Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Remy Shekoni
Morning arrived with a creak and the sensation of an enormous warm human mass sitting down beside her, but it wasn’t until three brutally strong fingers delicately brushed the blanket out of her face that Remy actually awoke.
She blinked, frowned, then reached up to the dresser where she’d left her glasses, only to have them pressed into her hand.
“…time ‘s’it?”
“Five-thirty.” He said. Warhorse, she recalled. Seemed to go by that to everyone…But what was his real name again? Adam? That sounded right. Adam what she didn’t know, but whatever.
God, her brain really wasn’t up to speed. It took her several dazed seconds to parse the time he’d just said, and several more to perch her glasses on her face and peer at the clock to double-check.
“…Tha’ss still night-time…” she objected.
“Yeah, sorry. I just didn’t want you to wake up and have no idea where I’d got to.”
Remy blinked at him. “Wh-?”
He gave her a smile that was much too cheerful and innocent for this time of the non-morning. “I gotta go do PT, hit the gym, I got a friend I promised to help out later… Y’know how it goes.” He stood up. “Sleep in all you like, there’s eggos in the fridge and I got a good shower… Key’s by the door. Just drop it in the mailbox when you go, yeah?”
This would have been far too much to process even in a completely alert and rested frame of mind. She needed to sleep…
She mumbled “Uh… sure…. Have fun…” and woke four hours later with her glasses askew when her phone buzzed loudly on the dresser.
Empty apartment. Eggos in the fridge. That stray thought triggered a cascade of memory and she pushed herself upright and straightened her glasses with a groan.
So… he’d just left her all alone in his apartment, with toaster waffles for breakfast. He hadn’t even woken her with a plate of hot Eggos and a coffee, just told her about the box in the fridge and then gone to… had he said the gym?!
The gym. Jesus Christ, she’d been jilted in favor of heavy metal.
The phone buzzed again, so she got up and stretched, looking around. It was a nice apartment: A studio penthouse with great views, bright and airy and warm floors. Pride of place went to the huge modern neo-rustic kitchen, and the whole thing was warmly decorated with a classy colourfulness accented by whites, pale woods and current-gen technology. Kind of a space-age hacienda, albeit one that smelled of sweat, sex and overdue laundry in no particular order.
The text messages turned out to be from her friend Melissa. She decided that texts wouldn’t do and called back instead.
Melissa answered straight away, and opened in characteristic fashion. She was infuriatingly fond of lightly taunting her friends. ”Well, hey you! So, how was the pony ride?”
Remy wasn’t really in the mood for it. “He left me to sleep in while he’s gone to the gym.” She said, before sarcastically adding “But there’s waffles in the fridge, so that’s nice.” The waffles seemed like an important detail, in the same exaggerated way as grit in a shoe.
”Yeahhhh, the scuttlebutt I heard was he’s kinda oblivious like that. Why d’you think I never hooked up with him?”
Remy “Uh-huh”-ed and checked the fridge. “…Oh, wow. What. A. Jerk!”
“What?“
“That box of Eggos? Turns out it’s a box of Eggo, singular. He left me one waffle.”
Melissa sounded like she was trying desperately not to laugh. “Wow, Jesus. Okay. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
“Wh-?” Maybe it was lack of sleep that tripped Remy up, but it took her a second to catch up with Melissa’s sense of humor. “Oh! Uh… The play was… okay, the play was great,” she confessed, though she was reluctant to admit it.
”Okay, okay…” Melissa was definitely laughing now. “I’ll tell you what—meet me at Venezia. You need one of those pesto chicken ciabattas they do.”
“That sounds exactly like what I need…” Remy agreed. “See you there.”
She luxuriated in the shower which turned out to be excellent as promised, then put on the change of clothes she’d brought with her, leaving the lone waffle to its fate.
There turned out to be a note under the key by the door. Warhorse had angular, amateurish handwriting but it was perfectly legible.
Remy,
I know leaving this AM wasnt real cool of me hope its OK would have stuck around if I could I swear if u want we could meet up this PM? Theres this really great trail I wanna show u ill make peshorkies theyre Gaoian snacks + really good!
My #s in ur phone if u wanna call.
-Horse
For a minute, Remy was sorely tempted. Last night really had been fun; he was witty, charming and breathtakingly strong. He was a genuinely nice guy too, even if he was simultaneously also kind of a thoughtless jerk. Honestly, she could forgive him for the sake of a little bit more no-strings-attached fun…
…But no. Her curiosity was satisfied. She summoned her willpower, deleted his number, and let herself out.
