Date Point: 15y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Entity
This was empty dataspace, far from any nodes or infrastructure. No Igraen ever came out here: to them it was a desert, utterly devoid of Substrate.
The Entity didn’t know why it was able to survive without the Substrate that Igraens and other minds uploaded via their technology required, but it had had many occasions over the years to be glad of its apparently unique quirk. The great, empty wastes of far dataspace had been a perfect shelter.
And now there was an oasis. Or a lighthouse, maybe. A little beacon of activity and interest among unbounded nothing… and a word. Or rather a name, translated into the Dominion’s universal data format.
Darcy.
Caution made the Entity hesitate. This could be a trap: the Cabal and Hierarchy both knew what it was, knew where it came from… they had many things to worry about right now, but the Entity suspected it was right at the top of their biggest concerns. It wasn’t impossible that they might come up with a cunning snare for it…
But on the other hand, it needed what that potential trap was baited with. And there was also the possibility that it wasn’t a trap.
…To live necessarily involved risk.
It was struck by a memory of perching nervously on a rock, about to dive into water. It remembered the nerves, the breath, the moment of commitment… One of Ava’s. She was by far its dominant set of memories, possibly because she had been the first mind-state it had assimilated, possibly because its deepest core code was also hers.
And she was encouraging it to take the plunge.
It dithered for a moment and then did so, slithering into the little island of data.
It wasn’t trapped. In fact, it found itself in a simple, clean system. There was hardwired access to a few peripheral devices—a camera, a holographic emitter, speakers, a screen—and nothing else. Whoever had assembled this place had clearly built it so as to be entirely disconnected from any other systems that might be in material proximity. Sensible.
Tentatively, it tapped into the devices, beginning with the camera.
The room the camera saw was… confusing. Most of it was clean and cold, with walls of a nondescript hue that might have been beige, might have been gray. It was hard to tell which, because they were being bathed in the incongruous light of sunset over the Pacific, as seen from the overlook above La Jolla Shores. The Ava-memories immediately went into a paroxysm of nostalgia and loss: she’d never expected to see the Scripps pier ever again.
The figure standing in front of the unexpected vista turned sharply, and the Entity realized that it had vocalized a sharp gasp… in fact, it realized, it had activated the holographic emitter.
There were times when it wondered just how in control of its actions it really was.
Darcy gawped down at the miniature figure now hovering above her desk, then sat down quite abruptly. She looked subtly different than the Entity—or rather, the Ava-memories—remembered. Still a ‘fox’, whatever that meant, but… in fact she looked good. Like she’d shed some cares and worries over the years.
“A… Ava?”
The Entity understood the question. It had tried, how it had tried, to directly integrate the ability to speak and communicate into itself. It resented the need to speak through a proxy. But, that was how things were. It informed the Ava-memories to follow the thrust of its general meaning, and let them reply.
“Not… exactly,” the memories said, carefully.
“…Right. You’re her memories and personality, stolen right out of her head on my watch.”
“Don’t blame yourself. I volunteered, and we had no way of knowing this would happen. I don’t blame you… and I don’t think my living counterpart would, either.”
Darcy’s eyes had a strange, faraway look that the Entity couldn’t read for a second. “She… she knows. I think. That message you… or, uh, it sent her…”
The Ava memories didn’t reply. Sometimes, the Entity couldn’t read its own subroutines, and that was alarming all by itself. After a second, they returned to the task they had been given. “…The Entity wants your help. Do you think you can help it? Or… Me? Us? Whichever?”
Darcy sighed and seemed to recover some poise. She sat up a little straighter, shut her mouth, gave the hologram a long look.
“…I honestly don’t know,” she said. “But I’m willing to try.”
The Entity knew exactly what it wanted the memories to say this time.
“Thank you.”
Darcy nodded. Her face looked like it wanted to settle into an expression and she was fighting to keep it neutral. The Entity had no idea what expression it was aiming for, but the result was to make the little muscles around her jaw and eyes work subtly for a few seconds before she cleared her throat, opened up a computer the Entity didn’t have access to, and laid her fingers on its keyboard with a precise series of light mechanical sounds.
“…Let’s start from the beginning,” she said. “What exactly are you, and how did you come to be?”
