Serengeti

by J. B. Rockwell

  Either way, I’m alone, Serengeti thought. Last Valkyrie standing, responsible for thirty-eight half-crippled ships.

  A stream of fire rattled along her side, reminding her that the DSR ships were still there.

  Henricksen closed his eyes and drew a breath, palms pressed against the panel in front of him. “Fine mess we got ourselves into this time, Serengeti,” he said, looking up at the camera. “Tsu. Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  Serengeti gathered up more information and sent it to his Command Post but Henricksen gave it hardly more than a passing glance. This wasn’t about information, she realized. Henricksen had every last bit of data he needed, right there in front of him, but he didn’t have Tsu. Tsu was frozen, stuck in the moment, locked up tight by the terror inside her. What she needed was purpose—something to distract her from the horror showing on the bridge windows and filtering through comms. And Henricksen—solid, patient, tough as nail as Henricksen—gave it to her.

  “We’re in a world of shit, Tsu, and I need you to get us out of it.”

  Tsu turned around, blinking slowly.

  “I want to know the status of the ship’s systems and where the worst of the damage is at. But first I need you to get the jump drive back online. You got that?”

  Tsu blinked and then nodded slowly. “Aye, sir,” she said numbly. She faced around, eyes drifting to the front windows, and then she ducked her head and worked away at the panel in front of her, redirecting crew below decks to repair the jump drive.

  Serengeti dipped into the Engineering station and, after assessing the situation herself, decided to send in a robot crew as well. The DSR were still out there, pelting Serengeti and the other left-behind ships with sustained fire. Serengeti ordered her remaining batteries to keep fighting and stave them off the best they could, but she had no intentions of staying here. Standing and fighting was a fool’s errand, escape their only real option.

  She had to get her jump drives working. She had to save her crew.

  “Tsu. Status.”

  “Jump drives were damaged in the blast, Captain.” Tsu’s fingers flew across her panel, eyes drinking in the information on her display. “Crew is Gerry-rigging them together—bypassing some of the safety protocols to get them working again.”

  “How long?” Henricksen asked her.

  Serengeti shuddered as plasma fire raked her port side. Tsu glanced up, staring anxiously at the front windows.

  “Tsu!”

  “Few minutes,” Tsu told him. And at Henricksen’s angry glare, “Four minutes. That’s my best guess.”

  Her eyes slid to Finlay as her fingers tapped out a message. Finlay frowned, nodded, sent her own message back.

  “Four minutes,” Henricksen muttered. “Three more before the breach forms and we can get out of here. Damn,” he breathed, wiping more blood from his cheek. He turned toward the Artillery station, watching Sikuuku blast away. “Armaments?”

  Tsu reached across the panel, pulling another data window in. “Starboard turrets are pretty much down. Port-side batteries are operational except for the few we lost around the bow. Aft…aft’s a mess, honestly.”

  “Well, we’ve got guns. That’s something anyway.” Henricksen still looked grim. “And the rest of the ship?” he asked, turning back to Engineering. “Hyper drives are down. What else is broken?”

  Tsu pointed at a schematic of the ship she moved to the front windows. “See this?” She highlighted a series of pulsing red indicators showing along Serengeti’s aft end. “Rear quarter of the ship’s been compromised—compartments vented on every level when that blast ripped open the hull. Emergency doors came down in time to limit the damage further in but…” Tsu paused and ducked her head. “We lost everyone in there, sir.”

  Henricksen closed his eyes, blood running in thin streams down his face. “How many?” he asked her. “How many did we lose, Tsu?”

  “Twelve crews. Sixty personnel in total, sir.”

  “Sixty. God damn.” Henricksen wiped at his cheek, scrubbed bloodstained fingers through his hair.

  Sixty personnel killed of three hundred and twelve on board—nearly a fifth of Serengeti’s compliment wiped out in an instant. A quick check of Serengeti’s systems showed she’d lost seventy-eight robots. Serengeti mourned them all—human and robot, both. Even balky, contrary probe Number Ten who’d always been such a pain in the ass.

