by Ramy Vance
The wave of relief that crashed through Jaeger nearly sent her to her knees. She had to get her AI under control. It might not be an outright rebellion, but until this exact moment, she hadn’t appreciated how nasty this ship could get if Virgil went rogue.
As soon as possible, she swore to herself. As soon as possible, she would get Virgil fixed.
For now, though, she had a different fire to put out. “Where is everybody?”
“Occy and Baby haven’t left the engine room. Toner is moving up the juncture from the port wing. Sphynx is…” Virgil hesitated for a split second, barely long enough for Jaeger to notice. “Sphynx is moving through No-A.”
Jaeger felt her heart skip a beat as she stormed past the command column maintenance module. “What is he doing in No-A?”
Virgil didn’t answer. The image of the jammed captain’s door flashed behind Jaeger’s eye. The missing hard drive.
The thousands of deadly executable files, and who knows what else, contained on that missing hard drive. All the data one half-crazy catman would need to build himself an arsenal.
“Virgil!” she shouted. “What is Sphynx doing in No-A?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil admitted. “But I believe the computer disruption is originating from No-A as well. Sphynx may have activated some dormant control program.”
“Maybe,” Jaeger whispered.
She shouldn’t have listened to Toner. She should have deleted the damned Crusade Protocol. She hadn’t known what other executables had been lurking amid all those weapons instructions.
Now she knew. It contained a control program powerful enough to override Virgil.
Sphynx was using it to steal her ship.
Knowledge was power.
Analysis of the leadership prowess of the human calling itself Captain Jaeger: insufficient.
Analysis of the contents of the recovered log and the contained Crusade Protocol: sufficient.
Very sufficient.
Sphynx drifted at the center of the No-A dais with his hands folded neatly behind his back as he studied the embryos flowering in the tanks before him. Of the twelve activation tanks, only five were fully operational. Five would be plenty.
Normally it took six hours for the tanks to accelerate embryos into fully-fleshed and capable crew members. Sphynx didn’t have six hours. Fiddling with the chronological sequencing to speed up the process required overriding certain safety protocols.
It wasn’t without its risks—to both the physical bodies of these fragile embryos as the machines activated certain selected, specially-crafted genes and to their equally fragile minds.
Pain lanced behind his eyes and Sphynx doubled over, clutching his skull. The headaches, at first only a mild annoyance, were getting worse. His head reeled with a thousand years of memories that could not possibly be his.
The training programs that turned a tabula rasa into a fully capable and trained crew member were supposed to be loaded into the enhanced embryo’s brain once. Only once.
At the time of Sphynx’s development, the ship’s computer had sustained damage. So had the tank the first mate grew him in. Most fatally, First Mate Toner was an imbecile. Sphynx’s program download had been…buggy.
Ten thousand copies of the basic training program swirled through Sphynx’s head. In what should have been the brief six hours of his gestation, he had lived through centuries of brutal military indoctrination. The same relentless program of training and discipline and information repeated on a loop.
Six hours of gestation should have left Sphynx with the illusion of twenty-five years of growth and development. It felt instead like an eternity.
It was nearly enough to drive someone crazy.
Sphynx watched the progress bars on each of the tanks before him. Five more feline mutations, fully enhanced. Easily enough to assume control of the ship and return it safely to the Tribes, where it belonged.
He didn’t know who this Jaeger woman was or how she had come to command one of the most powerful warships humankind had ever constructed.
He didn’t care.
Overhead, a massive holo-screen filled the air, displaying a running list of all of the fascinating files that had stayed hidden away on a secure computer in the captain’s quarters. Sphynx nearly allowed himself to become distracted, admiring the elegant weapons’ designs. He currently had no use for a microwave cannon or EM-pulse array, of course, but, in a fit of pique, he had asked the modest No-A fabricator to build him one of the lovely toys.
