“I’m not by myself,” Chris snapped. “I have Sid, and a Firefly ...”
Hugo stared, incredulous. It was a look Chris was getting quite used to.
“And I took down the Grand Vizier, a Star Killer-class frigate,” Chris added.
“You had help from a bunch of rogues and mercenaries,” Hugo said. “You probably won’t find such support the next time around. It will be you against twenty dozen fighters. It doesn’t matter how skilled a pilot you might be, or what your Firefly can do for you, you won’t succeed against such odds. Please. Don’t throw your life away.”
Chris paused. There seemed to be more to Hugo’s desires to keep him and Sid here than he was letting on. Chris went with his first assumption. “You lost someone, didn’t you? Your brother? Your son? Someone around our age? That’s why you don’t want us to go, isn’t it?”
Hugo stared at his feet. “My sons, yes,” he said. “I can see you as a mirror for them – your fighting spirit, your willingness to go along with it, feeling the confidence radiating off one another.” He glanced to Sid. “I wanted them to stay, but they wanted to fight in memory of their mother. They were two of the first to die in that battle over Ceradse.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said.
“Some days, I wish I hadn’t bothered signing up for this whole damn business. I might have lost my wife, but at least I would have my two boys here with me.”
Chris was sure he could see a tear forming in the man’s eye. Hugo raised his head and Chris saw a trickle running down his face, clear in the light.
“It’s simply not worth it,” Hugo finished. “One man doesn’t stand a chance.”
“That didn’t stop William Benedict,” Chris said.
“Ha!” Hugo said, sniffing and wiping away the tears. “William Benedict’s story has been told so many times that it’s starting to become impossible to separate fact from fiction. Some will tell you that he took on the entire WEAPCO naval fleet all by himself, while others say that he raised an army to fight them. Whatever it is, he barely got as far as Murdar before he was taken down. He was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of power that met him there. And he never even made it to Sol. If that was the level of opposition that hit him at Murdar, imagine what WEAPCO’s home would be like.
“You ask me, the story’s all bull. There’s a good chance that the man didn’t actually exist and it was just some rogue AI system that WEAPCO lost control of.”
“Does anyone know why he did it?” Sid asked. He had been rather quiet ever since Hugo had started to walk him and Chris around the base, and Chris had wondered if Sid was okay. Perhaps there was something on the hacker’s mind.
“No one knows for certain why he did it,” Hugo was saying. “The reasons vary as much as the tale itself – that he was tired of living under WEAPCO’s rule, that he did it because he was feeling suicidal, that he was bored and did it just because ... The most popular one seems to be that it was revenge for the Corporation killing his brother. Not that the reason matters.”
“But he did manage to find a way to take on WEAPCO, by himself,” Chris pressed.
Hugo sighed. “Benedict’s story is a myth, nothing more; the same old claptrap that people make up to inspire others to do their bidding. Rulers have done it years, organised religion being the most obvious example.
“So,” Hugo said, composing himself and folding his arms. “Did any of the living quarters take your fancy? There would be room for your talents here – you, as a skilled pilot, you as a techie.” He looked at Chris and Sid in turn.
“We’re not staying,” Chris said, starting back towards the Manx. “I don’t believe William Benedict was a myth; he was a real person, with drive, spirit, and conviction. He was an inspiration, one that knew that you don’t overcome injustice by lying down and curling up into a ball.”
Hugo looked as though Chris had just slapped him in the face. “Fine,” the man said. “I’ll leave you to your little starfighter project. At least I can say that I gave you the opportunity to find somewhere safe to settle down.”
“A corner in which to die, you mean,” Chris said.
Hugo continued to present Chris with an unimpressed glare but did not contradict the younger man. His shoulders then slumped in a sort of acceptance of what Chris was saying. Seeing him that way made Chris suddenly regret his words. Hugo was only being kind, only trying to help.
“Please don’t think me ungrateful,” Chris said, “but when I look around here, that’s what I see – people who have given up the fight. Thank you for the offer, Hugo, but we’ll be going now. Sid?”
No answer from Sid. The man hadn’t moved.
Chris paused. “Sid, what gives?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Chris,” Sid said. “I think Hugo might have a point.”
Chris’ jaw dropped. Was Sid serious? “Okay, what’s going on?” Chris asked. “Before you came here you were all set on helping me to continue and finish this fight. Now you’re thinking of quitting?”
“I don’t think they can be beaten that easily, Chris.”
“They can,” Chris said. “We just have to believe that they can. We’re already seeing WEAPCO’s influence here starting to wane. They’ve lost their base of operations on Ceradse, and have incurred the wrath of every mercenary group in the known galaxy. If the response from the mercenaries is the same throughout all the major star systems as it is in Spirit, it gives us an even greater chance of success. We have found ourselves three unexpected allies – the mercenaries, the Firefly, and that trade freighter. There will be more. They might not be here on Hail, but they are out there waiting for us to find them. No offence, Hugo,” he added to the man.
Hugo nodded, standing back a little from Sid, as if implying that it was now his choice to make. Sid took a moment to weigh up the options.
