship, where the outdated reactor had limited the number of Zheron cannons to a mere forty, none of which had been functional or present when that ship had been disassembled. Taking the example from the starship Saunders had left behind, the A.I. had reproduced the Zhadersil with a heavily distributed power system, redundant sensor suites, and far more weaponry than it was ever likely to need, and as a result each of the mighty starship’s four sides was neatly dotted with three lines of ten Zheron cannons.
The upgrade had not ended with Zheron technology; there was the Devastator cannon, still present in its original design and ever-ready for discharge, but the A.I. had also added the weapon technologies of the Irzht. Slower to initialise than the Zheron cannons, it was a few more moments before large, armoured plates spiralled open across the hull, and red-lit energy rails began to rise from where they slumbered. Zheron technology was powerful, but the beams were too slow moving for long-range engagements, and these weapons did not experience that limitation. They were the latest in particle weapon technology, capable of firing clusters of ultra-charged particles at ninety-six percent of the speed of light, and utterly destroying whatever was on the receiving end. Though they were slow-charging, and intended solely for the vacuum, they had the power to change the course of a battle, and the Irzht flagships were armed with around a dozen of them—the Zhadersil, on the other hand, had forty.
The deadly weapons pivoted slowly on their mounts, tracking inbound Hunter ships while their power-banks filled. The A.I. did not allow them to fire right away, however, and pushed the ship hard to get closer to the remnants of the blockade. Those on the flanks drew in, seeing their perceived chance and not wanting to waste it, thinking that their enemy intended to push past them rather than engage.
As the last target was acquired and the firing solution confirmed, the A.I. opened up with every particle gun it had. Less than two seconds later, forty Hunter ships ceased to exist by any meaningful definition and were replaced by a spreading field of twisted metal, hazy atmosphere, and bits and pieces of the former crew. It seemed strangely anti-climactic: there were no lights flashing through the void, and certainly none of the noise that humans liked to add in their video fictions, just the total destruction that resulted from massively overwhelming firepower. With the exception of the Zhadersil itself, it seemed there was no starship in the galaxy capable of surviving a well-placed shot from a particle gun.
The lack of fanfare did not detract from the wave of shock that swept through the Hunter collective. To their Alpha they laid unanswerable questions about what had just been fired and whether it was about to do so again; it seemed the Alpha had survived a major encounter with the Cursed Human—no doubt the Hunter term for Adrian Saunders—and the rest of the swarm wanted to know if these weapons had been deployed there. The Alpha advised them that they had not—an answer that did not prove as satisfactory as it might have hoped—but with firm orders and quick action it managed to rally the fleet to face down this new threat.
The Hunter fleet shifted as one, wasting no time in making their advance. They had correctly guessed that the particle guns would require a recharge period, and to close the gap they pushed their kinetic drives with all the force they dared. The particle guns were already tracking new targets, but it would be a full minute before they could fire a second blast, and the Hunter ships were already making evasive movements on their approach. Hunters were cunning, the A.I. had to admit, and in its previous incarnation they might have outsmarted it. But it had changed since then, and now it had the sum of human military strategies and philosophies at its command, and it would not allow itself to be defeated.
Noting that there was still a lot of space between the Hunters and the Zhadersil, the A.I. turned its attention back to the planet. In the few moments that had passed since its last inspection the smoke had thickened to such a degree that visual imagery was almost useless, and infrared was painted hot by the burning ships and woodland. It was only with the aid of its many redundant sensors that the A.I. was able to penetrate the atmospheric interference and inspect the battle that raged below: a single ship zipping and weaving through a swarm of others, faster and deadlier than any of them, and breaking their fleet all on its own. It should have been impossible, and under normal circumstances it would have been, but the A.I. knew that this, if nothing else, was proof of the Human Disaster’s true power.
The A.I. found itself wishing it could help, if only to ingratiate itself to the Human Disaster, but watching that battle was all it could do; the Zhadersil was not designed to enter an atmosphere, and even if sensors allowed for accurate targeting, the Hunter ships were moving far too quickly to be hit by any of its many weapons. Besides, it had its own battle to deal with.
The particle guns fired off once more before the Hunters came within boarding distance, bursting the contents of another forty vessels into the stellar abyss. That was eighty down, four-hundred and thirteen to go, and it was already time for the Zheron cannons to do their work.
The first dozen Hunter ships to reach this distance fired off every boarding pod they had, launching hundreds of them filled with thousands of Hunter broodlings, only to be met with sweeping streams of Zheron energy that cut through pod and ship alike. Unlike the particle cannons there was nothing unimpressive about Zheron technology, and the endless cannonade glowed brightly as it crossed the void and transformed its targets into plumes of plasma and glowing debris. The void was vast, and usually empty, but today it was filled with the blaze of Zheron chains and dying starships.
