“Initiating active scans.” Serengeti reached for systems, sending a deluge of muons and other elementary particles into the emptiness around them.
“Short range is coming up empty,” a woman’s crisp voice said.
That was Finlay at the Scan station—late to the party and trying to make up for it. She was a tiny thing, even for a human. Petite and red-headed with a spray of freckles across her cheeks and nose, bright—though not the genius Kusikov claimed to be, nor a tenth as annoying—eager and just the tiniest bit naive.
Serengeti liked her. Liked her a lot. In fact, she liked most of the crew she’d been given this time around. Even Kusikov when he wasn’t being a smart-ass know-it-all. Not as many veterans on board as there once were, but she enjoyed this crew’s youthful exuberance. Their idealistic approach to a war that had raged for half a century and more.
A little too idealistic sometimes, Serengeti admitted, but Henricksen kept them grounded. Henricksen and Sikuuku, the handful of other veterans seed throughout the ship. They’d seen it all—the worst war had to offer—and adapted. Overcame. Kept on fighting.
Serengeti respected that, and them. Youthful exuberance was one thing. Youthful exuberance unfettered could get them all killed.
She let the scans run, processed the data they returned and then waited, holding her tongue, letting Finlay work through the information in her slow, methodical way.
Finlay cycled her panel, swapping one data screen for another. “Long range scan’s picking something up.”
Good girl.
“What?” Henricksen demanded. “What’s out there?”
“Hard to tell.” Finlay frowned in confusion, shaking her head. “Few pings, that’s it.” She tapped at the panel in front of her, scrolling through the sensors’ data streams one after the other. Lot of information there. Hard for a human mind—even a bright one like Finlay’s—to make sense of it all. “Dammit.” Finlay swiped at the panel in frustration, starting over from the beginning.
Serengeti parsed a few strings, ran a quick correlation and pushed the results to the Scan station to help Finlay out. She’d get it eventually, but Serengeti needed to move this along. An AI only had so much patience for the slowing processing of a human mind, after all.
Finlay pulled the new data over to her central screen and leaned close, brow furrowed as her eyes devoured the information. “Looks like…metal? Some kind of alloy? Or composite, maybe.” A few more taps at her screen, another shake of her head. “Whatever’s out there, it’s not a ship.”
“At least not anymore,” Henricksen said softly. Far too softly for Finlay or the rest of the bridge crew to hear, just loud enough for Serengeti’s microphones to pick his words up. He raised his eyes to the camera in front of him, mounted high up on the wall. “Could’ve been, once upon a time.”
He stared into the camera’s lens a second or two and then flicked his eyes back to the front windows, looking out at the stars.
Serengeti looked with him, studying the emptiness outside with one fraction of her consciousness while the bulk of her processing power sifted through the wealth of data her systems collected.
Definitely metal out there. Metal and composite both. But whether it was the remains of a ship or not…
Hard to tell. Finlay’s right in that.
Serengeti amped up the sensors, reaching farther out with her scans, stretching to the very edge of her systems’ range to suck in more data.
Information poured in, but it didn’t really offer anything more than what Finlay had already reported. There wasn’t much out there—that’s just about all the scan data said.
But those pings…
Distant as they were, scattered as they were, those pings merited further investigation.
“Launching probes,” Serengeti said, voice soft and serene, infinitely confident.
Flares erupted along her port and starboard sides, rounded metallic shapes shooting off into space, ion drives glowing cobalt blue in the darkness.
“Finlay. Bring the probes’ cameras up on the main screen,” Henricksen ordered.
Finlay stared at the console a moment, lips pressed tight, looking like she’d eaten a lemon.
“Finlay!”
“Aye, sir.” Finlay threw an irritated look at the closest camera as she set her hands on the panels in front of her. She was mad—that was clear—and her fingers fairly flew across the Scan station as she called up the feeds from the twelve probes Serengeti had sent out. A few seconds of processing and she shunted the video to the front windows—thick panes stretching from the floor to ceiling, curving with the outside wall of the bridge—so the rest of the command crew could see.
Odd, those windows, and that state of the art vessels like Serengeti, still came equipped with them. Once upon a time, those reinforced panes were necessary, back in the days when ships’ scans were limited and line of sight still mattered. But now…modern ships’ systems provided far more information than human eyes could ever discern.
And yet human designers clung to the idea of windows anyway, inserting them into every new ship that rolled off the line. Serengeti asked Henricksen about that once, wondering why humans insisted on keeping such a silly, useless thing. Henricksen just shrugged and said they liked them. That they liked to look through them at the stars…
An error message appeared, flashing until Serengeti gave it her attention. She spotted the problem right away and started to fix it.
Finlay belatedly noticed and jumped in to help. “Number Ten’s malfunctioning.” She frowned at the blank window where the data from the Number Ten feed should have been. Number Ten had always been buggy—a manufacturing defect, or maybe just a quirk of its programming. The probes were AI, after all, and designed by humans. “Running diagnostics.”
Faster if Serengeti ran the diagnostics herself, but she left Finlay to it to appease her, and cast her eyes about the bridge while she waited for the results.
Five stations on the bridge—plus the captain’s chair—with a single crewman manning each. The Captain’s Command Post sat dead center in the middle with the other stations—Scan, Communications, Navigation, Engineering, Artillery—arranged in a ring around it.
Circular stations, circular bridge, circular camera eyes watching over it all. The ship designers certainly do like circles, Serengeti thought idly.
She checked in on Finlay, working away at her circular station, found her still working furiously away.
This was taking too long. Ten was a puzzle Serengeti figured out long ago, no sense having Finlay try to recover that ground. She reached for the probe herself, bypassing Finlay entirely to dip directly into Number Ten’s systems.
“Repairs complete,” Serengeti said, making a last few adjustments before bringing the probe’s feed online.
“I had it,” Finlay muttered, stabbing angrily at the console in front of her.
“Stow it, Finlay,” Henricksen barked.
Finlay flushed brightly. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” She raised her eyes to the camera in front of her, looking angry and contrite at the same time. She nodded stiffly to the camera and then bowed her head, focusing all of her attention on the Scan station in front of her.
Finlay was a hard charger and didn’t like being shown up. By anyone. Not even a Valkyrie class starship. Serengeti filed that away, adding it to the library of information she’d collected from her human crews over the years. She was AI, her mind a thousand times more powerful than a human’s organic brain, but she forgot sometimes how important it was for humans to feel needed.
Need. Such a strange concept. So difficult for an AI to understand. Truth be told, Serengeti didn’t really need her human crew. It was slower—infinitely slower—to let them run basic ship’s operations. She could manage everything on her own and still have enough processing power to monitor the hundreds of cameras and relays, circuits and networks and every other thing wired into her body.
But I like having them about, Serengeti thou
ght to herself.
Crew was…comforting. For herself and the humans who’d made her. Truth be told, humans still didn’t quite trust AIs. Funny, considering human engineers designed every last one of them, making them stronger, more capable with each generation. Humans built AIs and wrapped them inside armored shells they launched into the stars, but they still wanted human crews on board those space-faring ships. Human minds and human judgment as a counter—or perhaps a foil—to ship’s intelligence. Because most AI couldn’t feel in the way humans did.
Maybe there’s something to that, Serengeti mused. We’ve learned emotion—some of us anyway—but it’s not organic. Not innate.
She cast her eyes across the bridge, looking from Henricksen to the stations behind him, circling around to Finlay at Scan. Need was important—Serengeti learned that over the years. Next time she’d let Finlay run the scans and argue with Number Ten.
Good luck with that one, sister.
Serengeti is available from Amazon here
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