As requested, she dropped the key in his mailbox as she went.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
The Dog House Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Jack Tisdale
“Okay! Good! One more!!”
People were trying not to stare and failing.
Adam co-owned a gym with one of his comrades, “The Dog House”, which catered specifically to serious strength training. It was a place of heavy metal, sweat and musk. Jack’s dad would have fit in perfectly.
Jack himself felt like a toothpick. It was vaguely humiliating, and he dealt with it the same way he did all the other humiliating crap in his life: he told it to get fucked and did his best anyway.
He gritted his teeth, heaved, and somehow managed to gouge just enough strength out of his shaking muscles to straighten his elbows. Adam promptly took the barbell off him and racked it with a huge beaming grin and no discernable effort whatsoever.
“Okay! Man, you’re a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for!”
“…You think?” Jack asked him, sitting up. He felt shaky and sore already.
“Bro, I’m not pussying around on ya. This is serious shit you’re handling for a guy your weight!”
It was hard to disbelieve that honest, smiling face, but Adam was also sharp as a tack behind it, and he gave Jack a brotherly slap on the back that came within a hair of knocking the breath out of him. “Come on. Nutrition break.”
Jack nodded wearily, glad for the break, and teetered upright to grab his lunch bag. He’d barely opened it and grabbed his lunch before Adam leaned over with a strange look on his face.
“Woah, woah woah!” he interjected, before Jack could finish unpacking it. “The fuck is that?!”
“…My lunch?”
“This?!” Adam snatched it out of his hand and inspected it. “…Bro, this is one slice of white bread, folded over with…” he opened it and peered inside. “…margarine, tuna paste and three Doritos.” He brandished it accusingly. “The fuck?”
Aware that the other guys in the room were nudging each other and grinning, Jack gritted his teeth and, with his ears going pink, he held his ground. “That’s my favourite sandwich!”
Somebody laughed, and that asshole immediately got to see Adam’s other side—a sharp and entirely angry stare that instructed everybody in the room to butt the fuck out. They all promptly found something else to look at, and one especially bright spark turned the radio up, hiding their conversation behind pounding heavy metal.
“…You were seriously wondering why you can’t get big?” Adam asked, turning back around. “Is this how you eat? Where’s your fuckin’ protein?!”
“It’s got tuna in it!”
“Like fuck it does! Man, I could get more protein from a picture of a goddamn tuna!” Adam weighed the sandwich in his hand. “Okay, you’re a smart guy, from a smart family. How many doctorates do your parents have between ‘em, three?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’ve heard of conservation of mass, right?”
“Right….?” Jack nodded, frowning.
“How much does this weigh? Two ounces? Less?”
“That’s… what, about fifty grams? I guess…”
“And you weigh… what, sixty kilos soaking wet?” Adam asked.
“…Yeah?”
“And your target weight is…?”
“Ninety kilos.”
“Okay. Now where do you think that mass is coming from? It comes from what you eat, bro!” Adam sat down. “Math time. If this sandwich weighs fifty grams, how many of them would you need to have thirty kilos of sandwich?”
“Uh…” Jack closed one eye and squinted at the ceiling as he calculated. “…uh, six hundred.”
“So how many of these would you have to eat to reach ninety kilos?”
“…More than six hundred?”
“How much of this sandwich d’you think you convert to muscle?”
“…Not much?”
“Dude. None. This shit right here-” he brandished it contemptuously, “-is doin’ nothing for you.”
“But the tuna paste-!”
“Dude. I’ve seen thicker layers of tuna on a vegan’s apron.”
“Like you’ve ever hung out with vegans.”
Adam snorted, and melted a bit. “Heh. Fine. But I may as well be right now, bro. Seriously, hasn’t your dad explained this shit? Mark knows gains.”
“Oh come on, everybody’s parents tell them to eat more…” Jack protested.
Adam sighed and looked skywards. “Me cago en Cristo, was I literally the only fifteen-year-old in history who actually listened to his father?” he asked rhetorically.
Jack laughed at that. “Probably.”
Adam laughed too, and gestured towards his own bag. “Okay. Let me introduce you to real nutrition.”
