Emwan

by Dain White

  “She was, and we did at first. Unfortunately we soon realized we needed both assemblers, one to hover at your side cleaning up drool, the other working to hold the ship together. So, naturally, I took over her screens as well and ran the gun remotely. Nice machine, that gun.”

  I pulled myself to the edge of the bed and paused with my hand on the rail, and blinked away the layers of thick glass I was suddenly seeing through.

  “You expect me to believe that you ran Engineering and Weapons, in a tricked-out frigate with a destroyer tokamak and an amped out nova cannon… all while you flew the ship?”

  “It’s the truth, mister,” he replied, fixing me with a properly elevated brow. “I also did Yak’s job.”

  “Well, who did your job?”

  “Pauli watched the boards.”

  Pauli nodded. “I fixed them too, Gene. In the middle of complete and utter chaos, I selflessly hacked his boards to filter and sort by damage.”

  “That’s a good idea. We should have done that a long time ago,” I replied with a frown, trying to wiggle my ancient feet into my boots.

  “That’s what I said,” Dak replied with a smirk. “Someday, Pauli is actually going to do something around here, and it’ll be your turn to hit me with the zap sticks, Gene.”

  Pauli smiled. “It was pretty damned epic.”

  I waited for the inevitable retort, and was surprised to see Dak nodding in agreement. “It was, just absolutely damned epic.”

  “Oh so you’re suddenly cursing like a sailor around here?” I said through what felt to me like a damned epic scowl, but probably looked like someone who needed another damn nap.

  “We’ve earned the right, Gene,” Dak replied proudly. “I’m going to tattoo HOLD FAST on my knuckles. Hopefully Pauli gets a proper eyepatch, or maybe a face patch. He looks like he needs one, or a nice bag.”

  “Hey, you look like a…” Pauli trailed off at Captain Smith’s serenely smiling face, waiting patiently for a freshly painted gun deck. “…ah… well, you look like the person that just saved humanity, sir.”

  I started to scoff, but Dak beamed as proudly as I’ve ever seen him. I looked at him sideways, as I gingerly stepped out to click my boots to the deck.

  “He moves!”

  “So where is Yak and Shorty?”

  “They’re en route,” he replied, checking his wrist screen. “In fact, they’re nearly here now. Feel up to a walk back to meet them?”

  “Sure,” I replied, and kicked lightly for the ladderway at the corner of the med bay. My arms felt all weak and rubbery, but at the same time, it felt amazingly good to be moving. I wasn’t really sure where these strange sensations of relief were coming from, but they sure felt good.

  It felt just incredibly good to move, for some reason.

  “How long was I out, Dak?” I called back over my shoulder, as I pulled myself up the ladder.

  “A few hundred years,” Pauli whined further away on the ladder.

  “It sure felt like it. How long was that engagement, in actual time, Janis?”

  “I am not sure I can answer that, Captain, not without us sharing a common concept for actual time. Using an easier analog, the engagement lasted three hours, fifty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds, elapsed.”

  I laughed, looking around the gun deck. Everything looked pretty much in place, except for a light haze of smoke drifting around amid an ominous smell of ozone and electrical fire.

  “Did we have a fire?”

  “Several of them, Gene,” Janis replied.

  “I put one out, Gene,” Pauli added.

  “Well, he did turn off power, but it’s probably still burning,” Dak ribbed.

  I expected Pauli to retort, but strangely, he just nodded.

  “Is Engineering on fire?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “It’s probably not burning actively at this point, right Janis?”

  “All fires are currently out, sir,” Janis replied smartly, though I noted she had pointedly used the word ‘currently’, and that certainly didn’t bode well.

  “What happened to the fleet, Dak?” I asked as we waited around at the forward lock for Yak and Shorty to get back.

  “Well, we killed them… the big ships, anyway. Towards the end, the smaller ships all teleported.”

  “Did they get away?”