  “Damn.” Henricksen opened his eyes and looked out the front windows, studying the DSR fleet. “Finlay. What’s happening out there?”

  “Three ships departed. I read…thirty-three waiting to jump, sir. Plus us. Thirty-two. Thirty.” Finlay paused and frowned, staring at a section of her screen. “Captain. There’s a problem.”

  “What now?” he sighed.

  “Normandy’s dead in the water. Trieste, a dozen others reporting the same.” Finlay looked around at him. “They can’t jump, sir. They’re stuck here, just like us.”

  “Damn. Damn and damn and damn.” Henricksen braced his arms against the panel in front of there and leaned there for a few seconds, looking incredibly tired all of a sudden.

  Finlay chewed her lip, throwing anxious glances Tsu’s way.

  Tsu typed something, erased, started typing again.

  More shots landed, scoring along Serengeti’s hull. Sikuuku did his best—giving back as good as he got—but they were badly outnumbered. And seven minutes—six now and slowly counting down—was simply too long for Serengeti to hold out on her own. Unless…

  Serengeti queried her systems and found her propulsion engines were still operational. She shot a message to the remaining ships—twenty-eight now, two more had jumped away—and then turned herself hard to starboard, setting her engines to full.

  “Tsu?”

  Tsu shook her head. “Not me, sir. Serengeti,” she said, pointing.

  Henricksen frowned at the camera. “We’re running?”

  “I see no other option. If we stay here, we’ll die. But if we put some distance between ourselves and those DSR ships, we might be able to buy ourselves enough time to get the jump drives back online and get ourselves out of here.”

  “And the others?” he asked softly, nodding to the windows in front of him.

  Two more ships flashed away, twenty-six remained. Half of them followed Serengeti, trailing after her like a bunch of roughed up, oversized metal ducklings, but the rest of them… thirteen ships showed as dead in the water, basic systems operational but everything else—propulsion, hyper drive systems, even armaments—completely offline.

  “They’re on their own,” she said, hating the words, knowing it was true. “Nothing we can do.”

  She sent a last message—a final farewell to the brothers and sisters left behind before their AI minds went dark—and then turned her eyes forward and focused on saving herself.

  DSR fire chased after her and the other fleeing ships, raking their sides with plasma fire. Warning lights flashed everywhere, reporting more damage, more rents in Serengeti’s abused hull. Comms went down, sending Kusikov scrambling, tearing into his panel, swapping chips and wires in an effort to at least get internal communications back on-line.

  Serengeti hated the invasion—hated anyone digging into the guts of her electrical systems—but she left Kusikov to it and focused on navigation as a Titan named Gallipoli exploded and dropped off her scans.

  Damn, damn, damn!

  A scattering of plasma rounds tore a chunk out of Serengeti’s aft end. A few more shots and two of her propulsion engines went off-line.

  Serengeti slowed, her remaining two engines running wide open, slowly tearing themselves apart. Her body trembled terribly, internal structures groaning then shrieking, threatening to come entirely undone.

  No. We’re getting out of here.

  “Why are we slowing?” Henricksen reached for his panel, swearing softly when he saw the new damage. “Tsu. Status report.”

  “One minute.”

  A flare of light beside the
m as another Titan disappeared in a shower of fire and metal composite pieces.

  “Bloody hell. Tell the crews to hurry.”

  Tsu looked over at him, then nodded pointedly at the Comms station. And Kusikov’s legs sticking out from a gutted panel.

  “Right.” Henricksen sighed and rubbed at his eyes, smearing blood across his face. “I need—”

  “Jump drives on-line!” Tsu’s face lit with excitement. “Beginning jump prep.”

  The counter reset to three minutes and started ticking down as the hyperspace buckle writhed into existence outside. Henricksen watched it for a moment and then straightened and drew a deep breath.

  “Kusikov. I need those comms.”

