Emwan

by Dain White

  These ones were more heavily armed, and armored. They had some sort of plate armor that looked like a mineral growth, slightly translucent and dark blue. The surface of the armor looked pretty, with beautiful geometric patterns of squares.

  They had wicked looking weapons, possibly beam cannons, mounted on low profile turrets that were integrated into the very solid, monolithic plating they wore. We were going to have to be wary of those guns, but their armor wasn’t going to protect them much from us. I started to relax a little bit, but then scolded myself for complacence.

  We were letting them overextend, hanging themselves out to dry, which they were doing quite effectively. They didn’t seem to have a fix on our position, but Emwan had them scoped solid on our screens.

  One thing that bothered me was up until this point we haven’t met serious resistance. I wondered, would these aliens learn from their losses? They were definitely approaching cautiously.

  “Should we just let ‘em live, Jane?” Yak called over.

  “I don’t think so, but I’d like to know what is up there first, before we kick the hornet’s nest.”

  “No hornets here, Jane.”

  “Yeah. Still…” I trailed off, looking ahead of us into the shadows. It was hard to scan, but there were definitely webs of some sort ahead.

  The closer we got to this area, the worse it got. At first, I noticed scattered strands of what looked like faintly glowing web, though on closer scan, they were clearly transmitting some sort of electrical signal.

  “Em, do you have any idea what they’re transmitting on this webbing?” I asked.

  “It is an active network. Breaking any of these strands would definitely alert them of the precise location of the break.”

  The amount of web strung haphazardly through the space above and in front of us increased.

  The surface had also become well tracked, even compressed in many places. There were still dusty areas, but the rest had become dirt and crusted.

  Ahead of us though, the web was definitely becoming thicker and more entangled, until it filled the space above and around us.

  “Jane this is looking grim,” Yak called over in a strange voice, like he was trying to swallow a bug.

  That gave me an idea. “Em, how many kilotons would it take to drop one of these arcos?”

  “That would result in an unacceptable loss of life, Jane!” Em burst out sadly.

  I laughed. “Well of course, Em! I don’t want to do it, I want to avoid it.”

  Emwan replied in a burst of nervous laughter. “I am sorry Jane! If you were to auto-fire at maximum, you could certainly knock one of these down.”

  “Good to know,” I replied. “Well, Yak, as much as I might want to test the mettle of these things, my vote is to engage at range.”

  “Don’t you think we should try to learn more about them, Jane? We can get through this web easily enough. We just go where they go.”

  “But that’s where they are, Yak,” I admonished. The webbing now extended a few hundred meters up the trench above the intersection and we had to step into the tunnel openings that yawned ahead of us, half submerged and tangled through the debris and compressed dust at the bottom of the trench.

  “This is pretty horrible, Yak,” I said softly. I’ve never really been the type that is scared of spiders, and I knew this wasn’t actual web but some sort of electrochemical secretion, but the sheer scale of what I was seeing offered me far more nightmare fuel than I wanted.

  “Copy that, Jane,” he said softly. Our bravado was gone, as we ghosted closer to the intersection.

  “I am afraid I am unable to scan through that material,” Emwan said softly. “I will hold position here, and maintain a scan on the perimeter.”

  “Copy, Em,” I replied slowly, not liking what I was seeing, and at the same time, knowing the way out of it was either through it, or to vaporize it.

  “Sure are a lot of openings here, Jane,” Yak said, moving into one of them like a ghost. I drifted down and behind him, taking a position to the rear.

  “It’s just because the web isn’t super thick yet. It will all go into a single opening on each line of the trench at the center.”

  I increased my field of vision as far as I could stomach; I didn’t want anything to hit us from any of these side tunnels. My senses were jacked on every wavelength, tuned to the full spectrum.

  Yak slowed and raised a hand.

  I stopped.

  Ahead of us, another one passed from right to left, dragging something in the dust, something man sized.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Copy.”

  “Think that was a person?”

  “Was, would be the correct term,” I replied.

  “The Captain and Gene were talking about people down here. Feral people, beyond savage… I thought I saw really rudimentary shelters dug in back there...”

  I replied with a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Yeah, I thought so too. Now we know where they went.”

  “Well, whatever we do down here, let’s avoid becoming food.”

  “Copy that, Yak,” I replied, laughing despite myself.

  08232614@14:23 Captain Dak Smith

  The bright shiny sector of this planet that burned so brightly below us was going dark, section by section.

  “Pauli, report!” I snapped across the bridge.

  “We’re fighting it, sir. The AI is aware of us, and actively destroying everything it can, wiping all traces of itself out of the network.”

  “Janis, Em – can you rebuild, err, recode these systems?”

  “We are working on this now, sir,” Janis replied. “We are also focused on absorbing the wave before it propagates into the reactor fields.”

  That sounded bad. The reactor fields were a sizable sector on the southern end of New Turiana, seemingly endless blocks of reactors stretching out into the baked desert. There were no services out there, just graffiti and dust.

