Proxima Centauri - Hunt for the Lost AIs
Page 29
Oh yes, I’ve thought of it. Never stopped thinking of it, to be exact.
Logan and Tobias both sent their assent; Logan’s was accompanied by a flare of approval.
The two AIs sent their compliance at their commander’s orders, and Eric turned his attention to the remaining two AIs that needed rescuing.
* * * * *
Jason saw Terrance straighten, his eyes taking on the distant look that indicated he was speaking with Eric. He suppressed a slight flare of jealousy; as much as he enjoyed having the enhanced capabilities that came with being a ‘sport’—one of the first known naturally-occurring L2 humans—at times like this, he’d swap it in a heartbeat for the ability to embed with an AI.
The exec turned to him, humor from their previous exchange wiped from his face. “Looks like we have news about the AIs we’ve come all this way to rescue.”
Jason sat up at that, his attention sharpening. “Should Calista be in on this as well?”
Terrance paused to consult with Eric and then nodded. “He’s pinging her now. She can join us over her Link.”
Shoving the bowl of berries off to one side, Jason crossed his arms on the table in front of him. “What kind of news are we talking about, Eric?”
He frowned as the commodore brought them up to speed.
Jason saw Calista join the net at Tobias’s comment. He saw her avatar cock her head.
He saw Eric shake his head ‘no’ before Calista had even completed her thought.
As Jason opened his mouth to protest the loss of stealth a hard burn would have on the operation, Eric went on.
Jason shut his mouth and sent Calista’s avatar a shrug as he leant back once more and threw one hand across the back of a neighboring chair.
“So what can we do to help?” he asked.
Eric began, and Jason smirked as Terrance snorted.
“Hey, partner, you forgetting that wherever I go, you go?” The exec grinned over at him and Jason grinned back.
He heard the commodore make a noise over the net that almost sounded like the AI version of a snort.
Jason mentally inclined his head in acknowledgement. “So what do you propose?”
Jason sobered, recalling the frame Landon had once worn. He tried not to be obvious about it but he couldn’t help sparing a mental glance at Logan’s avatar to gauge the profiler’s reaction to Tobias’s words. The AI hadn’t mentioned his twin recently; he hadn’t chosen to do anything with Landon’s ICS cube either.
There were none.
Jason reached for the bowl of berries, only to have Terrance swipe the bowl out from under his hand.
“Asswipe,” he muttered with a sideways look as he kicked his feet back up onto the table.
Terrance just snorted, tipped his head back, and popped the last few berries into his mouth. As the exec passed, Jason felt the man give the back of his head a soft whack as he and Eric headed for the galley exit.
Jason narrowed his eyes just as Tobias’s voice came across their private connection.
RADIATION BURN
STELLAR DATE: 03.10.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Icarus Shuttle Sable Wind, KLM Refinery
REGION: Cool Dust Belt, Proxima Centauri System
Tobias’s words cut through the silence that had settled between the refinery team ever since the Sable Wind had floated free of the Speedwell’s docking bay. They lent a reality to the last two months of training that even the AIs’ insertion into mech frames and subsequent load onto the shuttle hadn't given him.
Of course, by now, the training was rote, the load in and prep for burn rehearsed in sims so frequently over the past eight weeks that he was sure any one of them could do it in their sleep. He chuckled mentally at the human idiom; it was both appropriate and utterly inaccurate all at once.
He scanned the shuttle’s interior, noting everyone was in place and all systems were green. Logan and their ESF add-on—the soldier, Kodi—sat with their mech frames locked down next to Tobias, while Niki’s frame was ensconced in the spot just aft of the pilot’s seat that was usually reserved for point defense.
Over the combat net, Shannon’s avatar nodded crisply at Tobias as she studied the data from the red dwarf star. She knew that he was calculating when the sensor blackout would hit the refinery, and was awaiting his command to engage the little ship’s engines at an acceleration toward the upper end of the spectrum of g-forces an AI could tolerate.