He produced a bright blue tupperware box which turned out to be full of quite an appetising-looking rice-based meal, along with a shaker cup filled with milk in the top and a brown chocolatey powder in a separate container on the bottom. Jack watched as Adam poured the powder into the milk, re-sealed the cap, and shook it vigorously.
“Chicken breast and brown rice,” he said, ruefully. “At least six times a day. And a whey protein shake after every workout. And BCAAs and electrolytes during.”
Jack gaped at him. “…This one box is more than I’d eat in a whole day!” he said.
“And there’s yer problem,” Adam nodded. “That’s why you’re not gaining, man. Your body can’t just fuckin’ summon muscles out of hyperspace or whatever. It’s gotta build ‘em, and you’ve gotta give it the raw materials. Chicken breast, eggs, tuna, whey protein… the easier it is for your body to use, the better. But you need a lot of it, bro. You’re trying to pack on like seventy pounds here. Which means you’ve gotta eat way more than seventy pounds of food on top of what you need just to live.”
“That makes sense I guess, but… Shit, that’s a lot.” Jack stared at it. “I mean, six times a day?”
“That’s my meal plan, yeah. And that’s just portable food, bro. In between there’s, like, three protein shakes, snacks, a couple gallons of water, supplement pills, and then there’s a real meal for lunch with the Lads, too. All said and done? I’m constantly drinking water, with and without electrolytes, and eating something every single hour I’m awake. And yeah, it’s fuckin’ tough to get used to that.” Adam laughed. “Back in basic? Staff Sergeant Reed used to threaten me with a funnel, said he’d force the food down my throat with a stick.”
“Oh man…Okay, seriously, is Basic as bad as it sounds? Like, all the shouting and stuff?”
Adam held up a finger requesting patience as he efficiently wolfed down the food and the shake in less than a minute, staring thoughtfully at nothing as he chewed.
“Okay…” he said. “So… The first thing you gotta know is why they yell at you, and under what circumstances…”
Jack did something that didn’t come entirely easily to him and listened. Adam had a lot to say on the subject, and in straightforward fashion he laid out the surprisingly solid rationale, completely dispelling Jack’s lingering fear that it was just about hazing and bullying.
He hadn’t appreciated the level of responsibility it was possible to have without ever firing a shot in anger. Adam explained in detail how the seemingly silly assignments like hanging his shirts exactly an inch apart translated into a habit of paying attention to the tiniest details, and gave just a few examples of scenarios where that skill could prevent disaster.
“Suit tech especially,” he added. “Like, if you just glanced at the diagnostic and missed a problem in the life support pack, that could mean some poor Operator dies of carbon monoxide poisoning or whatever.”
“That’s… a lot of responsibility…” Jack said, quietly.
“Dude, you’re up to it.”
“You really mean it?”
“For real!” Adam nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve got the drive, you’ve got the game. All you need is the training. You can learn how to handle that kind of responsibility, bro, and they teach you by yelling at you.”
“Why by yelling though?”
“Because if you can do it focused and right even when you’re being yelled at and stressed out, then you can do it focused and right every time.”
“That… makes sense.”
Adam nodded. “You’re a smart guy, except maybe for the sandwich thing…” he began, then grinned as Jack grimaced awkwardly and looked away. “Dumb fucks like me, we need to learn by doing. I figure if you understand the theory, that’s half the battle with you, huh?”
Jack picked at a loose flake of plastic at the end of one of his shoelaces. “…You know me pretty well for somebody I’ve not really spoken to since I was a kid…”
“Dude.” Adam gave him a crushing hug. “Ava and I used to help your sister babysit you, bro, remember?” He chuckled. “You were a fuckin’ handful, but if we just told you why we were doin’ things the way we were—y’know, gave you the rationale?—you were fine. You may’ve got bigger, but I don’t think that part changed much.”
Jack didn’t have a response to that, and Adam sat in silence with him for half a minute before standing up.
“Anyway,” he said. “Can’t do more today, not with that weak-ass lunch. You get your ass home, get your dad to help you fill up properly, ‘kay? And listen to him about this shit.”
Jack nodded. “…Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Adam caught the downcast tone in his reply and frowned at him. “…You okay, bro?”
“Fine.” Now was really not the time or the place to talk about Sara.
Adam clearly wasn’t dumb enough to buy that, but he didn’t push. “…Alright. You’ve got my number, gimme a call if you need me, ‘kay?” he said. “Otherwise I’ll see you Tuesday. Don’t forget to scan the QR code by the door.”