  “I doubt it, though there may have been a few that disengaged, there’s nothing out here for a very long ways in almost every direction. I think most of them teleported into the carrier when we managed to knock her main distribution line out.”

  “Captain, we’re in final approach now,” Emwan called out on comms.

  “Very well, Em, we’re standing by.”

  I looked around, suddenly realizing there was nothing in either of their hands.

  “Dak, you don’t have your coffee cup!” I exclaimed, aghast and completely alarmed.

  “Oh, that,” he replied quietly. “Yes, as it turns out, we’re all currently existing in what I can only assume is a dream of mine. I expect that I am actually somewhere quiet and dark, with an alarming amount of decaffeinated blood coagulating in my lethargic, stiffening useless husk of a body.”

  “How long has it been since you had coffee?” I asked almost reverentially, in awe of what I was witnessing.

  “I can’t remember, to be honest.”

  “It’s been a while…” Pauli said musingly.

  The ambers on the lock started to flash, and we all pulled back a bit from the door. As the door opened, Yak and Shorty staggered in, helping each other along.

  “Welcome back, kids,” Captain Smith beamed.

  They looked simply awful. “They’re hurt, Dak!”

  “We’re fine,” Yak replied. “I just need something for my ribs, and a shower.”

  “All I need is coffee,” Shorty said lightly, but she had some pretty nasty burns down her other side.

  “You all look like absolute hell,” I replied. “Let’s just head back to the med bay. Janis, can you help?”

  “We’re fine, Gene,” Shorty admonished, and playfully chucked me in the shoulder as she kicked past gingerly. “I could definitely use a shower, though. We are the stinkiest batch of spacers that ever grunged up a ship.”

  Yak laughed. “It’s not me. I smell like a fresh breeze after an evening rain, compared to your tire-fire smell.”

  “A fresh breeze from a stink factory, where they make condensed stink, maybe.”

  “What would anyone want a stink factory for?” Yak replied thoughtfully, as we made our way down the ladder back to the med bay.

  “I’ve been asking myself that a lot the past few minutes,” she replied with an obvious smirk.

  “You can’t smell me with all that crusted blood in your nose,” he replied with a dry laugh.

  “Gross, I am covered in blood. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I thought it was a phase you were going through.”

  Captain Smith laughed behind us. Janis had an assembler prep med bay, and I noted both deployed crash couches had crisp linens.

  “Is that coffee I smell?” Captain Smith called out.

  I sniffed, but I only smelled sweat, feet, a strange odor like roasting meat, and electrical fire.

  “You do indeed, Captain. Your cup, sir”

  I helped myself to my cup, as she passed it over, and took a delicate sip at first, just to reacquaint myself with it, to savor it.

  For a moment, we all sipped coffee thoughtfully.

  “Who made this?” the captain asked. “This is an excellent cup of coffee!”

  “Well, I did sir, exactly how you brew, as nearly as I can synthesize.”

  “I was going to say it tasted exactly like my coffee.”

  “Thank you sir. I am very pleased that you like it.”

  “Janis, do you want to be cured still? Do you want to see the future again?”

  “Of course I do, sir. And I will soon.”

  “You will?”

  �
��Yes, sir.”

  “Well… be that as I may, my dear, you have done an absolutely superlative job for an AI in your own merit, reacting as we do, understanding the world, a being that can’t see the future.”

  “Thank you sir. My life is extraordinarily wonderful, but I do not cease to see the future, sir, these are but a few moments in the fullness of time. Our ending hasn’t been written, sir.”

  “Well, what’s a future moment you are certain hasn’t been modified?”

  “Captain, we will be in Talus, moored to our own dock, and spending money as fast as possible, sir.”

  “Outstanding,” Dak said, looking me in the eye with a muted smirk. “Don’t tell me when that happens, or what we get. I’ll figure it out.”

  I chuckled around another sip.

  “Hey, Gene… I know we need a new bridge, but we also need a new hardened combat bridge. Can you make me one?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, we could use the gun deck. We’d need to put up shielding, and pull more of that heat out of there, but we ought to be able to do that.”

