by M. D. Cooper
RECYCLED
STELLAR DATE 04.05.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS SO211A
REGION: Outside of the Orion Guard Debris Field, New Canaan System
Geoff approached the stream of debris slowly flying through space. Because it would take personnel and fuel to push the pieces all the way to the processing areas, one of the eggheads at command came up with something new. Once they were clear of the debris field, they released the pieces on a trajectory to be ‘caught’ by the processing area. The entire process was amazing to watch; Geoff had never seen anything like it before.
“Just look at all of this. At times, it seems like this is barely controlled chaos.”
“I can’t imagine being one of the herders,” Geoff said as he shook his head and sighed.
“Yeah, the ships that are flying around and adjusting the debris if it goes off course. It’s kind of like when they used to have to move livestock back in the day.”
Geoff positioned the ship along their prescribed course, nudging it with the thrusters until it was perfectly lined up down the middle.
Mal was double-checking the flight path of the debris attached to their ship, as well as extrapolating future courses for all the debris around them. He wanted to make sure that when they released this piece, it wouldn’t cause any more issues.
“Exactly, my friend. Low-risk means boring, and I need a little excitement in my life now and then.” Geoff made minute adjustments using his thrusters to bring the salvage in line with their launch trajectory. “All those ships are doing is nudging pieces back into place that go off course; not a whole lot going on there.”
“Been in a lot of dangerous situations, Mal?” Geoff was always trying to figure out more about Mal’s past. The AI was plenty talkative until it came to anything about his history. Geoff wasn’t sure why the AI always avoided questions like this. He knew Mal was a military AI, which meant there was a certain level of competence he could expect.
Geoff bumped the throttles forward, giving their ship a little extra speed. With the amount of mass they were hauling, they couldn’t accelerate too fast. When the ship was unburdened, Geoff felt like he had to fight to keep it at a reasonable speed.
“OK, course and speed are set, mains are at zero. Beginning separation.”
Geoff began applying thrust with their docking thrusters, maneuvering their tug slowly down and away from it.
“Got it, looks like we have good separation. We are now ten meters from the wreckage and moving down in relation. Separating at two meters per second.” Geoff was still using the docking thrusters, albeit more gently, to move the tug out of the way. “Anything in our way back there?”
While Geoff was maneuvering the ship, Mal was watching all the debris around him. Though it was rare for a piece to move off its trajectory, the AI was being a bit more cautious after the incident leaving the debris field.
“Switching over to mains,” Geoff said as he applied thrust to get them moving away from the stream at a faster rate. “Get me the course back to Recovery One.”
“I thought we were going to get to dock for a few so they could check out the thruster?” Geoff groaned. They had not been off the ship for more than an hour over the past few days. He didn’t mind being in the ship, though, and, truth be told, Mal was pretty good company. He just wanted to get up and stretch his legs a bit. Sometimes it felt good to go for a long walk after a shift in the black.
Mal located the frigate and began plotting a course to it. It was on the other side of the debris field, and he was looking for safe paths both through the field and around it. However, there were still some pieces caroming around the area that would continue to do so until a tug was dispatched to recover them.
“They let that hack job you did on the thruster stand? Stars, they must really be hurting for supplies.” Geoff laughed.
He was just giving the AI a hard time. Mal had made several field-expedient repairs over the past few days, and they all held. Until Geoff had a reason not to, he would continue to trust Mal’s work. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t give him shit about it, though.
“Well, when you make us sound all noble and shit, how could I disagree?”
“Nope, I got it. Besides if I wasn’t flying the ship, what would I be doing?” Geoff accepted the course and began to bring the ship around.
“Enough! I get it.” Geoff cut Mal off mid-sentence. “Fly the ship or be your personal maid. I’ll stick with the ship, thank you very much!”
“OK, on course. Looks like it is going to take a while for us to get there. I’m glad you decided to go around the field. I really don’t want to be in there unless we have to.”