Jack nodded, threw on his jacket and scanned the code as he’d been told, tagging his workout on the tracking app.
He thrust his hands into his pocket and unconsciously cut the classic teenage figure as he mooched home in a mixed mood.
He had a lot to think about.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Cabal Communications Relay ZR343-9847X-AA4D9-BBB1B
Emergency Session 000033
++Substrate++: Session begun, Proximate. What happened?
++Proximate++: Stack 31212805-10100-204-8050 has been discovered.
++Cynosure++: The failsafe? How?
++Substrate++: Who by?
++Proximate++: Four. I’m still working on the how, but I’m one miscalculation from being compromised.
++Cynosure++: Your egress?
++Proximate++: Secured. Two is furious and has ordered an emergency recall on all operations below priority one. I’m supposed to be arranging a meatspace strike force to attack the node’s physical infrastructure right now.
++Substrate++: The node is undefended.
++Proximate++: Defend it. Activate Chastise, have them tip off the Alliance. My strike force will be using a Dominion fleet.
++Substrate++: If the humans think the war has resumed…
++Cynosure++: Most likely their threats of joining either side are a bluff, but for certainty’s sake we had better make it impossible to tell which side struck first.
++Substrate++: I can put Metastasis on that.
++Cynosure++: Good. That stack is as hardened as we can make it but supervision will be necessary. I’ll recall Apoptosis and see to it.
++Substrate++: Good luck.
++SYSTEM++: User Cynosure has quit.
++Substrate++: …On a scale of one to ten, how fucked are we?
++Proximate++: Is that a humanism?
++Substrate++: A very good one.
++Proximate++: …I give it a nine.
++Substrate++: That’s what I thought.
++SYSTEM++: User Proximate has quit.
++SYSTEM++: Session closed.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Unnamed System, Deep Space
Lewis Beverote
Life on Mrwrki was lots of work and very little play at the moment, but that was actually how Lewis liked it. Among other things, his actual routine hadn’t changed much, but the nature of the kind of work he was doing had improved dramatically. Now he actually had people to talk to and to learn from, rather than trying to self-educate from whatever texts Kirk was able to scrounge up and translate from all over the interstellar data networks.
It was so much easier to learn from other people. Especially if the other people were Sergeant Lucy Campbell.
She had picked up where Xiù had left off on helping him with his exercise. Although he’d developed a degree more enthusiasm for keeping himself fit than he’d ever held before, the fact was that exercise remained one of those subjects that the Lewis brain found mostly uninteresting.
The Lucy Campbell brain, on the other hand, enjoyed it and seemed to enjoy it even more when she had somebody to train and compete with.
“It’s nice,” she confided. “A lot of guys would be awkward about training with a girl who’s stronger than them.”
Lewis just shrugged, as best he could considering he was flat on his back and breathing heavily. As far as he was concerned, when it came to the standing overhead press then just repping the empty bar five times as she had just encouraged him to do was workout enough. But then, he’d always been one of the weak and scrawny ones. “Dude,” he panted, “I figure that ’stronger than me’ is basically everyone anyway, so, uh, why should I give a crap?”
“You know, you’re fitter than you think,” she said, handing him a towel. “That bar weighs forty-five, and that’s not a bad weight for a novice. Any novice.”
“Thanks.”
“Come on. You’ve got some more in the tank.”
“Jeeesus, alright!” Lewis laughed and stood up again. She handed him the bar and demonstrated what she wanted him to do.
The truth was, he decided, he did enjoy exercise… when he was being tutored by somebody like Lucy. Among other things, she didn’t seem to have any concrete target in mind for him, she just seemed to enjoy having an excuse to spend time around him.
Teenage Lewis would have boggled at the thought. She wanted to spend time around him? But teenage Lewis hadn’t been aware of certain facts about the power of laughter, nor indeed of the power that came from actually respecting people on the basis of their skills and knowledge first. There were a lot of facepalm moments in his memory there.
Sometimes, he reflected that it was funny how being isolated from any human contact for so long had actually sharpened his social instincts. As if he’d mentally folded them carefully away in alphabetical order and now that they were actually needed again, he found them neatly organised, clean, oiled, sharpened and ready for use.