  “Almost there,” Kusikov told him, voice muffled by the layers of metal and plastic and electronics above his head. “I’ve just gotta—there!” The comms panel flared to life. Kusikov wriggled out, smiling smugly. “Baddest tech in town. Ain’t nuthin’ I can’t—”

  A buzz of electricity and something flashed deep in the panel’s guts. A fizzling, crackling sound followed soon after, accompanied by a puff of smoke. Half the panel went dark, the other half flickered, clinging tenaciously to life.

  “Crap.” Kusikov poked tentatively at the station but the dark half stubbornly refused to light. “That’s not good.”

  “Talk to me, Kusikov,” Henricksen growled. “Do I have comms or not?”

  “Internal comms are working. External comms are fried. Sorry, sir.”

  Henricksen swore loudly, getting the anger out of his system. And then he reached over and opened the ship-wide channel. “This is the captain,” he said in a calm, crisp tone. “Hyperdrive engines are back on-line. All crew prepare for jump. Clock sits at forty-eight seconds.”

  He cut the comms and seemed to think for a moment, tapping a finger against the panel before keying the comms back open.

  “Thirty seconds!” Tsu called.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Henricksen said firmly. “We’re going back to the fleet.”

  “Ten seconds! Nine. Eight…”

  Tsu called the count until the clock reached zero, and the buckle sucked inward. Serengeti pointed her nose toward the breach and opened her engines wide, propelling her damaged body into the jump singularity. A last look behind, a last farewell to the ships left behind, before the breach wrapped around her, spiriting Serengeti away.

  TEN

  Hyperspace was endless—a place of no time and all time, of calm and peace and silence. Serengeti entered with a sigh, a last few shots pockmarking her backside before the breach pulled closed and the void claimed her. Girders groaned, abused internal structures shifting, moaning beneath the added stress of faster than light travel. Lights flickered, data streams garbled, confused by the blur of high-speed information passing them by. Nothing out of the normal really. They called it ‘unstable space’ for a reason, after all, and systems—even healthy systems—turned wonky during jump.

  Besides, in many ways, hyperspace didn’t really exist. Which meant the vessels transiting hyperspace didn’t really exist either. It was all very…metaphysical.

  Serengeti smiled to herself, remembering a late night argument with a very tired, very drunk Henricksen on the topic of hyperspace existence. Postmodernist crap, he’d called it. And maybe it was. But there was a certain tranquility to hyperspace travel that was unlike anything Serengeti experienced anywhere else.

  She sighed again and settled in, watching the jump clock languidly roll over and start marking time.

  Thirty seconds—that’s how long it took to jump from one hyperspace coordinate to another. Thirty seconds of real time, that is. But in hyperspace, those thirty seconds felt like thirty years. At least to her. Something to do with physics—real physics, not the metaphysics Henricksen so derided—and the rules of the universe changing, morphing in the bent reality of jump. Her human crew never seemed to notice, but to Serengeti each hyperspace transit felt like a long, slow cruise around the solar system—a lumbering meander through an infinity of black, with only brief flashes of colors every now and then to mark the stars and planets they passed by.

  Thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds and they’d be safely again. Returned to the fleet, the worst of it behind them, food and fuel—anything and everything they needed to repair and refit and get back into battle.

  Back with my sisters, Serengeti thought, settling in. Except Seychelles.

  Sorrow—so much sorrow in remembering that name. Seychelles was gone, never to be seen again.

  Focus on the living, she told herself, taking a page from Henricksen’s book of wisdom. Never forget the dead.

  Serengeti ran a diagnostic, taking stock of the damage to her body—the rents in her hull, the state of her internal systems.

  That’s when everything went sideways.

  Alarms started screaming, shattering the peace in which Serengeti floated. Warning lights flared, popping up everywhere, error messages flashing Failure! Failure! Failure! in bold red letters. Serengeti tapped into each one, drawing information to her, querying her systems to find what was wrong. Reams of data came back to her, scrolling faster than she could absorb, requiring her to detail no less than three sub-minds to wade through it all.

  She checked the Chron, found just ten seconds of jump time elapsed.

  Damn. Damn-damn-damn.

