by Dain White
“Gene, we're coming out of slipspace in a few moments. I will need full power to armor.”
“Full power to armor, aye.” Good old Gene, back in the saddle and wearing his big boy boots. Almost time to go. I checked the timer, and we had less than five seconds remaining.
Something important, something that I needed to think about hovered right outside the shining light of my intellect, like a moth fluttering in the dark that I couldn't quite see, it was moving too fast.
Something important.
Something about... the turrets.
“Gene, damn and blast man! Do we have any operational weaponry aboard the Archaea at the moment?”
I felt my pulse rate climb as I waited for his response.
“Dak, they are installed and secured, and I believe Pauli has them connected to wetnet, but they aren't energized. We would also need to fabricate a part to connect the ammo oven to the loader. I was going to leave that to Shorty...”
As he was saying that, we came out of slipspace.
“Captain, I have the target on-screen!” Pauli's ragged voice rang out, I could almost taste his fear.
“Very well Pauli. Take a breath son. What range and bearing please?”
He took a deep breath. “Captain, target is dead ahead, range 42 kilometers.”
“Pauli, I need you to keep an eye on her. Make sure I know they are changing course before they know it themselves.”
“Will do, sir” he said, a tiny bit less terrified than before. A good captain encourages their crew, inspires them to greatness and gives them opportunities to work beyond their station and abilities. A great captain does this without even trying, and an exceptional captain does this without even thinking. I must be a legendary captain.
“Gene, you know that feeling you get when someone is about to start shooting real live ammunition at you? I am getting the strangest feeling we might need our turrets operational. Can you please hop on that, quick-fast, like a bunny? Be advised, we need to burn, and soon.”
“Quick-fast like a bunny, aye. Consider it hopped.”
*****
As I hopped on through the cargo bay to the gun deck, I couldn't help but smile. Forced to move, to act before we had the time to plan, before we had time to prepare – this is the true way of the world, the nature of the beast.
As much as I am the type of person that looks before they leap, that watches where I step, it seems like I keep leaping into something brown and goopy that smells like excessive adventure. And now Dak has me hopping, like a blasted bunny no less.
The task at hand is critical. We don't have any time left, we need operational turrets immediately-if-not-sooner, and once again, like so many other times in my career as an engineer, it's on my shoulders to make it happen. Not that I mind, of course – I live for this kind of pressure.
As I kicked through the gun deck towards the topside ladder leading to the turret compartment, the captain mashed the maneuvering alarm and punched the reac drive. Despite the alarm, I suddenly found myself sliding aft in an incredibly painful, undignified manner.
Of all the damned times to throw me on my mass, the captain's timing is impeccable as usual.
Luckily, I'm an old space hand, and I've spent enough time rattling around in these cans to have developed an almost preternatural sense of self preservation. My hand was reaching out almost as soon as I felt the deck become the wall, and I managed to snag a grabber and fetched up alongside the gun deck rail.
Orientation under acceleration is one of the toughest things to learn for a lubber, fresh from the dirt. Some never learn the trick, as it involves a sort of divorce from your basic standard perception of where you are, and what you're doing. In space under acceleration, the trick is in understanding innately that down, is wherever you have been, and up is wherever you're going.
As a ship translates through its axis, rotates, burns along a different vector, up may become down, or sideways. The floor and ceiling almost never make sense, and if you can't accept that, if you can't welcome it and aren't ready for it, you will spend a lot of time in uncomfortable positions, possibly bleeding.
For me, though, this sort of thing is pretty much as natural as breathing. The hand rail becomes a ladder, with evenly spaced cross bars to serve that purpose, and I hardly feel any vertigo at all.
Not that I don't let it stop me from cursing in the name of our captain, may he be triple-damned for flinging me around like that – but that's nothing out of the ordinary for me. I spend a fair amount of my day doing nothing else.
The turret compartment is a mess, and I know Shorty is going to carve off a big slice of my butt for dinner when she sees what Pauli and I did to the place. Access hatches are all undogged, various parts and pieces are scattered around, nothing is shiny and operating-theater-clean, as she requires.
Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of time at the moment, so I have to try to see past the worst of it, and get it operational.
I am not a weapons specialist like Shorty, so there's really not much I can do to calibrate the turrets. Hopefully Janis can shift fire and adjust for accuracy, though I am not at all confident that will be possible. Janis is unbelievably good, but turrets that aren't calibrated and zeroed out would compound the error as they translate through their azimuth and altitude, and then to base ballistic calculations from a flawed platform... well, I don't understand enough of it to even know how hard it would be.
The challenge in front of me though is pretty straightforward. The wetnet is connected, and it looks like Pauli did his typical perfect job with it, so my first order of business will be connecting power leads.
These are modular systems, which greatly help with upgrades, but the Archaea was built a long time ago, in a time where connections were wired up rather than plugged in. Luckily, I've done a ton of work upgrading her power backbone, and can pull voltage where I need it, at the right amounts, just about anywhere.
I'd like to fabricate new connectors for the turret sockets, but given our time crunch, I'm going to have to hot-wire them. Shorty will definitely see red when she gets an eyeful of this work, but I just don't have time to do much more.
