by M. D. Cooper
“Oh-ahy,” the man rasped weakly.
The console in front of Amavia showed the main reactor coming online, while the ship’s systems reinitialized on power from the SC batteries—which were still near full charge.
She prioritized comm system activation, and when they came online, sent out a coded pulse, waiting for the response that would contain tightbeam coordinates for Sabrina.
They came in a second later, and she made a connection to the other ship.
Amavia laughed at the AI’s consternation.
It was Sabrina’s turn to laugh.
The ship’s AI sent a laugh across the comms.
Amavia sent a serious glare to Sabrina.
* * * * *
Jessica dove the Sexy beneath a cargo net and across a salvage yard then around a protruding hab cylinder, twisting the pinnace amidst struts and through spaces that even she thought might be a touch too small for the ship.
She was certain Usef thought so. He wasn’t saying anything, but she was starting to fear for his seat’s armrest.
“Easy on the upholstery, Usef,” Iris said, apparently on the same wavelength as Jessica.
“Don’t deny me my coping mechanism,” Usef said through clenched teeth as Jessica slipped the ship behind a large passenger liner docked on a spur. The ship obscured her from the AST vessels and she added more thrust, then killed the fusion engine’s outputs and pushed off the liner with the grav drives, cutting those as well once the Sexy was past the stern.
Then they were on a trajectory away from the station, fully stealthed with decent velocity.
“Now we drift for a bit,” Jessica said.
“Shit,” Trance whispered from behind her. “I don’t know whether or not to jump for joy or puke my guts out.”
“Why can’t we do both?” Usef asked.
“You’re welcome.” Jessica gave the colonel a sour look. “If you check behind us, you’ll see that we’re outside the grid those cruisers set up. Unless something gives us away, those AST dickwads aren’t going to have any reason to sweep their beams across this vector.”
“So long as they don’t get desperate,” Iris added.
“Whose side are you on?” Jessica asked with a laugh. “Now, where is Sabrina.”
“I got a burst from them earlier,” Usef said. “They’re getting the Garrulous Brooke from the impound strand over there.” He gestured to a nearby moon with a five-hundred-kilometer strand coming off it. The structure was laden with ships, and Jessica hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to get the Brooke away. Before long the rest of the local AST ships would join the hunt, and then keeping things on the down low would become much more difficult.
“Sent out a coded pulse and…I have them,” Iris said a moment later. “Establishing a tight beam.”
Sabrina gave mock-maniacal laugh.
Jessica rolled her eyes and brought her hands to her temples.
Cheeky made a barfing sound.
Jessica had just spotted two of the destroyers altering course for the impound strand.
Jessica knew how Sabrina felt about impound yards and that it wasn’t something the AI would budge on.
* * * * *
* * * * *
“OK, Cheeky, Amavia gave us a five-minute countdown,” Sabrina said via her mobile frame.
Cheeky gave her an appraising look. “I was listening in. She said six.”
“Yeah, but she was padding. Look, we can see the docking clamps disabling from here. She can totally walk and chew gum—just like she said.”
Shaking her head, Cheeky fired up Sabrina’s grav drives, adjusting the ship’s vector to align with the impound strand right above its anchor station.
“I never got that saying. Everyone can walk and chew gum.”
“I can’t,” Edgar chimed in. “Granted, that’s just because this frame has no mouth. Gotta admit, I’m a bit jealous of yours, Sabrina.”
“My mouth?”
Edgar groaned. “Your frame.”
The ship’s AI gave a long laugh. “I don’t know if you noticed, but all our mobile frames on this ship are female. Do you want to be a girl?”
Edgar cocked his head to the side. “Sabrina. You’re an AI. You’re not a boy or a girl.”
Sabrina gave Edgar a measuring look. “Do you really believe that?”
“Um…yes? I didn’t know it was a strange belief to hold.”
“Edgar, Edgar, Edgar,” Sabrina shook her head. “Haven’t you noticed that humans treat males and females differently? And when you assume one of their genders, you have to match your behavior to that gender? That helps them understand how to treat you, and makes everything feel consistent, warm and fuzzy.”
Cheeky giggled from the pilot’s seat. “Sabs, you’re totally a girl, but you don’t quite behave like a human woman.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Well…honestly? You can be a bit neurotic at times. A little…over attached.”
Sabrina snorted. “Well, you were one of my role models, Cheeky,”
“Zing!” Edgar cried out. “Maybe you do have human female down right, Sabrina. I see a catfight coming on.”
Both Cheeky and Sabrina gave Edgar quelling looks and he laughed nervously. “See? This is why I don’t try to act like a human male. It never works. I’m certain that I’d do even worse trying to emulate a female. I’ll stick to my ‘less authentic’ frame I suppose.”
“Probably a good call,” Sabrina said with a soft laugh before turning back to Cheeky. “So, stasis at the last second?”
“Yup, with any luck we can apply stasis shields, hit the strand and then disable them once we’re beyond the blast…which should take two-point-six seconds. Given how close to the moon’s surface we’ll be, I don’t think any of the AST ships will be able to see the hit directly, either.”
