by D. Rus
This was a risky strategy, but we had to move up on the college rank table. Standard actions and keeping to the beaten tracks would never help us win the jack-pot and stand out from the average masses.
“Move up!” Murom said hoarsely next to me, leaning his back against the projectile shell and demanding that the AI activated the magnetic clasps of the charging drum.
“Five hundredths of an inch higher and two degrees more parallel to the normal line,” the pseudo-AI imperturbably adjusted the projectile’s position.
“Fuck you in your microcircuit chip…” Ara squirmed under the outrageous weight, serving as our freelance hoisting jack.
“Shit!” Oksana cried, feeling that after the movers’ final effort, the projectile pinned down her slowly regrowing hair. “Lift it up for a second!”
“Yeah, right,” the men dropped on the deck, exhausted.
We overstrained ourselves moving yet another projectile shell. The hassium turned out to be a lot heavier and uncomfortable to handle than americium. The isotope’s short life required additional screening and dividing all non-critical mass into clusters.
One of the more warm-hearted and cheerful warriors tossed Oksana a custom blade. Our homemade product department now had a decent production line, and we no longer had a critical shortage of knives.
“Cut it,” said the man. “Your hair will grow out soon, our regeneration rates could make anyone jealous. Arty is probably tired of taking your virginity every night. We’ve offered to help him so many times!”
The blond Artyom jumped to his feet in fury, intent on shutting up the vulgar fellow.
I stepped in, telling the joker where to get off: “Belay that! Cracking jokes again, Luke? Your tongue gets in your way? I’ll find a decent use for it. You’re on new moss combination testing duty, out of turn! And you, Artyom, sit down and don’t fret, or you’ll join Luke, to lovingly hold him by the shoulder while the wisecracker pukes.”
I then turned to the furious girl: “Cut it, Oksana,” I affirmed. “The clutches are locked. We won’t be able to move the projectile shell.”
So, I stretched the truth, but what choice did I have? Perhaps an asymmetric haircut would get the girl down from the clouds, and she would cease to perceive herself as the hottest chick in town? To be honest, her constant desire to dazzle all the men along with Lina’s painful jealousy were starting to make my life quite miserable.
Oksana tugged her hair for another minute, then started sawing the flyaway locks, choking back angry tears and casting challenging looks at us.
“Rise and shine!” I ordered to avoid further trouble. “Let’s haul the second to last projectile shell! By the way, where’s Macarius? I remember him swearing that he could assemble a transportation cart.”
Eight hours and three injured soldiers later, we had finally crammed the last projectile shell in its armored slot. The latches clanked loudly, and the alarm gave a triumphant bark, driving us delicate humans away from the mechanism’s moving parts.
In an instant, the twenty-ton drum disappeared inside the bottomless belly of the charging machine. We exchanged impatient glances, shifting our eyes from each other to our logs and expecting pleasant chiming that signaled points being added to our RCs. We also hoped to receive an additional comet on our chevrons. A unique mission and twelve hours of Stakhanovite effort is no joke.
A sound did come, but it wasn’t chiming. The ship jerked so sharply that the deck flew out from under us for an instant. Then, it slammed into our feet with such force that it broke the bones in our soles.
My wonder boots absorbed the impact. But three other boys were less lucky. They fell on the deck as if cut down, their cries of pain and cursing filling the hall.
A myriad of messages flickered on my interface, but I had no time for them. The half-dead cruiser’s thrusters activated, turning the ship towards an unknown destination, then went off with a bang, firing two main caliber shots.
The deck jerked again. The recoil of the projectiles restrained the ship like tight reins a swift horse. However, if expected, this recoil was no more shocking than jumping down from a height of three feet. You could break your legs, but it wasn’t difficult. The most important thing was to jump like you normally would, without trying to land on your heels, or the balls of your feet, or whatever.