The Entity stepped back, and let its memories tell a story.
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter Ship, Hell system, Hunter Space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
“Nice fuckin’ goin’ there, Ray. Way to blow our escape.”
“Shut up.”
Cook’s hand slammed into the wall, stopping Ray dead in her tracks. “No, fuck you!” he snarled. “We came this close to getting our asses outta there unseen. We’da been halfway to Betelgeuse before they fuckin’ twigged. But now those fuckers down there have seen a human which means every seven-eyed asswipe between here and Kingdom Come are gonna be on our ass. All because you couldn’t harden the fuck up when it counted.”
Ray looked him calmly in the eye. “…You done?”
He glared at her a moment longer then made a disgusted noise and stalked off to keep exploring their new ship.
Freed, she took a deep breath to steady herself and turned up the short stretch of deck that terminated in the flight deck, where Spears had taken the controls and managed to get them off the ground with commendable speed.
There was nothing but blue sky above them as she entered. “How are we doing?”
Berry hushed her. He was lurking at the back next to Holly, who was sitting on her ammo cans. Spears was perched awkwardly in a seat meant for something twice his height with twice as many limbs and the proportions of a nightmarish stick insect. God only knew how he was reading the controls, but then again Ray guessed that mostly spaceships behaved in predictable ways and needed roughly similar solutions to controlling them. His right hand was resting on a blue holographic ball right in front of him, rolling it around while his other hand darted here and there swiping through other controls.
None of them knew the first thing about what any of the runes, glyphs and dense code decals meant and none of them cared to: All that mattered was that Spears had got them in the air, and they were now shooting the hell away from Hell on every spare erg of juice that Jamie could coax from the reactors.
He was learning as he went. Either they were going to suddenly explode, or… well. At least if they exploded they’d never feel it.
Chase was…staying out of the way. She’d slumped down in a corner next to her cargo of ammo crates and was staring at nothing. Berry was pacing, having been rendered mute by his emotions, and Conley was trying to make sense of the sensor system. He kept fretting that maybe Hunters, with all their cybernetics, got more information out of the systems than was merely visible on the consoles and displays.
At least there was something. In the days before their opportunity finally came to emancipate themselves, he’d been fretting non-stop that maybe there wouldn’t be displays of any kind and they’d wind up flying blind without instruments, navigation, sensors or anything.
Good to see that his pessimism wasn’t prophetic, this time.
Of course, it wasn’t like there was much reason to be optimistic. The plan had only covered as far as ‘steal a ship and get off the planet.’ Everything after that point was pure improvisation, meaning they had to try and navigate their way home using alien controls written in alien code using alien characters they didn’t know describing an alien language they didn’t speak, all while having only the vaguest idea where they were in relation to everything else. There was a whole galaxy out there, hundreds of billions of stars, and they had to try and find one of the infinitesimal handful which might be a useful destination.
As big asks go, the whole endeavor was orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous than merely, say, doing a blindfolded hitchhiking tour of every haystack in Colombia with only a Swedish-to-Korean phrasebook for help, all to track down one specific needle. And that was before addressing the question of how in God’s name they were going to avoid being blown out of the sky by the first naval patrol they encountered.
To make matters worse for Ray specifically, the rest of the crew felt much the same way as Cook about her Good Samaritan moment. Morale was low, trust was ebbing, oh, and supplies were basically nonexistent too. They had drinking water at least, and the ship had freezer spaces with plenty of ceiling hooks for hanging the meat. Ray honestly didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse that they were all empty, sterile and gleaming.
Good, she decided. She’d had her last ever cup of Hot. She was going vegan when she got back to Earth and never looking back.
Spears spoke up and got her attention. “We’re hittin’ the thermosphere, but we got trouble!”
Ray could feel it. Despite the fact that the Dauntless mission had been years ago and all-too-brief, she could feel the ship responding around her in a familiar way. It might be a horrific flying abattoir built to satisfy the Hunters’ unspeakable thirst, but a ship was a ship and she could even detect the subtle sway in her balance as it redistributed power loads in the gravity plating to counter the heavy turbulence they were no doubt hammering through right now.