Once I have the power lit and the turrets energized, I started on the next challenge, to fabricate a new loading rail between the ammunition ovens, and the firing breech of the kinetic railers.
Again, I am faced with the type of engineering challenge I know I can do, but not necessarily one that I can do well. As I grind and mill on the parts I need, I am afraid none of this work will reduce the chewing I am going to get from Shorty.
“Gene, I am standing by, waiting patiently for you to give me the good news that we're going to be able to defend ourselves out here in the great big scary galaxy.”
“I'm very close Dak, very close... I need to machine a loading rail, but it's a pretty straightforward job. After that I need to plumb in the cooling harness, and then calibrate, though I am hoping Janis can work some sort of offset to handle that, as it's really a job suited for Shorty.”
“How much more time are we looking at Gene? I am currently closing with the target, but without those guns, I am afraid I won't have much to convince them to slow down and listen to us, beyond my unmitigated capacity to blow smoke up their stern tubes. Of course, to add insult to injury, we've been going all day long and I have hardly had a single drop of coffee. You know that makes me a little edgy. I hardly remember what it tastes like at this point.”
“Dak, it's going to take me about 10 minutes to machine the part, and maybe another 10 minutes or so to install it. Whether or not it will work at that point is also up in the air. I'm not Shorty, you know... these damn things terrify me. Once that is done, I will have at least another 15 minutes or so for the cooling harness.”
“Gene, I'm sorry, I wasn't really listening to you there. I was thinking about my coffee cup, and remembering a time around here when I would say hop, and you would be refilling my cup on the way down. I'm afraid all these words
you are using are not making any sense. Right now, the words I want to hear, the words I really need to hear are: Soon, Damn Soon, Right Away, Within Moments, and so on.”
I made a face at the milling machine as it tracked back and forth and took a deep, career-saving breath.
“Aye skipper. Damn soon, within moments sir.”
“Very well Gene. Carry on.”
Chapter 6
The captain was reeling in the target slowly, like a fisherman playing the hook. He was coming in hard right astern, trying to hide in her baffles. He explained to me that because gravimetric and other emissions detectors have a hard time reading dead astern when reac drives are burning, our best chance to close into turret range is from dead astern. It seemed pretty risky to me, but this isn't really my thing.
“Pauli, our handsets work on some sort of network, correct?” the captain asked.
“Yes, there's a local area network they connect to that uses a radio carrier wave.”
“What's the range of the network?” he asked, under the shade of a standard-issue eyebrow.
“Well, there are two networks, in fact, they switch between frequencies to function at different ranges to create local-area and wide-area connections, and when they're in range of Unet, they shunt traffic through Unet nodes to create a network with unlimited range.”
“What is the range of the wide-area?”
“Our WAN is pretty good, we can shoot a few kilometers before the signal-to-noise ratio degrades to the point where the network can't effectively communicate.”
“So there is leakage, of a sort, on shipboard networks?”
“Yes... in a classic sense, I guess there is. I don't think it's really something we could leverage though. Take our network, for example. We had a pretty decent one when we started working on the Archaea, pretty standard sort of setup. A key is generated unique to the ship, and all traffic is signed and encrypted with that key, to prevent unauthorized access, but also to limit interference from other systems when we're in port. Of course, our setup now is considerably more secure, because I am a pretty heavy-lifting security geek, we use a military-grade shifting key that assigns a uniquely identifiable key per transmitted packet, so each packet is unique.”
“Well that sounds... fascinatingly nap-inducing, Pauli – but I guess the takeaway here, is there is leakage, and if we get in range, you and Janis can just hack in and take over their systems, right?”
I shook my head. “I suppose she could, but she's not really built for that type of hack.”
“Nonsense, she is an excellent hacker, Pauli. She burned right through Europa Station's security system for me.”
“Captain...”
“Yes Pauli?”
“Are you sure that's what she did? She may have just looked up information from the local connection we make when we lock to moorage.”
“Damn son, you're dangerously close to doubting me. You know that's a capital offense, right? I'd hate to make someone clean something dirty around here.”
I laughed, “No sir! I wouldn't ever doubt you. I was just asking for information, of course.”
“Well, in that case... I guess this time I will stand down and put away my serious ship-painting eyebrows. Be warned though son, your captain is a kind, generous, intelligent and devastatingly heroic leader, but he's also a vicious tyrant, a mad dog, a scoundrel of the worst stripe when required.”
I turned around and was damn near blinded by a brilliantly gleaming toothy grin.
“Janis, my love, my sweet flower, can you please tell Pauli the technicals about what you did for me on Europa Station?”
“Absolutely sir. Steven, the captain gave me explicit permission to access any system or network at my own discretion, at any time, so long as it doesn't jeopardize the security or safety of the Archaea or crew. While docked on Europa Station, I interfaced with the security and enviro control systems to identify the locations of Yak and Jane.”
I swiveled around and looked at the captain, who was busy looking anywhere else at the moment, and smiling.
“Janis, how were you able to bypass the security system on Europa Station?”
