by E M Gale
“I suppose I could go and get Rob, he’d love this,” I remarked.
“You can’t do that unless you tell him about you being a vampire.”
‘Oh, yeah. Good point.’
“OK, robot, do you know how to fly?”
“Oh, no. Clarke, just look around, nick some coffee to get over your kleptomaniac urges and go and bite some necks.”
I grinned at that and went exploring.
The ship was small, with a few small rooms for people to sleep in, kitchen–complete with good coffee–dining area, coffee machine, weapons lockers, corridors.
‘Boring. Ah, the bridge.’
The door slid open as I approached. I grinned. I seemed to like black for interior decor too. The effect was pools of molten darkness. The bridge was classy, streamlined and efficient-looking. It was much smaller than the bridge on the Shiny, Shiny Egg. This was obviously meant to be piloted by one or two people; there was a pilot’s seat and a co-pilot’s seat. I threw myself into the seat that had more buttons, assuming that it was the pilot’s seat; I was sitting side on, my back against one arm rest and the my legs hanging over the other.
“Please, Clarke! You’ll crash your pretty head into an asteroid!”
“Why are you calling me pretty? Anna’s the pretty one,” I commented, swinging round in the chair to investigate the buttons.
‘Now, how do I turn this thing on? Hey, why are none of the switches labelled?’
“Hey, robot, why are none of the switches labelled?”
“Your future self is excessively paranoid. By the way, your future self is a strategist, not a pilot.”
‘That’s hardly useful information, is it? I hope there’s a more useful computer on the ship. And instructions.’
I looked around the console.
‘No manual. Why? Oh, here goes nothing.’
“Well, she must fly this ship, right? It looks like it’s been designed to be operated by a single person.”
“There are two seats here,” said the robot. “And she told me she can’t fly; she programs the computer to fly on autopilot.”
I flipped the biggest switch, which was positioned up and to the right of where my right hand would rest when I was sitting in the chair. The ship hummed, lights switched on, various noises started up, noises that would probably mean something to someone who had spent a lot of time on a spaceship’s bridge before. I hadn’t, but I’d spent a lot of time using computers. I was used to listening to the noises, I just couldn’t tell if they were good or bad ones.
“Welcome aboard, Clarke,” said a voice. A computer, I would guess. It came out of the speakers in stereo and was far more monotone and synthetic-sounding than the robot. The volume was turned down very low.
‘Perhaps a normal Homo sapiens wouldn’t be able to hear it. Is it set to be so quiet so I can listen to the ship’s noises as well?’
“Hello. Is there an autopilot on this thing?” I asked the bridge in general.
“Good idea,” said the robot, sounding relieved.
“Yes,” replied the computer.
“Please can you fly me off Tortuga?”
“Yes, plotting a course now,” it said.
“Cool!” I exclaimed.
“Would you like me to adjust the climate controls?” asked the computer.
“Oh! No! No, computer.”
‘Oops.’
“You want to address each command with its name, then it will know when you are talking to it and not to yourself,” the robot said. “Or you could not talk to yourself, that’s always an option.”
‘Huh.’
“What’s the ship’s computer called?” I asked, but I never got to hear the reply as the ship suddenly lifted off. Hovering about a metre off the docking bay floor, it executed a yaw turn whilst I giggled delightedly.
“Wow, does it have Harrier-style jets, so they can point downwards to make the ship hover?” I asked.
“Something like that,” said the robot. The ship moved forward out of the docking bay.
“Where are we going? How do we get off of the Icarus without spacing the docking bay?” I asked.
“Ah, you ask this now?” said the robot. He sounded amused.
The docking bay door started to open as the ship we were on approached it.
“Argh! We’ll space the marines!” I cried.
“Calm down, there’s a forcefield behind us, keeping the pressure,” said the robot.
“Like an airlock?”
“Yes, but with a forcefield in place of doors.”
“What if the forcefield doesn’t work?”
“It will work.”
I looked to the front. The door was still opening and I could see a great, yawning space in front of me.
“Wow!” I said, filled with awe. The ship crept forwards through the opening and stopped. We were surrounded by space with the Icarus about ten metres behind us. I laughed again.
“Handing manual control back now.”
‘Eeek!’
“Hold on, computer, bring up a map, please?” I said.
A three-dimensional map hologram appeared in front of me, and I noted with satisfaction that it had the heliospheric current sheet marked on. Most of that seemed to come from the nearby dust sculpture.
‘OK, so this space station is just hanging somewhere random in space, not near a planet or a star or anything. I guess that’s why it was so hard to find. The only thing that’s nearby is the edge of the dust cloud. I wonder if that helps disguise the space station?’
“Can you fly to this coordinate?” I said, picking a random point in space that did not seem to be near anything else. I didn’t want to crash into Tortuga.
“Yes.” The ship moved forwards.
“Is that area roughly safe to practice in?” I asked the robot.
“Well… yes, actually,” said the robot.
“Ship’s computer, I don’t suppose you have a flying tuition program, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you start it when we are at the coordinate?”
