by John Lane
“Alfred, can you interface with the casket?” Tommy asked.
It took the avatar that Alfred controlled a moment to connect to the port in the casket. As he did, data scrolled across the tablet screen. “I have found something,” Alfred said after a minute. “There is a list of the developers of this hibernation technology. It is over sixty years old. And there is a picture.” On the screen appeared a group of about fifteen people, men and women of various ages. “I believe that I have found you, Agnes.” The picture expanded on a young woman in the front row. Agnes stood center among the older group. “The project head and major design engineer is listed as an Agnes Zephyr. You were the oldest daughter of the company CEO, Caesar Zephyr. I can do additional research into your background when we next dock at a frontier hub system.”
Ann, the Ai interjected, “Zephyr is my name. I took your father’s name when we married, Tommy. Agnes was my older sister. She disappeared soon after she started that project. I was very young at the time.”
Agnes slumped against casket. She didn’t know who she was and suddenly her lost family surrounded her, sort of. She had a nephew on one side, the cyber ghost of her sister on her other side and the electronic echo of her brother-in-law standing over her inside an avatar. What else could she do? So, she had a coughing fit. When she finished, Tommy handed her a flask of water. She sipped it thankfully.
“Agnes, your sleeve.” Tommy gestured to her arm. Spots of blood splattered where she had coughed into it.
By now another humanoid avatar entered the cabin under Dr. Judson’s Ai control. It examined Agnes and concluded, “Her gene treatment has improved her condition, but she needs to complete her regimen soon. Annie Judson left some additional processed serum, but a close relative will need to donate genetic material to process the rest of her supply.”
“That’s what she meant by a close genetic match.” Tommy realized that the genetic material came from his mother. She provided samples they scrubbed of her virus. Annie gave her sister Agnes a chance to recover from her long hibernation. “Will I do?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Dr. Judson. “We can start right away.”
“It will have to wait,” interjected Alfred. “Tommy, the pirates have returned.”
“Battle stations everyone,” Tommy announced. Alfred programed the pickups in the room to accept Tommy’s voice and broadcast it throughout the joined ships. Tommy hurried through the ships to the Swift’s bridge. From here, he controlled both ships. Agnes went to the MOM’s bridge to coordinate the systems Alfred had not completely repaired in such a short time. Dr. Judson activated monitors on all of her patients, including Christine in hibernation.
Alfred, again in his cyber world, floated among the multiple images coming from both ships. He coordinated with Tommy to engage the smaller A/W drives on the Swift and balance those with the energies from the few remaining engines on the MOM. Both ships moved away from the station at a lumbering pace.
The nine pirate ships slipped back into the region around the station. No two of the ships looked alike. The usual cylinder inside a tube of an A/W drive ship still predominated their designs. Of the nine, eight loomed large, either cargo or troupe carriers of various sizes. Much smaller the ninth ship buzzed about the others. Even smaller than the Swift, this ship scouted and reported back quickly. Under their impulse engines, these ships out flanked the combined MOM/Swift. Where most ships used a standard outer coating of white or silver thermal coating, these ships had been customized. They each had a different paint scheme. Some were painted for camouflage in different environments, greys and blacks. These ships would be lost against the visual landscape of a moon or asteroid. Two others had a paint scheme to hide them among the whites of comets and icy planetoids. The rest were flat black, including the scout ship. Black masked these ships against the black of space. This color made tracking them under impulse speed very difficult.
The MOM/Swift moved slowly away from the station under maneuvering thrusters. It would be easy to track their movements when they went to impulse. Tommy intended to use the ships to block the pirates from a direct course at the station. There may have been nobody left on the station, but it was someone’s home. Once clear to maneuver, it took two micro jumps to put the ships in position to defend the station. One and a half ships against nine, Tommy liked their odds.
