by S. Walker
That was the wildest way to describe Corporate she'd ever heard. "Let's go with the second option. Sure."
He put both arms down with a thump, then nervously massaged the carpet with soft fingertips. She remembered being that carpet, once. "Okay, our collective is the opposite, majority first: More than half the group makes a decision? It happens. But when an overwhelming amount of people go for something all at once it's pretty much undeniable. So everyone getting excited all at once about making contact with whoever was running a beacon alongside the Consumers... kind of pushed us into going directly there."
Jamet's jaw dropped. "You piloted an entire ship into a hostile system because of wish fulfillment? That is the most unbelievably stupid thing I have ever heard!" She banged the crystal again to emphasize the point.
"I know that! I was against it! But by the time the excitement faded we were under attack, and you don't just get away from the Consumers. Ever! So our only hope became-"
"Getting to the smelter and hoping someone really could turn them off." She facepalmed. "Well, we're all fucked, now."
"So you can't?" He seemed crushed, perfect features and expensive tailoring collapsing all at once.
"No." She tossed the crystal across the room, bombshelling it into some sort of leafy potted plant with an explosion of dirt. "We've never even met these things before. It actually sounds like you have more experience, so maybe... look, seriously. Can you just switch off looking like-" my ex, a traitorous shitweasel, my last happy fantasy "-that person, please? I'm getting uncontrollable rage every time you glance at me."
"Promise not to count any more?"
"No."
"Ok." He glanced her way, then looked back at the ceiling. Cleared his throat. Did a little nervous hand pat on the carpet. "I actually, uh, don't have any control over the way I look to you. Wait, where are you going?"
"Gettin' my skull banger back." Leaves rustled.
"Please don't." Kent's borrowed voice sounded so miserable something deep in her heart lurched. Traitorous feelings staging emotional insurrections. "We gave you priority control in the collective. We needed you to stop all this and didn't have time for anything else. So you're deciding everything, right now. Even how I look."
Jamet thought about that, balancing the urge for some very immediate satisfaction against a newly-born sense of personal responsibility. A month ago this sort of situation would have been a slam dunk of personal gratification: A lookalike of her worst, most intimate betrayer, put under her control with zero lasting repercussions? She'd have played symphonies with his screams one broken bone at a time, gone to sleep every night on a lullaby of begging with a smile on her face.
But now all she could think about was the sad, tired look on Siers' face. The weary way he talked about righting the wrong things he'd done in his life, before passing a file stuffed full of her own sins across like a bitter pill. Thousands of names, families, dependents and connections she'd written off and never known about. All the while promoting herself through Corporate positions, looking for that extra bonus to buy herself something nice. He took the time to know her worst side, read the whole thing... and still gave her the chance. A gentle push: Be better.
She'd been trying before that, of course. Janson got her started on the right path just by accepting her immediately without (justly deserved) reservations. Hearing Emilia's story of parental sellouts broke the illusion of a perfect Management system, followed by Paul nailing the coffin lid shut on any excuse of altruism. By the time Siers cut her out of that old life completely she'd been ready to become a new person, a better person. Worth at least twice as much as Emilia.
And then Targer. Like a vengeful reflection, everything Jamet could have been in another life. One where she and Kent really did work out, promoted upward together. Maybe became a family. Then sacrificed each other for five more minutes of life on a derelict habitation ring in the most Corporate way possible.
Corporates.
Collectives.
She slowly turned, looking across a fake room at a memory riding a very nervous... well, person. "Sorry. Let’s try this again: What was your name?"
He seemed worried to meet her eyes. "Under."
"Under where?"
Watching Kent's flawless face blush in embarrassment was a novel sensation. "Just Under. I thought it was... catchy. Interesting, I guess. Like something that would be really appealing if I met someone." He made an awkward gesture with one hand, turning it palm up in a 'ta da' motion. "I'd say 'Hey, I'm Under' and she would say 'Under what' and I would... nevermind. It's stupid."
An entire mountain of guilt crushed Jamet into paste. She only realized her mouth was open when jaw muscles started hurting. "How old are you?"
He kept right on blushing, harder and harder. An adolescent's reaction in a sculpted faux-model body. "It's stupid. You don't have to be mean about it."
And just like that, between one blink and the next he wasn't the Kent from her memory anymore. Million-credit surgical alterations and designer apparel melted into the memory of her classmate from Corporate authorized schooling. Skinny, awkward and just shy of six feet tall. Sporting the mild acne that became a curse that only credits and good gene therapy could cure, much later in life. "Oh!" Kent's smooth baritone voice became a slightly high pitched, nasal sound. Skinny arms rose, hands flipping over to display teenage skin with a slight rash across the knuckles. "Does... this mean I can sit up now?"