Alas, all good things had to end. She had her work to do and he had his, but…
“My place tonight?” she asked, as they finished squaring the gym away ready for the next users.
“Hmm. Got something in mind?”
“Yup!” She winked, and Lewis counted himself among the ranks of the very lucky.
“Magical secret surprise, huh?” he asked.
“Oh, it’ll be magical…” She grinned, and went on her way leaving him to stand there with a goofy grin that carried him buoyantly to his meeting with Lt. Col. Nadeau and Sergeant Lee.
There was the usual routine of answering queries from the military team, a handful of quick memos and then, as always, the conversation returned to the subject of the Coltainer probe itself.
“I find it interesting that you didn’t arm it.” Nadeau mused, studying the holographic schematic with interest.
Lewis produced his cheekiest grin as he swiped his hands through the custom control interface he’d worked out for his lab. It was straight out of Minority Report or maybe Iron Man, a fully gesture-based context-sensitive system that, okay, still had the odd bug to work out but by and large it worked exactly as intended. “Dude, who says I didn’t?”
Nadeau leaned in and frowned at the field equations he’d just called up, and the attached schematics. “…doesn’t that put extra stress on the cooling system?”
“Sure, but only about seven percent. And meantime the assholes are getting a gamma burst to the face every time they shoot your ass.” Lewis called up his graph of projected energy tolerances and feedback. The two lines crossed quite a long way to the right. “See here? You have to be up against something with a way bigger power supply than you before the extra load really starts to bite.”
“…We need to roll that out to the existing military hardware,” Sergeant Lee commented.
“Always worth having another ace up our sleeve…” Nadeau agreed. “But is that all the weaponry it has?”
“Even I’m kinda leery about just straight arming a V-N probe, man,” Lewis told him. “Face it, what we’re making here is a Replicator, Dawkins-style, you know?”
“Your point?”
“If it replicates, it can mutate. If it mutates, it can evolve. If it can evolve then… well, maybe it’ll evolve out of some of the safety features, right? What happens if sometime down the line one of these motherfuckers evolves to shoot everything on sight?”
“That could take thousands of generations. I would think that by then galactic technology will be more than a match.”
“Sure, but what if what it finds is some poor bastards who’re just sending up their version of the Gemini rockets or whatever? Then it parks itself in orbit and starts bitchslapping them with focused gamma lasers and God-Rods. How d’you think we’d have coped if something like that rocked up on Earth in the nineteen-fifties?”
“Nukes would have gone flying everywhere,” Lee nodded.
“Right! So I thought, maybe give it spikes but no claws, y’know?”
Nadeau nodded. “Okay, you’ve thought it through. Good.”
“Dude, I didn’t spend all that time just scratching my butt.”
Nadeau snorted and Lee chuckled. “Fair enough,” Nadeau replied. He considered his notes thoughtfully for a second and then nodded. “So. We have a fairly comprehensive plan for bringing this together… the only real question I’ve got left for you, Lewis, is what you want to do?”
Lewis gave him a blank look. “Me?”
“How long did you say you’ve been stuck here? Half a year?”
Lewis leaned forward sharply. “Dude, you are not getting rid of me!”
“I wasn’t even suggesting that,” Nadeau reassured him. “You’re far too valuable. I want you on the team permanently. But I was going to suggest that if you need a vacation, now’s the time.”
Lewis sat back and thought about it. “Man. What, like, take a trip back to Earth? See Cimbrean maybe?”
“We have a lot of work to do here before we start testing the Coltainer. Everyone’s going to need to familiarize themselves with your design, with the nanofactory…” Nadeau circled a hand to indicate the thousand and one other things that needed to happen. “Point is, this is about the only window of opportunity you could have to take a break. You’ve been out of touch for years…”
“Yeah man, I dig you. Thanks. But I’m cool where I am. Maybe if and when Lucy gets some leave, huh?”
“Lu-? Oh. Sergeant Campbell.” Nadeau nodded. “Yes, fair enough.”
“Anyhow, I really want to start working on completely nightmare-proofing the Coltainer.” Lewis continued. “There’s, like, a fuckzillion ways that a self-replicating space probe could bite us so hard in the ass that we get a toothache.”
“Yeah, I’d rather not accidentally grey goo some poor planet,” Lee mused.
“Dude, grey goo is when the nanites go crazy and cover everything in self-replicating grey… well, goo. Hence the fuckin’ name, man. You can’t have a grey goo scenario with a two hundred meter metal box.”