He had been watching the work of the other tugs, as well as keeping an eye out for any other incidents. Between the tugs knocking stuff around, and the planet’s gravity, things were getting hectic in the field.
“Yeah, that sounds good. I could use a few minutes to wash up,” Geoff said as he rose from his seat. “Then I’m going to go and walk around the ship a bit. Need to move around and get the blood flowing again.”
Geoff exited the bridge of the tug, turning his head back to look at the ceiling of the compartment with a smile. “And don’t touch anything, Mal. You may be good at charting courses, but leave the flying to me.”
CONTACT
STELLAR DATE 04.05.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS SO211A
REGION: Orion Guard Debris Field, New Canaan System
“Is that our piece up there?” Geoff asked Mal as he s
ettled back into his seat. It seemed each run was getting longer and longer, the further they went into the field. In the beginning, they had been moving roughly one section every hour. Now there were long burns involved with getting to the wreckage and getting it out again. All that went to the back of his mind as he looked at his flight console, he noticed some of his screens were rearranged.
“Mal, what the hell happened to my console?” Everything had been changed. Gone were his custom screens and commands, everything he had set up so he could respond to any situation quickly.
“Wait. What? Why would you do that? I told you not to touch anything!” Geoff began resetting all the screens, looking for where he’d stored his default configurations.
“Then you take control.”
Geoff was beginning to get frustrated. Each ship was different. They all had unique interfaces and control surfaces. Luckily, most consoles had the ability to store preferred configurations for each user. Geoff, however, had not paid attention to where they were stored, since he was the only pilot on the ship.
Like most pilots, he was constantly tweaking his console, making it more efficient over time. He’d planned on uploading his configurations to the network for storage; in case he ever had to fly one of these again, he could just download them and be good to go. If he could find them, that was.
“Use? You don’t even need to look at the….”
Geoff paused what he was doing.
“Are you fucking with me again?”
Geoff swore he heard a bit of a snicker in Mal’s voice.
“Mal, you can be a real asshole sometimes,” he said with a grin.
It seemed like the AI was starting to open up to him. Geoff caught a feeling of amusement from Mal, as his console reset itself to his configuration.
When they had first been assigned together, Mal worried over everything. He was always triple-checking whatever Geoff was doing. It was almost as if Mal didn’t fully trust him. However, three days together in a tiny ship tends to quickly make people friends, or cause them to be just plain annoyed with each other.
He was glad Mal was starting to feel more comfortable with him. Maybe he would eventually get him to talk a bit about his past in the ISF, though that had proven to be tricky thus far.
Geoff thought about that for a moment. He’d accepted Mal’s Link tokens when they were paired together. That was how Mal was talking to him now. He just never spoke back over the Link.
“I guess I am just used to having a human crew.”
“It’s too quiet,” Geoff said as he thought about it some more. “If we communicated exclusively over the Link, I think I would lose my mind. If I didn’t talk to you out loud, I think the silence would get to me. Just a byproduct of the social animal called ‘humans’.”
“Nah, we are good like it is. Although, anyone who didn’t know I had an AI in here would think I was crazy.”
“Yeah, otherwise they would think I was talking to myself.”
Mal sent amusement across the link, and Geoff realized his crewmate was messing with him again.
“You’re in an awfully good mood since I got back. Maybe you needed the time to yourself, too.” Geoff smiled as he thought about what an AI would do if they were alone with no one to talk to. He realized he didn’t have the slightest idea what kind of interests or hobbies Mal had.
As Mal spoke, the noted piece of debris was rapidly becoming larger. On his display next to the object was information regarding its trajectory, speed, rotation, and mass. Geoff maneuvered his tug so they would be approaching it from the port aft direction.
“Mal, let’s loop around this once on our current trajectory and then loop over the top and the bottom. Once we are back at the bottom, we should be reasonably close to our exit vector.”
The AI began warming up the sensor suite on the ship. This section of the debris field was fairly remote in relation to the other tugs and S&R shuttles. Even when they were working closely together, they couldn’t see the other ships in the area. Distances out in the void were immense, but support had been only a minute or two away. Now, the current closest vessel was over an hour away, and that made Mal nervous.