“Steven, it was rather trivial. I performed an analysis of data packets on the network and identified an origin-key algorithm. As the nature of the communication was the method used to secure the communication, I simply wrote packets that matched the level of security I required, and set the signifier for each packet so it would back-trace to nodes that matched other packets of traffic for the same systems.”
“Janis, that is brilliant. You reverse-engineered and prototyped a real-time packet shaper and router. How did you reverse engineer the key signature?”
“Steven, I didn't. It didn't seem to be an efficient use of resources to do so. It was far more efficient to reuse existing packet signatures that matched the correct back-trace key. I simply re-routed them without changing their origin.”
“Janis, I am amazed. This is an incredibly elegant hack.”
“Thank you Steven, that is very nice of you to say. Would you like to keep the captain's directive in place, or modify it to restrict my access to external networks?”
“Janis, Captain Smith is the ultimate authority aboard the Archaea. As his crew, we should obey him to the best of our ability at all times. If you are unable to abstract his request or order to a complete logicspace ruleset, please let me know so that I can help resolve any conflict.”
“Thank you Steven. I shall do so.”
A light sweat had broken out all over my body as I thought more clearly about what it was Captain Smith may have done.
“Janis dear”, the captain said in his most endearing tone, “If we get into range of that target's network, can you access it?”
“Of course, sir. I am already resident in their network.”
“I thought we weren't in range?”
“Sir they were in range of a number of orbital platforms with transmit and receive capability as they raised orbit, I inserted a TSR node into their network at my earliest opportunity so that I may be resident in memory in advance of our need. It seemed likely that with the turrets inoperable, we would need an alternative method to leverage their compliance with our request.”
“Our request, dear?”
“Yes sir, to release Yak, or else.”
*****
We had closed to within 15 kilometers of the target, and as far as I could tell they hadn't yet noticed us, slowly but surely catching up with them from the shadowy depths of space. Off the starboard bow the harsh glare from Vega shone on the port bulkhead, reflected even more brightly from the target ahead. My breath caught in my throat at the savage beauty of the moment, the hunter and prey, the inevitable conflict, the impending crisis of command, the complete and total lack of coffee in my cold, dry cup.
“Gene, what is the good news?” I ask, through lips that have forgotten the warm, life giving embrace of coffee fresh and hot.
“Twenty more minutes, Dak?”
“Oh, I am sorry Gene. That was not the correct answer.”
“I am working at full speed here, but the loaders aren't letting the round rack into the chamber. Something with the alignment, or the adjustment, I am not sure. I am working as fast as I can, Dak.”
“Very well Gene. Because I am such a great guy, I can wait fifteen minutes. It's only time, right? I ought to be able to cool my jets for ten minutes, easy. Take your time, mister, just be advised, once I have waited the full five minutes you have requested I will be using those guns, with you in there or not.”
The silent hiss of the comms was all the answer I needed. I intended to give Gene as much time as he needed, but I wasn't sure if our target would agree to wait as patiently.
It was likely they would not.
*****
As I woke up, the nightmare of dust and terror screaming and shrieking in my ears, the fading dream mixed with the low hum of an air scavenger as I pried open eyes that felt packed full of dust and grit.<
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I started to sit up and the crash bars tight around me held me fast, so I took a moment and breathed deep, filling my lungs with sweet, fresh air.
For a brief moment, the terror of the howling night filled my ears, then I was back, in the Archaea, home and safe. I swallowed dryly, but the dusty taste in my mouth wouldn't go away. I was dirty, stinky, sore and mean. I needed a bath, a lake of clear, cold water, and an ocean of moisturizer.
“Captain? Anyone?” I asked the air, with a voice full of gravel.
“Hello Jane”, Janis said sweetly. “I am glad to see you awake, and will alert the captain immediately. How are you feeling?”
“Awful, Janis... like I have dust ground into every pore, like my throat is full of broken glass and my eyes are on fire.”
“Jane, I am truly sorry, that sounds horrible. Please rest as you need.”
I looked around the sick bay, lit by soft and subdued lighting, and felt the pull off acceleration shoving me into my toes. It was a little disorienting, as it felt like I was laying against a bunk on the wall, but the crash bars compensated well and wrapped me in a soft embrace that felt as huggy as a girl could want on a cold morning.
“Good morning lazy bones”, said the captain on comms. “How are you feeling Shorty?”
“I am not sure yet. I am frightfully dirty and stinky, I think we're going to have to burn these sheets, sir.”
“Indeed. Pauli told me he and Gene couldn't tell where the dirt ended and the Shorty began. Bet you're ready for a shower and some water right about now, and then... adventure! More than you could ever want, guaranteed.”
“Sir, I would gladly trade Gene's next paycheck just to hear the sound of running water right about now.”
“Paycheck? Do we have those? Pauli, what is this about paychecks... do you get those?” he asked across the hot mic. “Seriously though Jane, I am going to drop acceleration here for a few moments so you can get to your stateroom, but please proceed with all care. We are moments away from a little bit of shooting, if Gene can get the turrets online.”