She felt the urge to facepalm herself out of existence. "Yes. And I'm sorry about- well, all the threats. I didn't know you were so young. No offense."
He got to one bony knee, then lurched upright with all the flailing coordination of a newborn colt. "It's okay, I guess. But it won't matter soon, anyways." He gestured widely, indicating everything outside the room. "The Consumers are pulling the ship apart. We're all dropping out of the collective one at a time. We hoped giving you control would let you stop them, but-" he shrugged, pulling a thin shirt with a brand logo up and down. "-guess that didn't work."
Jamet tilted her head, listening. She could hear it, if she wanted to: Dim wails, high screeches and a steady heartbeat sound. Individually they didn't mean anything, but translated into the Tulip's shared space the sounds became impact sirens. Breach alerts. Weapons charging.
And suddenly she was all teeth, full of righteous hate and mean spite. "Under?"
He leaned far, far away. Gawky motions translated into an intense look of worry. "Yessss?"
"Does having priority control mean I pilot the ship?"
Worry deepened into outright alarm. "Um, maybe I should talk to someone about this first."
Jamet pointed at him in victory. "That's a yes. Which way is the control room? Bridge, whatever you call it?"
He waved around, caught between wanting to answer and some sort of deep-seated terror. Which, when she thought about it, seemed pretty realistic: Turning over your entire ship control to a representative of an alien civilization you'd just met? Whew. Jamet could imagine the amounts of instant heart attacks every single Executive would have. "It's anywhere. Everywhere. You just decide where to put it, this is a shared space anyways. If it makes sense to you it works for the ship. Did I mention about adaptive magnetic resonance imaging...? Because your thoughts are kind of being used to-"
She wasn't listening. Instead Jamet headed for the nearest closed exit, stepping to the door by the secretary's desk and pausing for a moment. In the real headquarters-- the one not in her memory-- this door led to the kind of extravagant meeting room that Board members loved to sit in. All deeply stained wood, stuffed leather chairs and meeting tables wide enough to qualify as dance floors. Overhead lighting with mid-air console systems for three dimensional presentations. Every seat given its own personal console for notes or (more likely) mid-meeting blackmailing and deals. She'd lived for those get togethers, once upon a time.
But she didn't want that room, full of betrayal and fiscal hypocrisy. No, she wanted something more rece
nt, the place of her personal triumphs. Where she'd started becoming something (and someone) better.
Jamet put her hand on the latch, stared at the polished brass and pushed with her memory and knuckles, all at once.
The door opened straight onto the bridge of the CES Kipper.
"Fuck yes!" She whooped, then yelped in surprised shock. The forward screen was a screaming mess of damage, the event horizons of active drones blasting by at incredible speeds that left callouts of failed systems behind.
Jamet took two running steps to the back of the CEO workstation and vaulted it in a smooth motion. She wristed the console from force of habit, then started grabbing icons and callouts with the speed of desperate imagination. "Under!"
He followed her through the door, eyes wide and jaw down. "What is this! It's- it's..." surprise and shock transitioned to sheer wonder. "This is awesome!"
She pointed at the co-CEO workstation. "Sit! SIT!" He scrambled into the chair with the enthused awkwardness of someone still figuring out how long each limb was. A second later his workspace lit up with callouts full of drone markers, red colored and looping through long lines of predicted flights. Jamet grabbed every weapons indicator the ship offered, dumping it onto his console in rapid flicks. "There! Shoot things! I'm navigating!"
He stared at the console, eyes alight and terrified. "I can't! Everyone has to agree to fire, or the weapons won't work-- that's what the leaf buildups are for! They all agree on one target!"
"That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard." Jamet screamed. "And I've been to budget meetings over water rationing on aquatic startups!"
"I don't know what that means!"
Jamet hammered controls and flicked the result his way, giving every weapon callout the gold border of full access. "There! You are the top authority, now. Shoot! Everything!" Then she tuned him completely out and dove into manual navigation.
The Tulip was absolutely massive and it drove like a tank. Whatever propulsion they used-- directed plasma? magnetic guidance?-- worked on a double track, one for each side of the ship. Advancing one side of the Tulip while pulling back on the other started rotating in place. Pushing both sides forward at once built up to full forward motion, while reversing both braked and (presumably) reversed, eventually. A separate system did the exact same thing, but with a track above and below the ship. Combining both together let Jamet throw or pull power to accelerate or spin in place at any angle.
Or it would, if the Tulip wasn't giving her catastrophic failure warnings across most systems. Fully half of the behemoth ship was inoperable, limping along on the last dregs of systems. Propulsion was erratic, damaged. She could actually feel subsystems struggling to right themselves, reroute and contain problem areas. It felt quick, adaptive, almost like... "Oh! Under, is the collective alive?!"