Geoff fired his braking thrusters, bringing him to a crawl in relation to the frigate, which had been broken into three pieces. The medical section they were recovering was the biggest. The next two largest were parts of the drive section and the command deck. The section containing the command deck was surrounded by a sphere of its own debris, while the drive section looked completely unrecoverable.
Mal began to do so with every means at his disposal. As they passed around the section, he began to shape an image of it from the scan data.
“Got it. Starting secondary sweep.”
This wasn’t the most exciting part of flying, and it showed on Geoff’s face. But still, he understood why they had to do it, and a little boredom was a small price to pay for a clear conscience.
Mal had received a few anomalous readings, but they had not been solid contacts.
“Not a problem. You picking up anything yet?”
Geoff watched the scan data come together on his screen. Theoretically, he and Mal should be receiving the data at the same time. While Mal was using the primary arrays, Geoff was tied in to the secondary arrays wherever possible. At the distances they were scanning, the loss of fidelity from using the secondary suite had a negligible effect on the data.
Geoff brought the ship to a dead stop in relation to the wreckage. If Mal thought he saw something, he planned to give him as much time as needed to investigate that.
“What did it look like?” Geoff was concerned now, all thoughts of boredom gone from his mind. If there was someone in there, they were going to need help immediately. “Could it have been a crew member?”
Geoff was looking through his data, trying to determine what the AI had seen. The fact that he didn’t see it right away didn’t concern him too much; Mal could process and collate data much faster than Geoff could ever dream of. Plus, Mal didn’t have to use an interface like the scan console to access the data, like Geoff did.
“Send me the area so I can take a look at it.”
He focused his scanners on the area Mal highlighted. There did seem to be something there, but he couldn’t get a full picture of it, either.
“The closest shuttle equipped for personnel recovery is about two hours away. Just to be on the safe side, I’m going to try and raise them on comms. I’ll see what their response time would be.” Geoff turned his head to look out the window on the port side of the ship.
“Mal, take a look at the port side. I thought I saw something glint off that piece of debris over by the command deck section.”
Mal never got to finish, as a bright light
appeared from the direction of the contact, and the small tug was cast into darkness.
ISOLATION
STELLAR DATE 04.05.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS SO211A
REGION: Orion Guard Debris Field, New Canaan System
Geoff’s eyes had barely adjusted to the gloom in the cockpit. They had been facing away from the system star when the tug lost power, so the only light he saw was reflected off the pieces of the broken Orion cruiser that surrounded the tug.
“Mal, talk to me! What happened?” Geoff was furiously flipping switches, trying to reboot the system. “I’ve got nothing over here. I can’t even get the consoles to reboot.”
He noticed how quiet the small cockpit had become. There was no hum from the engines and, more importantly, no gentle hiss of the environmental systems.
That was when he noticed that Mal was completely silent. No, not just silent—he was completely off the Link. Gone.
“Mal! Can you hear me?”
Geoff began to panic for a second before his training kicked in. He had been flying for a long time and had practiced just about every scenario he could imagine.
“I’m heading back to the engineering deck.” He didn’t know if Mal could hear him, but he talked nonetheless. “I’ll see if something was damaged back there. Maybe we should have run a full diagnostic on our way here.”
Geoff was looking at the exposed conduit and cabling throughout the ship as he pulled his way back to engineering. Nothing seemed out of place, but the air had the almost ozone-like quality of burnt electronics. Arriving in engineering, he noticed nothing out of place. Everything was exactly as it looked when he’d left it last. His flashlight caught a few wisps of smoke, and the pieces came together in his mind. Smoke and the smell of ozone meant only one thing to him.
“EMP,” was all he was able to say before he kicked off the wall, shooting himself back toward the bridge.
Mal’s core was stored in the aft area of the bridge, in a compartment where the NSAI nodes for the ship were housed. The area was shielded and armored, so theoretically, Mal should have survived.