Valor's Cost

by Kal Spriggs

  “That expense, and the variety of issues surrounding Project Quicksilver, is why every one of you cadets with a quicksilver implant is vital,” Commander Weisfeldt went on, “Not just because of your potential, either. For now, I want you for real-world testing.”

  “The shuttle?” I asked excitedly. The thought of flying a prototype vessel made me squeak a bit in excitement.

  “No, no, no… That’s a garbage run doing six trips a day?” Commander Weisfeldt waved a hand. “No, I need you… and Cadet Regan, too, mind you… to conduct interfacing tests with our Alexandria-class ship and its systems! We’ll do full diagnostics and integration. This will be so important to making sure that all of our systems work together and that our interfaces function as designed.”

  That didn’t sound like fun. It sounded very tedious. I glanced at Kyle and his expression mirrored mine: a sort of half grimace of disappointment.

  “Now, let’s get down to the lab, they’ve just installed a sensor array and I want both of you to work on calibration diagnostics!” Commander Weisfeldt gave a wave, “this way!”

  ***

  As much as I might have wished it, Commander Weisfeldt hadn't overstated the amount of work to be done. There were dozens of systems being assembled to go into the ship. Many of them were part of the ship and couldn't be assembled outside. All of them needed to be calibrated and integrated with one-another. In a shipyard, it would have been a standard assembly, especially with known designs and components.

  Nothing in the Alexandria-class ship was standard. The warp coils were custom-designed. The environmental system followed a template for a smaller crew, but still had to provide redundancy and cover a relatively large vessel... so it too, was custom designed. And since it was designed rather than standard, the designers had sought to do all kinds of “improvements” on efficiency and capacity.

  I started hating those designers as I tried to make their vision a reality. It didn't help that I'd been one of those designers when this had just been a project. I'd had ideas like “wouldn't it be neat if...” and Commander Weisfeldt had loved those kinds of discussions and ideas.

  Now, though, I had to make them actually work and I wasn't the only one frustrated by it.

  “Are you kidding me?!” Kyle demanded as he opened up a cover and stared at the tightly-packed solid-state electronics inside. “How am I supposed to figure out what I'm looking for without a full system diagram and labels?”

  “It does use less space that way,” I noted somewhat defensively as I looked over.

  “But it's terrible for maintenance and even worse for troubleshooting...” he sighed as he pulled out his datapad. “One of the solid-state cores is installed backwards. But the way they're all installed, I have to take all of them out to fix just the one. Let me guess, you had a part in this?”

  I ducked my head and pretended to be too busy to hear his question. That wasn't hard, I was elbow-deep on a set of coolant feeders for the weapon systems. In theory, each of those feeders provided enough cooling capacity to facilitate the Alexandria's burst-fire systems in near continuous fire mode. But the coolant lines had been drawn overlapping power conduit and no one had noticed the overlap, so I was trying to see if there was room for both or if things needed to be moved.

  Right now, it wasn't looking good on things fitting.

  Kyle grumbled a bit more, “I almost miss Summit Station.”

  I snorted at that, “Almost.” My humor faded a bit as I realized, once more, that everyone on the station, from the harried Lieutenant Thomas to the annoying Lieutenant Koga was dead.

  “I try telling myself that it’s not my fault,” Kyle said in a low voice. “That I couldn't have known about the security code in the software... but that doesn't help much.”

  “It's not your fault,” I protested. The very idea that Kyle might blame himself for what had happened made me angry.

  “I triggered the code,” he replied. I looked over and saw that he'd stopped working, his head hung low and his eyes were closed. “All I did was a search, yeah, but that was enough...”

