Wandering Engineer 6: Pirates Bane

by Chris Hechtl

  “You are projecting that the Horathians main target... is the defenders themselves? Is that why you are keeping them on the jump point?”

  “Yes. And it's also why I don't have a fleet train listed for them. Knowing combat was going to happen, the enemy fleet Commander would no doubt keep them tucked away in hyper or even leave them behind in 101.”

  “I see. True,” the Admiral said, nodding thoughtfully. His eyes watched the ships darting in and out, in a dance of death. But the Horathian's weren't to be fooled again, this time the large Pyraxians took hits as well.

  “They can chose the direction and timing of the attack, but the enemy can react,” Irons murmured softly. “Killing the tin can is one thing. You don't think they'd go for a capture?” he asked.

  “No. Given their experience with you it would be tempting, but given the tonnage differential?” Sprite asked, shaking her head. “No. I think the Commanders would conclude it was too risky.”

  “Concur,” Irons replied. “And I know Damocles isn't as well off as that. I didn't send enough to get her to one hundred percent. Not by a long shot.”

  “No. Which means they have to fight her carefully, and any damage she takes has a modifier.”

  “Understood,” the Admiral replied, frowning as Damocles broke off the last pass. “I see.”

  “Logan will be conservative with his assets. After all, he can't build more. But... he can be wily,” Sprite hinted. After a moment more ships came onto the plot. A familiar name came up the Bismarck.

  “She's... no way!”

  “Never underestimate the power of running a bluff Admiral,” Sprite said. Suddenly the enemy ships changed course. They couldn't just reverse course, but they were now running for it. Firefly darted in, hammering one of the tin cans but getting hit by the BC in return. She broke off, limping away. After a moment the enemy reached the jump point and vanished.

  He couldn't help but close his eyes in pain. Not at the shredded loss of ships and memories of explosions to fill in the void the icons left wanting, but in knowledge that so many splendid people, filled with potential had lost their lives. He let out a slow breath. But it wasn't real, he reminded himself. A sim.

  “So, they won,” Irons said, feeling torn. He should feel vindicated he thought, but wasn't. Pyrax had won the day, but not without taking heavy damage.

  “One battle. Care to see the follow up?” Sprite asked.

  “Pass. I'm now seeing this was more of a rub my nose in things than a distraction Commander.”

  “Correct,” Sprite replied, not in any way upset by his realization. She seemed defiant, but determined.

  “And I have a lot to think about.”

  “Possibly. But not a lot we can do right now.”

  “No, but it is something to consider. Night Sprite,” the Admiral said, cutting the sim.

  “Good night Admiral. I'd wish you sweet dreams...”

  “More like nightmares. Thanks for that,” he exhaled noisily. He realized it was important; he had been avoiding it for too long. The implications to his plan were chilling. For too long he'd not only ignored the threat, he'd hoped for the best. Now that had to change. It was unpalatable in some ways, but he'd have to figure something out, and soon. Beta 101a1 was going to be a game changer; he knew that now.

  “If I didn't bring it up I wouldn't be doing my job,” she said with a shrug. He gave her avatar a curt nod before he exited the compartment.

  <----*----*----*---->

  “So? What now? Another sim lecture reminding me of what I can't change?”

  “No, and I have an objection to the statement that the future can't be changed. Or can't be changed by you Admiral,” Sprite replied.

  Irons nodded grudgingly. “Self pity adjusted. What now?”

  “Well, if you are willing to play a bit of a game...”

  “Game?”

  “Something of a maze, some part educational,” Sprite replied, sounding mischievous. “It should give you a bit of a break while entertaining you a little.”

  The Admiral cocked his head. He could tell the AI was up to something, but not what. He could order her to just spit it out, but that would ruin her fun. Besides, he could be a good sport, he thought. He'd give it a try. Slowly he nodded.

  “Have a seat,” Sprite said, indicating his bed. He sat, then laid back and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Um, you better jack in for this.”

  “Oh all right,” he replied, reaching over and pulling a cable out of a small alcove. He'd built the addition to allow the AI to jack in while he was resting. That way his implants could recharge from the ships power net and they could enter the ship's net and not use his wifi, which had limited bandwidth.

  He plugged the cable into his right arm and then settled back down. As his breathing slowed he closed his eyes. When only his HUD appeared he started twiddling his thumbs.

  “Patience,” Sprite said reprovingly. After a moment his HUD disappeared and a loading screen appeared. He watched the bar run its course to one hundred percent. It blinked then the image of white faded to a woodland scene.

  “Here is the game. You are a hunter. A weasel. Here is the rabbit,” Sprite said. A cute fuzzy rabbit peaked out of a rabbit hole. “He's dinner. Catch,” she said.

  “Oh come on,” the Admiral said as the rabbit twitched its nose at him, then cocked his head. Sprite had used a texture map instead of a hair map for the fur, but it still looked cute. There was even a twinkle in his eye.

  “You can't be serious.”

  “Can't handle it?”

  “I'm...” the little rodent turned and scampered when he lunged for it. His brain signals were controlling an avatar, no longer working his real body. The little rodent kicked virtual dirt in his face and then scrambled for a hole in the ground. It did a spin around the hole, turned and held its nose and dropped in cartoon style.

  “Why you little...” Irons growled, giving chase.