For this maneuver, the ship’s holo gauge would briefly hit the top of the ‘never-exceed’ arc on its speed indicator before settling into a steady eighty-g burn for the duration of the blackout. Since Shannon was technically the Icarus-class shuttle’s S&P—its spaceframe and powerplant expert—Tobias was confident the vessel would hold up under whatever the engineer put it through.
Shannon executed the burn just as the radiation from the coronal mass ejection temporarily rendered their sensors useless. The Icarus shuttle’s shift in acceleration had even the mech frames sending overstress warning signals to their respective HUDs. The CME and accompanying series of flares would last a total of ninety minutes—more than enough time for their thirty-minute hard drive toward the refinery.
At that point, they would cruise for more than seven hours at zero-g, until it was time to execute another hard-braking maneuver—again, timed to occur during one of Proxima’s frequent flares.
Tobias noted the Sable Wind’s dosimetry sensors continue their trek upward. Th
is was another reason he and Eric had decided this would be an all-AI team; the astrophysicists on Chinquapin had predicted this coronal mass ejection to be on the upper end of Proxima’s scale, and initial CME estimates had turned out to be accurate.
Given the inverse-square nature of ionizing radiation, and the refinery’s distance from the star, the dose would be intense, but not enough to do an AI permanent harm. This, too, was where Icarus’s Elastene shielding proved more effective than traditional ship cladding. The metal foam completely absorbed the betas and absorbed and deflected much of the gammas. What did make it through wasn’t enough to damage hardened ship’s systems or their mech frames.
He knew both the settlement on Chinquapin and the C-47 habitat cylinder orbiting it would have experienced higher levels of radiation from the CME, as they were fifty-six million kilometers closer to the star than the refinery. Solar storms like this one were why both installations had thick metal plating to augment standard magnetic shielding. It was the only way humanity had managed to survive in this system.
As these thoughts flickered through a compartmentalized portion of his mind, another part of his mind remained focused on the refinery they were nearing. Shannon had flipped the shuttle and initiated the thirty-minute braking burn just moments ago, as soon as the next solar flare rendered them blind.
They would complete their approach until they were at station-keeping relative to the asteroid that ensconced the lab, based on sensor readings that were now ten minutes old. Given that the refinery’s sensors were also blind, their approach should go undetected. Hopefully their breach would be equally low key, provided the blueprint that Eric’s contact had found of the refinery was accurate.
Shannon’s voice came over the combat net, and Tobias sent her a thread of acknowledgement. He was riding the connection with her and felt the thrusters fire and the shuttle’s subtle shifts in attitude as it approached. The maneuver was a bit tricky; she first had to do a lateral translation, and then fly retrograde for a brief period before easing toward the refinery’s docking bay.
They had chosen this bay to approach as it was in the lee of the star, and the bulk of the asteroid provided additional shielding from the star’s ejection. Tobias activated his mech frame and walked it to the Sable Wind’s airlock. Radiation levels were beginning to drop, and that meant sensors should begin to come back online shortly.
The next part of the plan would be in his hands. The spider-like frames he, Kodi, and Logan wore each had eight articulated legs and a body that was ringed with sensors. Two of the eight arms were dedicated to spinning and deploying nano filaments they would use to defeat the refinery’s defense systems.
An additional three limbs terminated in various forms of weaponry: a self-loading breaching rocket launcher, loaded with depleted uranium sabots, a small-scale gatling whose magazine feed was slung under the mech frame’s ring of sensors, and a particle beam weapon he’d had to argue with Eric over before the commodore would agree to let him to install it into the frame.
That last packed a bragg’s peak that would fry any system beyond repair at point of impact.
Tobias intended for this refinery to become nothing more than another piece of metal slag in orbit around the red dwarf when they were done with it.
Shannon’s exclamation sounded at the same time the Sable Wind impacted with the refinery. A scraping noise, combined with the groan of stressed metals, accompanied the resulting jolt that tossed Tobias’s mech frame across the cabin to slam into the craft’s port side.
Not this again, he grumbled inwardly as he fought to right himself. He really hated operating from a mech frame….