  “You couldn't have known that!” I stepped back from the coolant feeders and went over to him, resting a hand on his shoulder, “Kyle, it's not your fault--”

  “That doesn't help!” he snapped. He looked over at me and for a second, his green eyes blazed with rage. But the moment passed. “God, I'm sorry, Jiden.” He flushed. “I didn't meant to snap. It's just... it doesn't seem fair. I triggered the trap, it was our snooping that found the issue with the software, and I'm the reason they sent the ship to attack the station. I got a hundred or more people killed and yet here I am, cracking jokes with my girlfriend and fiddling with a ship. And I don't feel like I can talk to anyone about it because who would understand?”

  “Kyle,” I answered in a level voice, “if anyone in this universe is in a position to understand your situation, trust me, it's me.”

  Kyle winced. “Yeah, I suppose you would.” He turned and opened his arms. I stepped forward and hugged him, planting my face in his chest. For a moment, it didn't matter that we were in uniform, that we were supposed to be working. Nothing mattered but that human contact.

  “Your grandmother didn't ask if you turned around because of me, did she?” Kyle asked softly.

  “What?” I looked up at him in surprise.

  “When you turned around, after my ship was damaged, you did it because of me, didn't you?” Kyle asked, a hollow look in his eyes. “When you did it, I thought for sure we were both going to die.”

  “I did it because it was the right thing to do,” I told him firmly.

  He squeezed me a bit, “You're not just saying that to make me feel better, are you?”

  “No,” I answered meeting his eyes. “I knew that the best chance we had, that I had, was to take that destroyer out, regardless of what Arton's orders were. If I kept running, that destroyer would have come after me again, and again, and again until it got me. Taking it on together was tactically the best solution.”

  Kyle drew me close and I rested my head against his chest, listening to his heart. “I don't know what's worse,” he said, his voice quiet and thoughtful, “thinking that you might not be able to do your duty if my life was on the line, thinking that I might not be able to do it if our situations were reversed... or thinking that either one of us will have to decide between duty and... us.”

  “That's why they don't normally want people in a relationship in the same unit,” I answered. “And in the future, that won't be an issue anyway, right?”

  “Maybe,” Kyle sounded almost resigned. “I just can't help but think you would be better off--”

  “Don't you dare finish that statement,” I growled. I looked up at him, meeting his green eyes with my own, willing every bit of determination I had into my voice and expression, “You're stuck with me, Kyle Regan, whether you like it or not. And you can't keep blaming yourself for what happened at Summit Station. You didn't kill those people, the people who attacked the station did. Do you understand me?”

  Kyle grinned at me, “Yes, ma'am!” he chimed.

  “Good,” I gave him a last squeeze and then stepped back, straightening my uniform. “Let's get back to work.” There'd be time for him to muss me later, when there was less chance of being caught.

  ***

  “Look this over, will you?” Commander Weisfeldt asked as he transferred me a file. I'd just finished my report on errors and issues that Kyle and I had fixed for the day.

  I examined the file, puzzled at first. It was a program, I saw, designed to interact with software. What it seemed to do was isolate the target software and then clean the system of it entirely, overwriting the target millions of times with gibberish code, and then doing a fresh installation. “This is for the course generating software from Arco Dynamics?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I've yet to test it, we're still identifying potential traps in their software. As you can imagine, the last thing we want to happen i
s for us to trigger a warning signal here at our top secret shipyard.”

  I snorted at that, “Yes, sir.” I examined the coding further, noting how it first cut all external communications with other programs and then attacked the target itself. “It seems nasty enough to do the job, who designed it?”

  “A hacker by the name of Stasia,” Commander Weisfeldt answered. “She was wanted by Guard Intelligence, actually, and we made an... arrangement so that she could claim asylum here. She's one of the people we've had analyzing the coding from Project Quicksilver, actually.”

  “You have some random criminal hacker going through the Quicksilver files?” I asked in shock.

  “Well, she's a bit volatile, but she's mostly idealistic motivated, and we're careful how we handle her. She quite likes her current arrangements,” Commander Wiesfeldt answered. “Century has something of a history of offering outlaws from Guard Space second chances.”

