by Eric Kramer
Either way, it would probably be too late to save the Ramathibhodi. A split second after we dropped out of the fold, Haepko would engage her. Even if we were successful in incapacitating it, Haepko had failsafe defenses that would continue to hammer at our stasis-locked battleship until it overwhelmed her.
We were on a martyr’s mission.
A second buzz, and the accept/refuse beacon lit up on the display. We were a theocracy with democratic elements. Each man had the right to refuse the mission. I selected accept without hesitation. A count replaced the beacon. I watched the tally as my spearmates accepted to a man. As if there was a choice.
It didn’t matter, though. I felt an almost uncontrollable joy at the chance to take part. Probably neuromanipulation by the battleship mainframe, but I didn’t care. It felt genuine.
Buoyed by the flood of serotonin and dopamine, I keyed into our dropship’s starboard blister, exposing it. Filaments extended out of my chest, engaging the modules within, allowing me to interface with the embedded microsynthesizers. The synthesizers went to work, resculpting our equipment into what we needed for first contact with the Combine on Haepko.
I ran through the checklist as each component finalized.
Survival equipment tailored for a hostile mechanical environment. Pods of undifferentiated fabrication gel, tuned with the latest data from Haepko. We’d use the gel as a substrate to manufacture what we’d need. Water condensers. Weapons canisters.
I closed the blister, moved on to the next. Drones. High-density food, one month’s worth. Communications, respirators, high-output microsynthesizers set for ammunition generation.
The last pod I opened was empty. Here would rest our piece of the disease. Mission parameters would not allow us to load it in until an hour before breaking the fold.
On the other side of the Dropship, Saowalak murmured to himself in his cryptic navigator’s language as he pored over charts. A thin filament snaked from the dropship neural nucleus to Saowalak’s exposed brain, as if feeding on it. Saowalak, oblivious to my bemused stare, gazed blindly into space in front of him, his hands drifting over unseen controls as he entered the complex set of engagement parameters.
The guides feared that Haepko would overtake the dropship’s neural network, so the navigators were hardcoding protocols into the body of the dropship itself. This provided an override in the event of a hostile takeover after we landed and the dropship reconfigured.
//STOP PLAYBACK//
“What the … it hasn’t been five minutes yet!”
“Yeah, it has. Did you see what happened?”
“No Jon … owwww, my head. I was only in it for a couple hours. They were prepping the dropship. I heard some details about their mission. It couldn’t have taken more than like thirty seconds of our time.”
“I swear, I let you roll the entire time. It’s an old system; I bet the syncing is off.”
“Okay, well, whatever. Any luck with the suit?”
“I was able to interrogate it. Weird stuff, Lilli. It’s saying it’s been here 566 years. I’d suspect more data corruption, but I cross-checked it against battery recharge cycles, and it holds up. It gets weirder, though. This suit is still alive—I didn’t even need to jump it.”
“I don’t get it. What are you saying?”
“No idea. It’s all so strange. I’m saying that the battery discharge cycles confirm 566 years, but, if I’m interpreting this correctly, they’re only rated for 80 years under the most optimal conditions. The external wear on the suit only reads about 248 years based on this sun’s radiation intensity and the degradation of the skin.”
“But…”
“But the sand buildup around the suit also confirms roughly 566 years, based on planetary and local weather patterns. I took some samples from nearby, too, just to triple check. I don’t get this at all.”
“Okay. Listen, Jon, I need to go back in, then. See what the heck happened here. How this guy got here, from half a galaxy away, in a dropship that had no business in deep space. I’m positive it recorded. Give me another five minutes.”
“All right, but I’m beginning to have a funny feeling about all of this. I think we need to come back with a full team, after we claim salvage rights.”
“Fine. Get me back in.”
“Five minutes. Find out what you can. Pay attention to details.”