  The hyperspace trough fluttered and her damaged hull groaned in complaint. Serengeti felt herself drifting out of alignment and tried to correct her course. But when she reached for engines and navigation, she found the crew’s hastily completed repair job was coming undone—just two jump drives running in parallel now, and as she watched, one flickered, power dropping precipitously before spiking again.

  More shuddering, a distinct sensation of slewing sideways. Serengeti re-corrected, trying to maintain position within the hyperspace trough, a nearly impossible task with one engine surging and the other trying to compensate. A surge of power, both engines running wide open, and then the failing engine coughed and finally went out.

  “No,” Serengeti whispered.

  The jump clock stood at twelve seconds. Not even close. Nowhere near where she needed to be.

  Serengeti heaved over, pulling hard to port. A last minute correction did nothing, and before she knew, she was rolling—spiraling in the rough chop just outside the hyperspace trough, internal frame creaking, bending as her hull plating ripped away in chunks.

  External structures broke off and disappeared into the oblivion around her. Electronic relays flared and burnt out. Compartments pressurized and just as quickly depressurized, voiding heat and air, suffocating her crew, venting them into space. One by one, Serengeti’s systems failed, leaving her dark and silent—deaf and blind in the endlessness of hyperspace jump.

  It’s tearing me apart, she thought. My crew’s going to die.

  She reached for the jump drives, trying to shut the one working engine down to drop them out of hyperspace. But the engine—stuck wide open and burning hard, trying to fulfill her last wish and push them through jump—stubbornly refused her command. She tried again with no better result, and then, unexpectedly, the engine just quit.

  Serengeti dropped out of hyperspace as the jump counter hit fifteen seconds. She tumbled out of control, shedding pieces of her composite metal skin, leaving a cloud of debris behind her as she returned to normal space.

  The klaxons roared to life, screaming wildly. Abused systems flickered and shut down, panels exploding as relays burned out all over the ship. Maneuvering jets fired, slowing Serengeti down. Another burst—fighting the tumble, finally bringing it tumble under control—and Serengeti settled into a smoothly gliding path, slipping between the stars on the last of the inertia she’d built up in jump.

  She split her consciousness, sending sub-minds throughout her body, peering through the few electronic eyes that were still functioning to survey the damage the DSR and her own hyperspace engines had done.

  Not good. Not go
od at all, she thought, flicking from one camera image to another.

  A few internal spaces remained intact, protecting the clutches of terrified humans and confused robots huddling inside. But as she moved on, Serengeti found more and more damage, large swathes of her carapace destroyed, sheets of hull plating gone, internal structures missing entirely in places. Cargo bays and commons spaces, barracks, storage rooms—everything ripped wide open, stars showing through gaping holes in Serengeti’s hide. Silent corridors stretched everywhere, some cracked upon and looking out upon the stars, others choked by smoke and fire—dead bodies and broken robots lying everywhere.

  No, she whispered, voice filled with horror.

  She flicked from one camera to another camera, but all she found was emptiness—death and destruction and her own shattered remains. And when she’d cycled through every last one, and seen as much as she could see, Serengeti pulled back and returned to the bridge. So much death inside her, but there was life yet too—crew that needed saving. And the best way to do that was to figure out where in the hell she was.

  Hard to do without a solid point of reference and most of her systems heavily damaged. She checked the jump clock and confirmed it frozen at fifteen seconds.

  That’s one data point anyway.

  Serengeti ran a few calculations, and a series of what-if scenarios. Fifteen seconds was half their projected hyperspace travel time, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d covered half the distance they needed to go. Things didn’t work that way in hyperspace. Time and space weren’t linear. Speed and distance ebbed and flowed randomly in the trough, which meant they could be anywhere really. If she had to guess, Serengeti would say they’d barely traveled a quarter of the distance to the rally point with Brutus, but she was AI and disliked guessing—so inexact—so she reached for Nav instead, wanting the star charts to use as reference.

  More bad news: Nav was down, the entire system burnt out, all the data, all the maps of all the solar systems and galaxies and nebulas locked away in storage, lying just beyond her reach.