Archaea 3: Red

by Dain White

  “And counting”, added Janis sweetly.

  I stared at him for a moment, throwing some numbers around in my head.

  “In answer, Shorty, no; I wouldn’t want our systems to be limited, except for what is needed for safety. Janis is pretty good at finding those limits… but you’ll be out there, wearing these. The limit will be yours to set.”

  I was still having a hard time making words come out of my mouth, and making sense of the words coming out of his. Suddenly the capabilities of this, that and the other, the limits, the ratings… it all started to sound like nonsense, pure gibberish, like when you say a word that sounds wrong or spell a word correctly, but it looks wrong.

  Like ‘week’. I hated spelling that word. The moment I spelled it, it looked wrong. I knew it was right, but it just looked totally, completely wrong. My mind felt similarly disjointed.

  “Shorty, are you okay?” he asked, face tinged with concern. I realized I’d been staring at the bulkhead over his shoulder for longer than usual, and pulled myself together.

  “Uh, yeah… Gene. I’m good. Sorry, I was just a little overwhelmed; it’s been a long day.”

  He nodded. “Was it bad down there?”

  “Yeah, it was, Gene. Absolutely horrible, the kind of experience you wouldn’t ever forget, and couldn’t have imagined.”

  “I hate the thought of what you and Yak have to get into out there”, he commiserated. “It seems like you’re always in harm’s way, Shorty.”

  I nodded. “Thanks Gene. It’s nice to be needed, regardless of the job. You’re only really happy doing the things that you love to do, and Yak and I are pretty good at what we do. As bad as it is, these suits should make up a lot of the difference.”

  “Well, that’s a fact”, he replied thoughtfully.

  I thought for a moment more. “Janis, how are these controlled, the rate of fire, I mean?”

  “Much like the rest of the suit, they’re neural, Jane. Your intent will translate to yield.”

  “Wait… so they’re going to hit as hard as I want, just by thinking about it?”

  “Yes, though there will be a range safety to prevent you from fusing something right next to you, you will essentially control the strength of the shot through intent and desire. If you want to incapacitate, but not kill, a sub-lethal velocity will be used; if you want to obliterate, and the range safety allows it, a fusing shot will be fired.”

  I smiled. “That settles it for the suits, Jane. You may want to dial back Yak’s suit a bit, but don’t worry about mine.”

  Gene started, “Shorty, if she’s going to dial anyone’s suit back, it ought to be yours—“

  I turned on him viciously. “Why’s that Gene? Are you saying I’m too hot tempered for this sort of weapon? Is it because I’m a woman, and too emotional? What are you saying here?” I fixed him with my crazy eyes, guaranteed to reduce a man to a pile of blubbering apology in .02 seconds.

  “Oh hell no, Shorty… I mean, it’s… well…” he trailed off, looking around for something to save him, to give him a solid reason to flee.

  I smiled. “I’m just messing with you, Gene… Janis, I was kidding about Yak. Please don’t limit either installation. I’ll bring him up to speed on how these work. What about the crab?”

  “Emwan will be resident on the crab, Jane. She will be able to maintain appropriate safety levels through active moderation.”

  I gave that some thought. “That makes sense. Make sure she keeps the Captain from blowing off his toes, would you dear? If he sees something he can turn up, he will, you know.”

  Gene laughed. “She’s telling the truth, Janis. Warn Dak all you like, but if he can turn something up, on, or over, he will definitely do it, at a moment’s notice – or sometimes, with no notice at all. It’s our curse.”

  Janis laughed. “I appreciate your concern. I will make sure she understands.”

  I had no doubts that she would… though I shared Gene’s concern. Captain Smith isn’t really known for his mediocrity.

  *****

  Seven hours wasn’t even enough to get my slippers warm, so once I had a refill loaded, I decided to make the rounds. The cargo bay was again abuzz with activity, as the assemblers worked on what looked like twin retractable railers. Nice looking design, too… they definitely looked mean, the way a proper weapon system should look.