Suddenly, the module’s communication loudspeakers came to life. A hoarse, weary voice filled with joy cried desperately: “Casemate two! There’s a backup fire control center here! Whoever you are, I need one more projectile shell on the lifter! Come on, my dear friends, you can do it! There’s an almost completely regenerated heavy cargo carrier of the technosentients abeam. Come on, comrades! Ten more projectile shells, and I’ll blow it off the orbit. I’ve been watching that bastard for seven years now through my visor. Let me at least die with company.”
The AI, receiving new instructions, beeped in alarm and opened yet another projectile shell cell without orders. Murom raced to the cell, jumping over the wounded writhing on the deck. Wheezing under the strain, Lina was already dragging the hoisting tackles. The logistics unit girls quickly grabbed the heavy rollers’ bars. They were nearly tearing out their fingernails in a hurry to help the unknown gunner. He was full of hope and faith. And, most importantly, although he had an accent and used confusing words, he spoke the great and mighty Russian language.
I became stone-faced. We’re not abandoning one of our own!
I punched an order into the group’s public chat: “All hands free from high-priority tasks, head to Casemate two; help loading shells needed.”
I then activated the icon with the image of a sad child with the eyes of an old man. That was the avatar that the AI had chosen for itself. “AI!” I cried, “Get the reserve fire control center on the line!”
The AI spoke with a sorrow it could not possibly have felt: “Missing connection link. The FCC activated alternative wire circuits. I have no access to them. There's a three percent chance that the center's systems can only receive signals, not send them. Should I continue executing the order?”
“Affirmative!”
“Ready to transmit over the emergency and public channels.”
Waving my hands and directing the group crowded inside the chamber, I dictated a message: “FCC, Casemate two here! We’re ready to supply firing units. Until further instructions, we will provide single projectile shells according to the last order. Loading cycle…” I stopped short for a second, then bitterly said, “At least two hours. We’re working manually.”
The heavy footsteps behind me made me turn around. The quarantine droid was struggling to squeeze through the gateway. The droid had closed the PSH and was now mobile again.
Macarius followed it proudly. His eyes shone with triumph; the promised transportation cart he had assembled was beyond praise.
The droid surveyed its surroundings, assessing the work front, then shook its arms and reported: “Ready to speed up the loading cycle by a factor of a hundred. Warning: in accelerated mode, I can work no longer than an hour given my accumulated energy.”
I broke into an involuntary smile. Barely refraining from smothering the droid’s dirty armor with kisses, I added to the message: “FCC, Casemate two here. Correction: one projectile shell every one and a half minute.”
Murom intruded the channel: “Kick their asses for Sevastopol! Waste them, bro!”
No answer followed. Perhaps the gunner had simply spent the last bits of the archaic personal communicator’s power. Or perhaps he was taken under return fire by the technosentients.
The silence motivated the boys. “Grab, lift!” they cried.
Now, three independent groups stubborn as ants dragged the projectile shells to the loading mechanism. Compared to the quarantine bot, our efforts were laughable, but none of us wanted to just sit around.
Everyone stopped when the droid placed the first projectile shell on the lifter's sliding carriage, wondering if the shell would arrive at the proper
destination.
The silent mechanism finally gave a rapacious noise. The transuranic projectile shell disappeared in the breech block. In a fraction of a second, it traveled to the zero mark of the mile-long acceleration tunnel.
“Fire!” a morbidly thin man cried hoarsely with joy. He was dressed in a worn-out yet clean uniform of an RE fleet gunner.
Over five years ago, he had awakened in a permanently sealed reserve deckhouse. His stasis capsule had done everything in its power and loyally awaited a rescue team while preserving the man in time. Due to the partial damage of the memory modules, the system errors snowballed. The capsule would restart, received software updates from the built-in backup, but red error messages kept piling up in the system logs.
At some point, the capsule estimated that the next restart could be fatal because the boot-up sector crystals had also deteriorated. And so, the system awoke Marat’s last surviving crew member.