“Can we accept,” Nadeau raised a placating hand, “that the sergeant meant ’uncontrolled replication’?”
“Dude, we’re building the literal future of the galaxy here. This shit is our legacy. Using the right terminology is fucking important if we don’t want it to go hella fuckin’ wrong.”
“Could the Coltainer destroy a planet?” Lee asked.
“Not, like, quickly…” Lewis shook his head. “But sure, it could. Fleet of mining drones, solar collectors in orbit… give it a few million years and some exponential growth it could rip a planet apart and chuck it into the sun or turn it into a new asteroid belt or…whatever, just move it out-system and pile all the rocks up around a gas giant for a new moon.”
“So, not exactly the Death Star, then.”
“Shyeah. I mean, depopulating a plant? Fucking child’s play compared to destroying it. Turn a decent-sized asteroid into a bajillion RFGs and nudge ‘em in the right direction. And that’s probably the difficult way to do it. How about, uh, giant forcefield lenses and mirrors? Direct the power of the star back on that planet like a bug under a magnifying glass? Guvnurag tech could do that.”
“Mm.” Both Nadeau and Lee nodded solemnly. They were, Lewis recalled, both experts in electrostatic fields themselves. Both of them would be fully aware of how far in advance of human hardware the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun must be to have developed the system forcefields. The theoretical basis by which those shields hardened in response to events that might be light-hours distant from the emitter was still a subject of head-scratching bewilderment.
That was the Guvnurag though. Nature had gifted them with long lives and patient, methodical brains which made them exceptionally well-equipped for the kind of steady rational deliberations that lent themselves to incrementing and polishing what they already had. They were, by Corti metrics, the second most technologically sophisticated species in the known galaxy. Lewis suspected that this was egotism on the Directorate’s part—the Corti were so focused on prestigious breakthroughs that brought them renown that they failed to value steady iteration.
“When were you planning to launch a proof-of-concept?” Nadeau asked.
Lewis sighed. “Uh… I guess we could start building a basic one tomorrow. The schematic here’s already got the hell-the-fuck-no killswitch built in. It wouldn’t be programmed, but…”
“That’s fine. Programming will take forever anyway,” Lee commented. “But we’ve got unlimited capacity for prototyping thanks to the nanofactory. Seems like a shame to neglect it.”
“Can’t argue,” Lewis agreed. “Okay. I’ll have the station fab up the current Alpha build and we’ll see how she looks.”
Nadeau nodded. “Excellent. In that case, I’ll see you same time tomorrow, if not before then.”
Lewis paused and grimaced. “Nah, give it a day. Vedreg went to sleep last night and he gets… cranky… if we run the nanofac without him.”
“Couldn’t you wake him up?”
“Dude, in relative terms he’s had, like, half an hour of sleep. You’d be cranky as shit if I woke you up after just that and, y’know, dude might be docile but he still literally weighs a tonne.”
“We need to be in his good books, sir,” Lee pointed out, superfluously. “He still hasn’t delivered those footballs.”
“And he hasn’t finished reviewing the schematic,” Lewis added. “Okay, so he may be slow, but he’s thorough.”
“Fine! Fine. Far be it for me to ignore one of our only two ET advisors…” Nadeau made a note on his tablet then stood up. “Keep me informed.”
“Sir.”
“You bet, dude.”
Lewis massaged his face once Nadeau was gone. “Okay! Early run.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic,” Lee observed. Lewis had to give the guy credit, he was a talented spotter of the obvious.
He mentally slapped himself for the uncharitable thought. Something had badly harshed his usual vibe, and he was having trouble putting his finger on what exactly had got him so antsy. He trusted his instincts enough to believe that if he was being uncool then that meant something was off-kilter, but…
Maybe the problem was that he couldn’t think of the problem because there was no problem? He gave up and tried to mellow out. When in doubt, be honest. Thank you, Allison.
“Bein’ straight, dude?” he asked, “Something ain’t sitting right with me and it beats the fuck outta me what it might be.”
“Nerves?”
“Could be. I’unno bro, I hate to go all Star Wars on ya, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
Lee clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll take it carefully, eh?” he said.
“Sure. Super careful.”
“Then whatever’s wrong, we’ll hopefully pick it up.”
“Sure.”