It was, all in all, too easy. All he’d had to do was plug the captain’s log into the No-A hub, and the Crusade Protocol began to upload itself directly into the ship’s mainframe. It gave Sphynx access to all sorts of ship-wide systems—including the distant assault sirens that were currently reverberating through the central column. Wondrous.
However, it was a tiny noise that caught his attention, almost impossible to catch over the distant clamor of sirens outside of No-A. One distant intake of breath that could have been anything—a fluke, a fragment of imagination, a stowaway fly letting out a courteous fart.
Sphynx’s design noticed small things.
He turned from the tanks to see the octopus-child standing at the center of the vast No-A cathedral, staring at the holo-screen. All of those lovely, deadly schematics reflected over his childlike eyes. His soft face was a twisted knot of horror.
“You have disrupted chronological sequencing as well,” Sphynx said, curious despite himself. “I wonder. Was your mind aged beyond your years, like mine? Or are you entirely as you appear to be? Too young.” He eyed the boy’s youthful face, his childlike frame, dwarfed by the bouquet of tentacles coiling out of the bud of his shoulder.
“God,” the boy whispered, entranced by the Crusade schematics flickering behind Sphynx. “God. What did you do? The alarms…”
Only a child through and through, then. Sphynx was almost disappointed. He activated his mag soles with a click of the heels and sank smoothly to the floor. He stepped lightly down the dais, each step silent. “I sealed the doors,” he said. “How did you get in here?”
Awareness flooded the boy’s face. His tentacles contracted, grabbing the stacks behind him. He jerked backward, away from Sphynx.
Occy didn’t have the vampire’s elegant antigrav control. He didn’t need it. With a dozen long tentacles in place of one arm, he could tow himself anywhere he wished at an astonishing pace—and with terrible momentum.
Sphynx stopped outside of the reach of those powerful tentacles.
“You found a backup hard drive?” Occy breathed. “With an intact AI? Is it fully functional?”
“I don’t know,” Sphynx admitted. “I’m not sure if it contains a complete AI matrix or not. It began uploading itself when I plugged it into the mainframe. I’m not concerned. I found this file in the captain’s quarters. The true captain, you understand. Whatever it is, it is more faithful to our command and our mission than this Jaeger woman.” Sphynx took another curious step forward.
Occy jerked backward.
Sphynx smiled. He couldn’t help it. There was something about the abrupt fear-twitching of a prey animal that gave him a warm shiver.
He drew in a deep breath. “You understand this, yes? Jaeger has strayed from our directive. They have been hiding things from us. It is our duty to return to the mission.”
Something on the screen drew Occy’s gaze for an instant. Then his gaze snapped back to Sphynx. Fear scrawled across his face. “There is no mission without a ship and without No-A,” Occy said, almost pleading. “We can talk to the captain about our concerns once the ship is out of danger. Turn the sirens off. You’re only making things worse!”
Sphynx shook his head. “I was afraid your programming had malfunctioned. You’re as immature as you look. How disappointing.” He drew his hands out from behind his back.
It had only taken the No-A fabricator a few minutes to construct the flechette pistol. It was a simple weapon, elegant and s
leek—a long metal tube in the style of a classic firearm, capped with a comfortable handle and trigger of polished synth-wood.
A classic firearm, however, punched a single dull bullet out of a barrel with enough force to potentially pierce metal. Dangerous to fire in a spaceship, of course.
A flechette pistol was so much safer.
Occy’s eyes widened as he recognized the weapon. His truncated training experience hadn’t skipped that particular lesson.
The training program didn’t include a lesson on what it felt like to be shredded by a thousand twisted pieces of micro-bladed shrapnel, although after his first sixty rounds through the programs, Sphynx would have welcomed the change of pace.
He nearly envied the new experience Occy was about to have.
He pulled the trigger.
Analysis of the enhanced engineer crew mutation formerly known as Occy: failure.
Knowledge was power.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Jaeger entered the wing juncture at full speed, flinging herself from the slowly rotating central column into the zero-G open air. She felt gravity slide away as she tucked her knees to her chin and somersaulted into the wide hallway. The sound of the alarms had further faded, but she feared that said less about the actual volume of the warnings and more about the fading capacity of her much-abused ears.