Odd as it may seem, the man facing death inside the isolated deckhouse survived. He had received superb training in Stellar Ryazan – long, comprehensive, and imaginative training. He licked drops of condensation off the walls, then built his own little version of the Tear Fountain. He raised a slug colony whose members multiplied abnormally fast to his luck.
He crossbred and vaccinated mosses until he had an incredibly fertile albeit carnivorous species. He could now sleep no more than two hours in a row, else his dietary supplement could very likely eat him.
The man watched outer space very closely for a long time. With hopeless hatred, he looked on as the self-repair systems restored the broken ships of the technosentients, the seeds of death that were about to give rise to a new wing of the Hive.
Time and again, he would find the black, ribbed bodies through his aiming grid and powerlessly pull the sensor trigger. But no miracle happened; the counter of the ship’s various types of ammo displayed a series of desolate zeroes. But one day… one day, everything changed.
The gods of space took pity on him, awakening him at the start of the third cycle of his 24-hour-long sleep. The almost-forgotten buzzer of the loading device emitted a combination of signals the gunner knew by heart: a triple Alpha signal and a triple Tango signal. It meant that three shield-piercing, americium sharp-nosed projectiles and three fougasses of unstable hassium had been placed on the suddenly-recovered drum.
The gunner leapt off his bed. Reflexively tearing off the moss stems reaching for him, he ran to the pristinely clean control panel.
A second signal came, confirming that this was not just another dream, but reality.
The gunner did everything mechanically. He had thought this through to the last detail long ago and learned the enemy ships’ orbits by heart. His only regret was that the torpedo-boat spacecraft carrier with the damaged engines was currently on the other side of the planet. The carrier was always the top-priority target for Marat which had been put in the battleship formation out of a dire need.
Starting the control panel and running the express test of readiness took five seconds. Then, a minute to pump energy into the bottomless reactors of the acceleration tunnel.
The target designation systems had already located the huge sluggish cargo-carrier of the technosentients. Work was in full swing around the ship. For the entire last year, drones had been dragging to the carrier all the broken steel within their reach.
The first shot was a ranging one. The optical range finders had been destroyed during that horrible battle a while back. Only two unmanned scout ships were responsive, and each sent the FCS completely different numbers.
For outer space, it was a small error; a difference of 100 miles. And although the cargo-carrier was huge, almost four miles in diameter, the gunner had little hope of hitting it given such inaccuracies.
Another shot. A miss, of course. But the fire control system instantly made the necessary adjustments and recommended to “shoot to kill from both barrels.”
The technosentients were already responding to the threat. The cargo-carrier wrapped itself in petal-shaped force-field segments. The empire knew not of this technology; humans had AM-shields of a different construction. In any case, two projectile shells of Marat’s main caliber could easily break through this type of defense.
Boom-boom!!! The inertial impulse of the double shot made Marat shudder. The gunner listened in alarm to the hull’s muffled creaking. Marat’s primary structure was damaged, and the recoil could easily make the ship fall apart.
The three-ton projectiles traveling at a speed of 1,250 miles per second had enough kinetic energy to destroy two thirds of the enemy ship’s shield.
Given standard space battle conditions, when the projectiles’ traveling time equals roughly 30 seconds, and when the target is actively maneuvering in all directions while also creating obstructions and being engaged in counterbattery fire, hitting the same spot twice is unlikely.
Now, however, it was very likely, given the pathetically short firing distance of 4,300 miles and a target that stayed still, its anti-spacecraft defense systems damaged. The gunner had much choice which part to shoot: the wide-open flight deck, or the vulnerable underbelly, where the projectile shell would burst through the bulkheads and eventually reach the cargo-carrier’s armored heart.
The two sharp-nosed projectiles broke through the shield over the external station hangars covered with clusters of immediate defense drones. The most urgent objective was to deal with the threat to Marat.
Once inside the enemy ship, the nuclear hassium fougasses swelled up like balloons, becoming over 300 feet in diameter. A buzzer went off, signaling depleted projectile supply and tearing the gunner out of his battle trance.