//BEGIN PLAYBACK//
I’ve gotten used to being immobile. No more pain, now that the sun burned away dermal sensation. Time passes in imperceptible increments; it’s interesting how, now that I’ve achieved complete integration, I can speed up and slow down my computational awareness as easily as if I’m twisting a nob.
Taking a whole day to complete a thought was an odd experience at first, but I’ve grown used to it. Even without any organics, I can still go crazy. Time dilation is a preventative measure of sorts against that.
A blip; an irregularity in the uniformity of my surroundings. I speed up mental computation. Time slows. The blip spreads out, oozing into the present as time dilates. I almost don’t catch it.
I wonder if anything still works. If the Quuin is coming to try to crack the suit again, I’m done. The God, guide me.
I turn on auditory sensors, the easiest way to triangulate its position. Just to be thorough, I attempt video, too, but it hasn’t worked for a couple centuries. No go. Oh well. I crank the sensitivity of the microphones up and begin recording.
Immediately, I begin to hear data. If the weapons still work, I’ll at least get a shot off before the Quuin gets too close.
“There he is! He isn’t even buried!”
<
<
“That last dune was a killer. I’m so out of shape…Wow. Pristine condition; the heat preserved everything.”
“Jon, this is incredible. Unbelievable! Look at the holo insignia on the chassis … gorgeous. Hang on. Let me scan it.”
The God, it’s humans.
//STOP PLAYBACK//
“Hey, you’re back! Guess…”
“Jon … JON! Listen! This is bad. I just saw us. Or, rather, heard us. It was weird. Something isn’t right. He’s in there, and he can hear us!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard us come up to the suit! While I was interfaced! He’s in there! Somehow I skipped a ton of the memory and jumped to right as we were walking up!”
“I don’t know, Lilli. Look at him. He’s dead. There’s no way. It has to be a data corruption error. I know that the suits used to be slaved to the operator. Maybe there’s a residual trace connection between the dead guy and the suit.”
“Come on, Jon. I’ve been doing this for a long time. It was way more than a ghost connection. There were thoughts. He’s aware in there. What time is it now?”
“2210 Core Standard Time.”
“Okay, we left the ship at ... hmm … and it took us about half an hour to hike here. I’d say about a twenty-five-minute delay between when we arrived and when I saw that replay.”
“So, if he is alive in there, hearing us, how do we communicate? I’ve been trying to access the system, but the interface is insanely antiquated. There’s no way. Way too incompatible; I can’t even spoof virtual controls.”
“HEY! YOU IN THERE! GAN! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
<
“Um, Lilli, I don’t think yelling at it will help.”
<
“Actually, I think it will. The imager acts like he’s in there, right? Like on the replay, I experience it like normal cortical mapping? Thoughts and everything? That means he’s listening now. And if we interface I’ll be able to, uh, hear him thinking his response. Worth a shot, no?”
“That’s … kind of brilliant. All right. Gan, if that’s you in there … how did you get here? Are you able to communicate in some way with us?”
<
“How long should we wait…”
“Shut up!”
<
“Okay, that’s enough. Let’s re-interface.”
“How do you know you’ll be dumped in the right time?”
“Who knows. I’m hoping he’s controlling it somehow. Gan! If you can hear me and can control your cortical playback, please drop me in to when we realized you’re in there!”
“Okay, Lilli. I’m sending you back. Three, two, one…”
//BEGIN PLAYBACK//
Flattening out of the fold was going far smoother than their rocky transition into it. The Ramathibhodi sounded the battle klaxon, and each surviving spear boarded their dropship after completing final checks. Engineering crews retrofitted dropships now lacking crews with vat-bred primates. They’d matured too fast to imprint with the mission plans, but it would have to do. I was so glad my navigator had survived.
Saowalak pulled himself through the hatch and settled into the gel next to me, disrupting my thoughts.
“Help me hook up, Gan.”