Using the same trick he used with the boarding party, Alfred carried on communication chatter with the approaching ships. The pirates were surprised the MOM had been repaired enough to move, but Alfred feigned they were still having trouble with the engines. The pirates could not see the Swift attached to the MOM. Alfred deployed three holo-projectors from the MOM around the Swift. They projected extra length to the MOM ship. They hoped that the pirates did not pay attention to the details of the total tonnage on the MOM before they had chased off the station folk. Now four of the larger pirate ships moved in to dock with the station and load the loot of their raid unhindered.
Tommy kept an eye on the escape pod that held his mother. It carried a beacon. As soon as the pirate ships picked it up, there would be trouble. Tommy would have liked to pick it up himself or at least get one of his drones in position to tow it. With no time for either, his drones were tasked with other defenses.
Like ships during the Wars, these had no real offensive weapons. They were useless against a ship with an A/W drive. By the time you targeted, even an energy weapon, on a ship it was already gone. Once under power, the ship maintained a micro universe around it. There was no way to destroy a moving ship. Fighters were used for close fighting and attacks on orbiting stations and planets. They used conventional rockets and powered darts for offensive and defensive purposes. If a navy could catch ships in orbit they were vulnerable.
The station lacked fighters, and Tommy hoped that the pirates didn’t have any either. Their sketchy intelligence from the prisoners showed that the pirates didn’t trust their own soldiers with operational information. As Alfred said, this was the best they could do with the time and resources at their disposal.
The four cargo ships moved in as four uneven streaks of color. Painted in greys and greens they stopped just off the side of station with MOM/Swift between them. The first ship passed by them to dock. From an open cargo hatch on the Swift, Alfred launched half a dozen small spider avatars. Not happy about losing his workforce it couldn’t be avoided. On this first ship to dock, their mission was to sabotage as much of that ship as possible.
“Alfred, any response on our little bug?” Tommy asked.
“Not yet. The virus I piggybacked on the signal has not penetrated their cyber network. That is a slow process. We don’t want them to find it too soon and wipe it,” Alfred explained.
From the MOM bridge, Agnes joined in. “Tom’by,” she blew her nose loudly over the open channel, “that scout ship is moving in on the escape capsule. It won’t be much longer before we’re found out.” Agnes accessed more sensitive instruments aboard the MOM used for planet surveys to find contagious viruses and bacteria. “I can still do that fine adjustment to a sensor array. It will disrupt their systems when I hit them with it.”
“Go ahead, we may need it,” Tommy replied. Tommy watched from the Swift. The first pirate passed by his cockpit window. As always, Alfred recorded everything they encountered. They broadcast a forged ID beacon, but on the painted side of that ship a singular identification stood out, the scythe. This one displayed an empty eyed skull staring blankly from behind that scythe with the blade passing over the forehead and the staff snaking between the eyes and to the gaping mouth. “Way too clichéd,” Tommy’s commented to Alfred. That’s when everything happened.
HONK! “Sorry, the scout just rendezvoused with the capsule,” Agnes warned. “I’m targeting that closest ship and disrupting them now.” With that, a disruptive beam of electromagnetic radiation, ranging from radio through Gamma waves, bombarded the closest ship. Alfred pinged it before Agnes attacked, and his virus burned through t
heir firewalls. That, he thought, should disable them.
“Initiating drones,” Alfred informed. The three sentinel drones had moved opposite the station to hide until given the signal to attack. Now they attempted a new strategy of Alfred’s. Each of the drones warped to one of the three other cargo ships. They maneuvered close enough to the A/W drives on those ships that the drones would have been destroyed. Instead with the drives shut down, the drones slipped into the main drive ring and activated their own impulse drives. The smaller drives created a smaller warp wave. This wave ripped apart any material that was both caught in the wave and outside it. On two of the three ships, that is what it did. The drones returned to repeat the process on the pirate ships a second time to eliminate the impulse engines as well.
