by Chris Hechtl
“Captain, we've got masses coming in on us. All around us!” the sensor rating said.
“From where?” the captain said, rushing from her wardroom to the bridge.
“Hyper, Ma'am! We just picked it up with the sensor modifications. They are big, Ma'am, massive. A fleet.”
“Jump us out,” the captain ordered.
“Are you certain they are even there?” Lieutenant Ashers asked, coming in at a run behind his captain. “With the computer on the fritz…” he cautioned, trying to get his shirt on. Captain Ride snorted as he twisted about. Finally, she took pity on him and pulled the arm straight and untucked the sleeve to get him in it.
“Thanks, Ma'am,” he mumbled.
“It's real,” the rating said, looking up, face serious. “I've triple checked it.”
“So, it was a sentry. We tripped it. And it blew up when we tried to tamper with it. So…” Captain Ride said taking her seat. “Engineering, time to jump?” she demanded.
“Five minutes, Ma'am. We'd be quicker with a full crew and a working computer, Ma'am. I'm not sure about this jump…”
Captain Ride scowled but then shrugged. “No helping it Garth, we work with what we've got. Read up on what Bill had done,” she said.
“Yeah, mucking about with my engines,” Garth grumbled. “Some friend,” he growled.
“You're just annoyed that you didn't think of it first, and you weren't on hand when he did it,” the captain teased.
“Too right, I am,” Garth retorted, face clearing slightly. “Are we going to make it?” he asked.
“Six minutes thirty seconds to exit,” the rating said. “It'll be close,” she warned.
“Running for our lives. Joy,” the new chief engineer said. “This is so getting old,” he grumbled as he cut the circuit.
“Leave a probe behind,” Doctor Chou urged, waving a hand as he entered the bridge. “Give them a message saying we're sorry and if we can set it up to relay what it sees to us while it can.”
“Can you do that?” Captain Ride said as the Asian male stumbled.
“Sorry, still getting my legs back,” he mumbled. He took the nearest seat. “To answer, yes. I scanned the papers Doctor Blither and Jed came up with for the sensor modifications. But we need to get on it now, no time.”
“Do it,” the captain ordered with a nod to Lieutenant Ashler and the sensor tech.
<|>-^-<|>
As they crossed the alpha wall, Drake left behind a probe of their own. Drake crossed the hyperwall slow but picked up speed over the next two minutes before they got the transmission burst.
“Captain, one burst, it's an Omega transmission. Probe destroyed. We did get this though,” the communications rating said, pulling up a feed and putting it on the main plot. The captain paled when she saw the behemoth ships jumping out of hyper. Smaller ships were arrayed around them. One of the behemoths passed the camera and then lashed out with energy weapons, blowing the probe apart.
“It seems they don't like us,” the captain said. She sighed. “Well, that answers that,” she murmured thoughtfully.
“The ships, the big ones are spindle in shape, quite large. The equivalent of a dreadnaught, Skipper. Based on the weapons and energy readings…she's very powerful.”
“Shit,” Lieutenant Ashler curse.
“The other ships…some were launched, others were corvette and cruiser scale.”
“A full fleet? To answer the distress beacon of one probe?” Doctor Chou murmured thoughtfully. The captain turned to look at him. “It doesn't make sense. Why send a sledge hammer to probe the loss of a sentry?”
“What bothers me more, Doctor, is the timing. To get here from wherever their starting point was in what? Six hours or less?” Lieutenant Ashler asked.
It was Dr. Chou's turn to pale slightly. He frowned, then turned to his station and began to type. The captain pulled up a feed to echo his. She noted he was looking at star charts of the surrounding space, first eliminating the ones they had gone to. She nodded. Chou was a good guy; he had a good head on his shoulders. Despite the mental cobwebs from stasis fatigue, he was thinking and not just reacting. Not that it was doing him much good she thought sourly; the computers were still slower than hell.