“So it just might look like some sort of missile strike or bomb.”
“That’s the hope,” Cheeky replied.
Sabrina nodded, but didn’t speak further as she watched her pilot pick up speed working toward a velocity of forty kilometers per second—which both their calculations showed should be enough to slice through the strand without stretching or bending it.
A clean break, and then it would fly away, heading toward the inner system.
The maneuver was one she could make herself, but Sabrina liked it when Cheeky flew her. They had a strange sort of symbiotic relationship. Neither needed the other to survive, but they still wanted one another.
The weeks in which Sabrina had thought Cheeky was dead had been nearly as bad as the long period she’d spent in the impound yard before Sera had found her.
Well…not quite that bad…but close.
Sabrina sent a laugh.
Sabrina considered that. She never really told her stories much, but because they were always made alongside her crew, she didn’t have to—Amavia was new so there was a lot of lore for her to catch up on.
That was what Sabrina liked the most about being a starship. Her stories were always made with her favorite people, and they stayed attached to her forever.
She thought back over her past, to all the things she’d done, all the adventures. It really was the best life she could have ever hoped for. One she planned to keep living for a long time to come.
Mobile frames are nice, but I really just like being a starship.
“Not using goldie?” Cheeky asked, glancing at the frame as it sat still at the weapon’s console.
Cheeky nodded with a smile on her lips. “So you did. OK, we’re occluded by the moon. Burn in five, four, three, two, one.”
When they hit the strand, the execution was perfect. Cheeky killed the engines, the stasis shields snapped into place, and the strand’s anchors were obliterated by one hundred quadrillion joules of kinetic energy.
The impound strand flew free from the moon and, with its existing velocity, began to pull free from Chureen’s gravity well, while the moon slowly shifted in toward the gas giant.
Cheeky, Edgar, and Sabrina had a good laugh as the AST destroyers rapidly altered their trajectory to avoid colliding with the moon. Following which, the two ships shifted vector to pursue the strand, but peeled away as explosions began to blossom around them.
A bubbling laugh came from Amavia.
The strand was moving at nine kilometers per second and at that speed a large number of tugs would be required to capture it. It would take some time for the string of ships to reach the inner system, but when it did, Sabrina was certain the people of Sarneeve would be ready to catch their prize.
After a few hours of careful maneuvering, Jessica brought the Sexy to Sabrina and docked the pinnace, the humans and AIs carefully moving what ended up being twelve hundred and eleven AIs into Hold 2.
Sabrina marveled that when adding in humans saved from Thompson’s arena, there were over sixteen hundred people aboard her.
After keeping close to the departing strand for a day, Amavia brought the Garrulous Brooke alongside Sabrina and, when the ship’s original crew returned to their vessel, Amavia reboarded Sabrina. And once again the entire crew was inside her hull.
Sabrina felt complete. Happy. Like a starship should.
CERKA-BOUND
STELLAR DATE: 05.06.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Sandy Sea Asteroid Belt
REGION: Border Territory, Virginis System
For a day, it was touch and go.
Two of the AST cruisers had taken a wide slingshot around Chureen, moving toward the drifting strand. To discourage any close investigation, they flew Sabrina close to the enemy
ships, dropping limpet mines in their path, hoping the cruiser captains would think that the drifting strand of ships was still losing mines in its path, and write it off as being not worth the trouble.
The other AST vessels performed sweeps around Chureen, but eventually seemed to give up the search for prey they’d never even laid eyes on.
The crew had an amusing time listening to the civilian and military comm traffic as everyone tried to figure out what had gone on.
It was agreed that some group of freedom-fighters had struck Chittering Hawk, and the impound strand, but there were no reports about the twelve hundred liberated AIs.
There seemed to be two camps amongst the AST: some who felt Virginis wasn’t worth the effort to hold onto, and others who were pushing for a full-scale obliteration of every station and world within the heliosphere.
Jessica hoped that cooler heads would prevail, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
Once the enemy ships had all called off their pursuit, the refugees had moved to the strand, along with the liberated AIs. They began to search for any remaining ships’ AIs and repair what vessels they could.
She’d had a brief conversation with Thompson, but the brooding man really hadn’t been interested in talking, and had left Sabrina with the briefest of goodbyes.
With the ship once again empty, Jessica marveled at how over the course of just two days, she’d become accustomed to having so many people around. It had been annoying at times—the ship was certainly not set up for hundreds of passengers—but there’d been a certain charm to it.
The investigation into Roy’s behavior had found he’d behaved more cowardly than criminally, and his former crew had incarcerated him on their ship until they reached Sarneeve where they would have him tried under LoS laws.
Jessica had offered to take any who wished to Cerka Station, but none of the refugees had felt comfortable with going to the station that was the seat of Virginis’s government.
From what she’d been able to discern, their reluctance was mostly because of the general expectation that Cerka was bound to be attacked. Sarneeve was a beautiful garden world, one that everyone believed would be left unmarred by the AST if they moved in to take the rest of the system.