On the third ship, it worked out differently. The first pass succeeded. On the second pass a smart pilot activated the impulse engines on the side of the engine ring where the drone attacked. This destroyed the drone and that ship. Its own engine, active but with control lines cut, lost coordination and ripped the ship apart. They did eject lifeboats.
“Hmmm. I’ll have to work on that one. It only worked sixty-six percent of the time,” Alfred mused aloud. He got a chuckle out of Tommy and a laugh out of Agnes. In Alfred’s cyber world it pleased him that amongst this danger, his family was able to laugh. And Alfred did consider them his family. Tommy, a brother he had known Alfred’s whole life. Agnes was actually Aunt Agnes. That might take some getting use to. But for a girl who still had no personal memories of her past, she used the skills she did retain to make a difference. Finally, the Ai version of Tommy’s mother, still untested, but she jumped in where Annie had left off.
Surrounded by his virtual monitors, Alfred managed multiple systems. He ran two linked ships and prepared to coordinate their activated impulse engines, some partially functional. Alfred had plenty of leftover processing power to track the errant virus code as it snuck up behind him. Snap went the mousetrap. Alfred thought he needed to build a better one. He held up a cage in which you kept a small rat and peered through the wire. “Really, for code that is so similar to mine, you’d think you could do a better job.” There in the cage was a visual copy of Alfred. This one wore a fur coat and a tail. That is how Alfred’s visualized the code in his cyber world.
“I don’t have time for you right now. I’ll have to store you away. But first, let me see that nasty tattoo you have on your neck.” Again the scythe depicted with the blade above and the staff snaking across the image with an elongated handle at the bottom. This one wore the reaper’s cloak, dark under the hood, but open at the chest. The ribcage still dripped with flesh as if it had just rotted off the bones. Alfred filed this one like the last, on its own small drive. An avatar removed it from the computer core.
“Time to move on. The other three large ships are heading this way,” Alfred warned. Tommy and Agnes didn’t even know he’d captured another viral code. It happened in a picosecond.
It was Tommy’s turn to engage the pirates. He gently increased power to the impulse engines on the ships. They both shook. “OK guys. What’s up?” he asked.
“On’b it. Just a sec,” came Agnes’ response. She checked a waveform monitor on the MOM’s engines and tapped in an instruction. Honk went her nose, “Alfred, we lost one engine before we started. Tommy, take it easy until we’re in position. You could lose the MOM.”
“Right,” came the unison response. The joined ships now streaked away from the station. Their goal was to lure as many pirates away as they could. They shot toward the pirates, and when they were within a few light seconds, Tommy reversed direction. With no inertia to worry about, Tommy made the maneuver look easy. The Swift now handled all engine power and navigation. Tommy could “fly” the ships as he pleased, and it pleased him to loop around the pirates and come in behind them.
Tommy’s piloting caught the pirates off guard, of course. Tommy’s ships closed on the trailing pirate. Agnes had come up with this idea. She watched a targeting screen, fine-tuning the trajectory, but not the ships. Once they reached the correct distance, she punched a launch button and the joined ships shut down their engine to come to a relative stop in space. Instantly, one of the MOM’s last remaining impulse engines launched with another small spider avatar riding it. This time, Alfred did not have to lose one of his own. The MOM supplied a maintenance avatar for the cause. If it had been one of Alfred’s avatars, as the engine raced toward its target, it would not have been surprising to have seen the avatar waving a small cowboy hat. Such was his humor.
The engine turned guided missile crossed the distance between the joined ships and the pirate almost instantly. With its warp bubble fully engaged, it skimmed the surface of the pirate, disrupting the hull and shattering the main engine. The avatar guided the engine on a reverse pass several times across the surface of the pirate, effectively stripping its hull. And to add insult, the avatar placed a virus aboard the pirate through its contact. On monitors all over that disabled ship, a message read “Dangerous! Professional pilot on engine. Do not try this at home.” Then their computer shut down leaving them only life support.
“Your mother is gone, Tommy.” Agnes blew her nose. “The scout just left the system. I have a direction plotted, but they could end up anywhere.”
