Magnitude: A Space Opera Adventure (Blackstar Command Book 2)

by A. C. Hadfield

  “The shield is a field of energy, right?”

  “Right,” Senaya said, leaning forward, her eyes wide with interest.

  “And those things are metal. What does metal do?”

  “Conduct energy—and electricity,” Marella said.

  The sound of sawing metal echoed throughout the ship, followed by the high-pitched wail of a drill.

  “Eesoh, I want you to dump all auxiliary electrical power into the shields.”

  “That’ll destroy the shields, Kai Locke,” Eesoh said.

  “And the Koldax. At this point, it’s them or us, and I choose us. Can you do it or not?”

  “The power converters will need rerouting from the supply unit in the cargo hold,” the AI said. “I can instruct Senaya on how to do this.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “A few minutes at most.”

  “That’ll do. Senaya, can you get on that right away? We don’t have any time to lose.”

  “Aye, Captain,” she said, removing herself from the harness and running through the main bridge door.

  “I just hope you’re right, Kai,” Marella said.

  “I’m open to alternatives if you have any?”

  Marella fell silent, and she dropped her gaze to her control panel. Bandar and Brenna shared a look and then conversed quietly among themselves. It irked Kai, but he turned his attention to the holoscreen. Eesoh had brought up some ship-related metrics.

  Hull integrity was at ninety-nine percent and falling.

  So far, the Koldax hadn’t pierced through yet, but it looked like it was going to be a tight race between them breaching the hull and Senaya diverting power through the shields.

  That was if it even worked.

  For all Kai knew, the Koldax had defenses for such things.

  “You’re taking one hell of a risk, Kai,” Bandar said.

  “I don’t hear you coming up with a better strategy.”

  “I could take the Rapier. Lure them away.”

  “And then what? The Rapier gets cut to pieces too. No, we stick to my plan.”

  Kai’s mother stared at him with a curious look in her eye.

  “What?” Kai said. “You think it’s a bad idea too?”

  Brenna held up her palms, communicating no. “I’m just glad to see you being assertive is all.”

  “Now’s not the time for a mother-son growth moment,” Kai said, and then turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “Eesoh, how’s the power diversion coming along?”

  “Thirty percent complete.”

  Outer hull integrity was down to seventy-five percent.

  Marella’s eyes had changed to a dark red color that Kai assumed was fear.

  He felt it in his guts and down his spine too. A deep chill that one only ever experienced when one was just a thin skin of metal away from being exposed to the brutal nature of a cold vacuum.

  “Senaya,” Kai said, “how are you doing back there?”

  A long moment passed.

  Hull integrity dropped to sixty-three percent.

  “Almost… there…” Senaya said between heavy breaths.

  Fifty percent.

  Thirty-five.

  The Koldax were speeding up their efforts.

  The cameras showed sparks and outer pieces of hull being stripped away by the spiderlike machines. A red warning light on the screen flashed, communicating that the particle disruption cannons were offline. One of them on the port side came away from its hard point and floated off into the dark expanse.

  “The damned things are stripping us of weapons,” Bandar said.

  “Senaya,” Kai prompted, “we need to do this now. Like, really, now.”

  “I’m… trying,” she said.

  “Eesoh, dump the power the second the reroute is done,” Kai said.

  The holographic face appeared passive for a few long seconds; then the eyes flashed a bright blue. “Reroute complete.”

  “Now!” Kai yelled as the hull integrity dropped to just fifteen percent.

  The holographic display showed a wave of electricity flowing out from the tip of the ship and quickly flowing through the shields surrounding the hull. Blue lines of electricity struck the remaining Koldax as they arced from one to the other, each machine exploding in a cloud of sparks before the vacuum of space extinguished the flames.

  One of the machines clung to a hard point even as it died from the electrical overload. It remained stuck there, inanimate as its fellow machines joined the debris field in many hundreds of small parts.

  A fitting end, Kai thought.

  He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding and closed his eyes.

  “You did it, Sen,” he said. “You really did it.”

  “Are they dead?” she asked, her voice high-pitched with hope over the comm channel.

  “Yeah,” Bandar said. “And even better; one of them is stuck to the hull. How’d you like to take a look inside one of them?”

  Kai shot him a look. “What is it with you wanting to go out there?”

  Bandar smiled back at him and shook his head. “Not me… A tether. Let’s drag it inside and see what it’s made of. Consider it an autopsy. If we’re to fight these things, it makes sense to cut it open and see what makes it tick.”

  “He has a point,” Marella added. “More knowledge is more power, after all.”

  Kai noticed his mother glare at Marella with a strange expression. He couldn’t decide whether it was suspicion or aggression.

  “Eesoh,” Kai said, “are you still operational?”

  “I am,” it said. “We currently have twenty-three percent auxiliary power left after the discharge.”

  “Good. Can you target the Koldax on the hull and bring it into the hold with a tether?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Yes, I do. Let me know when it’s on board.”

  The AI confirmed the order.

  “Mother, run a diagnostic while Eesoh is dealing with the Koldax. Let’s see how badly the Blackstar was damaged in all that.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Brenna said with a smirk.