  “I don't know about that,” I muttered.

  “Your ultimate great-grandfather, the first generation Militia officer, was arrested by the Guard and broke out of one of their penal colonies, didn't he?” Commander Weisfeldt looked at me under bushy eyebrows.

  “Well, yeah, I think so,” I answered, flushing a bit. I still wasn't what anyone would call well-read on my family history. But I'd read another cadet's paper on the subject. “But that's different.”

  “Different, how?” Commander Weisfeldt asked.

  I shrugged, not really able to put it into words, so I changed the subject, “How do we know she can be trusted?”

  “She gave her word,” Commander Weisfeldt answered, “and we gave her an opportunity to prove it. That goes further than you might think.”

  My eyes narrowed, “You almost make it sound like you've been there.”

  “I have,” he smiled slightly. “In case the name didn't give it away, I'm not native to Century.”

  I frowned at that, “You aren't?”

  “I grew up on a colony, well, quite some distance away. Some years ago, it was offered 'Protectorate' status within Guard Space, an offer backed by the arrival of a significant Guard Fleet. You might imagine what they decided.”

  I winced at that. “Sorry.”

  “I wasn't even born at the time, as I said, it was some years ago... but my family, my clan, you might call them, weren't very big on the event. Particularly since their businesses and fortunes went into sharp decline. My grandfather's trading company went under, various industries they owned were put out of business, either through Guard interference or mega-corporations forcing them under. By the time I was born, most of the people on my world were the equivalent of wage slaves to one of the larger corporations that owned our planet in all-but-name.”

  I was quiet as I considered that. “Were you a freedom fighter, then, sir?”

  “Me? No, I stole from the company I worked for to help buy fake IDs for my family members to escape. A few of them came here. I got caught and went to a penal colony for... some time. While I was there, I got letters from my family here, it sounded like a good thing, so I emigrated. The rest, as you might say, is history.”

  I was quiet as I considered that. “With a criminal background, how did you get into the Militia, much less as an officer?”

  “One of my family came to serve under the Admiral. She learned that I had engineering training and, given my background, offered me a waiver.” He shrugged. “You'd be surprised, Cadet Armstrong, at how much loyalty a little trust can buy you.”

  He sniffed, “Now then, something I want you to consider as you work on integration is the bridge command structure. We're looking to make full use of substantial automation, including remote controlled robots to be operated by a combination of autonomous programming and quicksilver implants. I'm not sure we have the bandwidth within the ship's network for that level of computational power, so I want you and Kyle to run some tests...”

  ***

  A lot of what I had to do was interface control systems so they’d actually talk to one another. Most of the equipment was built on-site and a lot of it used the same basic software, much of it designed to work together... but some of it wasn’t. And sometimes when someone had changed one set of control software to talk to another, they’d made it so that those two systems wouldn’t talk to anything else.

  I could do that kind of work anywhere in the ship, but I spent a lot of my time up on the bridge area, where I could physically inspect a lot of the control systems. The bridge wasn’t anything near completed. There was the bridge proper, with several positions installed: communications, weapons, and sensors, along with the command console. The whole forward bulkhead was open, though, to the various computer and control systems for the ship. And the side bulkheads weren’t up, either, since those would be support systems like emergency power and life support.

  The Alexandria was over three hundred meters long, a bit longer than a destroyer. With the parameters of the Weisfeldt-Armstrong-Regan drive-field, it could have been bigger, much bigger. We had originally designed it based off of dimensions that Commander Weisfeldt had proposed, at under three hundred and twenty meters length and a hundred meters wide at the widest points. Now I knew those dimensions matched the shipyard they’d been building, though I still had no idea where it was. I wondered how long the Admiral had been planning this “upgraded” fleet... and just how my joining the Academy had tied into her plans.

  I didn’t think she could have planned for me staying. I’d left after Academy Prep School, I’d planned to make a career out of Champion Enterprises. Project Quicksilver had still been a theory, at the time, with Doctor Aisling doing some testing and nothing more.