"What- yes?! It's us! We are- you are- that's the dumbest thing I've ever..?!"
Suddenly the adaptability of the subsystems made a lot more sense. "Holy shit, you're the ship. All of you!"
Under flicked callouts and icons like he'd been born to it, throwing delighted targeting snaps across the workspace. Ravaged leaves responded, slapping drones out of vacuum like irritating flies. Two long petals combined together, plasma tips glowing like stars as they unleashed an unfocused miniature version of the main beam at a dozen drone event horizons. "No! We're not! But yes, we are!"
Well that solved everything. Jamet rolled her eyes and dove back into systems, mentally slapping the parts that felt more responsive. They reeled like stunned children, aghast and frightened. She pointed mentally, directing them to repairs and firebreaks, then sectioned off a whole third of the Tulip and sent another group that way. It felt like using both hands to mentally shove a pile of cranky dolls into another room.
Then she was back in navigation, seizing tracks and sending the Tulip into a corkscrew. "I'm turning the ship!" She eyed the markers for attacking drones, confused for a moment that the ship seemed to see them only as black dots of singularities. Whatever the Collective used for sensors picked up contacts more by the lack of anything happening in that area of space than the visual output of light on hulls. Singularities were just black dots, no two any different except for size. Suddenly she understood a lot more why the Tulip assumed Corporate ships and Consumer drones were the same. "Damn, what a time for my guess to be right."
"What?!" Under was having the time of his (its?) life, throwing plasma at everything with rich glee.
"Nothing, ignore that. I'm going to keep rotating us so they'll only be able to come from one side. Focus shots there!"
Jamet didn't wait, throwing the ship into a roll lengthwise as they corkscrewed through space. Presented with movement the swarm couldn't circle any more-- they had to match her maneuver or lose attack surface. They were fast, but not quick enough to completely out-circle a rotating ship while coming in for attack runs. Having to keep pace with the Tulip got them sorted nicely into Under's shot path. He whooped and started slapping drones left and right with gleeful abandon.
But it wasn't enough: Another set of critical systems went down. Jamet more felt than saw it, but knew how bad it was without looking. She was too late to the fight, the collective’s Tulip sustaining accumulated damage that was starting to cascade unstoppably. Although the drones were much, much smaller than their behemoth of a ship sheer persistence was winning the battle: The outcome wasn’t in doubt. The Tulip would run out of ability to fight before drones ran out of units.
Jamet swore. "Do you have lifeboats on this thing?"
Under shot another singularity off the forward display. "This is a lifeboat!"
"This is a lifeboat?!" Her brain broke trying to imagine what something this size docked to. "Well... shit. I guess we're going down with it then." Something critical failed mid-ship, dying with a scream of collective terror. She felt coldness in her chest, an echo from the Tulip translating failure into something humans could understand. "I tried. Sorry. For everything." Wow she was bad at this. "And for kind of luring you in. It wasn't intentional."
Under didn't say anything, just scowled.
"Anyways, I'm going to keep-"
A contact bloomed on their screen, an event horizon so massive Jamet's heart froze. It was streaking across the system, crossing from outside the nearest gas giant directly towards the Corporate arrival point. Easily twenty times larger than the biggest drone dot. Every single drone immediately broke off attacking the Tulip and angled off at full speed to meet up. "Oh shit. The big one's back." Visions of a ten mile long vessel ramming a Corporate warship crossed her mind with a grim finality. If that thing was back already their odds of survival dropped into laughable ranges.
"Wait! They're all lining up!" Under seemed excited. "They're bunching around the big Consumer! That’s perfect, we can hit them all at once. Turn! Turn! I can- I can fire the main! We can get them all right now if you can line up!"
Jamet strained with renewed hope, pulling navigational tracks around the ship in protesting curves. It felt like trying to lift the universe with just one arm, the other dragging downward on a thousand pound weight. The Tulip eased out of their turn, bow coming around like a drunk out of a bar looking to nosedive into the gutter. She could feel dozens of subsystems failing all down the length of the hull but there was nothing else to do keep going. "Almost... almost...!"
Forward screens came around, showing a huge cluster of black drone singularities gathered around an even bigger version of themselves. One of those massive mothership Consumers, loitering around systems while smaller drones did all the work. Except- no, wait. That wasn't right. Jamet squinted, mentally poking the Tulip’s systems to pull the image apart in a way her overstressed brain could handle. “That’s not…”
"Closer! Closer!" Under poised over his console, both hands ready to smash downward. "I can almost get it!"
She leaned in further, urging the Tulip to give her better focus. It wasn't a mothership-- or whatever the Consumer version was.
It did resemble a huge singularity, but not a single enormous event horizon. In fact it looked more like three oversized event horizons, all working together to move a single ship-