“Get me my computers back. Take the secondary's offline; purge them, reboot, do whatever you have to do, then have them take over and do the same purge on the others. Figure out what the hell is bogging us down,” she growled, glaring at the engineering tech.
“We've tried, Ma'am,” he said, spreading his hands. “Whatever it is…it's like a damn virus. But one we've never seen before.”
“A virus?” Doctor Chou asked, looking up in surprise. “How? Where?”
“The probe,” Lieutenant Ashler murmured thoughtfully.
“You think so?” The captain asked, turning to him.
He shrugged. “It fits. Though how alien software could run on our hardware…”
“Our firewalls are supposed to block anything we don't recognize,” the engineering rating said.
“Tell that to the computers,” Ashler said, waving a hand to the computer display.
“We…Ma'am, sir, we did record the transmissions from the probe. And we were sampling that code for analysis.”
“Did you buffer it?” Doctor Chou asked.
“To some degree. But if it is some sort of virus, it could have um, been a micro or a nano. Something that put small pieces of itself into each peek we took.”
“You have to look at it to view and interpret the data. And of course you didn't do that from a system not connected to the net,” Doctor Chou said.
She hung her head. “No,” she mumbled.
He sighed, shaking his head. The captain frowned. “Well, what's done is done I suppose, we'll have to figure this out. See if you can find the code samples you were running.”
“Yes, doctor,” she said, going back to work, but with slumped shoulders.
<|>-^-<|>
“Captain…”
Captain Ride sighed rolling over to hit the night light. “What is it now?” she demanded. She'd had a hell of a day, actually past couple of days. This was her first downtime she'd had in nearly seventy-two hours, and of course, it had to be interrupted.
“Ma'am. We need you on the bridge.”
“Just spit it out. You don't need me holding your hand to do that,” she growled, looking down at her naked form. She hadn't even gotten into her nighty; she'd gone right from the shower to the bed.
“Ma'am, navigation is…well, we're off course. We're not on our programmed course, and we're not controlling the navigation of the ship, Ma'am, the computer is,” Lieutenant Drumore stated.
“I'll be right up,” the captain said, throwing the silk sheet off her bare form.
<|>-^-<|>
“What the hell is going on?” the captain demanded, storming onto the bridge. Lieutenant Ashler and Chief Garth were close on her heels.
“Ma'am, it's not my fault, Ma'am. It looked fine, but when we swapped out the primaries for the secondaries, it was different,” he said, indicating the navigational course feed. See?” he asked, just as the plot changed to their planned route. “Um…”
“A glitch?” Lieutenant Ashler asked. The captain frowned thoughtfully.
“Not likely, Doctor Chou said. They turned as he entered. “Remember that virus? In order for it to function as it is, and yes, we've come to the conclusion that there is an alien virus in the computer…but in order for it to adapt to our network and sneak in with us unaware, we've determined it has to have some level of intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence? And our own AI…”
“Has been supplanted by it. As has the navigational feed,” the doctor said, waving a hand to the feed. “Undoubtedly, if you did the same thing again, you'd get similar results, but then the feed would return to the altered course. Or the feed we're seeing is a fake.”
“We're being spoon-fed a view of the route we're on. I don't like that,
” Garth growled.
“I don't like being out of control of my own damn ship,” the captain snarled. “Find a way to get us control again. Do what you have to do,” she ordered. He nodded.
“We're being redirected. Where?” she asked. “Back to where we started?” she asked thoughtfully.
Doctor Chou frowned and then pulled out a tablet. He tapped at it, then observed their course. Then he showed it to the captain. “I missed the course change. Can you show it to me?” he asked.
She pointed to the tablet, then outlined another star, one they hadn't visited yet.
He turned the tablet around and then nodded. “As I suspected. The AI is redirecting us to one of the systems I thought that the enemy fleet came from. Quite devious,” he murmured. After a moment code strings began to form and scroll on the tablet, then it blanked out. “Damn! Another one!” he snarled.
“Another one?” the captain asked. She couldn't help herself, she yawned.
