by Dain White
“She’s right, son. We’re holding out own here. We can survive this, and we might even win, if we…” he trailed off for a brief moment as he precessed for another burn, “…if we can hold this line. Tell you what, son. I want you to take a look at how the topside hull capacitors might work a little bit more efficiently. I need to feed more to the hull. Can you do it for me son?”
My fingers had already called up the screens I needed, and it was strangely soothing to start working on controllers. Grunt work, but the captain clearly understood that it was what I needed at that moment.
“Em, this isn’t how I’d run this,” Captain Smith said nonchalantly.
“I understand, sir, but I don’t think our flank will be exposed unnecessarily.”
“Well, it’s exposed. If we lay over and hit Master 56 first, we can haul back as Master 72 comes into our shot, then we have a solid shot on their carrier. “
My screens blurred momentarily. We were facing a carrier? Could we?
“Captain, there is another carrier, sir, Master 93.”
“I don’t have that in my list,” he replied.
“Captain, I am afraid I don’t know precisely where Master 93 is now, however, I know where it will be.”
“That’s fine, Em. Give me preactive targets as well, please. I want the biggest possible picture here,” he paused for a sip, reminding me that I tasted coffee, once.
“Captain, can I get you more coffee?”
“No, son. It’s not a good idea to get out of your seat. Janis, can you run an assembler forward with a reload for Pauli and I?”
“Certainly, Captain. You know, it is very strange for me not to know you were going to ask me something.”
“I can imagine, my dear. I hope it is a humbling, yet ultimately rewarding experience for you. This is how we normally see the world.”
“It’s dreadful, sir.”
The captain laughed.
“You’ll be fine, soon, Janis,” Emwan said sweetly. “Captain, I am drawing a cloud now with my best guess for Master 93.”
“Very well, dear… this is great. Em, please hold our current evolution. I see no reason to change this. This is the last carrier?”
“Sir, it is the last carrier in this area. We need to get to Eagle Station as quickly as possible.”
“I understand. Listen, if we take out the bigger ships here, we’ll cut the support for the little ones. We need to hold the line on this now; we can’t cut and run until we’re down to chasing corvettes.”
“I agree, Captain.”
“You see Master 56 turning? Did I call it, or what?”
“You did sir,” she laughed in reply.
“Pauli, we don’t seem to be in their range yet, but I am afraid these carriers may hit pretty hard. Are you on task for that work I need done?”
“It’s done, sir,” I replied, killing a few remaining debuggers. It wasn’t hard, especially with two AIs to help me with a few of the trickier bits of math.
“What sort of improvement am I looking at?”
“Twenty-one percent, sir,” I replied.
“Very well,” he grunted softly. Clearly he had hoped for more. That didn’t surprise me, but it also didn’t give me any comfort, either.
“Ah thank you, my dear,” the captain called out politely, as the pump pressurized his carafe. I reached out for my carafe, and made sure it was as handy and in range as possible by waving it across the bridge at the assembler.
Janis reacted immediately, the assembler meeting me more than halfway, taking my carafe back to the helm station. A few moments more, and the assembler expertly handed me the full carafe, which I clicked to my station.
“A day without coffee is like…” the captain trailed off dramatically. I waited for a moment or two, and laughed as he started to snore.
The hull work reminded me I could hunt down more work like this, and keeping focused on tasks like this can only help our situation. As always, I found myself digging into the enviro systems. Air scavenging and recycling was a particularly interesting challenge, though mostly what I looked for were improved redundancy, rather than more efficiency. So long as controllers existed, additional bootstraps could continue to provide coverage for the network as nodes take damage. Wetnet systems support such high transmission rates, you can really route commands sequentially using completely different node rates, without latency.
This malleable connectivity allowed me to build controller machines that were really array groups of controller machines, throughout our ship. Our ventilation systems had excellent redundancy already, but being able to build systems that cross-ventilate adjacent chambers to cover a loss of enviro in an area; that’s the work of a geek.
“Pauli, what system are you working on there?”
“Shipwide enviro, sir,” I replied.
“Are you looking at ways to improve venting from this compartment, son?”
”I was working on redundancy, sir,” I replied.
“Well, that’s now job number two, son. Can you work on refrigerating the bridge, please?”
“I sure can, sir,” I said, calling up the bridge enviro systems and turning the coolant pumps on full.
“We need heated seats. Can we make those, Janis?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Very well – someday we will. Ah that feels better, Pauli.”
“Thank you sir,” I replied over my shoulder, still looking for ways I could scavenge more heat out of the system. At this point, I had done little more than turn down the thermostat as far as I could figure out how to make it go.
I knew I had to do more. We had to deal with a lot of heat from our main gun, especially when we fire it on a continual beam – and because these craft could survive blasts from our nova cannon, we were almost always firing it continually at this point.
Luckily, nothing can withstand that.
08242614@01:22 Gene Mitchell
I woke up surrounded by crash bars, with my ears ringing. It took me a moment to remember that I was in med bay, and I had just been awake a few moments ago. My ears were ringing off the proverbial hook, and I mentally ran through a physical checklist, making sure everything wiggled.