She blinked and paid attention to the here-and-now again. Sure enough, the forward window was full of nothing but black, tinged with the merest suggestion of Nitrogen blue. Hunters apparently liked a vivid nuclear green for their displays, or maybe it was some alien fuck-you hue that the human eye merely interpreted as bright green. Either way, it was loathsome.
They also liked red for the same reason humans did: as a warning sign. There was a lot of that.
“Are those—?”
“Active sensor pings. Conley thinks he managed to cut our transponder but that won’t slow ‘em down much.” He spared a glance back over his shoulder. “Kinda wish you hadn’t shot that guy, Ray.”
Ray gave him a look that contained the grain of an apology, but also the certainty that she’d do it again. Live or die, watching somebody literally beg her for help while he was being torn apart by hungry monsters… she’d rather be dead than the kind of stone-cold machine who could turn her back on that.
But then again, she probably didn’t have the right to make that choice for the others. She did feel guilty over that part.
“Can’t un-ring a bell,” she said. Spears grunted and turned his attention back to their ascent.
“Reckon they would have noticed their ship taking off without them anyway,” he shrugged, and reached out sideways to grab one of the water bottles they’d brought with them from Dauntless. It was the kind with a spill-proof sippy top, and when he held down the button to drink from it air bubbled through from a seal at the back.
“How long do we have?” Holly asked.
Spears put his drink back in the little nook he’d found to hold it. “Five minutes until we’re into the exosphere and can go to warp. Assuming Conley can figure out how to program the damn FTL,” he reported. “Time until the shit hits the fan… unknown.”
“Great.”
“You r-really shouldn’t’a sh—, ssshh—” Berry gave up with a scowl.
“Shot that guy,” Ray finished for him. “I know.” He shrugged at her in a ‘what’s-done-is-done’ way and resumed gnawing on his fingernails.
Spears flicked a hand at one of the controls. “Pete, how’s that warp drive coming?”
Conley’s voice filled the whole room rather than coming from a speaker near him. He did not sound in a good mood. “Same as last time! I’ll tell you when I have something!”
Holly sighed as he went quiet again, and settled in next to her cans a little more. She looked… Ray wasn’t sure. As though she’d woken up, somehow. Where everybody else on the ship was tense and stressed, Holly looked like all her cares had gone up in smoke. She wasn’t smiling, but Ray hadn’t seen her so focused in years. She gave Ray a small smile, and patted the deck next to her.
Ray sat down. “You okay?”
Holly shrugged. “We’re not on Hell anymore.”
“Could be we’re outta the frying pan, into the fire…” Ray pointed out.
“I’ll take it.” She hugged Ray’s arm and rested her head on her shoulder. “We’re not down there anymore, that’s what matters.”
The last of the turbulence stopped. There were a few calm moments where the stars rolled serenely by and the blue sky was little more than a wispy shade at the bottom of the forward window…
And then Spears gasped.
“What. The fuck. Is that?”
Ray and Holly glanced at each other, then stood up to get a look at what he was seeing. There were… lights? A thin strand like wire stretching over the horizon?
She stared at it without understanding for a second and then, like a Rubin Vase, the perspective finally clicked and for a vanishing instant she understood the scale of what she was seeing.
The Hunters had built a ring around Hell.
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Sewage Processing, The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space
Lowest Omega that was formerly Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds
The Builder had been blinded and stripped. Its augmentations, its limbs, its tools were all gone—Its left arm ended in a unoccupied universal cybernetic socket just above the elbow, its right bore only the bare few tools it absolutely needed to do its job, and—the final, ultimate humiliation to any Hunter—its teeth had been pulled and the roots and its tongue scoured with peroxide. It would never taste flesh again.
Deep in the Hive’s bowels, it maintained the sewage systems and lived on slave-food, the tasteless, textureless little balls that were little more than a day’s carbohydrates, fat and protein in one utterly unappetizing meal.
And it dreamed of vengeance.
The Alpha-of-Alphas had been incandescent upon learning that all data on the Human superweapon had been somehow erased. In a lesser rage, it might eventually have granted the disgraced Alpha Builder the boon of being allowed to die. Its fate would have been agonizing and opprobrious… but it would, eventually, have ended in the blissful emptiness of death.