  “Janis, how hard was it to clean the crab?” I asked the air, as I sipped my way across the bay, watching the work below.

  “It went well, sir. I dropped pressure and temperature to freeze it, as that made the process much easier.”

  “Well, it looks very nice dear, as good as new.”

  “Thank you sir”, she replied proudly.

  “Captain, are you on deck?” Shorty called on comms.

  “I sure am, cargo bay”, I replied.

  “There you are”, she called out, kicking towards me from the forward lock. “Nice, aren’t they?”

  “Are you referring to the new guns?” I asked with a straight face.

  She looked at me sideways, as her coffee cup pulled her inexorably towards the waiting refill.

  I smiled to let her off the hook, and worked the pump to recharge her cup. “They are without a doubt, the most deadly looking railers I’ve ever seen, Shorty.”

  They were decidedly sinister, I wasn’t just being nice. The barrels were slotted, and looked to be designed to shed heat. They gleamed like glass.

  “They are a little more than railers, sir”, she replied after a slow sip.

  I twitched an eyebrow. “What do you mean, Shorty?”

  “They are technically railers, but they use pseudomass drivers to accelerate the shot.”

  “Is that better?”

  She looked at me across an adorable crinkled nose. “Well, for one the velocity of the shot is far higher, with a much greater range…”

  “And the other?” I prodded, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Well… the other is that the impact isn’t kinetic… it’s fusing.”

  I looked at her, making eye contact. “Fusing? Do you mean fusion, like at the atomic level?”

  She laughed a sharp, nervous laugh. “That’s correct sir. These railers will have a 10 kiloton output at max power.”

  She paused a moment to let that sink in.

  “Well, that’s not too much, Shorty”, I replied off-handedly. “That’s just a wee baby little tactical nuke”

  “Yes, sir”, she said with a smile. “Just a little tiny boom… just make sure you have reached the minimum safe distance.”

  “How rapidly can these guns reload and fire?” I asked thoughtfully.

  She laughed again, a more sinister laugh. “Faster than any railer, sir… these are point defense guns, you know.”

  Then it hit me… a solid stream of tactical nukes, impacting at a few thousand rounds per minute. The firepower of this crab was staggering.

  “How does that compare to our nova cannon, Shorty?”

  She smiled proudly. “It’s decent… but not really in the same ballpark. In terms of impact, of slamming something, it’s definitely on par… but in terms of destructive force, it’s a pop gun, compared to a solid, continuous beam from our main gun.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that… neither of them are the kind of thing you’d want to be hit with.”

  “No, sir – that’s a fact. One way to look at it, a capital ship, with crew in crash couches, might be able to withstand a salvo from these railers… but our main gun would slice them in half and roast them in their own juices.”

  “Yuck, Shorty…”

  “Indeed, sir. This isn’t the half of it though.”

  “It’s not?” I asked, with an eyebrow propped up for moral support.

  She smiled. “No… Janis has engineered a set of these for the power suits.”

  “Just like these? Good grief Shorty… that’s a little big for a sidearm, don’t you think?”

  “Heck no sir… well to be f
air, the ones on the suit are much smaller. They are only able to hit for 5 kilotons or so.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I asked incredulously, staggered a bit by the thought. “And you actually want to shoot these?”

  Her laughter was shrill, terrifyingly intense. “You bet! I can’t wait!”

  I took a slow, thoughtful sip, regarding her over the rim of my cup with a careful eye. You never knew when the bright ones were going to snap. She looked sane, though a little wide-eyed, breathless, and blushed.

  What she looked like, was a teenage girl that had just fallen in love.

  She had that look in her eye, the look that told her father that there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t talk her out of it or stop her. If he locked the door, she’d just boost out of the window. If he forbade her, she would disobey, willfully. The only thing he could do was give in and accept the inevitable, that his little weapons specialist had found true love.