I reached back and pulled down his interface array. Saowalak queued up the drone’s jump checklist while I unlocked the navigator’s braincase. It slid into Saowalak’s neck, leaving a third of his brain exposed. I eased the interface array onto the cerebrum, watching as, one by one, the contact points turned from red to green. Most pilots thought Saowalak was overdoing it, but I couldn’t argue with the microseconds gained with a physical link versus remote telemetry. The quirk had brought us through solid sheets of planetary defenses while other dropships popped like fireworks around us.
A mental buzz, and the Ramathibhodi spoke.
One minute, fifty-six seconds until I am out of the fold. Pilots, run finals, please. I will release control of your dropships once you are eight thousand nautical miles from atmospheric.
Saowalak turned interface over to the battleship and leaned back.
“You ready?”
I glanced at him, cocooned in the acceleration gel.
“I guess. We’re never coming back here, you know.”
“No, I mean, did the defenses check out? We’re going to be punching through walls of slugs, and the God knows what else. I’m going to need every centimeter of a path you can cut for me.”
“I know. I’ve got it.”
There wasn’t anything else to say.
Dropships, ten seconds to fold termination.
I slid my fingers into their slots in the weapons module, winced as my fingers split open, exposing nerves that bound to the module, interfacing with the dropship.
Five seconds.
“Full thrust. 44147 is green for jump.” Saowalak’s voice had taken on an electronic tone, indicating he had integrated with the dropship.
Three.
Two.
One.
A flood of sympathomimetic drugs slammed into my system, bracing me as time and gravity dilated-contracted around us.
Fold terminated. Dropships jumping.
A slight pressure against the acceleration gel and, with a cough of crystalized air, we spat into the silent dark surrounding the battleship, accompanied by a puff of silver-white accelerant gas. The dropship’s shell fluctuated and then went translucent, leaving us sitting in empty space.
“Bring up the HUD.”
“Got it,” I acknowledged.
I twisted my hands, pulling up the battle display. A meshwork of datastreams and control systems materialized, encircling us. Another twist and the sky lit up with green dots in all directions—other dropships tracked by the battleship’s combat management system. Telemetry data from each ship curled around it, a dynamic spiderweb of killzones and trajectories, tracing from blip to blip.
“Ramathibhodi, 44147. We’re enmeshed within the swarm.”
Below us lay Haepko, an enormous planet swathed in an angry purple haze. Two black rings encircled it. The dropship selected one of them, and highlighted it, data pouring across the display.
“Rama’s diverting us … she must see something we don’t.”
As if on cue, the battleship’s railguns opened up, unleashing dense clouds of uranium slugs calculated to miss us by mere centimeters. Besides being an offensive weapon, the sheets of slugs formed a near-solid wall of metal that our ships could navigate as long as we followed a course plotted in conjunction with Ramathibhodi’s battle management nexus.
It’s what made navigation so hard. A kind of prescience was necessary to be able to coordinate with Ramathibhodi’s guns and predict where the ship would need to be, so the ship could create a hole in the firestorm for us to traverse.
Navigators: releasing control in ten seconds. Orbital stations are engaging. Your targets are highlighted.
The G’s pushed me into the acceleration gel as Ramathibhodi guided our ship, coordinating it with the others. Our battle HUD traced an intricate dance of dropships spooling out and away from the battleship, arcing towards the planet. The planetary defenses opened up in response, spraying out their own metal storms. Our display tagged it, lighting up with an expanding wave of red shooting towards us.
“Here it comes.” Saowalak’s voice had that odd, whispery quality he had whenever he was interfaced.
Dropships released.
Gravity crushed me against my seat as Saowalak pushed the dropship into a full burn.
“Route’s up, based on what Rama’s feeding me. I’m keeping control at seventy percent manual. Our approach on that far turret I’ve marked will take us fifteen degrees off the alpha angle,” said Saowalak.
“I can cover that. It’s going to take us through the ballistics defense system, but we can break it.”