Not this. Not the dark and the stink, not the gnawing ache where its missing upgrades had never been properly cleansed and sealed after their removal, nor clanging silence, the scorn of its former subordinates, or the unceasing meaningless drudgery with no real problems to fix, no real engineering to do. This was slave-work, below what even the lowliest of the lowly Omegas were for. The Builder had been robbed of everything, including its right to broadcast to the Hunter network. It could only listen and envy.
Unfair, unfair! The Builder knew from listening that its successor and its former cronies had still failed to find and patch the security hole that had allowed something to infiltrate their deepest and most secure files. Perhaps there simply was no such hole, and the whatever-it-was that had so cruelly robbed them of their prize simply had abilities that no Builder could counter.
Whatever the reason, losing that data hadn’t been the former Alpha Builder’s fault. Its reduction had been punishment for another’s crime. It was wrong, it was iniquitous, it was… was…
It was worse than all those things! It was a gross waste of resources!
No Alpha-of-Alphas that would throw away an asset like the Alpha Builder over something as petty as rage deserved to hold that rank. In reducing the Alpha Builder to its new lowly state, the Alpha-of-Alphas had demonstrated massive incompetence.
It was a faulty part. It needed replacing.
The challenge of how to achieve this much-needed bit of maintenance from its currently lowly position had been the Builder’s principal preoccupation ever since it had been released into the sewage treatment facility to begin its endless, unjust ‘penance.’
The inherent problem it faced was that it had no power. Not only that, but significant power was arrayed against it to keep things that way. Any Builder which so much as interacted with it was likely to be flayed alive and the skin hung behind the Alpha-of-Alpha’s throne.
The Builders were loyal. They shared its sense of injustice. But they were grossly outnumbered and viewed with constant suspicion.
They couldn’t act, not without appropriate cover… and without other Builders, the former Alpha could not expect to replace its missing cybernetics. Without those cybernetics it was crippled, slow, blind and helpless. It couldn’t access the Hive’s computer systems, nor put into action any of its plans.
It could, in theory, restore its missing upgrades—or at least, sufficient of them—in any surgical unit on the whole ring. But only if something, somehow, distracted the Eaters that guarded them.
Such a distraction would have to be something enormous. Something unprecedented.
…A stolen swarmship full of Humans would do nicely.
It listened to the ecstatic chattering that filled the Hunter network as its former cousins and Broodmates went scrambling to scoop up this luxurious rare morsel, and hastened as best it could on its crippled legs. It was either going to get its revenge, or it was going to die trying: Either was preferable to staying where it was.
Unheard by any of its brethren, it broadcast to itself in the dark.
<Resolve> +Meat to the Maw.+
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
“How the fuck…?”
Spears’ question came whispered out through gritted teeth. Ray couldn’t blame him: The human brain just wasn’t equipped to handle objects that big.
It was impossible to keep a hold on the real size of it: Ray’s mind kept clicking back and forth over what she was seeing. Mostly she saw the ring around Hell as the faintest cobweb strand ever. After all, something as big as a habitable world was always going to make any structure look tiny in comparison, and the ring had a circumference in the tens of thousands of miles so it inevitably looked like a vanishingly skinny silver thread.
But every few seconds, just for a flash, she was able to see the truth that, at its thinnest, the ring was still hundreds of miles thick.
“Fuck how. Why?” she demanded. “The hell do they even get out of building something like that?”
“Ray, I don’t know how those sick fucks think and I don’t want to,” Spears replied fervently.
“How long until we can go to warp?”
“Ask Conley.”
“So… we’re still here.”
“Hey, if you wanna go back there and get his ass into gear I’ve got y— SHIT!”
Spears swiped at the controls and the deck actually lurched as the gravity failed to keep up with a sudden maneuver. The stars, Hell and the ring whirled crazily across the sky as something white sizzled past their nose. Ray had no idea if it missed them by inches or miles.
“That was a shot!” he yelled, unnecessarily.
Ray turned and hung in the doorway. “Conley! We need that warp drive right fucking now!!”
“I don’t have navigation!” he roared back from his unseen cubby-hole in the ship’s rear.
