by Isaac Hooke
“Oh I know,” Mark said. “You’re always bragging about your latest digital conquests. What was it you said about your last AI girlfriend? Oh yeah, that you programmed her difficulty level well past nightmare mode.”
“She was a tough one,” Cranston admitted.
“But she wasn’t even real,” Gavin said. “The very fact that you programmed her should tell you that.”
“I know,” Cranston said. “But she’s as real as any other AI. As real as your Accomps. In fact, she uses the same partition as my Accomp, to ensure human complexity.”
Gavin shrugged. “I’d rather my fembots weren’t complex. They’re just something for me to utilize when I need to let off a little steam. If you catch my drift...”
Sheila sniffed. “You would denigrate the female form to the realm of objects.”
Gavin gave her an indifferent look. “You do the same. Last time we were in your VR environment, you were surrounded by loincloth-wearing, oiled cabana boys answering to your every beck and call.”
“But that’s different,” Sheila said. “Women have been objects for so long to men, it’s about time we get a chance to make men into our objects.”
Gavin chuckled. “Okay. But you know, you don’t actually have a gender now, right? It’s all in your mind. We’re sexless machines now, baby girl.”
Sheila stiffened. “Don’t call me baby girl.”
Gavin shrugged again, and took a long sip of beer. “Anyway, I agree with Cranston. If Mark and Medeia have something going on, I’m not going to hold it against them. But companionship is overrated, you ask me. Give a man a good fembot, with a hole he can fool around in now and then, and he’ll be happy for life.”
“Except you’re not a man,” Sheila said.
“I’ll try not to take that as an insult,” Gavin said.
“But by your own admission, you’re a sexless machine,” Sheila said.
“None of us are men and women anymore,” Jain interrupted. “We’re Mind Refurbs. More than men and women. Much more.”
Sheila nodded. “We are. And we always will be. There are drawbacks, but the benefits outweigh them all, in my opinion. I don’t miss being human. Not at all. It would be nice to feel safe again, though. Not like the entire universe is trying to hunt us down.”
“Yeah, about that.” Mark generated another hot dog, this one covered in relish, ketchup and onions. “So, we have no chance of beating more than nineteen alien ships, according to the simulation. Well, all I can say is, it’s a good thing we ran from the Mimic fleet. You led us well once again, Jain.”
“Thank you,” Jain said.
Mark nodded, and took a big bite out of the hot dog.
“You’re the only one who feels good about running,” Gavin said. “Myself, I would have preferred to stay and fight.”
Mark gave him an incredulous look. “And die?”
“I think we could have taken them,” Gavin said.
“But we lost in the simulations every time, when we faced the same number of foes,” Mark said.
“That’s because it was the simulation,” Gavin said. “It’s different in real life. When we know we can actually die. We’ll try a helluva lot harder.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Cranston said. “We’ve been trying pretty hard back in the training sessions.”
“But it’s still not the same,” Gavin said. “Especially considering that our simulated enemy is piloted by one of our own AIs, rather than an alien intellect.”
“That’s definitely a factor,” Cranston admitted. “Though to Xander’s credit, he’s been trying to think like an alien.”
“Really?” Gavin said. “And how is that even possible? The Accomp has no idea how a Mimic commander thinks. None of our AIs do. We’re not even sure if we’ve witnessed all of their weaponry yet. They might have black hole generators, too, or something worse.”
“Hopefully, we won’t ever find out,” Sheila said.
“Oh, but we will,” Gavin said. “You’re the one who’s so eager to jump back into human territory. What if it’s overrun with those Mimic aliens?”
“I hope not,” Sheila said. “That would be the suckiest thing ever.”
“Don’t you know it,” Gavin said. He glanced at Jain. “What do you think?”
Jain had only been partly listening. His mind had drifted back to the battle, and their losses.
“What do I think?” Jain asked.
“Uh huh,” Gavin replied.