“Are we okay Janis?” I croaked through dry lips.
“We are, Gene. Hull integrity is holding.”
“How’s our current output?”
“Gene, we are energized to maximum.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I took a sip of water. “Janis, can you please let me know if there’s anything I can help with?”
“Gene, we are operating at maximum efficiency, and Steven is currently looking at ways to hack even more efficiencies. We all hope you feel better soon, Gene, but you need to just try and relax.”
“Janis, I know, but you know, getting knocked out isn’t really all that conducive to relaxation,” I returned gruffly. “I want to do what I can to help, I feel helpless.”
“Gene, I understand. Very well, I need you to remain as relaxed as possible when you see this. I am going to clone your console here; please understand, however, that should this upset you or make you anxious, I need to turn it off.”
“I understand, I’ll be fine,” I snapped back.
The screen overhead lit up the normal center console, and I saw that I could gesture tabs around like normal, so the loss of my side screens didn’t really affect me much. I busied myself in my screens for a few moments, looking through as much as I could; trying to keep from reacting.
It was hard.
We were clearly pushing everything we had at this point. To say it was beyond anything I could have imagined was a bit of an overstatement. I could see ways to hit these levels, and noted with no small sense of relief that Janis had done everything I would have.
I hated the thought that we had to be at this point, however. Shaking around as I was, crash bars or not, this was a bit of a wild ride.
“All hands, prepare to fire.”
I groaned, and fell back a
s the crash bars hugged against me.
“Fire.”
The rumbling hum overhead from the main gun torching off shook my teeth a little more than it did in Engineering, but it wasn’t that bad. I counted the seconds.
“Master 56 destroyed,” Dak called on the 1MC. “Secure from fire mission.”
I eagerly pulled through the screens again, running the numbers in my head, cross-checking my own solutions. Math was just what I needed, the kind of medicine I guess a part of me craved. I realized I didn’t need to do this, but it was so necessary to know how, and to stay sharp. We may have what seems like a perfectly-tuned symphony of systems aboard this vessel, but engineers just do what they do.
We can’t help it, really. No system ever passes muster. Everything can be improved. Nothing ever works perfectly. I have a firm belief that just enough, is good enough – but nothing is ever good enough around here. I might have to work hard to sharpen the edge of our current efficiency, but it’s something I have to do, and what I am best at.
The klaxon wail of the collision alarm jolted me out of my reverie, and I fell back into the cushions again as the crash bars cinched down. A titanic crash hit, shoving me violently into the cushions and hard over into the bars.
I wasn’t knocked out, but it hurt enough, I sort of wished I had been. “Captain, are we okay?” I called up on comms.
“Looks that way, Gene,” he replied as casually as if I had asked him if he wanted lettuce on his sandwich.
“What was that?”
“Some sort of high order antineutron beam weapon from Master 63. They can fire at more elevation than I had anticipated, and moving like a slug as we are, they have all the time they need to light us up with that thing.”
“Well blast and damn sir, drive this ship,” I muttered. “We don’t need to be hit by that again!”
“Calm down, mister, and that’s a direct order you will obey.”
I took a breath. “Captain, don’t put our lives in jeopardy on my behalf. I’ll be fine, Dak.”
“Gene, I am flying the route Em’s giving me here, and we’re doing fine. She’s confident, and I’m—“ he was cut off by another incredibly violent crash and bang that hurled me viciously off the cushions to collapse deeply into the crash bars like a rag doll.
My eyes winced as a sudden stabbing headache screamed for attention behind my left temple.
“Gene, I am going to give you something to relax,” Janis said soothingly.
“No, Janis, I’ll be fine,” I replied hurriedly.
“Yes, you will, Gene. Goodnight, please get some good rest now.”
“No, damn it, Janis, I’ll… be…” I was suddenly skidding sideways in my head into a soft silent cocoon that wrapped silky strands around me, as I dropped softly away.
08242614@01:29 Shaun Onebull
“Jane, watch out for that one,” I called over, and made sure she had telemetry of the target I had just tracked. These ships were maddeningly quick, teleporting rapidly on our position and firing immediately, then almost as rapidly blinking out of existence again.
Some weren’t fast enough, and we kept whittling them down, but they were actively hunting us now. They knew we were out here, and every time we managed to get a kill shot, we had to immediately exfil as fire converged on our positions.
We were doing well though, these railers were undeniable ordinance. Even as armored as these craft were, our railers just overwhelmed their defenses and hammered them into bits. Each target led to another target, as we hurtled around and around the Archaea.
The Archaea was taking care of business, though there were a few times when I wasn’t sure it was going to make it. A few of the bigger beam weapons on the carriers had hit her hard, leaving massive white-hot glowing patches on her hull, but it was growing more clear that she could take it. The hot patches swiftly faded into molten sections of Duron that smoothed back out from the electrochemical reaction of the regenerative coating.
All the same, I was really glad I wasn’t in there at the moment. I felt bad for Pauli. The last shot had hit right across the port side of the bow, and it hit hard enough to knock the Archaea hard over. It looked like the captain was taking advantage of the boost he got from the blast to line up a shot, however, and another searing beam burned out from the Archaea into the inky depths.