  “Gene, what’s the worst thing that would happen if the computer systems for the reactors crashed?”

  “Which reactors?”

  “All of them.”

  “Uh,” he trailed off. “It’d be catastrophic.”

  “Wouldn’t there be mechanical safeguards?”

  “Well, sure. There are things that are supposed to work to stop the reaction, but you don’t just turn off a tokamak. They’re managed down, not turned up. If you want to put it out, you have to manage the fire back down. If you lose control, the only way to quench it without blowing containment, is to dial it back. The problem is, even with the mechanical triggers and multiply redundant failover systems to handle the scram and prevent a runaway core fire… the loss of all function would definitely crash the switches needed to trip the manuals. You are talking about a total system crash here, right?”

  “It’s a hypothetical, Gene. Our girls are fighting it.”

  “Fighting what?”

  “No time, Gene.”

  I pounded a quick sip. “What’s the ETA on the Honorable?” There were definitely worse things than blackouts and riots about to happen down there.

  08232614@14:26 Shaun Onebull

  We were pushing our luck here, and I hoped Jane knew how much. We had seen over a hundred of them by now, and even though we’d been very lucky so far to not trip up, the odds were starting to stack up against us. The web had become an interconnected series of tunnels, barely larger than the aliens that were scurrying around.

  They were definitely stirred up.

  “What do you think is going on, Jane? Think this is all because of us?”

  “Well, we’ve obliterated a few of them, so they have to be pretty upset. This looks different though…” she trailed off as we saw a solid line of aliens all racing through a tube.

  “Are they carrying things, Jane?” I asked as we drew ourselves up into a hollow between the cross strands of an intersection.

  “Looks like seeds, or some sort of egg, maybe?”


  “That’s what I am thinking too.”

  “Could be anything though.”

  “But it’s probably eggs.”

  “Yeah…” she trailed off to a place I wished we didn’t have to go. But here we were, nonetheless.

  “Think we’d fit in there?” she asked after a few moments.

  I shuddered involuntarily. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I looked at her in response, silently hoping she’d forget she said it.

  “Well?”

  “Nope. I’m not doing that…” I stammered. “You go right ahead, I’ll stand guard here and wait.”

  “You baby. There’s plenty of room in here over them,” she chided sweetly, and as if to prove to me how incredibly insane she was, she drifted closer and slid into the space above the thundering, slithering, sliding mass of them racing along.

  “Are you coming?”

  I was telling her no, explaining to her how we were going to get caught, and then we’d be hand-to-hand with hundreds of these multi-ton creatures. I think I cried a little bit, despite my tough exterior, this was really beyond the absolute limit of what humans should have to endure.

  While I was doing all those things in my head, what I was actually doing was slowly sliding towards the gap above their shells, as Jane moved forward to make room. Cursing myself for being weak, for being afraid, for being unable to master my panic, I slid through the gap and drifted up towards the web above.

  “This is crazy, Jane,” I choked. “We snap any of these webs, they will know it!”

  “Nonsense, Yak. Not in here. Not with these things tearing around like this. Look, down near the bottom there,” she gestured to the right below us. Sure enough there were cloudy tangles of strands that had snapped, furred with dust.

  I felt a little better, but not much. Jane pushed ahead, arching her back into the narrow throat of the next section. My gorge rose in my throat as I realized there was only about a meter of clearance between her and the legs pumping by as each creature passed. This is absolute madness. The top of the tunnel was scant centimeters over their shells now.

  Jane slid through like a wraith, and I don’t know how I did it, but I followed. Luckily the tunnel started opening back up, and I just focused on moving towards the widening gap. The sight of the legs flashing past below me had taken me to a place beyond terror, where the fear was so real it became something else, something almost tangible.

  “It’s opening up,” Jane breathed, as we slid further into madness.

  08232614@14:32 Steven Pauline

  We may have turned a corner. The three of us were holding our own against the AI. Though we weren’t winning yet, the end was in sight. I was working through the water system, calling pump functions as fast as I could code them; the pads of my fingers sore, I furiously blinked through the sweat dripping off my brow.

  I was peripherally aware of the task list to my side; even though Janis and Emwan were working through it as fast as we triggered the tasks, for a while there I wasn’t sure if we were going to hold this back. The kill command was thorough and crashed logicspace completely. There were probably backups, but we didn’t even have an interface for them to run.

  The only hope we had was with Janis and Emwan. They were resident throughout the systems on Vega 5, and had a signature, of sorts, of the systems they were resident in. They were working to rebuild the code they were left with after the AI burned through. As fast as they brought up the lower level framework and schema, I dove into a mounting task list of code that had to be written to hack things back together.

  We had tools to help, naturally. Writing code for an entire planetary system was a little out of my experience, but it seemed to be well within Janis and Emwan’s skill set. They were flying through their tasks many thousands of times faster than I could; it was all I could do to hold on.