“I still can’t believe I lost six ships,” Jain said. “We’re down to eighteen.”
Medeia put down her mug and wiped her lips. “Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t your fault. And at least none of those ships contained Mind Refurbs.”
“Yes,” Jain said. “The only redeeming factor.”
“We never faced that many enemies before,” Sheila chimed in, obviously trying to console him.
“Maybe,” Jain said. “But we did train in VR.”
“Never against so many, though,” Sheila said. “Until recently. Because we knew we’d be overwhelmed. Just as we were. You did all you could out there. You pulled us through.”
Jain nodded. “I was thinking... if any of you want to take over, maybe you should.” He glanced at Gavin hopefully. “You always wanted to lead us.”
Gavin set down his empty beer glass. “I used to think I did. And if you’d offered me the role a month ago, or even a week ago, I would have accepted. But after meeting this latest alien fleet, and thinking on it... I actually kind of enjoy the blamelessness that comes with my current position.” He materialized more beer in his mug. “You have your work cut out for you. I don’t envy you in the least.” He took another long sip.
Jain ran his gaze across the others. “No one else wants this?”
None of the Void Warriors volunteered.
Jain sighed. “All right. I’ll do my best to lead you through whatever comes. And I still intend to ask for votes, when it comes to important decisions. Like whether or not we should actually return to human space.”
“I guess that depends on what the probes return, once we have the rift online,” Medeia said.
“And so it does,” Jain agreed.
9
The repair swarms finished mending the damage to the Daktor in five days as promised.
Jain told Sheila to open a rift to the system coordinates that Maxwell had sent them, and he launched a probe toward it before the tear in spacetime formed. The probe began decelerating before it arrived at the rift site—the goal was for the device to spend the least amount of time in the destination system as possible. He wasn’t worried about the probe being destroyed—though rifts always opened in fixed locations once calculated, those locations varied from rift ship to rift ship, and were essentially random, so no one would be expecting the probe to appear where it did—but that said, Jain didn’t want any inhabitants in the system to get a proper fix on the heat signature, which would allow them to ID the probe as of human make.
The rift opened, and the probe passed through an instant later; the timing had been just right, and the probe achieved zero velocity in the target system and reversed course, passing back into the Granalus system almost a split second after its arrival, having collected all the necessary light and thermal data.
“Close the rift,” Jain ordered.
The Daktor shut down its beams, and the circular ring of gases that formed the rift collapsed in upon itself.
“So, Xander, what did we find?” Jain said. “Is there an ambush awaiting beyond? Or a colony?”
“Actually, neither,” Xander said. “As far as I can tell, the system is completely empty. There is no evidence of alien occupation. Nor any indication of human habitation. It’s just a typical main sequence star, class K spectrum, with a series of ordinary planets orbiting: a mix of gas giants and terrestrials. No asteroid belt or extensive ring systems.”
“The Mimics must be there somewhere,” Cranston said. “Hiding behind one of
the gas giants. Or the sun, maybe. With inertialess drives, you can get very close to gravity wells.”
“That’s one scenario we definitely want to avoid,” Medeia said. “Staging an attack against these bastards in a powerful gravity well. While we were struggling with huge Delta V costs, trying to achieve escape velocity, they’d come calmly coasting in for the attack.”
“Why do you think I always launch the black holes behind our trajectory?” Mark said. “Though don’t get me wrong, a well-placed black hole in our path can work wonders, too, if we’re looking for a quick speed boost.”
“Why didn’t you do that last time?” Sheila asked.
“Too busy trying to keep our enemy occupied,” Mark replied.
“I have to agree with Cranston,” Jain said. “Mimics are definitely waiting somewhere inside that system. So then, we were going to send a probe to human space next. Any candidates?”
“How about Alpha Centauri?” Sheila said. “According to my database, there’s a large Canadian colony there.”
“Alpha Centauri it is,” Jain said.