“OK” Tommy paused. “Two more. Stay sharp,” he reminded.
The last two pirates reversed and closed on the joined ships. These two were smaller than the cargo ships that had been disabled. They were closer to a courier ship, the size of the Swift. That meant the joined ships massed more than their opponents. The Swift’s engines carried the extra mass under combat conditions. Alfred managed the navigational calculations, but structural stress showed on his readouts. “Tommy, watch how much you push it. We’re stressing out.”
“Right,” Tommy replied and mostly ignored the warning. He put the joined ships into a looping spiral. The course brought them right between the two pirate ships. Their pilots used straight line navigation, and they had no way of predicting where Tommy was going. The spiraling loop took the joined ships below the southern pole of the planetoid that the mining station orbited. The pirates attempted to follow, but using their linear geometry to navigate, they had to stop and reorient their ships to follow. Tommy pulled his ships in a closer path around the rock in space. This left them time for their last defense.
When the pirates rounded the planet, they faced not a single mad ship, but two mad ships. Of course, they did not know that the MOM floated dead in space. The Swift, now free of its extra bulk, used the last of its fuel to scrape the pirate farthest from them. The last pirate ship, now alone and out numbered, stopped to set up a course out of the system. Agnes was having none of that. She hit it with the same disruption she used on the first ship. Agnes even had time to nip on down to a docking hatch to use her handy dandy scalpel weapon. Once the pirate was dead in space, Alfred moved the MOM on reaction thrusters close enough that Agnes’ scalpel cut away parts of the pirate ’s engines. They would not easily repair their ship.
Once the pirates were marooned, Tommy docked the Swift properly at the front end of the MOM and made ready to tow it. Alfred sent out an “all clear” message to the system inhabitants. As the Swift made ready to tow the MOM, they arrived in smaller craft and started to clean up the mess the pirates had made.
Before leaving the system, there was one last thing that Tommy had to do. He delivered the mail and picked up the electronic mail packets to be delivered. Once the settlers refueled the impulse engines, they left to take the MOM to her hub system for repairs.
*****
There it was that itch she couldn’t scratch. Thomas Judson was connected to the medical manufacturing and research firm Zephyr INC. His mother originally a Zephyr, and his own grandfather was Caesar Zephyr, the founder of Zephyr INC. Caesar disappeared, along with his son, soon after their settlement met with a cataclysmic disaster.
It was there on her wall. She just connected
the dots. Tania rearranged her wall to connect those dots into a new pattern. Most information on Zephyr INC was classified. Without her upgrade in rank she would not have seen the patterns emerge.
Tommy served in the Wars. The ebb and flow of the Wars reflected the rise of Zephyr and its technologies. The demand increased for their medical products as the battles increased. But the lack of innovation plagued her. Their products have remained much the same for the last fifty years. Innovation has come from other sources. Yet, Zephyr has always been in the right place at the right time.
Tania had more puzzles and more questions, but the pieces were falling into place. Knowing that her mind only absorbed what her body could take, she lay down on her office couch for just a minute to rest.
Late the next morning, the aide that Admiral Sutton assigned her woke her from her sleep with a new set of data to add to her wall.
Chapter 9: Shopping for Clues
He awoke. It was still early. Stand. Walk to the bathroom. He fumbled around in the dark to relieve his bladder. He splashed water on his face to refresh himself. Then turned on the light.
David’s face smiled back for just a moment. Then it registered with him. David looked at his naked head full of cybernetic protrusions and a hideous tattoo below his left ear. The hazmat symbol made of sickles glistened with biomechanical circuitry and water beading down his face. It was his face, and he controlled it. David leaned back grabbing the edge of the counter and started to fling his face at the mirror.
That was close. He had dipped his attention into the cyber world to review data and send instructions, a breakdown here, a bit of lost data strands there. He had so much controlled chaos to manage. All of it served the Function. He lost control of the body.