“Coffee, Skipper?” Lieutenant Ashler offered.
She nodded. “Please. Something tells me we're going to be up for a while again,” she said. “Another one what, Doctor?” She asked.
“Another tablet. I was so sure I cut off the Wi-Fi. How the hell is it getting in?”
“If you did it through the software, then it's easy to reverse that,” the engineer said helpfully.
“Damn,” the doctor grumbled. “All my data…compromised at best, deleted at worst.”
“Either way, useless since the tablet is locked out right?” Garth asked.
“Here, see for yourself,” the doctor offered, holding the tablet out. The engineer frowned but he took the device. He rebooted it, but it didn't get past the first boot screen before it crashed again. “Yeah, a virus inside, or it's being controlled from outside.”
“I'll get another one. A clean one,” the doctor said. “I'll need help disabling the Wi-Fi, this time from the chips.”
“I'm not certain we can doctor. The best I can do…” Garth frowned.
The captain frowned, listening with a half an ear as they muttered as she checked the ship readouts. She didn't like what she was seeing, since they suspected the readings were falsified. She wondered what else was a lie. She felt a tap on her elbow and turned to Ashler. He handed her a steaming cup of coffee. She smiled politely and took it to sip at it.
<|>-^-<|>
Two frustrating days later Drake jumped out of hyper right where Doctor Chou suspected but well ahead of her planned exit. “And now we have our answers or at least some,” the captain murmured, staring at the plot.
They had taken the systems down one by one, then brought up the systems that could function on their own network without interacting with the central computer. So, they could see with the sensors but still couldn't maneuver or fight. If they even wanted to fight, which they didn't. She shook her head. Fighting was pointless, she thought, looking at the millions of drive signatures being painted on the plot. Like trying to fight a solar flare.
“So, this virus brought us…here. Where is here?”
“A G class star, Captain. Right now, that's all we can tell you. That and well…” the sensor tech waved helplessly to the plot.
“Yeah, and that,” the captain said. “We're recording?”
“Yes, Ma'am,” she said.
“Well, at least we've got one thing straightened out,” she murmured.
“Captain, I've gotten into the alien code. At least a piece of it,” Doctor Chou said. “It's definitely an AI, but oddly I found some references to another species.”
“Another species? Not its own?”
“No, Ma'am. I should say more than one species. A catalog of species, and well, some were labeled with a negative. It's taken some time with our linguistics people, but we think we have some answers,” he said. He showed her his tablet. “They are called the Demon Mecha.”
“Not a good sign, doctor,” Lieutenant Ashler said.
“Oh, it gets worse. They are Xenophobic like the Zerinoth.”
“Zerinoth?”
“Another alien species, apparently the one who's been destroying ships along the Delta frontier.”
“Oh.”
“The two species, if you can call the Demon Mecha that, are at war. They've been at war for…millennia it seems. This is one of the worlds the Demon Mecha recently conquered. A former Zerinoth colony,” he said. He waved a hand just as the sensor tech brought up the image of a planet. It was blue, but when he zoomed in they could see clouds of black inky smog. Through holes in the smog, they saw dark alien industrial cities, patterns of them, covering every square centimeter of useable space.
“This is…not good,” the Doctor murmured. “Any signs of life?”
“No, doctor.”
“So, now we know the nature of the enemy. I doubt he has a face,” the captain murmured.
“No organics, all electronic, mechanical. A machine race. A hive mind perhaps?” The doctor shook his head. “This would be fascinating if I wasn't so terrified,” he said, voice quavering slightly.
“Shake in your boots later, doctor; let's get the hell out of here!” the captain growled. She looked about, trying to think of some way out of the damn mess.
“How do you propose to do that? Whatever is in the computer…why did the fans turn off?” The doctor demanded, looking up to the air vent.
“Captain, something…that AI or whatever it is, it's trying to get through communications,” the rating said.
“Thank god we cut that out of the computer network,” Garth growled. “Now what's up with the life support?” he demanded, turning about.