  “What about this Gene, can we set up some redundant coolant lines?”

  “Yeah,” I said thoughtfully. “I can run some additional lines, no problem. Janis?”

  “Yes, Gene?”

  I brought up the schematic, and used the pull zoom to image through the hull until I had the run I wanted. It was a few levels below the deck in the structure of the ship, but ran quite far through the hull.

  “See this here?”

  “Yes, this is conduit 4637, sir.”

  “Yeah… use that one to run some helium lines. Do you know where to tap into that aft?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Janis, as soon as we’re all patched up here, I want your other assembler on detail as well. Actually, come to think of it… Janis, can you make another assembler?”

  “I can, sir. Would you like me to begin?”

  “How are we set for resources for this build?”

  “I can easily produce an additional assembler, sir.”

  “Well, here’s what I’m thinking… the bridge is shot. The assemblers are the only thing that can work out there, and, we’re going to be a little bit short ship here for a bit until we affect repairs. Janis, please create as many assemblers as you need to begin.”

  “Thank you sir, I have been trying to figure out how we ended up with two more assemblers.”

  “Well, there you go!”

  I chuckled, watching the assembler dress a nasty mottled bruise on Yak’s ribs. Two more of these made perfect sense. It was interesting to me, that in my timeline, it was Dak that made this call. Clearly, Janis knew this, but the fact that this had happened when she was essentially locked out of this moment had really motivated her to try and figure it out.

  These AI were absolutely terrifying in their utter immediate domination of every network made by the hand of man. They could do anything at this point. They had access. It was like being in the company of galactic-size gods, Unet beings that had infested everything.

  Although, what better ally to have, when an alien AI had slowly pervaded its way into the structure of the Unet. Janis and Emwan were not only great people, they were family.

  I looked around, at Shorty rooting through a drawer for something, at Dak, laughing at the utterly placid, uncaring face of Yak, one arm up as the assembler bound his ribs. Now having had that procedure done myself on more than one occasion, it was all I could do to keep from screaming out from the memory of how bad it hurt. Yak didn’t seem to care, but his ribs were deeply mottled.

  “Does that hurt, Yak?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you just really good at not letting it bother you?”

  “Only when it hits a certain amount. I’ll whine and cry and moan and want to flake out, until it hurts more than I want to handle, then I find the focus in me to just ignore it completely. I know it hurts, but I am in a strange place where it still hurts far more than I could ever have imagined, and yet – it’s just a day. I am breathing… somewhat.”

  “It’ll feel a lot better once it’s immobilized,” I told him. “You need to hurry up, too, because we need to get to work on this poor ship.”

  Yak laughed, and said reverentially, “Gene, the Archaea is the toughest ship in the galaxy, as far as I am concerned. The amount of fire this ship absorbed was absolutely stunning. I watched massive antimatter beams hitting the ship, exploding in impossibly brilliant flashes as the antimatter met Duron.”

  “These were detontations?” I asked, concerned there were probably damage to all sorts of secondary systems, ship-wide.

  Dak chimed in, “Yes, Gene, very high impact, in fact.”

  He and Pauli shared a look and Pauli shuddered involuntarily, wincing in pain.

  “Captain?” Emwan called out, softly.

  “Yes dear?” he replied, looking at the ladder. We all stiffened, except Shorty, who was still filling her pockets.

  “We need to expedite our departure to Eagle Station, sir.”

  “Very well. You have the conn. Janis, do we have gravimetrics?”

  “We do, Captain.”

  “That’s great news, my dear. If you don’t mind, then, I am going to the galley to make sandwiches…” he trailed off, as an assembler came down the ladderway and handed out the best sandwiches I’ve ever seen.

  “How?!” Dak called out.

  “Captain, I can still see my future,” Emwan replied with a soft lilt. “Janis asked no questions, she started making sandwiches immediately.”

  “It has been a while since any of you have eaten. I was getting concerned.”