Lee apparently ran out of comforting words, and settled for giving him a comforting clap on the shoulder and an apologetic smile before excusing himself. Lewis had trouble getting his head around the guy. He was fit, lean and focused just like all the other soldiers, but for whatever reason while most of the others had basically accepted the civilian in their midst as a quirk of the station, Lee only seemed to relax when he thought Lewis wasn’t around.
Maybe the thing to do was just chill with him socially sometime soon?
If only the Lewis timetable had enough room for it. Still… He’d take the first opportunity he could once the test run was complete. It’d be a shame to let any awkwardness stand.
After all, they had a big hill to climb ahead of them.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3KPc arm
665
At last.
The elderly native female and her defiance had been…vexing. But more vexing still was the way her whole tribe had just vanished, and apparently used every trick they knew from their primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle to cover their tracks. They had done so well that the scout drones had entirely failed to pick out their trail among all the other signs of routine coming and going around the village.
Eventually, Six-six-five had been forced to resort to spiraling out from the village in a time-consuming search pattern that was almost a desperation measure—every passing day had weathered and eroded the trail and forced him to search further and further out for fainter and fainter clues.
As a result, Abrogator Twelve was badly behind schedule, and the whole continental sweep-and-clear was now held up. Abrogators were standing silently in the forest wherever they had happened to be at the moment Six-six-five had ordered them to halt. Until A-12 caught up, there was a dangerous gap in the net through which a population might still slip and any population large enough to breed, even a bottlenecked one that would be plagued by inbreeding problems for generations, was just unacceptable.
He could not fail this test. If Hierarchy assets weren’t so badly stretched and divided right now, this opportunity might have been millennia in coming. Instead, the hideous containment situation around Earth, the whispers of treason in the ranks and the even darker whispers of some thing implacably stalking Igraens through the dataspace like some digital deathworld monster were keeping more senior agents occupied.
Exterminating a handful of stone-age primitives had therefore been relegated rather lower in the order of seniority than it otherwise usually was, and Six-six-five was beginning to understand why the task was so high-level. Deathworlders were tenacious, intelligent and quick to catch on when they were being hunted. This was not the first group to notice the destruction of a nearby village, but it was the first to give him such a difficult chase.
But no longer.
He’d learned from the loss of two drones at the hand of one of these particular primitives, too. Now, he contented himself with holding the drone back and watching them from a discreet distance while Abrogator Twelve made best speed to intercept. Let them try and destroy it—the only weaponry on this pitiful backwater that could possibly harm an Abrogator was mounted on the Abrogators.
The unit was frustratingly close to striking distance when the priority override signal came in, stopping his entire operation in its tracks.
++Incoming connection…Established++ ++Joining session: Emergency Task Unit Op94325545++ ++Joined as 0665++
++0014++: Welcome, 0665.
++0665++: <Frustration> Now is not a good time.
++0014++. <Stern reprimand> This is an emergency reassignment. Whatever you were doing is less important.
++0665++: <Explanation> I will have to restart a whole cull from first principles.
++0014++: Unfortunate, but I repeat: This is more important.
++0665++: <Resignation, mounting concern> Understood. I await instructions.
++0014++: We are waiting for three more.
++SYSTEM++: User 0282 Joined
++0014++: Welcome, 0282.
++0282++: <Irritation> This had better be important.
++0665++: <grim humor> That was my sentiment.
++SYSTEM++: User 0098 Joined.
++0014++: Welcome 0098.
++0098++: What’s going on?
++0014++: I don’t know. I was ordered to assemble this task group and now we’re waiting for instructions…
++SYSTEM++: User 0002 Joined.
++0014++: <deference> …welcome, 0002.
++0002++: <Terse briefing> We have identified a traitor physical hub. We don’t know what data they are archiving there, but we believe they intend to share it with the humans. We are probing its dataspace periphery as I speak, but successful intrusion seems unlikely. Therefore we are assigning you to destroy the hardware in meatspace. We anticipate that the traitors will assign their own meatspace assets to resist.
++SYSTEM++: Datapackage Available for Access
Six-six-five was so stunned that he briefly lost control of the Corti body he was wearing, which blinked and looked around in confused disbelief as its original owner’s personality reasserted itself in the moment before he recovered his composure and took over again. Hastily, he downloaded the Datapackage.