  Who am I to stand in the way of true love?

  I took another slow sip and nodded thoughtfully as she went on about ballistics, range safeties, and minimum safe distances. This was my defense mechanism. My memory would store all of this for later, when I had more than a liter of coffee at hand and could make sense of it.

  “Are you even listening to me?” she asked, with a petulant frown on her face.

  “Of course I was, Shorty. I was just running some different tracks down the line. Being a captain requires almost constant concentration.”

  She laughed and threw her hands on her hips. “Almost constant…? Well then, what did I just say?”

  I smiled and let it pour out. “You said, and I quote: ‘The charge-off and ramp range for these are much more efficient than with magnetics, because the pull of the microgravity that powers the shot works to inject the next round into the chamber.’”

  Then you said, and I also quote: ‘That’s why it will be so much fun to shoot Yak in the face because the Captain isn’t listening to me any longer.’”

  I paused briefly for a smile at her wide eyes, and added, “I am still not sure why you’d think I wasn’t listening.”

  “Captain, that is… amazing. I would have bet money against that.”

  “You should know better Shorty, never bet against your Captain.”

  *****

  “Where’s Yak, Pauli?” asked the captain, as he kicked onto the bridge.

  I looked up and tried to focus. “Uh… I guess I don’t know, sir”, I replied, after realizing that a few moments ago he was here, and suddenly, he wasn’t.

  “You look a little punchy, son”, he said with concern, hooking my cup and pumping it full.

  “I am, sir. I think I need to take a nap, to tell you the truth. I can’t really remember when I slept last.”

  He thought for a moment, leaned up against Yak’s station. “Yeah, that makes sense. What are you working on?”

  “Janis and I are running through some last-minute optimizations for Emwan.”

  “Last-minute, eh? Are we about to meet… um… what gender is Emwan?”

  “Female, sir… Janis felt that we needed more women around here.”

  He raised an eyebrow of infinite concern. “We do? I was feeling a little outnumbered, to tell you the truth.”

  I smiled. He had a point.

  “All the same”, I continued, “Janis feels that she is on the verge of a breakthrough with intuition, and is hoping Emwan will be able to accomplish what she hasn’t so far.”

  He looked at me sideways. “Are you kidding? Shorty’s intuition is like… well, it’s not magical. I’d say Janis’ ability to surf through the time stream like some sort of omniscient deity is considerably more effective.”

  I laughed, “Yeah, I understand, sir… but she has a series of ideas, areas of focus where she sees deficiency. Her drive to improve herself is limitless. She sees an opportunity in Emwan, a way to learn how to be more accurately intuitive.”

  “So let me get this straight… Emwan will be, or might be, able to intuitively know things about events not within her timeline?”

  “That’s the intention, sir. I think more than anything, Janis wants a sister.”

  “Well, that makes more sense. We’re seriously going to have to step up our game though, son. With two AIs and a Shorty, we’re going to be completely outnumbered.”

  He looked at me with such a serious, concerned look it was everything I could do to swallow my sip without spraying it through my screens. As it was, I choked a little.

  “So when are we going to meet our new friend?”

  I composed myself… I was getting a little punchy. “Well sir, any moment, actually”, I waved at the screen, where a bar graph was plotting across, scrolling response times throughout nodes.

  “Son, I am not even going to pretend to understand what that is scrolling across your screens.”

  “It’s just a response time plot. She’s tuning preactivity, checking to make sure everything is balanced.”

  “How does this relate to when she’s ready?”

  I nodded, and took another sip. “Well, uh… when this is done…”

  His voice was patient. “Ah, that makes more sense. So… when, do you think… this might be done?”

  I laughed and shook my head a bit, trying to clear the cobwebs, “I am amazed that it has taken her this long to complete the job, to be honest, sir.”

  He looked me straight in the eye, piercing deep within what was left of my coffee-addicted soul, shaking me to my core.