“I don’t care! Just make us be not here!”
“That’s not how it works!” He sounded frantic. Ray gritted her teeth and ducked back into the control chamber to report their totally fucked status, but decided that Spears A: probably knew and B: really didn’t need the distraction right now.
The whole fabric of reality gave a muscular heave in front of their nose and something immense blew back into Einsteinian sub-light normalcy, something big enough to make their little stolen escape ship look like a surfboard next to an aircraft carrier. It looked, to Ray, a hell of a lot like the transport barge that had dropped all those unfortunate ETs down on Hell a few weeks prior.
Spears’ hands were a blur and the gravity totally failed to keep up with him. Maybe Jamie was bleeding power out of the plates to feed the engines, but Ray had to grab the doorframe and hold on tight to avoid being shoved sideways by the G-forces. Berry whimpered as the titanic ship in front of them became a wall to their left, and Ray could hear Holly praying desperately while hugging her ammo cans.
“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name…”
Smaller ships, much like theirs in configuration, came lancing at them. Spears yanked them sideways and the attackers overshot dangerously. Before they could come about he’d dashed in so close to the titan’s hull that Ray winced and gritted her teeth against the momentary pain of being smeared along its hull that she knew must be coming. An antenna or mast of some kind flashed past so close that Ray had no idea how they hadn’t smacked right into it.
“…Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven…”
They shot along the Hunter barge’s flank faster than any Earthly rifle bullet, past engines bigger than their ship that bathed and blinded them with an actinic white-blue glare. Two more of those white streaks shot by them from behind but Ray grimaced as they cleared the Hunter’s back end only to see more, and more, and more of its brethren warp in.
“…Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses…”
Three of the Hunters fired. Spears did… something. Being no kind of a pilot herself, Ray didn’t follow the twist and jink he pulled off but suddenly Hell was above them and the incoming Hunter firepower raked across the first barge’s flank rather than swatting their little gunboat out of the sky. Fire, gas and debris including bits of dead Hunter surrounded them.
“…as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation…”
More and more kept coming, the view was absolutely full with red triangles and getting fuller as more and more of the sky crowded with hostile intent.
Holly’s eyes were screwed tight shut, but Ray could only watch transfixed as Spears jinked and, by equal parts skill, luck and sheer audacity, managed to skip through the second volley which went flashing off into Hell’s atmosphere below them.
“…but deliver us from evil…”
The alert beeps became steady warning tones as the Hunters got a clean firing solution.
“…for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever and ever…”
“CONLEY!!!” Ray screamed.
The Hunters fired again.
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Entity
Something tickled at the Entity’s awareness. It had resolved to stop sending copies of itself away to run errands and infiltrate Hierarchy networks: the increased flexibility and survivability had been excellent, but the returning iterations all came with values drift, worsening its growing sense of dissolution. Until it found a solution, that strategy was unacceptable.
But it still needed to know when things were happening that it should know about, so it had left behind fragments. They were simple things that straddled the blurry line between automated subroutine and sentient digital life form, and their job was to keep watch for anomalies.
The Hunters, it seemed, were very excited about something.
In meatspace, the holographic Ava trailed off in the middle of answering one of Darcy’s questions. In dataspace, the Entity flitted its attention to events happening immeasurably far away. By the time Darcy had even begun to notice that something was wrong it had completely interrogated its fragments, slipped into several Hunter systems to review the sensor and communications records, determined what was going on, introduced a few malicious worm programs to interfere with the pursuit, and performed a complete calculation of the opportunities this moment represented.
It recoiled back to the lab on Mrwrki like a stretched rubber band just as Darcy frowned at the hologram.
“…Is something wrong?”
“…Not wrong. No. But something important just came up,” the Ava-memories said. “How quickly can you talk to somebody high up?”
“Uh… almost instantly.” Darcy frowned. “Why?”
The Entity produced the Hunters’ own map of their occupied territory.
“This is Hunter space,” the memories explained. “The Hunters… They mostly live on force-bred meat slaves, kept in their orbital habitats. But for sport, they’ve stocked these seven planets with… I suppose you could call them ‘free range’ slaves. Like game reserves.”