“Yes,” it replied.
‘I see, I’ve not programmed the ship to say ’yes, sir’. After the evening spent pretending to be a general I’ve gotten used to that, but I guess it’s rather inefficient to say ‘sir’ after everything. I know I’m in charge here, I don’t need to be told every sentence.’
I looked out at the blackness of space, the stars, the edge of the orange dust sculpture with small suns putting out different colours of light. It was truly beautiful.
I had maps and readouts and a huge window in front of me, but I couldn’t see much behind me. “Hey, robot, is there a way to get more onto the screen?”
“Uh, I don’t know, Clarke,” said the robot.
The ship came to a halt and the screen changed. The view was rather weird.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Tutorial one: battle mode,” explained the ship’s computer. It continued with the lesson. “In battle mode the screen displays a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle of view.”
The view had changed. There was a huge circle filling my vision, divided into six areas. There were three concentric circles. The middle one was split into four rants, left, right, top and bottom.
“The centre is rendered normally and is the front forty-five-degree angle of view from the front of the ship. The middle ring takes the view out to a hundred and eighty degrees. The top rant is above the ship, the bottom rant is below the ship, left-hand rant is the port side of the ship and right-hand rant is the starboard side of the ship.”
“Oh great, wide-angle stuff, like with cameras,” I remarked. The computer ignored me, the robot did not.
“You know about cameras?” he asked.
“The second circle has some distortion–” said the computer.
“Yeah, yeah, I know about that,” I said. The things towards the edge of the circle would appear wider than they would in the centre, because of the way the
angle of view was stretched into a circle. “What’s the outer circle? Is it the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view behind the ship?” I asked.
“The outer circle is the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view covering behind the ship. It is recommended that you press this button.” One of the black buttons lit up a small red light, quite a dim one. I suspected that a normal human would have difficulty seeing that.
‘Heh, I must look pretty cool piloting this ship in front of a Homo sapiens. No labels on the buttons, no lights.’
“Press the button,” said the ship’s computer.
I did, and the view changed. I pressed it again. It changed back. I did it a few more times.
‘Oh, I see, that’s for switching to look behind me.’
“Due to the distortion and the fact that attacking spaceships will expect that you can’t look behind you easily, it is suggested that you switch viewpoints frequently.”
I nodded at the computer’s instructions. The viewing screen was rather confusing. This would take time.
About three hours later, I had finished the tutorial and not moved from my position in space. I thought my poor robot had gotten bored.
“You do know you could have done the tutorial on the ship on Tortuga,” he said.
I nodded. I knew that.
“OK, ship’s computer, can I have full manual control, please?” I asked.
“Handing over manual control,” said the ship.
Nothing happened.
‘OK, here goes.’
I pushed my left foot down on the pedal and the ship executed a yawing turn; it moved around its centre, keeping level. I just spun there for a while, alternately flicking the view back and forth to get used to it.
“I’m getting dizzy,” said the robot.
Then I did the same thing with the two other dimensions, executing a few rolls and a few pitches around that point.
“I feel sick,” said the robot.
“Robot, you can’t feel sick. And anyway, I feel fine.” Which was a lie. I felt a little dizzy from watching the stars wheeling past on the screen and flicking from a forwards to a backwards view. “I need to learn to think in three dimensions as soon as possible.”
“No, you don’t. The Clarke from the future doesn’t pilot spaceships.”
I ignored him and grinned.
“Now the fun begins,” I said. I put my hand on the throttle. The ship made a new noise. The engines were singing to me as we moved forwards.
‘Time for some aerobatics, or, given that we are in space, some astrobatics.’
I rolled the craft to the left, went into a loop-the-loop, then yawed to the right to head up straight from the exact point that I’d started from.
“Oh, I feel dizzy just watching this,” said the robot.
I grinned.
I did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch to come back down, where I started again and repeated the same manoeuvre. It was confusing. There was no up and no down. I decided to take the up where I’d started as the up direction. But since everything was so far away I had to look at the map readouts and coordinates to get a handle on where I was. I was starting to get into the habit of continually looking at the coordinates and plotting in my head the exact shapes I was making in the sky… or space. It was just like the martial arts kata I’d done. I spent my time making up an astrobatic kata based on ninety- and one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angles.
‘I can add in the diagonals later. It’s like learning the waltz, you start off with the square steps before starting to do it on the proper diagonals. There is a difference between flying compared to dance steps or martial arts kata, as they are only done in about two and half dimensions. I can strike upwards or downwards with my sword, jump up or crouch down, rise and fall in a dance, but I can’t exactly fire myself upwards the same way as much as I can run forwards. In the spaceship it’s all different. The movements are truly three-dimensional.’
I drilled myself on the new ship kata for a few hours. Somehow I lost track of time and forgot all about vampiric duels until I decided to leave it and head back to Tortuga.
“That was pretty good for a beginner,” said the robot as I pushed the ship towards Tortuga.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you, oh robot, that the reason my future self doesn’t have to pilot, but can write computer control programs to do so, is because she knows how to pilot a ship? And anyway, you never know when you might need control. I presume she doesn’t let the computer handle it when she’s under fire?”