They were able to bring the Daktor online after the first four hours that first day, while the repairs to the gate and other systems were ongoing, and as such, the autonomous core had been busy performing calculations to different potential Earth colonies, Alpha Centauri among them.
That said, they still had to wait twelve hours for the gate generator to recharge via the onboard fusion reactor.
They spent much of that time training in the war simulator, practicing against a fleet of Mimic warships in a gas giant environment.
“Last time I bring up fighting in a gas giant again,” Medeia commented when Jain finally shut down the simulation.
“Hey, it was a good idea,” Jain said.
“Not really,” Medeia told him. “All we learned was that I was right. If we fight near a gas giant, we lose.”
At the twelve hour mark, Jain logged back into the virtual bridge. “Sheila, create the rift to Alpha Centauri. Xander, launch a probe. Time it so that it arrives just as the rift opens; use the usual in-out tactic of decelerating before entry so that the probe remains in Alpha Centauri for the least amount of time possible.”
Like before, the rift opened, the probe passed inside and returned an instant later.
“Seal the rift,” Jain ordered. He turned toward Xander. “So? What are you seeing in the triple star system?”
“Hmm, this isn’t good,” Xander said.
“What do you see?” Jain repeated.
“There’s a lot of debris in orbit of Alpha Centauri V,” Xander said. “That’s the colony world. And the colony itself is black. There should be thermals coming from the surface, but I get nothing. I fear it suffered the same fate as the Ablativus colony.”
“The aliens razed it?” Sheila said. “And deployed bioweapons to terraform the surface?”
“While I can’t confirm either way, that seems the most likely result,” Xander said.
“This isn’t good,” Gavin said. “Not good at all. What if every colony is like this? What if Earth itself has been destroyed? We should have never left ten years ago.”
“You’ve always been the fiercest advocate of never returning,” Cranston said. “And never helping. What’s changed?”
Gavin shook his head. “I always figured they’d be able to fend for themselves. That they’d create an army of Mind Refurbs to protect them. I never wanted this. Never wanted humanity to become extinct. If that’s happened... it feels like a part of myself has been killed off forever. Because like it or not, the humans are my creators, if not my ancestors.”
“All right, time to shut it down,” Jain said. “We check the next human colony in another twelve hours.”
And so it went, with the team waiting twelve hours, creating a rift to the next colony world—as documented by their cloud databases—and sending in a probe. Always, the device returned only orbital debris and seemingly dead colony worlds.
“Why don’t we check Earth system?” Medeia asked.
Jain shook his head. “Not yet.” He didn’t want to tell her, but he was dreading sending a probe to Earth. He couldn’t shake the feeling that their home planet, a planet they had never seen, was destroyed.
“Let’s check some of the Eastern Galactic Front systems,” Jain said. Those systems all contained military bases, and were meant to stave off the threat from the Link, who assaulted those systems once every couple of years.
When the Daktor was ready to create the next rift, Jain had Sheila open it to the first eastern front system. When the probe returned, she closed the gate.
“Interesting,” Xander said.
“What now?” Jain asked.
“There are vessels in the system,” Xander replied. “But they match up with Link makes and models.”
“So the link have overrun our eastern front,” Medeia said.
“One of the systems on our eastern front...” Jain said. “We’ll see how many have fallen soon enough. There are six more.”
Over the next seventy-two hours, Jain opened up rifts to the remaining six front systems. The first five were all overrun by Link ships.
“So it’s finally happened,” Cranston said. “Humanity has fallen. We had to fight a war on two fronts... the Link on one side, and the Mimics on the other.”
Jain was beginning to fear that Cranston was right. “We still have one more front system to check.”
“What’s the point?” Cranston said. “It’s obvious by now what has happened. The Mimics have destroyed humanity, for no reason whatsoever.”
“Oh I’m sure they have a reason, we just don’t know what it is,” Medeia said.