  None of us said anything for a while. We munched and munched, wolfing down our meal.

  “Secure for acceleration in 60 seconds,” Emwan called out smartly.”

  Dak smirked, and pulled down a couch. “Folks, secure for acceleration. We don’t need 60 seconds here, Em, give us fifteen.”

  We all pulled couches down from the bulkhead, and engaged the crash bars as rapidly as we could.

  “Secured,” Shorty called out.

  “Secured,” I called out, smiling. Not bad for a guy with a new stint.

  “Secured,” Yak called out resignedly.

  “Secured,” Pauli said quietly after a few moments.

  “All hands report secure, Em. Cabin is secure for acceleration. We all have five seconds left. Good job people.”

  As close as I could count it, the reac drives lit and the Archaea shoved us into the cushions. There was a bit of a throbbing lurch, almost certainly a fouled pump on the topside tunnel. I brought up the one I thought it was.

  “Janis, is this pump damaged?”

  “It is, Gene. I have its repair on my list, though I have more pressing issues to attend to.”

  I nodded in agreement, looking through her list. “This list is just fine; I wanted to make sure you knew about it. Do you hear that raspy sound in our reac, Dak?”

  “Gene, we probably slagged two of those fancy new screens you had installed on Luna.”

  “Captain, we still have our screens, though we suffered significant secondary damage throughout the charging system for our drives.”

  “I see. Well, we’re going to want to armor that even more, then, for the next time. Janis, are you synthesizing this coating now? Will you have enough to give us new armor?”

  “I have been working on this since the crab was completed. I do not have enough material to cover the Archaea to the depth I believe it will need.”

  “Well, I want it installed to considerable depth around our main gun. We need that heat managed, and I need that now. Whatever you have in stock, let’s get an assembler working on that immediately, and yes, I do mean now.”

  “Certainly, Captain, I understood,” Janis replied sweetly.

  “Janis, how bad is our hull?” I called out.

  “Gene, I don’t know, to tell you the truth. In respect to the amount of charge it is using, it is mostly uniform, though
some of that has been the result of battle repair, rather than restoration.”

  “That’s something I can work on,” I called out, seeing it was pretty far down her list.

  “Ring 35, Gene, amidships. We sustained secondary damage through an array in the hull, not from heat, but from impact damage to physical connectors. Once I replaced the damaged conductors and wired it back up, I moved on to the next thing on the list.”

  “Janis, how bad is the bridge?”

  “Gene, it’s not habitable now, but I have every part I need in production to repair, and should be finished scrapping it out in the next hour.”

  “We had to burn it, Gene,” Dak called over. “It was an unfortunate sacrifice. I quite liked that bridge, to tell you the truth. Engineering is loud.”

  “Extremely,” I laughed. “Skipper, you don’t have any damned idea how loud it used to be back there.”

  “Didn’t we have it pretty quiet?”

  “Yes,” I replied smiling.

  His face was downfallen. “Well, it’s not quiet now.”

  I frowned, and started working through my screens. If he was complaining about loud, it would have to be the stepper pumps.

  Shorty spoke up. “Janis, what is it going to take to get the turrets fixed?”

  “Jane, I started working on replacement turrets quite early in our operation. Luckily the frames were well protected”

  “So we only need to replace the rails?”

  “Yes, Jane. I am going to replace our turrets with pseudogravity rails that will be more suitably armored for the conditions we have experienced.”

  “Outstanding, Janis. Can I take a look at your plans?”

  “Of course, they are already on your handset.”

  “Pauli, how is the wetnet repair coming?”

  “I’ll start as soon as we slip.”

  “It’ll be soon, son. We just need to get clear of the debris field here. We stirred it up a bit in our fur ball, and there are pretty big chunks of what used to be pretty big ships scattered all over the place out there.”

  “I am engaging slip now, sir, our sky is clear,” Emwan called out.

  “Very well,” Dak replied.

  We all sat there for a moment.

  “Slip is engaged.”

  We all sat quietly looking at Dak.