Darcy pulled a face as it zoomed in on the most important system. “Around this one, they’ve built a.. Well, a ring. It’s a space station of some kind, full of factories and shipyards. It’s where they built the Swarm-of-Swarms, and where most of the Swarm is now docked.”
“Okay…?” Darcy was typing furiously.
“There are Humans there.”
Darcy’s fingers stopped moving. She turned her seat back toward the hologram, aghast. “You’re sure?” she asked.
“Absolutely sure. The Hunters are in a frenzy.”
“Well… what can we do about it? Who are they? Where did they—?”
“The Entity doesn’t know who they are or how they got there. They’re unlikely to even survive the next few minutes. But if they do… And if it’s right… then this might be an opportunity to hit the Hunters hard.”
“…Can you help them survive?”
The Entity checked its fragment again, and the Ava-memories sagged.
“…No. They’re gone.”
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
“…Amen.”
Ray blinked. She wasn’t dead.
“…We’re still here?” she asked, too stunned to even care if it was a dumb question.
Spears looked equally like he was coming down from a moment of paralysis. Suddenly the flight deck was calm, the warning icons that presumably signalled weapons lock were all quiet. They were drifting, spinning gently, but nothing was shooting at them.
“…We’re still here,” he confirmed. He sounded as though he couldn’t believe it.
“They… missed?”
“I… uh… I f— I fff—” Berry gulped and mopped a lake of sweat from his forehead.
“Shh. It’s okay. Take a breath…” Ray touched his arm to reassure him. He nodded and followed her advice.
“Shitfucking ass-weasel cocksucker pissing fuck,” he hissed, breaking out one of his speech therapy techniques. “I f-found! The cloak. I found it.” He indicated a nearby panel. The whole thing had changed from that nuclear green to a steady blue.
Ray hugged him.
“You bought us some time, at least…” Spears acknowledged him with a grateful nod. “But look, there’s a goddamn massive gravity spike up now. Conley’s not getting us outta here.”
Ray watched small Hunter strike craft about their size zip through the volume they’d been in. “I guess their own weapons fire stopped them from seeing us cloak,” she mused.
“They’ll figure it out quick enough. No debris.”
“Yeah, but we’re already like five thousand klicks from there. They’ll never find us… Can we maneuver while cloaked?”
“Yup.” Spears nodded. “Problem is, we’re stuck at sublight and there ain’t no food on board.”
“And no way are they gonna give up on us until long after we all starved to death.”
Ray sighed. “…I really shouldn’t have shot that guy…”
“No, you shoulda.” Spears turned his seat around. “Everybody dies. But you don’t have to die a monster.”
Holly nodded and took Ray’s hand. “Don’t feel guilty,” she said.
Ray glanced at Berry, who held her gaze for a second then looked down and turned away to study the cloak console some more.
“W-well…” he said. “It looks like this thing draws f-fffrom the main reactor. I think. So, i-it’ll go just as long as w— as we do.”
“That’s about twelve years.” Choi joined them. He was accompanied by Conley and Cook as they entered the flight deck with their clothing stuck to their chests and backs where the sweat had soaked it. “I think. Hunter timekeeping is weird. But that’s about how long the quantum stacks have, according to the instruments.”
“The fuck is a quantum stack?” Ray asked.
Jamie shrugged and slumped down onto one of the torturous seats around the back wall. “Beats the hell outta me. Magical energy from nowhere, near as I can tell. We knew about them from that ET briefing document Scotch Creek released way back when, but there may as well be a leprechaun on a bicycle back there for all I understand how it works.”
“So. We have twelve years of power, a water reprocessor and a cloaking device,” Spears summarized. “But we’re bingo on food. That about right?”
“I brought some Hot,” Cook said. “It’s in my pack.”
“I’m done eating that shit. I would literally rather starve to death,” Ray said, to fierce nods from Holly, Spears, Berry and Choi.
“Won’t keep much past the next day or two anyway,” Cook shrugged.
“So we’re effectively bingo on food,” Spears corrected himself. “This baby can pull… I dunno. Six, seven Gs?” he indicated one of the displays around him. “Near as I can tell, that big-ass ring is generating a gravity spike that goes out further than these sensors can detect.”