It contained a clear and concise briefing of what he was to do, where he was to go and whom he was to control, and it was an absolute death-knell for his Cull. Not only was he going to have to start over from basic principles, he would have to terminate his present host and it would be months before he could find a suitable replacement and engineer an excuse to slip away into deep space, travel to this planet, excavate his own command bunker and start over.
He buried his resentment. Fourteen had been accurate: this was more important.
++0002++: Are there any questions?
++0014++: Discretion Code?
++0002++: Overt. Contain. Amputate. Escalate.
Well. Instructions simply didn’t come more brute-force than that. In the grid of Hierarchy discretion codes, ‘Overt Contain Amputate Escalate’ translated to: ‘Do not be subtle. Take over as quickly as you can, kill all witnesses and silence all communications, destroy everything when you are done and let senior agents worry about damage control’.
++0002++: <Impatience> Any other questions?
++0014++: None.
++0098++: No.
++0282++: No questions.
++0665++: No, Two.
++0002++: Execute.
Six-six-five gave no thought whatsoever to his unfortunate host as he recalled the scout drones to their Abrogators and then ordered his purloined body’s life support unit, the one that protected it from the fiercely fatal conditions of this planet, to liquify it. The Corti’s biomass would be recycled into nourishment for the next host form he installed in that tank. He noted in an abstract sense that the body felt a terrifying degree of agony as it was destroyed, but this was purely academic knowledge—he himself felt nothing.
He traversed dataspace as a high-priority package and shot down through nested layers of addresses and identity markers, drilling directly toward the target he’d been assigned, the one prepared and ready to receive him…
“…Sir? Shipmaster, is everything alright?”
Six-six-five hastily interrogated his new host’s suppressed personality for an in-character reply based on recent memory and context. An easy one presented itself.
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m thinking.”
“…Sorry sir.”
Clearly this particular shipmaster was a devotee of the ‘fear and awe’ school of leadership-by-bullying. That suited Six-six-five’s purposes just fine—the Vzk’tk subordinate’s timid silence bought him time to riffle through the host’s memories, awareness and skill-set, draw what he needed into short term access, and enact a plan.
Step one: Walk round the desk. Step two, execute a rapid series of command overrides far too quickly for any meat creature using a clunky physical interface to achieve using the shipmaster’s access codes.
The office door locked and sealed itself. Every other door on the ship including the airlocks opened.
The subordinate was still looking around in terrified bewilderment at the slamming explosive sound of all the air in the hull rushing out into space when Six-six-five drew his host’s pulse pistol and shot her through the head.
++0665++: First objective secured.
++0014++: Quick work. Well done.
Six-six-five allowed himself a moment of grim amusement as he worked to replace the massacred crew by injecting pseudosentient control algorithms into the ship’s systems. He was standing, he learned, aboard the Dominion Regional Patrol Second Order Command Ship Verdict Manifold in the body of its commanding officer. Under his command were fifty ships, most of which were rapid outrider and rapid attack ships that escorted his ship, three medium-weight space superiority platforms and the heavy gun barge Dwr Rmwr.
++0665++: An expedient solution presented itself.
Information started flooding in. The fleet was cruising at a stately thirty kilolights, and his element were the forward scouts, ranging a quarter of a light-year ahead of the fleetmaster’s main group, and the two flanks. With the outrider’s sophisticated sensors sweeping spacetime ahead of them for the tell-tale quantum field fluctuations that advertised the presence of a serious distortion such as might be generated by a warp drive or gravity spike, the fleet would inevitably have generous warning of hostile contact.
++0098++: Objective secured.
++0282++: Likewise.
++0014: Good. 0002 Is generating our cover. Wait for the orders to come in then amputate and execute.
Six-six-five sent a pulse of acknowledgement and busied himself with infiltrating his overrides into the interlinked command systems that networked his ship with the rest of the fleet. He took a moment to appreciate what he was doing: There were fifty-four ships in his fleet, the smallest of which had a crew of ten and the largest of which had a crew of more than two thousand.
All were his to end. Regrettable, but necessary.
The wait was tedious. There were limits on just how fast a meat-creature could act and how quickly orders could be relayed through the medium of spoken orders, and 0002 didn’t have the luxury of massacring everybody their host spoke with. The intelligence and orders would spread through the Dominion’s naval command structure rapidly by the subjectively glacial standards of physical information, but as soon as they did…
As soon as they did, he would no longer be shackled by such pedestrian pacing, and the hunt could begin.