  Kai made a mental note to speak with her alone at some point. If he were to captain this vessel to the best of his abilities, he needed to draw a line with this family stuff. He couldn’t have his own mother or his half-brother undermine him.

  “Senaya,” Kai said over the comms, “I’ll meet you in the cargo hold in a few hours’ time. We’re having a present delivered and I’d like you to inspect it.”

  “I never knew you cared,” she said, a smile in her voice.

  “Everyone else, go grab some sleep; you all look exhausted. Senaya and I will take this watch. Bandar, Mother, Marella, you can relieve us in, say, six hours? Eesoh, can you manage and monitor the systems while we inspect the Koldax?”

  “Of course,” the AI said. “I’ll inform you of anything unusual should it arise.”

  “Oh, and one more thing, Eesoh. Does this ship have any spares to deal with the hull damage?”

  “No parts specifically,” the AI said. “But the ship is fitted with a liquid metal reforming repair system. I can tether in parts from the debris field and use those to patch the damage if you wish.”

  Despite his initial mistrust, Kai was starting to like the AI. Having it repair the ship was one huge headache he didn’t need to worry about. He just had to worry about more of the Koldax coming out of the darkness and tearing them to shreds.

  “Thanks, Eesoh,” Kai said. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

  With that, he left the bridge and headed to his bunk to get an hour’s rest before helping Senaya take a look at the Koldax. Fatigue washed over him as he entered his room and flopped down on the bed.

  Soon after, the dreams came.

  Chapter 16

  WHEN KAI’S alarm woke him up an hour later, he had no memory of the dreams, just a ghost of an idea of vague imagery.

  A part of him thought it was something important, s
omething he held within that data bomb of information that he couldn’t unlock. Without that access, however, he couldn’t know.

  He got up, washed his face, and picked up the tetrahedron, which had fallen out of his pocket and on to the floor during his sleep. He knew that it would still be important to him without knowing exactly why. He pocketed it and set about checking the ship’s repair statuses and running various maintenance routines.

  Thankfully, no more Koldax or other hostile alien had discovered them floating among the debris field of his fellow Coalition compatriots.

  He pondered on the loss of life again and became exasperated with himself. He couldn’t change it, and he knew, logically, that what he condemned them to was the only option, yet it still didn’t absolve him of his guilt.

  “Just got to live with it,” he said to himself as he left his cabin and filled up the next five hours with maintenance and repairs.

  When he was done, he went to check in with Senaya in the cargo hold to see how she was getting on with the Koldax machine—and to relieve her so she could get some well-earned rest.

  Kai walked through the narrow corridors and climbed the ladder down to the belly of the ship. He pressed his hand against the control panel to open the cargo hold door. It hissed quietly, and he stepped inside.

  Senaya was doing what he had learned to be her victory dance around the captured Koldax machine.

  It lay in pieces across the floor. Various elements of hardware were set amongst a trail of wires. A power cable connected the machine to the power conduit on the rear wall of the hold, another snaked to Bandar’s micro-hauler, while a third was hooked up to the airlock system, presumably going to the Rapier attached to a docking hard point just outside of the cargo door.

  Up close, the alien technology gave Kai a sense of its intelligence and utility. Each of its limbs featured multiple complicated-looking appendages among its arsenal of saws, torches, and blades.

  Its body, the narrow section from which the limbs extruded, stretched five meters long and a meter wide. The matt black color hid most of the details of the panels, but under the glare of the bright cargo lights, it reminded Kai of his biology classes as a kid when he’d had to dissect a fist-sized crawler beetle.

  Like the beetle, this thing’s carapace split down the middle. Senaya had most of its guts hanging out as she had sought to understand its inner workings.

  Kai didn’t recognize any of the parts. Complicated spiral gears of the utmost intricate design only added to its truly alien nature. Even the wires between hardware components looked more like blood vessels than something that would carry electricity.

  Whatever the thing was before, Senaya had reduced it to a collection of elements.

  Kai remembered the first time he’d had her work on an engine. He had expected a few minor adjustments, but within hours, she had stripped it down to all three hundred and fifty-three distinct parts and knew how each and every valve, sprocket, and bolt functioned.

  Senaya still hadn’t seen Kai enter.

  She gyrated her narrow hips and nodded her head to an imagined beat. Her mohawk flapped back and forth as the yellow and red diodes flashed. She held her spanner as though it were a microphone and sang an offbeat tune Kai didn’t recognize.

  He leaned against the cargo hold’s bulkhead, smiled and crossed his arms.

  It was good to see her happy again. Given all the trouble they’d had since coming through the Veil, he’d worried that the crew would end up in a dark depression from which they’d never escape.

  He had little experience in managing morale. He’d thought about speaking with his mother about it; she being far more experienced in these matters than he, but to do that would show weakness.

  If he was to cement his position as captain, he had to lead from the front.

  After a minute of watching her dance, Kai stepped forward and tapped her gently on the shoulder.

  She skidded to a stop and spun around, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. The spanner she wielded transformed from a faux microphone to a bludgeoning weapon.