  I didn’t know where Project Alexandria would be without me. I was sure that they could have done a lot of it, but I didn’t know if they would have figured out Kyle’s theory, or if he would have worked out the math without me. It felt weird to think about how different things might have been, had I stayed at Champion Enterprises or had I never uncovered the smuggling ring that my former friend, Tony Champion, had helped to run. Would they have discovered that Commander Scarpitti was an agent for another nation? Would Project Quicksilver have run its course to completion, with Doctor Aisling continuing to torture my friends?

  Would my family still be alive? That thought hit me out of nowhere... but there it was. Every decision I’d made had come with a cost, but those costs were weighed against how bad things might be if we didn’t make them. I’d told that to Kyle, but I did I believe it myself?

  My mother, my father, Grandma Effy, my brother Will... they’d died. They might not have died if I hadn’t been a part of Project Quicksilver... but they might have, too. Even if I’d never gone to the Academy, Commander Scarpitti had been investigating my parent’s research. Project Quicksilver had still been based upon the smart materials that my parents had developed based upon their archaeological dig. Charterer Beckman would still be involved in treasonous activities.

  I couldn’t continue to hate myself for surviving, to blame myself for the death of my family, and to then turn around and tell Kyle that he couldn’t blame himself for the events at Summit Station.

  Nor, I realized, could I continue to to blame myself for Ted Meeks, who’d died at the hands of the smugglers who’d tried to kill me. Or for Cadet Webster, who Commander Scarpitti had murdered and framed to keep her secrets.

  Sitting in that quiet, partially assembled bridge, my mind linked with dozens of systems, I had to pause and wipe at tears in my eyes. Maybe, I could admit to myself, it wasn’t really my fault.

  It was a strange, quiet realization for me. And then, because I really did have a lot of work to do, I turned my attention back to the systems I’d been analyzing. Because whether I blamed myself for all that or not, I had a job to do... and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.

  ***

  Chapter 20: Maybe Things Are Getting Better

  The last few months of our summer assignment were pretty uneventful.
I got an update from the Admiral about her investigation: it was ongoing and the software workaround was being implemented. That was all she told me.

  The Alexandria assembly had continued. The Directorate Thirteen shipyard, where ever it was, had more resources than I would have expected and had cutting-edge technology to back it. At a certain point, we moved past the integration aspects and Kyle and I were overseeing automated assembly systems that put together the various systems of the ship. Work wasn’t just going fast, it was going incredibly fast. A new, first-in-class ship normally took years to produce. I was seeing it go together over months.

  But we didn’t get to see it to the finish. We’d completed the major system installs, everything short of the power plant, which from what Commander Weisfeldt said, was still in production. Most of the secondary systems were either installed or ready to be installed.

  But our five months of summer was up. We had to be back at school.

  It was a bittersweet departure. On the one hand, I felt like I’d really had a chance to contribute to my world’s defense. I’d been building something, seeing a new ship take shape in a way that had been both inspiring and downright fun.

  But I had other things to do. I had to graduate, I had to get commissioned... and away from Directorate Thirteen, I could access the network again, I could start looking for information.

  I’d had access to news reports, granted. The reports on Summit Station had led to an official investigation, but there wasn’t anything more on it. One hundred men and women dead and I’d never have imagined the news would disappear... but it did.

  By the time I boarded the jump-shuttle, there was nothing in the news. Not even on the military specific news feeds. It boggled my mind. It was almost as if the attack hadn’t happened.

  It felt even more surreal to be back on campus. After months in the artificial lighting and industrial atmosphere of Directorate Thirteen’s Alexandria Shipyard, the bright, hot desert sunlight seemed harsh and alien. Quiet, calm corridors of the Academy seemed smaller, somehow, as if I’d grown and they hadn’t. Maybe, in a way, that was right.