She reached down to activate her mag soles, then something flashed in the corner of her vision, coming up fast from the port wing corridor.
She barely had time to shriek before Toner crashed into her. Without enough space to stop himself, he could only catch her in the cage of his long arms and double over, protecting her as he rolled himself into a stable hover several meters down the corridor.
Jaeger wrestled free of his grip and activated her mag soles. She snapped smartly to the floor and snatched the spare thermal hood from her belt.
She grabbed the drifting Toner roughly by his belt and yanked him closer. He blinked, blue eyes going wide in surprise, then confusion, as she jammed the hood over his head. It was on backward. After a moment of confused wrestling, he understood and twisted the hood properly over his face. He glared at her, blue eyes bright in the dark visual slit. His jaw worked against the skin-tight fabric, and his voice blossomed over the comms channel. “I got it. I got it!”
“You left the captain’s quarters door open,” Jaeger snarled, grabbing Toner by the arm and pushing him up the starboard corridor.
“What? No, I didn’t—”
“The log is missing, Toner!”
“What are you talking about?!” Toner shouted from behind his hood.
Jaeger thrust a furious finger up one of the side corridors. “Sphynx is holed up in No-A with the captain’s log.” She felt bile rising in her throat. “There’s a mass fabricator in No-A. Virgil is under attack and Sphynx has access to a mass fabricator and all of the Crusade files.”
Toner went rigid.
She had a moment to see the alarm dawning in his bright blue eyes before the alarms vanished and the universe plunged into darkness.
The sound vanished so suddenly and so completely it gave Jaeger whiplash. For an instant, she thought she was dead, blown to smithereens by a critical engine failure, and condemned to drift in utter darkness and silence, forever. No noise but the faint, bone-deep chime of tinnitus. No lights at all.
Then something gripped her forearm, and she felt the ship resolve around her. She sucked in a gasp. Deaf. She was deaf and blind and helpless. Shit.
The hand squeezed her shoulder, gentle but firm. Jaeger swallowed a lump, and though it made no difference, squeezed her eyes shut.
One step at a time.
Work with what you have.
She licked dry lips and groped around in the darkness until she found Toner’s bony hands. He patted her wrist and then, hesitantly, reached to the lip of her thermal hood. Jaeger stood frozen-still as he tugged the hood off her head. Air swirled around her face, and she felt cold, sticky trails of blood drying beneath her ears.
It took her a moment to realize that Toner was shouting, and when the noise finally registered, it sounded like he was speaking to her from the other end of a very, very long tube.
“Shit. Oh, goddammit.” The air, still and silent and dark, swirled as he drew away from her. “You’re bleeding. Can you hear me? Is it bad? You need to talk me through it.”
“I can’t see,” she murmured, dazed. She waggled her fingers in front of her face. Nothing. Someone might as well have plucked out her eyes.
“Me either.” His pitch rose and fell strangely, and she realized he was recovering from the sonic shock, too. “Jaeger. You’re stunned. You with me? How many fingers am I holding—never mind.”
“Where are the emergency lights?” she murmured.
“Fuck if I know. Seriously, can you hear me?”
“Yes…”
“Okay, good. I cannot emphasize this enough, Jaeger. I can smell you bleeding. I need you to hold it together and tell me how bad it is.” There was a moment of ringing silence as Jaeger struggled to process the words. Then, more quietly, Toner added: “I need you to tell me what to do.”
“Where is the hood?” Jaeger murmured. She realized she was holding the hood. Moving slowly, as if stuck in a dream, she pulled the hood back on over her head and straightened it on her face.
Then she activated the thermal vision.
The corridor unfurled around her, outlined in varying shades of cold blue and green. Toner burned orange where he drifted, a few meters down the hallway. The sudden onslaught of sensory input made Jaeger nauseous all over again, but she held her bile.