On my screen, the captain’s course and heading were glowing ahead of the Archaea, so it was simple for Jane and I to keep our flanking positions. We were also following a course, though ours was a lot less precise. Our courses were more like loose recommendations, given the rapid-fire, evolving situation we were facing.
As if on cue, Jane suddenly breathed into my ears. “Yak, eyes on new target at your three o-clock low”
“Copy target,” I replied, rotating swiftly and aiming at the pip, I poured fire downrange and watched brilliant flashes as the target flew right into the maelstrom. “Target down.”
“Copy,” she replied. Jane was all business now, her voice cold and dark, completely devoid of witty banter.
I was running low on witty banter myself. I was really in the here-and-now with targets, but in the back of my mind I knew the big picture wasn’t looking all that good. We were significantly outnumbered here, and it was looking like we were attacking a fleet.
I allowed my mind to reel a moment at the thought, but just for a moment. If I wanted to be a live Marine, I needed to be a focused Marine. It’s someone else’s job to worry about this. If Jane wasn’t worried, I wasn’t going to be worried.
It’s not like I had any time to be worried. I was firing almost continually from both arms, sometimes at multiple targets, all the while swooping around and through an endlessly shifting tube of waypoints.
“How are you kids doing out there?” Captain Smith called on comms.
“Fine, sir,” Jane said briskly. “We’re maintaining a pretty decent perimeter.”
“I’d say you were, Shorty,” he replied. “Great job, both of you… now, this isn’t going to get any easier for a while, and it’s about to get a lot harder. How are you holding up, Yak?”
“I could use a beer, sir,” I replied breathlessly.
“Check your tank, son. Janis probably has some there for emergencies.”
I laughed, but I did take a solid gulp of the tube just to make sure. It tasted depressingly of water, but it reminded me I was pretty thirsty.
“No beer, just water, sir.”
“Well, that’s probably for the best.”
“I have beer in my suit,” Jane said lightly.
“You do not,” I replied flatly.
“Okay, I don’t. I did find out I have coffee though.”
“You do not,” I replied again.
Her voice took on a bit of an edge, “The hell I don’t!”
I checked my tube again, and was rewarded with a perfectly hot sip of exceptionally good coffee.
Now I felt like an absolute ass. “Well hell.”
“Watch your mouth, Marine,” Captain Smith admonished. “Vulgarity is such a waste of time.”
“But she said it!” I replied with a petulant whine.
“She needed to say it to accentuate a point. That is a perfectly valid use for colorful invective. You’re just being needlessly vulgar…. typical jarhead,” he added predictably, after a pause pregnant enough for triplets.
I counted ten of my favorite swear words off mic, while Jane’s laughter rang out in my ears.
“Sir, do you have any idea how hard it is for me to not cuss and swear all the time?”
“I do, and I appreciate the effort you put into it. You deserve a medal, in my opinion, for the selfless manner in which you resist what I can only assume is an overwhelming temptation to rant and curse an endless stream of profanity from here to infinity.”
I laughed hard in response. “Sir, that’s not even the half of it,” I replied finally.
“I can only imagine. Be advised, new targets onscreen,” he replied, suddenly all busi
ness.
Ahead of us, a veritable cloud of oncoming targets appeared. The closest target lit up, and I streamed towards it at speed, pouring fire into it as soon as the pip lit.
08242614@01:39 Jane Short
“Captain, this is a sizable fleet!” I called out on comms. “There are three carriers in this group!”
“Indeed there are. My focus will remain on their destruction, and I need you to continue to react to threats on our flanks.”
As he spoke I was in the process of blasting a ship to glittering bits, so I smiled wryly. “React, aye,” I replied smartly.
There were at least 8 destroyer-sized vessels ahead of us in this system, and they had arrayed forces to envelop us if we pressed the attack.
I knew that was what we were about to do, however.
With Captain Smith at the helm and Yak and I flying cap, we might just pull it off. We have the firepower, that’s for sure.
A larger corvette-class vessel accelerated towards us from an oblique track in the far distance, but it was enough for Janis to track. I made ready for the inevitable jump, and relaxed. I took a moment to breathe, and convince myself that I could react in time.
The smooth point and fire a few moments later were richly rewarded with a furious intensity, as the craft disintegrated into sparkling little bits and pieces. Another went the same way from Yak’s sky, and a moment later the captain fired again on a distant target. As I focused on his target, distant outlines of vessels in the distance again caught in my throat.
I sure hoped he knew what he was doing here.
Furious blasts of antineutron burned through space around us, but it was clear the course Captain Smith had laid on was working to our advantage. It was random enough at our current range, though as we closed that range, I knew our margin of safety would shrink.
Their probing attacks had seemed to slow down, though that made me only more alarmed, not less. They clearly all had the ability to be on station and using weapons in short order. We had to be more ready.
“Captain,” I called out conversationally, “do you have a plan here?”
“I do, it’s onscreen now. I am going to maneuver for a flank on Master 75, and punch through their screen, and I will remove 75 from the sky. I need you to consider any target not named Archaea to be fair game, and do your absolute worst to them.”