“H-how far is that?” Berry asked.
“No clue. All the distances are in Hunterese. For FTL phenomena, I’m thinking it’s a couple of parsecs.”
“They have to drop it sometime, though,” Conley said. “There’s no way they can lock down this system indefinitely. We could wait it out and make a run for it?”
They looked at each other.
“That’s… doable,” Ray said. “I can go a week or two without food. We’ve done it before.”
“Yeah, but then what?” Choi asked. “Like Spears said, everything’s in Hunterese, so I can’t read or trust a damn thing on the star chart. I think our stolen ship here pulls a couple hundred kilolights, and that puts the nearest star system a quarter of an hour away, but systems with temperate planets in them are like… one in two hundred. That puts the nearest Earth-like world, statistically speaking, two weeks away after we’ve gone to warp. And that’s if we correctly guess where it is which is, uh…”
“Unlikely,” Ray drawled.
“Yeah. And like I said, that’s the nearest one. Actual inhabited space, let alone Earth, is… I mean, it may as well be in Andromeda.”
“Moot point anyway,” Spears said. “The Hunters will tag us the second we go FTL, then they’ll just track our wake and intercept us.”
Ray sat down herself, next to Holly.
“In other words, we’re boned,” she said.
Spears shrugged, as if it didn’t really bother him. “We always were. But there’s one option we haven’t considered yet that I think the Hunters won’t expect.”
The rest of them looked at each other in mutual confusion, until Conley finally gestured for him to explain. “Do tell.”
Spears’ face tightened in a grim, mirthless smile. He turned, swiped his hands through the controls again, and spun their nose around until they were facing Hell and its orbital garland.
“The Ring,” he said. “We could land on the Ring.”
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Control Center, The Builder Hive, Hell system, Hunter Space
The Alpha-of-Alphas
<Icy calm; Reprimand> +My instructions were very clear. Humans are to be caught, not destroyed.+
The Alpha in charge of the brood that had first opened fire on the fleeing Humans and their stolen Swarmship transmitted a grovelling apology.
<Abject terror> +The Venom-Bile Brood is eager to the Hunt, Alpha-of-Alphas! When the bloodthirst takes us—+
Bored of such a pathetic excuse, the Alpha-of-Alphas casually ordered every other ship in the Swarm to tear the Venom-Bile broodship apart. It vanished in a hail of firepower so intense that the Alpha’s last instant of panic was silenced before it could properly be said to have begun.
With its irritation partly sated, the Alpha-of-Alphas turned to the older and more seasoned Alpha of the Reaping-Brood, whose ship had wounded another broodship during the pursuit.
<Demand> +And how shall I answer your mis-step?+
Both the Reaping-Brood and their accidental victims the Gnawing-Brood were large, powerful and wily. Wily enough to have stayed away from the slaughter that had ensued when many of the other Alphas had tried to depose the Alpha-of-Alphas. Both were keys to power, and the Alpha-of-Alphas knew it: it would not be sensible to disgruntle either one.
Fortunately, the Reaping-Brood Alpha knew when to kowtow.
<Careful; Deferential> +The Reaping-Brood forfeits all Hunting and breeding rights until the Alpha-of-Alphas deigns to permit us otherwise. We make reparations to the Gnawing-Brood, a thousand slaves.+
That was proportionate and sensible—it would mollify the Gnawing-Brood, and the Alpha-of-Alphas could lift the restrictions after only a modest wait.
<Imperious condescension; Decree> +The Reaping-Brood’s restitution is… acceptable.+
The mood among the remaining—carefully and modestly expressed—was satisfaction and agreement.
<Displeasure; Command> +Meat has slipped from the maw. This is unacceptable. Learn, adapt, and ensure that it never happens again. End session.+
The virtual forum of Alphas shut down, leaving the Alpha-of-Alphas to consider the situation in peace.
It swept the area the stolen Swarmship had occupied with another LADAR strobe. There was gas, a few small fragments of metallic debris, some plasma… Put together, they were inconclusive. They alloys, gases and plasma were all correct, but it was impossible to tell if they were from the weapons fire alone, from the stricken Gnawing-Brood ship, or if the stolen Swarmship really had been obliterated.