“It's cut off the atmosphere! Life support! It's trying to kill us!” Lieutenant Ashler said suddenly, jumping to his feet in alarm. “Don't you see? It needed us alive to get here. But now we're expendable! All it wants is our data! With it they'll know about mankind and…” he waved to the navigational database.
“The locks are trying to cycle open! But they are hard wired…repair robots are going insane!” Garth said suddenly, then they heard the clatter of sounds as fighting broke out behind him.
“Captain, it's gotten through the firewalls; I think one of the repair bots ran a cable to my systems to bypass the bypass. We're transmitting something to the collective,” the rating warned, throwing up her hands in disgust. “And there is nothing we can do about it!”
“Oh yes there is; pull the hardware. Do it. Crew, suit up,” she growled, looking around. “Don't trust the coms; pass the word to get into suits. Pull the computers if we have to. Do it fast, we've got under ten minutes,” she said.
“What about them?” the rating asked, fingers shaking as she pointed to the plot. Hundreds of ships were headed in their direction. They were coming in all sizes, from the inner system.
“One thing at a time.”
“We have to stop that transmission and get out of here,” the doctor said.
“We're working on it,” the skipper said through gritted teeth. “Can't you see that? Why don't you quit bitching and lend a hand?”
“It's…Captain, please understand, they are no doubt transmitting our information. Everything about us, including our navigational charts. With them they will go back to Terran space and consume humanity!” The doctor said.
The captain and crew froze. The captain frowned. “Then we have no choice.”
“Yes! We must blow the ship!” The doctor urged.
“Or something else,” she said. “Let's see if we can find a slightly less drastic measure first, doctor,” she said caustically, looking at the status board. She could see alien eyes looking back at her. Her own narrowed. “Yeah, I see you, you son of a bitch. You may get us, but we'll get you too,” she snarled.
“Captain, ships are approaching our position,” Lieutenant Ashler reported.
The captain turned. “Bill's modifications to our hyperdrive are still on, right?”
Lieutenant Ashler and Drumore nodded.
“Fine then. We'v
e got control of the reactors?” Again they nodded. “Then take down the central net. Purge the thing. Every tablet, everything. Implants as well. Get that going now,” she said, grabbing Drumore's arm. He nodded. She turned to Ashler, letting Drumore go. “Andy, I've got something else for you to do. It's a long shot, but it's our only chance…
<|>-^-<|>
“Think it will work?”
“It'd better,” Captain Ride said, sitting in her chair. “We're out of time,” she said, looking balefully at the plot on a tablet. They'd cut the computer down to nothing, but it had been hell to do. The alien AI had done its best to lock them out of the computer rooms. They'd had to cut their way into some compartments; the ship was a mess.
She was unhappy about the butcher’s bill as well. In a last ditch or possibly malicious act, the AI had cut the life support to those in stasis. Hundreds had died before the life support techs had realized what was going on. And with their limited life support…Georgina had been forced to let most of the people die. They didn't have the support to save them, nor the time to divide their attention to do so. Only a handful had been saved.
She sighed. “Are we ready?”
“Ready as we'll ever be, Ma'am,” Garth said, panting. He sounded exhausted. Her heart went out to him. She nodded though, sobered. “Then jump,” she said.
“Aye aye, Ma'am. Once more into the unknown, but this time for real,” Lieutenant Ashler said, engaging the hyperdrive.
It was true; their last ditch effort to purge the ship's computers had wiped their navigational database. They were indeed jumping blind, clinging to hope and luck. Captain Ride wasn't certain if it was enough, but she was sure it would fulfill her last duty, the one to mankind. Either they would find a way home to warn humanity…hopefully without leading the enemy back…or they would die and preserve what secrets they had left. She looked over to smile at Doctor Chou. He nodded back to her. She turned, looking at the plot. Either way…they were truly going into the unknown.
“Jump,” she ordered, sitting back and settling her shoulders.
The End