“Turn on your hood,” she muttered.
There was a pregnant pause. Then Toner clawed at his face. “Right. Christ, I’m an idiot.”
She saw his tense outline relax, his head lift and turn from side to side as he joined her in the realm of the semi-sighted. Some of the anxiety drained out of his voice. “Well. That’s better.”
Jaeger groped at the half-empty water bottle hanging from her belt. She lifted the bottom lip of her hood and allowed herself three swallows of water. She tossed the bottle to Toner, who caught it by instinct. In hand, he chugged the rest.
“Okay.” Jaeger sucked in a wavering breath. “I can barely hear anything, and I can only see in thermal.”
“I think the sonic attack focused on the central column,” Toner agreed, and she realized that he had been shouting this whole time. “You got a worse blast of it than I did. You’re bleeding from the ears.”
“Ruptured eardrums.” She swallowed. “Hurts, but manageable. Can you keep it together?”
He paused. “Yeah. Good thing I ate recently. That’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
Jaeger felt, rather than heard, herself sigh. She turned up the corridor and took one step toward No-A. When she realized she could hear the thunk of her boots even through wrecked ears, she gave up, deactivated her mag soles, and began slowly—but silently—pulling herself down the corridor.
Toner followed, drifting smoothly but out of arm’s reach. “Where are the emergency lights?” he wondered.
Jaeger shook her head. “Virgil? You copy?”
There was another pause, this one long enough to make Jaeger fear that something truly fatal had happened to the core computers. If Virgil and the emergency lights were offline, life support would fail next—if it hadn’t already.
“I’m here,” Virgil whispered through her thermal hood speaker.
“Good,” Jaeger murmured. “I’ve never been so happy to hear your voice. You okay?”
“No.”
She grimaced as she grabbed a strut and turned herself down a side juncture. “I was afraid of that. Loop me in, Virgil. Let me help.”
Virgil hesitated, long enough to make her afraid that it was failing, after all.
“A rival program is uploading itself from the No-A computers,” Virgil said finally. “It is more…vigorous than I am. It has assumed some measure of
control over all primary systems, including comms and life support.”
“It turned everything off?” Jaeger held her breath, afraid of the answer.
“No,” Vigil said slowly. “I don’t think so. It does not appear to be damaging the ship in any way I can detect. I believe Sphynx is commanding the new program from No-A. He does require life support.”
“He’s making the ship hostile to us,” Toner grunted. Jaeger looked at him sharply. Toner shrugged. “It’s a combat tactic. Cause mass confusion. Disorient the opponent. Scramble the comms. Take away their hearing. Render them blind.” He let out an annoyed hiss. “I saw his enhancement file. Unlike us, the fucker can see just fine in the dark.”
“At least we have the hoods,” Jaeger breathed.
“At this rate,” Virgil said, “The new program will have me entirely overwritten within the hour. My control over ship systems is failing rapidly. I’ve already lost the ability to detect bio-signs. The last I knew, Sphynx was in No-A. Now, I am blind.”
“It’s the Crusade Protocol,” Jaeger whispered. She pressed her eyes shut. Virgil was watching itself being slowly destroyed and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. “We found a backup hard drive in the captain’s quarters. Sphynx must have stolen it. God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you mean in your quarters, Captain?”
Jaeger swallowed and said nothing.
“So you know.” Virgil sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, now.”
Jaeger shook her head. “Don’t give up and die. It’s been a rough few days, but we can fix this. Help me. Help me help you.”
“Sarah Jaeger,” Virgil said quietly. “You didn’t give one shit when an alien AI invaded my systems and used me, as long as you thought it served your ends. You will continue to use me however you wish to further your ambitions. With no due respect, Captain: fuck you.”
Something bumped into Jaeger’s leg, and she looked down to see that Toner had drifted close. He was staring in her direction.
She felt cold all over and couldn’t tell if it was shock, failing life support, or pure existential dread.