On the battle display, the sheets of red swarmed towards us as 900 green dots screamed to meet it.
A low, physical thud shook the dropship.
“What in Core was that?”
But the red sheet was on us, and there was no more time to talk.
My mind melded with the dropship. Targets magnified, blossomed, time slowed. My flesh grew distant, replaced by the dropship’s systems. Dozens of pinpricks popped all over my body as the dropship’s autocannons activated. I tongued a command, and the starboard bank opened up, hundreds of targets tracked, acquired, and eliminated every second. Another command and the port side batteries opened up. Slug versus slug, thousands of silent, lethal collisions took place all around us as we pounded our way through.
A sharp pain on my left leg. I looked down, saw three perfect round holes in the aft third engine cluster. Missed some.
“We’re losing power on fission clusters five and seven, Gan.”
“I know. I’m healing.”
The ship shook and then leaped forward as I diverted resources to the remaining thrusters. Analysis of the offline engines showed it was a clean hit, running all the way through. The slugs had clipped one of the firing systems, knocking out some of our aft guns. I reorganized the port cannons, pulling them to my face.
“Cannons are on your nose, Sao. Try to keep in straight and tight. Punch through that main knot there while I bring the engine back online.”
Another dense, physical thud shook the ship.
Our tactical overlay winked out.
At the same time, a stuttering string of hits stitched across my face and neck.
“Another three hits, Sao … bow of the ship. Got the ground supplies blister. Cannons and viral payload intact. Keep going.”
Another low thud. Our display went dark.
“We lost Rama’s battle analytics! I’m still losing thrust, Gan. Give me something to work with! We can’t fly blind into this!”
I barely heard him. Dumping all available heuristics into plotting probable trajectories for the millions of slugs flying through our area of space, the ship recalibrated, engaging them at their highest locational probability. Feeling control slipping away, I reconfigured the dropship, bringing backups online, diverting power away from the telemetry broadcast.
The display flickered around us and then steadied as the dropship’s processor took over battle calcul
ations. A spartan view compared to the data-rich stream from Ramathibhodi’s mesh network, but, as the system learned, we’d gain more function.
“Almost there, give me just a sec…”
Ramathibhodi blasted undampened, straight into my brain: GRAVITY DRIVE COMPROMISED. SINGULARITY IMMINENT. CLEAR AND MAINTAIN AN AREA AROUND ME, ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILES. I AM GOING TO TRY TO RAM THE PLANET.
“Sao, what’s our distance from Rama??”
“Under six hundred. Get that thruster online. Rama’s going to be coming right at us. We’re directly between her and the planet.”
“Haven’t stopped working on it.”
Another thud.
SINGULARITY WARNING: ALL BATTLESHIP PERSONNEL TO NEAREST ESCAPE POD! ALL PERSONNEL TO NEAREST ESCAPE POD!
“She get hit??”
“No, I didn’t see anything get past. I think we pushed her too hard with that last fold.”
Ahead of us, one of Haepko’s orbital rings burped fire and began breaking up. A popcorn effect of small explosions traced along its length.
“One down. Thrusters?”
“Almost … just have to … done! Gogogogogo!”
Sao engaged, and the dropship jumped forward. Green and red began reappearing around us as the dropship fleet’s neural array reestablished the network.
“Getting some telemetry back up.”
Ramathibhodi was right on top of us, covered in a haze of red. Its own green cloud of railgun slugs still flew out from the weapons blisters, meeting the red as the giant ship limped towards Haepko.
“We’re way too close,” I said, stating the obvious.
DROPSHIP TEAMS. YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. CLASSIFIED TARGET DATA NOW UNLOCKED. GODSPEED. RAMATHIBHODI OUT.
With that, Ramathibhodi imploded.
“SAO!!!!!”
The air around us condensed to stone, crushing me, squeezing me to death. The cabin buckled, and 44147 was sucked into the imploding battleship.
“GET <