The robot was silent. I pulled a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch, then went straight into a rolling turn for the fun of it. The cockpit was inertially damped so I only felt the slight movement of motion and didn’t fall out of my seat, but the feedback from the noise of the engines and the comfortable acceleration and deceleration both helped me figure out where I was and what angles I was pulling. I was almost used to the viewscreen layout and had nearly gotten the hang of switching from looking forwards to looking backwards.
“I thought she stood on the bridge looking important whilst someone else pilots,” said the robot sulkily.
“That’s UNSF flagships. What does she do in her own little ships?”
“Well… I hadn’t thought about that. She said she flew under autopilot most of the time.”
I nodded.
‘That doesn’t mean she has to.’
We were approaching Tortuga. Its massive shape loomed on high every second flick of the viewscreen.
“So, landing; how hard can it be?” I said with a smile.
“Oh, you’re not serious. You don’t know how to land!”
“Hey, I did the tutorial.”
“About three hours ago. You’ve probably forgotten!”
I was getting closer and closer to Tortuga. I’d never seen it from the outside before. It did look rather like the Icarus, but smaller and more of the surface was covered in metal where either Rob or Alucard had made modifications, but essentially the moon/ship had the same underlying shape.
‘Earth must know, if they’ve seen it. The captain and bridge staff have. Admittedly they’re in disguise, but what about when they go back to the open arms of the legit military? Is there a time limit on how long you can still be tried for crimes? I suppose nicking a ship in wartime is both theft and treason. Could I use the fact that it helped to win us the war and makes a good plot for cheesy movies to help my defence?’
“Hey, ship’s computer, can you do whatever it is to let me into the docking bay, please?”
“Yes.” And I heard the ship request clearance and a course granted response.
“You can’t land!” said the robot. “You don’t have to! It has an autopilot!”
As we approached Tortuga a red dotted line appeared on my three-dimensional holomap. I aligned the ship with it and guided it in towards the docking bay. The docking bay doors opened as I moved through and reduced speed to a crawl. I turned off the hyperspace engines and just used the slower anti-grav engines to drift forwards. The map showed the docking bay shutting behind me and the forcefield drawn as a yellow grid in front of me. But I didn’t need the map to know where the forcefield was. I could see a faint blue shimmer coming off it on the viewscreen.
“Hey, can normal humans see the sparkling of the forcefield?” I asked the robot.
“That’s Cherenkov radiation, and yes, if it’s not too faint, they can see it, but you can probably see it a bit better,” said the robot. The docking bay door shut, then the forcefield disappeared and I guided my ship forwards, using the pedals to turn. I stopped in its parking space and then put down the landing gear.
“Clarke, you’re five inches off the floor,” said the robot.
“Yeah, which one’s down in this instance?” I said, frowning at the controls. Then I pushed the joystick up, a bit too fast, and the spaceship landed with a bang and a shudder.
‘Ooops.’
“Nice parking,” said the robot drily. I grinned a slightly guilty grin a
t him. Since the robot lacked expressions I couldn’t tell, but I would guess that he wasn’t impressed.
“What? We’re alive, aren’t we?” I glanced at him. “Well, I am, anyway, I’m not sure if you count,” I added with a grin.
“Many people would disagree with you.”
“On which, me or you?”
“Both,” said the robot.
‘Meh, I’m alive. I’m sure I would remember if I died when I became a vampire. OK, maybe I looked pretty dead–Anna said that I did–but I still have a pulse, right? That’s kinda indicative of being alive. Of course, I would say normal non-Founder vampires are alive. They may not breathe and lack a heartbeat, but they can move and even eat, just less often than a normal human. And they can reproduce–well, make new vampires–that sounds like being alive to me.’
I got up from the pilot’s seat and looked around. I liked the elegant and efficient design of my ship.
“Hey, robot, who designed this ship?”
“Ah, the great Rob Deegen did. Although your future self helped a bit, I believe.”
I nodded.
‘I suspected as much. He probably did most of it, but I reckon that the piloting system was designed by me. He would have covered the cockpit in pretty blinking lights, rather than pools of soft darkness, minimal detailing and informative, but not cluttered, displays. He likes clutter, beeping noises and flashy lights.’
I walked out of my ship and strolled around it, checking for damage; it looked OK.
‘It wouldn’t really be much of a ship if a five-inch drop at zero miles an hour could break it.’
“The ship’s fine,” said the robot. “It was built for you, therefore it can take far more mistreatment than that.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“OK, robot, I want to fight in a duel.”
Never Drop Your Sword
“Where do vampires duel on this ship?” I asked the robot as I strode over to my elevator.
“There are several duelling arenas scattered around. Try level forty, there are some big ones there, usually frequented by younger vampires.”
“Oh? Why is that important?”
“Well, don’t you think it’s a good idea to start off fighting vampires whom your future self doesn’t intimately know? Then you’ll be less likely to be asked questions that you can’t answer.”