  “You scared the crap out of me, Kai,” Senaya said, stepping back and smoothing her wild hair with her free hand. She placed the spanner in one of the many pockets of her custom-made coverall. “How long were you skulking there for?”

  “Long enough. Your vocals are a bit pitchy. You need to work on your falsetto.”

  “I’ll work on removing your genitals with a blunt instrument if you ever speak of this.”

  Kai held up his open palms. “Hey, it’s fine, I get it. Sometimes you’ve just gotta dance. It’s like a fever.”

  “Seriously, Kai, shut up. Or I’ll tell your big brother that you sleep with a stuffed toy.”

  “That’s a filthy lie.”

  “Yeah, but he won’t know that.”

  Kai sighed dramatically. “Fine, your awful dancing and attempts at singing shall remain as big a mystery as the Navigators. Anyways, talking about mysteries, what have you found out about our new mechanical friend?”

  Senaya grinned, and her eyes went huge. “I’ve managed to crack into its programming. It’s still partly operational.”

  Kai’s stomach muscles tensed and he stepped back away from a limb that ended with what looked like a plasma torch. “The damn thing is operational, and you’re dancing like it’s Millennium Day? What are you thinking?”

  “I think we’ve got ourselves an asset that we don’t need to torture to gain information. Here. Look at this log report I’ve prepared—it shows that somewhere out there, there’s a swarm of these things numbering in the thousands. From its data drives, I’ve managed to separate this one’s ID from the others. And don’t worry, it’s no longer networked. I burned out the network chip from its processor array right after I downloaded all the data to a ring-fenced virtual machine on the Blackstar’s system.”

  “Okay,” Kai said, drawing the word out as he took the terminal from her and read through the report she’d prepared. His gaze darted from the log to the machine and back again. The report was over three thousand words long, not including charts and data visualizations. This was not Kai’s forte. “Give me the gist, would you?” he said, handing her back the terminal. “What exactly do we have here?”

  “We have a networked killing machine, ultimately. It has a kind of fuel I’ve never seen before that allows it to travel with great thrust, and having no soft, squishy organs to worry about, the g-force it pulls isn’t an issue.”

  “So these things can out-accelerate anything with organics inside?”

  “Yup. Easily.”

  “That’s… not encouraging. But go on.”

  Senaya squatted by the open section and indicated the components inside. “The processing power is incredible. It has a multidimensional quantum array. It computes across dimensions! It takes entanglement to whole new levels.”

  Kai pondered on what that meant. Quantum entanglement discounted the whole issue of light speed, taking it entirely out of the equation, but to have it accessible across dimensions meant a much greater capacity for information sharing.

  “They use it for communication?” Kai asked.

  Senaya nodded enthusiastically, adding, “And travel. I don’t think it is too dissimilar to how the Navigators and those Sumahn creatures use wormholes. They shortcut through dimensions. It’s still a theory at this stage…”

  Kai took a deep breath and wandered around the machine. It had proven to be far more advanced than anything he could have imagined. Which raised the question: “How did you hack it?”

  “I didn’t,” Senaya said, smiling broadly and indicating the cables. “I hooked up a processor bridge with the Rapier and micro-hauler’s AI to the Blackstar. With that power combined, and with a few tricks I learned from some darknet hackers a few years ago, we figured it out. Oh, and a few judicial appliances of a hot soldering iron. Turns out the Koldax like their encryption to be hardwired instead of relying on software redundancies.”
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  “I guess they weren’t planning on you getting your hands dirty on their innards,” Kai said, beaming with pride of what his apprentice had grown into. “So what now? Anything we can salvage and reuse?”

  “The whole thing,” she said, standing and grinning. “It’s under our control now. Watch.”

  Using her terminal, Senaya punched in a few commands.

  Within a split second, two of the rear appendages began to wiggle back and forth in a rhythmic movement. It didn’t take a genius to see that Senaya had set it to the same beat as her out-of-tune singing.

  “Great, you’ve got a mechanical dancing machine. This is really helpful,” Kai said with a smirk.

  “There’s more.” Senaya gestured across her terminal once more.

  The machine stopped its wiggling, placed all six of its limbs on the floor and lifted its body up, taking the wired parts with it so that they hung loosely in the air. Then it began to walk forward toward Kai, forcing him to back off. He shot Sen a glance that told her to stop it, which, thankfully, she did.

  “Now watch this,” Senaya said with an expression of smug pride on her face.

  The machine used two of its highly articulated limbs to place the components back into its open body. It was like watching a patient doing surgery on themselves. As each part was placed inside, another limb with a driver application screwed it in place while another routed the vessel-like wires neatly through its systems.

  Barely two minutes had passed, and the machine had fixed itself back together.

  “That’s impressive.” Although despite that, Kai couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this thing was just playing along and biding its time. “You’re sure we can trust it?”

  “Absolutely we can. It’s not malevolent now that I’ve removed it from the spawn network and reprogrammed its protocols. It’s just a machine to carry out our orders.”

  As if to prove her point, Senaya sat on its back sidesaddle style and walked it around the cargo hold, removing the power cables as it went so that it was completely independent and working under Senaya’s control.