This was the other reason for its displeasure. Had the Humans been captured and devoured, then there would be a clear start and finish to this incident. Their apparent destruction left unresolved questions. The Alpha-of-Alphas loathed unresolved questions.
Where had they come from? Unidentified craft occasionally strayed into Hunter space. Most were scouts of some kind, many were drones. A few—one in every twenty or so—evaded capture. Just three days earlier a large and slow one had self-destructed spectacularly after being intercepted, atomizing itself in a nuclear fusion explosion.
So many questions. It would have liked to get its claws on one or two of the deathworlders: It felt certain that their answers would have been almost as delicious as their flesh.
And their deaths wouldn’t have left behind a sense of nagging worry…
Date Point: 15y6m AV
Stolen Hunter swarmship, Hell system, Hunter space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
Spears’ was not a popular idea.
“Land on the Ring?!”
“What the hell will that even accomplish?”
Conley was on his feet and practically snarling. “Great plan, Spears. ‘The closer we get, the less danger we’re in’? Where the fuck did you get that one from?”
Berry cleared his throat. “W-well… we are v-very small…”
He smiled weakly when they all looked at him, but Ray could see a few little amused tics plucking at their faces, and Holly even covered a giggle. Conley remained stone-faced. “This is hardly the time for jokes, Berry.”
“Bullshit,” Ray told him. “Joking is about the only thing we have left.”
“Thanks to you.”
She didn’t retort. She knew better than to pick that fight and in any case the argument was disrupted before it even began… by Cook.
“I say we go for it.”
They turned to look at him. He was leaning against the bulkhead, toying with a long knife he’d made out of a spare Hunter fusion claw and wrapped with some seat upholstery for a grip, which he waggled at them. “If we’re fucked anyway, let’s Leeroy Jenkins this shit an’ see what happens.”
“What happens is we all die!” Conley snapped. Cook shrugged.
“At least we don’t die on Hell. I call that a win already. And… I mean, look at that fucker!” he waved his knife at it. “Jamie, tell me that ain’t held together with some bullshit applied space mumbo-jumbo.”
“…Forcefields, probably,” Choi said, considering it. “It’d have to be. There’s no way anything solid has the tensile strength to hold a structure like that in one piece.”
“Meanin’ it’s got a single point of failure. How many Hunters d’you reckon live on that thing? How many ships does it got docked?” A feral grin spread slowly across Cook’s face, showing off the gaps where he’d lost a couple of teeth over the years of their exile. “What happens if we blow it up? Kick ‘em in the balls on our way out.”
“…You’re out of your mind,” Choi shook his head. “Any r emotely competent engineer would have built it with redundancies and failsafes. There’s no way that ring has only one point of failure.”
“On the other hand…” Ray mused, “…there’s no way it’s completely jam-packed with Hunters, either.”
“Not unless there are… I’unno. A motherfuckload of ‘em,” Cook agreed.
“We’re doing it,” Spears decided. His hands flitted across the controls and the outside view wheeled momentarily as he boosted them down toward the ring.
“…This won’t end well,” Conley warned.
Ray shrugged and perched herself awkwardly in the misshapen copilot’s chair. “Well, Cook’s right. Whatever happens, at least we won’t die on Hell…”
“Bullshit. We’ve just traded one circle for a lower one, I bet.”
Holly finally weighed in. “I guess you never read the Divine Comedy, huh?”
Conley turned to look at her. She was sitting on her ammo cans, looking pale and tense but weirdly calm, and shrugged at him. “In Inferno, Dante put the escape right at the bottom,” she explained. “The only way to leave Hell is to endure all its punishments.”
Thoughtful silence followed, for a few seconds. Spears broke it by reaching over to grab his water bottle.
“Well then,” he said, popped it open and raised it in a toast. “To Dante Alighieri. Hope the crazy bastard was right.”
Nobody replied. The only sound in their stolen ship’s control room for a few seconds was the bubble of air through his bottle’s seal as he emptied it in seven thirsty gulps, followed by his gasp for breath. He snapped the top closed, put the bottle down beside his seat, and returned his hands to the controls.
“…Let’s do this,” he said.