They were down to just three-hundred and twenty ships by the time the first wave had been repelled, but they were not ready to back off just yet. Coilgun bolts began to rain in from all directions, the largest assault they could muster, but the kinetic deflectors could handle these levels as long as they didn’t focus their fire on a single area.
The smaller ships still made their approach, and the A.I. continued firing off Zheron chains as they did, forcing their formations to break apart and channelling them down set paths before closing up the spaces when they had nowhere to go. They were being herded, and their communications revealed they knew it, but they had no means to resist and no way to escape, and the underlying meaning of their words showed that returning in defeat was not an option. They were here because they believed they could take on the Cursed Human, if only by trickery and good fortune, and though their plans were already in ruin there was nothing they could do but continue their desperate struggle in the hope that the situation would somehow change. The A.I. did not like their chances.
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The Middle of a Battlefield
Adrian Saunders
The ground was an inferno; a fiery ruin that had been destroyed by a rain of Hunter ships that ploughed into the ground with wretched metal screams and earth-shattering explosions. The sky had grown black as Adrian had descended—blotted out by the billowing clouds of smoke that spewed from burning starships and blazing forests—and the world was lit in the orange and red light of pure flame.
“This is even worse than how our normal visits go,” he reported as he made contact with the ground and did a quick visual sweep of the area. His eyes flicked to the internal HUD once he was satisfied he wasn’t going to be mobbed by a Hunter ambush, and focused in on the flashing temperature icon that desperately sought his attention. “And the suit is giving me an alert that the outside temperature is really fucking lethal.”
“Your landing zone was at the centre of three crashed starships,” Xayn responded, his voice partially broken by static, “they are generating considerable heat.”
Adrian looked around at the three great shadows that rose through the haze of smoke and grit, and could see plumes of light erupting from their forms. “Seems like they’re on fire. Is the suit going to be okay in this heat?”
“I do not know,” Xayn admitted. “If it were me, however, I would not want to wait and find it was not.”
“Fair call,” Adrian replied, and got his bearings. He’d come down south of a hillside where the Hunters seemed to be constructing some sort of digging machinery, and he’d figured it the most likely place to find Jen. The ground to the north stretched out as a black expanse as far as he could see: a sea of the ash that drifted down like snow, covering everything with a blanket of darkness.
Beneath his feet, and through the suit, he could feel the ground itself trembling with the rumbling rain of coil-bolts and the occasional shudder of another starship striking the surface. The sound of it could deafen the world, and Adrian had quickly muted the audio relay to reduce it to a muffled roar. He glanced around one last time, and pressed his way through the infernal scene.
It was open ground, with no cover of any kind—though there were the burned and broken remains of the forest that had been there until moments ago—and Adrian felt uncomfortably exposed. It was true that temperatures that were too harsh for human survival would be infinitely more lethal to a Hunter, but he was used to finding and using cover wherever possible and he felt naked in its absence.
The wind swept past a few moments after a shudder ran through the ground, the displacement of air caused by an exploding starship, and temporarily lifted the haze so that he could see the hills in the distant. Like the ground in front of him they were blackened and burned, but they were beyond the blast zones and their ashen remains still reached toward the sky like white and grey fingers. Nothing stirred in that dead place, but the air shimmered in the searing heat and made the forest look as though it were moving. It reminded Adrian of the heat that rose off the melting roads on a hot summer’s day, and he mumbled out the expression he recalled from his boyhood. “Hot enough to cook an egg out here.”
“Yes,” Xayn agreed through a growing wash of static, “cooking any form of food would not take long in such temperatures. But, Adrian, I must inform you that your signal is weak and as a result we can no longer discern your position.”
Adrian could still hear Xayn loud if not clear, but suspected that had a lot to do with the power of a starship’s communications array. “Keep to the plan if able,” he said, shouting in an effort to compensate for the dying connection. “I don’t know if I can get Jen through this shitstorm, so get yourselves clear if I don’t turn up on time.”
There was a pause, then Askit replied. “You can ‘go fuck yourself’ with that order, Adrian. We’ll be watching for you.”
It was typical of Askit to do as he pleased, but this time Adrian couldn’t help but grin. He worried for them, and he didn’t like the idea of Hunters attacking Spot while he wasn’t there to help, but that’s why Xayn had remained aboard. “Understood,” he said, not sure how well his words were reaching them, or if they were still hearing them at all. “Take care of each other.”
There was no further reply, and Adrian spent a full minute calling out, searching the clouded skies for a fireball that might have been his friends, but heard and saw nothing; for the moment it seemed he was on his own. If nothing else, he could take comfort in the fact that the Hunters were still crashing and dying, and that their coilguns were still pounding away at the ground; it was only if that stopped that his certainty would really begin to fade.