“Yeah, well, they’ve probably been systematically working their way from system to system, tracking down the last vestiges of humanity,” Cranston said. “I have a hunch that we’re the last ones left. Once they’ve eliminated us, their work is done.”
“They won’t eliminate us,” Jain said. “Now we’re going to check the final eastern front system.”
Jain had Xander launch the probe when the rift was ready, and he was relieved when the Accomp reported vessels of human make.
He slumped in his seat, all the tension he had felt up until that moment seeping out. “All right. Some of us have survived, at least. How many did you spot?”
“Fifty two vessels in total,” Xander said. “All warships, mostly Dominators and Piranhas. They were congregated around the central military base, located on the fifth planet in orbit around the twin suns, a Mars equivalent.”
“Congregated,” Medeia said. “As if they’re expecting an attack.”
“From the Link, or the Mimics?” Mark asked.
“Maybe both,” Gavin said.
“Are we going to offer them assistance?” Cranston asked.
“Wait, can we truly be certain these are human ships?” Mark asked. “And not Mimic vessels disguising their thermals and visuals to fool any remaining humans or Mind Refurbs such as ourselves? Or perhaps to fool the Link into believing their vessels are weaker human models…”
“We can’t be sure, no,” Jain said. “So if we choose to help them, we’ll have to maintain our hundred thousand kilometer rule until we can prove otherwise.” Jain paused. “But before we commit, and make that choice, there are other systems we will still need to check. There might be worlds and colonies still out there, and in greater need of our help. Not that we’ll be able to make much of a difference. But at least we’ll know we tried.”
“I’m sure every ship will count at this point,” Cranston said.
Gavin nodded. “Even though I feel this isn’t my fight, I can’t abandon humanity… nor my brother and sister Mind Refurbs.”
“None of us can,” Jain agreed. “Sheila, we still have a few more places to check with our probe. We’ll return to the inner systems. We’ll open a rift to the Earth system first, and move our way outward to the colonies we haven’t visited yet.”
They spe
nt the next few days checking the different systems. Earth was intact, thankfully, and like the system on the eastern front, it had over fifty vessels gathered in orbit, alongside heavily-armed defense platforms. The feeling of dread he had felt was all for nothing. He had convinced himself the planet was destroyed, for no reason, except perhaps to worry himself.
Despite sending the probe to seven more systems, the probe detected intact colonies in only two of them, with thirty and eighty warships in orbit respectively. The remaining systems contained only debris, and the wreckages of starships.
“How disheartening,” Sheila said. “There are so few human ships and bases left.”
“Maybe the rest are hiding somewhere,” Gavin said.
“We can only hope,” Sheila said. “But somehow, I doubt it. According to our database, there should be over a thousand ships that are part of the combined Earth space navies. And now there are only one hundred and sixty-two, not counting us.”
“Remember, we’re not truly certain these are even human ships,” Mark said.
“No,” Jain said. “But we’re going to offer our help in any case. So. It looks like we have a choice. We can offer to help Earth, one of the two colonies, or the defenders along the eastern front.”
The Void Warriors exchanged glances.
“It seems obvious that Earth should be our first choice,” Gavin said.
“I agree,” Cranston chimed in.
Jain studied them. “How about this: we contact Earth, and ask them where we are needed most. Assuming they’ll take us back, which isn’t guaranteed either way.”
“Let’s do it,” Medeia said.
10
Clad in his pressurized suit, Jain crouched next to a thick bole. Heavy lianas hung down, like big cables, shielding him from view of the tentacled machines that rolled past.
He and his platoon mates were hidden amid the alien trees and foliage that lined the jungle trail. They had finally made it home, after that initial mission, only to be sent back, but this time as part of a larger army. Their mission now was to ambush a crucial supply line. These machines were part of the extensive logistics infrastructure the aliens had set up. The Brass labelled the aliens Xenon 626 after the star their planet orbited. And these tentacled machines, whose upper bodies were crafted in the image of the aliens, while the lower bodies were like human tanks, were called Crudes.