“Can we come back?” Sid asked Hugo. “If it doesn’t work out, I mean?”
“Of course,” Hugo nodded. “So long as you don’t endanger us, you two will always be welcome here.”
“Can I have some time to think about it?” Sid asked Chris.
“You’re welcome to stay here the night, if you wish?” Hugo offered.
“Okay,” Chris said. “But I will be leaving first thing in the morning.”
“No problem,” Hugo said. “Let’s find you somewhere to sleep. All I ask in return is that one of you helps me to cook dinner. I’ve got the recipe for a new curry I want to try out. Could use a hand with the preparation.”
“I can’t,” Sid said. “I could burn water.”
“I can,” Chris volunteered. “I used to work in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.”
“Ah, good,” Hugo said, smiling. “You’re clearly a man of many hidden talents.”
“Cooking being one of the most important ones,” Chris said, grinning back at him. “One should never go into battle on an empty stomach.”
~
The next morning, as promised, Chris returned to the Manx in the landing bay to prepare the craft for departure. He was alone. He heard someone enter the ship as he ran through the craft’s start-up and safety checks, and looked around the pilot’s seat to see Sid. The man was walking with a lot more vigour than he had the night before. He did look quite tired, though.
“What changed your mind?” Chris asked.
“Well, I thought about it last night after we turned in,” Sid began, “and I figured that if I gave up now, I wouldn’t be being true to myself. I would probably always regret it, too.”
“That’s the spirit,” Chris said, smiling.
“I think it’s also something to do with the reason that my dad killed both himself and my mum,” Sid went on, settling down in the seat next to Chris.
Chris shut down the engines of the Manx, and turned to give Sid his full attention. “What do you mean?”
“Like all of us, my mum and dad were going through some tough times – work, personal life, stress, and all that. WEAPCO’s regime led to my dad fa
cing the uphill struggle that was ultimately his life. He had never managed to catch a break. One day he just snapped and took it out on my mum and himself. I think he might have shot me, too, had I been there. I decided then that if WEAPCO had pushed him that hard and had caused him that much grief, a grief that was later extended onto me through the loss of my family, that I should do whatever I could to make sure it never happened to anyone else.” Sid went silent for a moment. “Do you ... know what I mean?”
“I do, Sid,” Chris said, squeezing the man’s shoulder. “It’s why I’m here, too. I’m not in it for the glory or anything like that. I don’t want to be a hero or be remembered for this. I just want to do what’s right.”
“What about your parents? Do you see them at all?” Sid asked.
“Haven’t for a few years now,” Chris said. “We keep in touch, but we don’t really feel like a family at the moment. They went into hiding shortly after I joined the Resistance, for their own safety. I’m looking forward to seeing them again some day.”
“And then you can be a family again,” Sid said.
“Yes,” Chris said. He could tell that Sid was thinking again about settling down with a nice girl. Some of the women here had turned his head, and Chris had thought that even the small amounts of attention and interest they had given the pair the previous night might be enough to convince Sid to stay. Not quite.
“We all set?” Sid asked, fastening his seatbelt.
“All set,” Chris said. He restarted the craft’s engines, brought the Manx off the ground and started down the launch chute, guiding the craft as though he had been flying it for years, rather than a few hours.
Sid watched him do so for a time, seeing how Chris was not nearly as skittish about the controls as he himself often was. “You picked up the handling of the Manx rather quick,” Sid observed.
“I know,” Chris said, as he guided the Manx out of the launch chute and headed skyward, back towards the Dodger. “It feels ... familiar. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s just easier to fly than I was expecting. I noticed that with the Firefly, too.”
“It’s possible that’s the Firefly’s influence. Your minds have bonded more than once, so there’s bound to be some sort of transference going on there.”
“Hmm.” Chris wasn’t so sure, and wasn’t about to entertain Sid’s theory. It was just a machine. It wasn’t alive, even if the thing did claim to be sentient.
“It’s perhaps something simpler than that,” Chris said. “Without trying to blow my own trumpet, they did say during my training with the Resistance that I was something of a natural. Maybe I just pick these things up quicker than most.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Sid said. “If you and the Firefly continue to share your minds, you’ll see a sharp increase in your piloting skills. You could end up gaining full knowledge of the Firefly, its strengths and weaknesses, and fly as if you were one.”
Chris smiled to him. “And then we won’t be needing the AI at all.”
He glanced at Sid, but the man met his comment with silence, and so Chris decided to say no more on the subject of what to do about the Firefly.
“I was thinking,” Sid said, closing his eyes. “That WEAPCO freighter might have some spare parts and stuff that we could use to upgrade the Firefly – strengthen the shielding, up the power of the plasma cannons and whatnot.” He was slurring his words a little as he spoke, sounding as though he was going to drift off.
“We need to upgrade it?” Chris asked. “That could delay things. I’m doing okay at the moment.”