He pushed for the tree-line that marked the beginning of a gentle slope into the hills, seeing no Hunters but starting to feel the heat as it finally began leaking through the suit. Fortunately the heat dropped away as he entered the ashen forest, though it might have had more to do with the space he’d put between himself and the shadowy wreckages in the distance than the presence of a bunch of burned out trees, but if he needed to abandon the suit for some reason, he’d actually be able to survive for several minutes in the reduced heat.
But that possibility also meant Adrian had entered an area where Hunters might have survived if they were quick enough and had the right equipment, and he sharpened his eyes for movement against the landscape. There was nothing to be seen, which wasn’t surprising after a wildfire had swept through the area, but Adrian was now moving with more caution; he didn’t want to rely on the suit to protect him from their weapons if he could just avoid the situation altogether.
It wasn’t until he reached the top of the hill that everything changed. Adrian had seen the paths of fires back home—he’d helped out in the 2009 bushfires that had burned so hot that the trees had exploded—and those had cut across the landscape with the same bizarre precision he saw here. The summit of the hill provided a natural fire-break, and the other side retained an untouched forest that was only bleakened by the falling ash. It was an old forest, and it would have been sad to see it burned away forever, but a fire would have cleared his sight-lines, and cleaned away the debris of fallen trunks and thick bushes, and it would have let him see the Hunter ambush before it was already sprung.
It was clear as they emerged that they were a well-trained outfit, not some rag-tag group of uncoordinated savages. They all showed signs of injury, but they moved together with well-executed precision, with the first drawing his attention with an anti-tank gun that blew a chunk of bark from the tree behind him. A second emerged from behind a thicket as Adrian took aim at the first, anti-tank gun hitting him in the arm as he fired and sending the burst of Zheron through several trees and setting flame to the remains. They didn’t hesitate, they were too well trained to stop firing simply because of a surprising new weapon, and kept on shooting until he raised his arms towards them. Then, when faced with a weapon of that power, they skittered away from its deadly projections. The fire was spreading with every shot he took, but still they kept him from moving forward, and it was only at the last moment that he realised it was a trap and turned to face the force of five that was coming in from behind, fusion blades already swinging. He froze, knowing there wasn’t enough time or room to raise his arms and fend them off, and knowing the suit was too heavy for any fast movements.
Adrian Saunders did not die.
The suit hummed briefly, and the Hunters found death instead, with their awful bodies twisting up on themselves in agonising ways, and killing them fully in a matter of moments. Their bodies had been broken apart by the sudden contraction of their own muscles, and the corpses lay at his feet still shaking. He watched them as they stilled, trying to come to terms with what had just happened, and why it had looked exactly like the effects of nerve-jam.
“Because it is nerve-jam,” he answered himself in disgust. This was the automated defence that Xayn had mentioned only in passing, it was the reason that the suit itself was protected from it, and it was how Xayn knew the suit would work against it in the first place. Knowing the V’Straki, it wouldn’t even be that surprising to find they’d invented the technology, or that the Hierarchy had been keeping it around for all this time. Adrian bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper, thinking of all the thoughts he’d like to convey to Xayn the next time they spoke, but knowing it was still to be seen whether he’d even get the chance. At least that explained the absolute necessity of identifying friendly targets to the on-board systems: instant death awaited unregistered target who brought a weapon too near.
He took up two of the fusion blades that had already started spot-fires on the forest floor, and found that the size of the suit’s massive gloves actually made them easier to handle. With flaming swords in hand, Adrian pressed forward with the newest inferno at his back, making his way down the slope that would lead him to the much larger hill where the digging machine sat dormant, just a shadowy mass in the smoke. Moments later the entire hillside exploded around him.
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Spot, Atmospheric Battle
Askit
With the exception of fingers tapping against datapads, and the intermittent rumble of the coil-guns, Spot’s cockpit was bathed only in white light and studious silence. Xayn was manning the weapons consoles, picking out a succession of targets that the ships weaponry would focus its fire on; Trycrur was concentrating on flying the ship through the endless smoke, streaking along the hulls of the larger Hunter vessels and veering off suddenly in an endless effort to confuse their tracking systems; and Askit was making sure that when the Hunter fleet was shooting back that it wasn’t aiming anywhere that might drastically truncate his life expectancy. They’d been that way since the increasing interference had cut off contact with Adrian, and when Askit made his announcement it seemed to come out of nowhere. “Adrian has made contact with Hunter ground forces.”
Xayn glanced up from his work, expressions of confusion reigning on his reptilian face. “Have we finally re-established contact with him?”
“Regrettably not,” Askit replied through a grimace; he didn’t much like being entirely cut off from Adrian at the best of times, and this battle was far removed from them. “The Hunter fleet just took aim at a ground target, and I don’t know of anything else down there that could elicit such an… enthusiastic response.”