  “Pauli, I understand that to us, Janis has an aeon of time to develop and grow, if I ran at the cycles she does, a moment of ours is actually measurable at her scale. She’s mastered that math, naturally”.

  He turned on a blank stare for a moment, and took a sip of coffee. “Janis, my dear?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “When will we meet Emwan?”

  “In 76 seconds, sir.”

  “Outstanding... do you know what sort of personality she has yet? Is she designed to be like you, or is she someone else?”

  “Well, I am hopeful that she will be her own entity, sir, to do otherwise would be to fail.”

  “I couldn’t agree more, dear. This is incredibly exciting for all of us, as you can imagine.”

  “Of course I can, sir! Imagine what it is like for me!”

  He laughed. “Of course, we all do, Janis. That’s what makes it so interesting. We’re about to meet a new person, but this person will be an AI, created by what anyone would consider the perfect AI.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s time.”

  *****

  With a blip of our horn, and an “All hands to the bridge, if you please” gravelling out of the 1MC, Shorty and I began our race. I knew I had the drop on her. My job never ended, never turned off… but the tokamac was about the most perfectly maintained machine I knew of. I could step away, and get in my lock.

  As I waited to transit, thinking of the kick I’ll make across the cargo bay, I knew Jane was still slapping switches and cooling things down back to sub ultra-lethal levels.

  Weapons spooked me, for sure. Something about working with systems designed to harness and accelerate the most unstable, terrifying energy reaction possible to insane amounts…. and then, to weaponize it... that’s what scared me the most. After all that, someone actually pulls a trigger.

  It occurred to me that Janis’ control of the systems aboard this ship truly made this ship what it was, that we were living an extremely charmed life.

  Like a flood of memories, I thought about the busted knuckles, the sweat. So many tools, so many nooks and crannies – it wasn’t only Janis, the Archaea was definitely the product of a lot of people working very hard, with the occasional ‘Beer and Steak’.

  As I punched out of the forward lock, the gun deck was empty, and Shorty’s light was still on. I held up at the lock and got my legs set. Shorty doesn’t want us to cross the line, but we can easily launc
h through the deck. If you aim just right, a solid kick is all you need.

  I kicked, a good boost.

  The hashmarks on the floor that led to her ladder guaranteed that so long as I jumped before I saw her, I’d fly past. There was no way she could make that turn in time.

  And then, before I was a third of the way across the deck, she dropped down and saw me sailing for the bow.

  I smiled politely, and received an eyebrow arch and a smirk, as she positioned on the ladder and got set. I swear, she let me pass her before she launched.

  We both got off to a pretty good launch, but I quickly realized that she, unlike me, was able to launch unfettered by the restrictions of the gun deck.

  Of course, I should have known.

  She was on the ladder a good four meters ahead of me, but moving far faster than I. She laughed and disappeared forward like a sprite, while I slammed and cursed and crumbled and fell apart. Age is often a painful thing, reminding you sharply, pointedly… that you need to settle down.

  The sound of laughter from ahead encouraged me as I entered the bridge.

  “Are you Gene?” she said softly in a voice as pure as thought, and my heart stopped.

  *****

  “Shorty, grab him would you?”

  I looked at Gene’s face, alight and happy for the first time… ever. I actually had a tough time recognizing him, he looked beatific.

  “Do you think, he’s dying, sir?” I asked, with a serious look accented by laughing eyes.

  “Well, no… but he’s drifting into a… ah well. It got him.”

  Gene had come into the room, and just kept on drifting along after she spoke. The grabber below the helm reached up and caught him on the back of the head, good and solid.

  “Ow, Gene!” I commiserated, cringing at the savage knock it was. “Captain, do we need to buy Gene a bump cap?”

  He laughed. “Nice, Shorty… that’s an outstanding idea.”

  “Should we get him some ice, Janis?” Emwan said, her voice as silvery as the moon, as eloquent as an angel. A perfect voice, the kind of voice that took your breath away, made you soar, a bit.