  They helped me as much as they could. As I swiped over each task, the libraries and functions and schema were mapped out, it was quick and easy to build calling blocks, hooks and iterators.

  Coding logicspace is what I do, and I was definitely doing the best I knew how. Amazingly, even with the sheer volume of work we had ahead of us, it did appear as if the task list was manageable, as Janis and Emwan were throwing their backs into it. The bridge was pretty silent behind me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything at that point beyond the relationships and actions I was trying to build.

  My screens were like tunnels in my eyes. I fell deep into them, pulling, pushing, and swiping in, out, over and through, burning connections between structures, walking the tiers of the logic. Meanwhile, at the periphery of where we worked, systems were still crashing into blackness.

  08232614@14:35 Captain Dak Smith

  The Honorable was in a retrograde orbit, coming in hot – but it looked like we had at least ten more minutes before they were effectively on station.

  “Janis, you have the conn,” I called out and started unclipping my crash bars.

  “I have the conn, aye,” she replied briskly. I stretched for a moment from the grabber, and kicked over to Pauli’s cup. He was so focused on his work, he didn’t even see me take it – or he didn’t care. That someone could do that, damn near took my breath away. Nothing could eclipse the mental stranglehold I had on my cup.

  I guess that’s why I’m the Captain.

  I topped off his poor neglected cup with the last of the carafe, clicked it back down, and kicked my way aft.

  08232614@14:38 Shaun Onebull

  “Jane, there’s so many…” Yak whispered as he drew up behind me.

  I nodded silently.

  The room ahead of us opened up into a central shaft, a column that reached towards the surface of the city, far above. From every corner of the compass, a flood of the aliens streamed, with each carrying multiple pods. They were loading them into a column of vessels that looked like sharpened teardrops reaching high into the space between the four corners of the looming arcos. As fast as they streamed in, they were leaving by other tunnels in an endless flood.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of these things were here, and clearly they were leaving.

  “We can’t let them escape, Jane.”

  “Nope, that’s a fact, Marine,” I replied quietly. “Do you think this is their only nest?”

  “I wouldn’t imagine so, Jane. They’ve clearly either been here for a while, or they breed very fast.”

  “Maybe both. Em, can you read us down here?” I called on comms.

  There was no reply.

  08232614@14:43 Gene Mitchell

  I ran into the captain in the galley, reloading the press. The fact he was rapidly slapping it into automatic surprised me less than the fact he didn’t seem to care that I was following my own coffee cup into the compartment.

  “How’re we looking up there, Dak?” I asked.

  “The Honorable is about five minutes out, and we haven’t heard from the kids yet,” he said matter-of-factly, loading my cup with a faraway look in his eyes. “Are you still tracking what is going on down there?”

  “The news is bad everywhere,” I replied, taking a sip and swiping through my wrist screen. “There are massive riots, fires, and a mounting casualty report from all across the city.”

  “Damn,” he said softly, looking me in the eyes momentarily before he pulled himself up the ladderway. “Hopefully it’s not as bad as that…”

  “It’s probably not, skipper,” I replied as optimistically as I could. Being from here made it really hard to imagine the towers on fire, screaming riots and broken glass, people falling… dying.

  “Keep me posted, Gene. Stay ready for anything back there, and let me know if the situation changes for the worse.”

  “Let you know, aye,” I replied, and kicked aft.

  08232614@14:46 Captain Dak Smith

  I chewed my cheek for dinner all the way back onto the bridge, and then seared my tongue with a scalding blast from my coffee cup. There was nothing I could do from here, except wait an
d watch.

  Damned and blasted as it might be, there wasn’t much else I could do. The bridge was filled with an incessant staccato clatter as Pauli melted his keys – work I couldn’t even begin to help with.

  I got situated back at the helm, swiped over the target layer, and smiled at what I saw: the Honorable dropping her burn as she arrived on station.

  Within moments, a small cloud of dropship targets appeared from her tubes, burning for re-entry like banshees toward re-entry.

  08232614@14:47 Jane Short

  “I’m going to try to reestablish contact, Yak,” I called out, and started to lift up the column towards the tangled web high above.

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m on six, roll up,” he replied.

  Occasional strands of lightly dusted web glittered across the space, barely visible on scan.

  “Careful Yak… these are probably trippable,” I cautioned, and tried to paint everything I saw to his screen.

  “Copy careful,” he replied softly.

  We had climbed closer to the end of the shaft, close enough to see that it did end, webbed over solid. Emwan probably couldn’t hear us down in here no matter what.

  “What’s the plan now?” he asked, pulling up alongside.

  “I don’t know,” I replied with a shrug. “Do or die time, I guess. Think this layer here is structural, or trippable?”

  He replied thoughtfully. “Well, those single strands are definitely trippable, but maybe… hell, we don’t have any other options, do we?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cover me, then…”

  “Covering, roll up,” I replied, magnifying the scan below enough to make sure of my aim.

  “Here goes,” he replied, and started tearing through the web.

  08232614@14:48 Shaun Onebull