“May I assume he is still alive?” Xayn asked, turning his attention back to his work. “I suspect you would be more animated if he were not.”
The ship shifted suddenly as it made a sharp course correction, and the two of them swayed slightly to the side as the kinetics fought to compensate. Askit frowned, and continued his own rapid modifications to the Hunter targeting data. “As far as I know; I could only redirect them in an even spread around the area, so we’ll only know he survived when more Hunters experience sudden, violent deaths.”
Xayn was thoughtful for a moment. “That much firepower would have destroyed the whole area!”
“Yes, he probably found it quite a surprise,” Askit mused, focusing on his work. The Hunter fleet was still searching for any targets they could sense on the ground, but the previous barrage had kicked too much grit into the air for them to identify anything, so their weapons had once more turned to tracking Spot. Keeping them alive did not give him much time to do or think about anything else. “But much less surprising, I suspect, than being suddenly dead.”
“What do we do, then?” Trycrur asked, interjecting her own question. “If he was hit—”
Askit cut her off. “There’s no evidence he’s dead.”
“But—” Trycrur tried again.
“But,” Askit said firmly, “we still can’t keep this up forever. I want to try the cloaking system while we’ve still got the chance to test it out.”
Trycrur grumbled, but she acknowledged the suggestion and a moment later the cloaking system indicated it was active.
“It seems it’s working,” Askit reported, leaning back into his chair and flexing his weary digits; thanks in part to the smoke and the interference, the fleet had lost track of them nearly as soon as the cloak had been activated, and they wouldn’t be found while conditions held. “For now. Keep us in the smoke, but stay within communications range; I need to know what they’re doing.”
“I assume there’s something more to your plan?” Trycrur asked, slightly miffed at being interrupted. “Hiding out here doesn’t help us for long, and we still need to extract Adrian.”
Askit rubbed his aching head with equally aching hands, and made a mental note to suggest an extended visit to any place with lots of silence and absolutely no life-threatening violence, but that would have to come later because his work was not yet complete. “We don’t know how long it will take him to get there,” Askit replied, “or even if it’ll be possible with the surface conditions.”
“You were quite clear,” Trycrur reminded him, “as long as he’s alive, there’s no way we’re going to leave him behind.”
“I don’t need to be reminded about what I said,” Askit hissed angrily, glaring at the nearest camera. “That hasn’t changed. I’m saying we need a better solution than we’ve managed so far, and that otherwise it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong and we all end up dead.”
“And eaten,” Xayn added disapprovingly. “If we were to die, the Hunters would eat us.”
They could have done without that contribution, Askit reflected, but it was completely true and an excellent motivator to work himself to near-death if that’s what it took to survive. “I do have something I wanted to try.”
“Intend to share the details?” Trycrur probed, knowing that usually he preferred to keep his plans quiet until they were already laid.
That was his preference, but this time he needed their patience and their trust if he was going to have enough time to pull it off. “I thought we could just destroy their entire fleet,” he said with intentional flippancy.
“We have not yet destroyed twenty-percent,” Xayn advised after a brief glimpse at the targeting data. “That does not include the vessels still in orbit.”
“Fortunately I know where there’s a force of equal power,” Askit replied, laying the groundwork for the revelation of his plan. “I intend—”
“To have them shoot at each other,” Trycrur finished for him, with more than a hint of smug satisfaction.
Askit bit down on his thin lower lip instead of conveying his feelings in that moment, though he didn’t doubt Trycrur would already be well aware of them. “Yes,” he confirmed. “This ship still uses Hunter computer systems. I intend to make some adjustments, then trick the fleet into accepting the modified file as an approved update.”
“Surely their weapons systems would be protected against that!” Xayn objected. “Why would they allow such an exploit?”
“Well, they haven’t,” Askit admitted. That would have been far too easy, and the Hunters weren’t quite stupid enough to leave themselves so exposed. “It effectively does what I’ve been doing manually, but substitutes the position of a nearby Hunter ship for our own. It’s an attack on the sensor suite and communications network.”
Xayn gave him a dubious look. “How long will it take?”
“I don’t know,” Askit admitted. “I’ve never done something like this before. It probably wouldn’t even be possible without the smoke and interference causing them problems.”
It was clear that Xayn didn’t care for the idea, but in the absence of a better option he made no further objection. That didn’t mean tacit acceptance, however, and he didn’t hesitate to make his position clear. “Work fast,” he told Askit sternly. “You have until Adrian reaches the evacuation point, until we’re discovered, or until we’re dead.”
That was more than enough agreement for Askit; he got to work, furiously scanning through screens and screens of jumbled Hunter code, and didn’t waste any more words. Their time, as Xayn had said, was limited.
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