Casting a furious glance at the firing unit counter, he stared at the scattered lights on his panel, and instantly it dawned on him. He slammed his fist into the “last chance connection” button, activating the reserve wire communication channels that connected Marat’s main units. Triple duplication was a law in the RE fleet.
“Casemate two! There’s a backup fire control center here!” he cried. “Whoever you are, I need one more projectile shell on the lifter!”
Chapter Fourteen
Kaboom! The deck jerked again, absorbing the impact of the projectile leaving the acceleration tunnel.
Each of us heard the ringing of two accounts this time: the first was our Fifth Rome account and the second was our Russian Empire Space Force military personnel account which had opened for us for the first time.
Ding! My Fifth Rome record card received a fair share of virtual prizes: “Participation in space battle. Secondary support role in the destruction of a sixth rank enemy ship. Points received: +41.”
“Leading interservice team in battle. Coordinating with allied subdivision. Using off-design weapon systems. Commander points received: 239.”
“Status alert: attained required quantity of points for achievement of new rank: Sergeant. Communicating with low-order stream of the AI Hannibal. Confirmation received, new rank approved.”
“Congratulations on your new patch! Many annulets to you, Sergeant!”
I wiped the sweat off my brow and grinned; this was my second promotion during a six-hour-long battle. No, not a battle, a slaughter; a wounded wolf awakened in the middle of a sheep herd, quickly licked his wounds clean, and started killing, and killing, and killing…
I heard triumphant chiming as my implant continued: “Target destroyed: technosentient gun boat, complexity index: 48 percent. Assessed value: 4.419.811 energy rubles. Crew bonus for destruction: 1 percent. Sergeant coefficient: 1.05. Personal share less taxes and compulsory payments: 542 ER. Current account balance: 12.891 ER.”
These prizes were the result of changing our subdivision’s jurisdiction. We weren’t just Fifth Rome cadets anymore, but mobilized Russian Empire regular military staff.
Boy, did this make the group happy. Our eyes burned. We proudly straightened our shoulders and kept glancing at our interfaces; an emblem consisting of a g
olden eagle trampling constellations now shone in one of the corners of each interface.
The gunner’s hurried, hoarse voice boomed across the chamber’s loudspeakers again: “Belay projectile shells; get me the segmental ones! Hurry, don’t stand there like a buncha capsule-fuckers! The mothership will leave the planet’s shadow any second now. It has more drones than a corncob has seeds; three layers of them!”
Murom’s division swore, carefully setting down the projectile shell they had already carried halfway. They shouldn’t have complained; the segmented projectiles were capable of splitting up into one and a half million tungsten pins tied to the solar system. The enemy mosquito fleet were a lot closer than the projectile shells. This was logical, as even milliseconds mattered in close-range combat.
I heard the quarantine bot’s heavy tread as he passed us by. He was our record-setter in work productivity, having done most of the dragging. The drone was still capable of working; for the sake of the common cause, the module’s AI had allowed him to take power and equipment from the local servos.
The Hive was functional and tolerated no delays. The heavily damaged technology remained on its orbit around the planet when it realized it had a tiny chance to survive and turn into a new Wing.
Overall, the technosentients did have a chance. In one or two centuries, they would have mastered the millions of tons of scrap metal drifting all over the star system. One more century, and their first ore ships would approach the asteroid belt, plotting force field traps around the star. One more millennium, and a renewed Hive blooming with its own technical solutions and designs would take wing, setting out with a great mission – to free the Universe from the biological intelligence polluting it.
But the technosentients didn’t know that the graveyard of steel housing the warmbloods’ fleet would come to life, sending forth a crumpled raider which bore an imperial flag. Like the technosentients’ greatest terror, the echo of the Big Bang, Marat slowly and methodically destroyed everything within its main caliber weapons’ firing range. This range was quite large.