“Right now you are,” Sid said, without opening his eyes, “but you’ve got, what, two plasma cannons on that crate? That’s not a lot, Chris. We could fit a new condenser into the cannons, which would up their power. Only if we can get hold of a cooler, though. You don’t want to be forced to fire slower, to avoid overheating. Later, we can look into attaching a third cannon.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“We can get the Dodger to help us,” Sid mumbled. “It has access to a load of maintenance robots and that. We can just reprogram them to do all the work. But I’ll tell you later. Right now, I’m too tired.”
“Up all night thinking this over, eh?” Chris asked.
“That, and you were snoring something incredible. I could hear you through the wall.”
“I snore?”
“Most of the time. Last night was the worst.”
“Oh. Sorry, man.”
“That’s okay, I’m a bit of a light sleeper, anyway.”
“Wake me up next time, eh?”
“Nah, I’ll just get some earplugs. Should count yourself lucky that Eve kicked you out when she was done with you. If you’d made that kind of racket in her bed, she’d probably have shut you up permanently. Kudos on meeting her hour-long demand, by the way.”
Eh? What did ...? How had ...? Chris looked at Sid, but the man had already fallen fast asleep. That workshop must have allowed Sid to spy on the mercenaries somehow. Chris wondered exactly how much of his encounter with the domineering tattooed mercenary Sid had caught.
Not that it mattered. He was just glad to have Sid back onside. He had always known that any fight back against WEAPCO would never have been easy, but he would rather die trying than not at all.
Chapter 13
The Artful Dodger was where Chris and Sid had left it, orbiting Hail and patiently awaiting their return. It seemed to Sid that the ship was a little dumber than he might have at first expected. He was convinced that all WEAPCO AIs shared the same software, code base, and core system structures, only having hardware and protocol tweaks here and there, depending on their tasks. In his analysis of the various ships run by the Corporation, Sid had discovered that all were capable of communicating with a human being on a level that would accurately replicate the expected flow of natural language, albeit in a rather stiff and formal manner. But to Chris, this freighter by comparison seemed ... slow.
“It’s as if it’s been given a lobotomy,” Sid said. “It’s happy to go along with just about anything I ask of it, so long as it won’t be putting its own life in danger. Most WEAPCO AIs have an inbuilt sense of self-preservation,” he added, as Chris made to ask the obvious question. “The fighters and warships will have a dumbed-down version of that, so that they don’t take the optimal path to staying alive and simply retreat from combat. Not exactly useful in a battle.”
“So, this thing isn’t even phoning home?” Chris asked.
“Not as far as I can tell.”
Chris nodded. It was nice to have a ship that they could use as a home base. It wasn’t a warship, but at least the Dodger offered them everything they would need in the way of crew quarters, a place to eat, and perform their strategic planning. It even had washing and recreational facilities. Which was odd, given that there hadn’t been any crew on board. When Chris had first landed on the freighter, he had anticipated needing to fight some of the serving crew. There had been no one there to meet him. It seemed that the ship was a hundred percent automated. He asked Sid why that might be.
“I don’t know,” Sid said, with a shrug. “Computer, if you are automated and have robots aboard to perform all the loading and logistical matters, why do you still have room for crew?”
“I have not yet been converted to make use of the additional space,” the AI responded. “I was original scheduled for this in five days’ time, following my return from my sweeping option, but my new mission parameters will see this being delayed until further notice.”
“What new mission parameters?” Chris asked Sid.
“Us,” Sid confirmed.
“Ah, I was worried there for a moment.” To the AI, Chris said, “Where are your original serving crew?”
“They were made redundant.”
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean in the same way as being fired,” Sid said.
Chris contemplated this for a time, then asked, “Other than us, when was the last time you
had a human crew working aboard?”
“Eighty-one years, four months, two weeks, three days, two hours, and seventeen minutes ago.”
“Eighty-one years?!” Chris looked at Sid. “That must be mistake.” He asked the AI the question again, phrasing it slightly differently. The machine gave the same answer.
“Something very strange is going on here,” Chris said.
“I agree,” Sid said. “I was expecting something more like five years, at most.”
“But it just restocked with food and water,” Chris said, scratching at the light stubble on his chin. “Why would it do that if it didn’t have any crew?”
“Perhaps it just keeps a regular stock, in case it needs to take on people?” Sid said.
Chris wasn’t so sure. “Computer, what have you been doing for the last eighty years?”
“Salvage sweeping,” the AI answered, simply.
“With access to the automated systems aboard, it could do that without the help of a human crew,” Sid said.
“I’m very confused,” Chris said.
“You and me both. I’m going to do some digging and try to find out what’s been going on. And you need to talk to the Firefly about upgrades. It might have some suggestions of what it would like adding.”
Chris had forgotten that the thing believed it was alive. He was still sure that that was some sort of AI trickery, some sort of Turing Test.
“I’ll get the data myself,” Chris told Sid. “You only need the rating of its core power supply and consuming components, right?”
“I’d suggest you talk to it, Chris. It will have a better understanding of all the fighter’s internal systems, the AI module being linked to it and all.”
“No worries. I’ll just transfer the relevant information to this,” Chris said, scooping up a datapad that Sid had been making use of earlier. “I’d rather not start getting too personal with it.”
~
Good afternoon, Chris.
Project Starfighter Page 17