It had been a matter of bad timing. The ship’s sensors were still reinitializing from the shutdown that had been forced on them from the radiation, and Shannon had been unaware that their vector had them approaching the docking bay at a slightly oblique angle. The shuttle had run into gantry arms that jutted out from the docking ring; the arms had bent under the Sable Wind’s velocity and, after the initial impact, had scraped along the starboard side of the Sable Wind’s hull.
He waited until she completed her systems check and then heard her admit,
Righting his own frame, he returned to the shuttle’s airlock.
It ground to a halt with an opening only sixty centimeters wide. Logan and Kodi latched articulated arms around the edges of each door and wrenched them open wide enough for their mech frames to fit through.
Tobias exited, spooling a line behind him as he floated from the Sable Wind to the blinking panel that was installed to one side of the refinery’s bay doors. The panel was blinking an amber-red-red code he was certain indicated a damaged entry point. He hoped the system saw it as random debris and not an attack.
Reaching out with one of his nano-deploying arms, he made contact with the panel and rapidly injected a passel of breaching bots into it. Spinning the filaments deep into its circuitry, he circumvented the system’s lockouts and overrode the sensor that would report the bay doors were open.
Bay doors split in the center and then retracted, half up into the overhead, the other half retreating down into its deck. Shannon floated the damaged Icarus shuttle into the bay and settled it into a cradle intended, he was sure, for deliveries. Tobias used his tether to reel himself inside the bay and then sent the signal for the bay doors to seal them in.
Niki had already exited and stood next to Logan and Kodi, awaiting instructions.
With any luck, the operation would proceed a bit more smoothly now. He hoped the opening gambit for Eric’s team would go better than theirs had.
* * * * *
Eric had ordered Jason and the rest of their team into the Eidolon, the newer of the two Icarus shuttles, a few hours ago. The AI pinged them now, initiating the team’s combat net.
From his position in the copilot’s seat next to Jason, Terrance could see Calista fold herself into the Icarus fighter’s pilot’s cradle and nod at them before the ultra-black canopy sealed over her head.
Terrance examined the mining torus’s schematics. Far larger than the Krait-1 torus he knew Jason and Calista had breached several months back, this one served as a hub and central supply depot for several mining concerns, with rigs scattered throughout the dust cloud’s near environs.
They were lucky; initial reports had placed these two shackled AIs at different mining platforms, but more recent information had them both installed within the main torus.
He realized how fortunate it was that Phantom Blade had such a well-respected and capable commander in Eric. He still wasn’t sure how the commodore had managed to wrangle permission for them to operate inside the terr
itory of another sovereign star nation—even if they were on friendly footing. But he had managed it.
If Proxima’s military intelligence had their information correct, one was tasked with running the torus itself, while the other was remotely operating several rigs owned by the largest of the mining concerns housed on the torus.
The fact both were in the same general physical location made extraction a much simpler prospect.
At the thirty-minute mark, they launched. Looking at his HUD’s chrono, Terrance noted that Tobias and Shannon must have already breached the refinery by now.
Good luck, friends, he thought, as his mind settled into the path that lay ahead.
TIME LAG
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Prime Minister’s Office, El Dorado Ring
REGION: Alpha Centauri System
“They should be insystem by now,” Esther murmured, and Lysander nodded.
He’d canceled his weekly cabinet meeting, knowing that even his renowned ability to multitask would have abandoned him on this day.
They were in a private expanse, just the two of them. It was a peaceful place, a glade of trees rising to a brilliant blue sky, with a carpet of soft pine needles cushioning them as they walked. A fellow Weapon Born had shown him this construct hundreds of years ago, and it brought him a sense of peace in times of great stress. Esther had remarked on it when she first saw it, but Lysander found that he’d been reluctant to share its origins with her.
“It’s times like this that I wish human fiction were reality,” he said, and laughed humorlessly at Esther’s quizzical glance. “Science fiction,” he clarified. “Specifically, communication—better yet, travel—at FTL speeds.”
Esther’s brow furrowed, and her expression turned slightly scornful as she replied, “Fanciful thinking.”
“Yes, but an example of humanity’s ability to dream; the powerful drive humans have for their reach to extend their grasp.” He gestured between them. “If not for that, we might not ever have existed.”