  He dived into the tunnel, really just a brown low polygon environment and looked around. Sprite floated in behind him. “You can use your senses to pick up on his trail.”

  “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Try not to hit too many dead ends. Cave ins are a pain. Not to mention doubling back.”

  “Great,” Irons said. The occasional root or rock poked out, breaking up the brown sameness. She hadn't gone all out on the textures, most likely to reduce the computer load. He nodded and oriented on the sound of scrambling.

  “Go get em Elmer!” Sprite chuckled and disappeared.

  He looked over his shoulder to catch her wink out and then frowned. Now why was that name familiar?

  He dived after the little rodent, but watched as it kicked up its heels and wiggled its tail at him as it danced out of range. For hours he went after the virtual animal with single-minded determination. The chase had him, but there was something there, a competition with a bit of malicious humor in it.

  Several times he thought he had cornered the little monster before something cut him off or whacked him in the head. Then he'd watch helplessly as the rabbit dove down a tunnel too small for him to follow.

  The human started to enjoy the experience until he realized the chase through the tunnels was a bit like hyperspace piloting.

  The realization made him stop what he was doing.

  “What are you doing? He's getting away!” Sprite said, coming up behind him. Sprite tried to edge him along but he called a halt. “I need a break here. Besides, something's bugging me. You didn't exactly make this fair Sprite,” Irons said.

  As he talked the little monster popped up to taunt him, then away. It did the same taunt several times before it edged closer to him.

  He pretended to ignore it, instead focusing on his implant feed. His HUD returned and he called up a system's check. All was fine there. Then he called up a log. They had jumped into Beta; something the AI weren't capable of handling. He frowned. On a hunch he ran a back track of their course. “Y
ou, what's going on here?” he asked.

  He was annoyed and amused when he found out the two AI had conspired to feed him the navigational feed. “You two set me up?” he demanded, sounding annoyed. Phoenix appeared next to Sprite.

  “It was her idea,” Phoenix said.

  Sprite however laughed. “It worked didn't it?”

  The Admiral snorted. He lunged and grabbed the rabbit by the ears. “Right,” he said, as the rabbit's form changed to a stick of dynamite hanging by fake ears. “Oh very funny. But he's no Bugs.”

  “No, I had to change the form or you would have gotten wise. So I used a cotton tail.”

  “I see that,” Irons said amused. He realized it was a prank and took it with slightly less ill grace. “If you could control the rabbit through the maze, why can't you handle hyper?”

  “We didn't actually control it,” Phoenix replied. “What we did is project it after getting a base course. We dangled it only when you needed the lure.”

  “I see.”

  “Bit of a downer, taking the fun out of it. Whoever heard of a magician giving the trick away?” Sprite grumbled, eying Phoenix. Phoenix shrugged.

  The Admiral disconnected and then sat up on his bunk. “It wasn't all bad. But it was a bit long. Not being able to catch the little monster does get you frustrated and annoyed. I tried to lay a trap twice.”

  “We know,” Sprite said. “I had to kick you back into gear.”

  “Right.” He shrugged, looking at the clock and then checking the ship's net. Phoenix had dropped them back into a sedate alpha octave.

  “All right, I approve of this. And any others you can think of that are similar. For instance a flight sim or underwater swim through rings or something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps a change of scenery will help get me over the tedium.”

  “You have been twitchy.”

  “Blood sugar?”

  “No, more like repetitive actions for too long a period. Even we AI have that problem.”

  “Understood. So, yes, you can do this once in a while.”

  “Going up and down is costing us as a lot in power, but it's making up some in transit time. We really are getting too close to the reserve Admiral.”

  Irons nodded bleakly. There was no helping it. He'd thought they'd pick up some grav sheer, or some high-density energy packets with the hyper collectors. They did close to what he had projected in Delta, but still, the bottom end of that projection. Which was annoying. He shouldn't have counted on that.

  He had stuffed Phoenix with bladders of fuel before they had left. It was all gone now; they only had the fuel remaining in the tanks. Even the bladders had been recycled to make room inside the ship. Not good.

  “So, I'll set up more methods of navigating in VR in rough patches,” Sprite said, recapping and getting his thought train back onto positive tracks in the here and now. "That will allow we AIs to focus on other tasks for brief periods."

  “Agreed. I think finding a way to do the job without sitting on my butt and staring at the screen helped a little.” Irons smiled slightly. “But I'm famished now.”

  “Lunch break?” Sprite asked.

  “Yeah, I'm thinking rabbit. Or as close as the food replicator can get,” the Admiral replied with a wolfish smile. Sprite opened her mouth as if to object but then closed it with a chuckle and shake of her virtual head.

  <----*----*----*---->

  When he was bored he wrote contingency plans and explored logistics tables or read manuals. They had a few manuals to hardware that had come after his long stint in stasis. Not much, some minor changes to reactor controls, some changes to add more redundant control runs to weapon mounts... minor improvements in efficiency... not a lot. Of course they had only a few years after he went dark before the Federation went dark as well.

  He winced and changed to something more productive. He explored the sector of space with a holo map. The Rho sector capital had at one time been Pyrax, which had been the oldest inhabited system when it had been formed into a sector. Eden, its planet, had been one of the first Terran colonies, terraformed and founded by Lagroose Industries centuries even before the Federation itself had been founded. The founder of Lagroose industries had specifically chosen the then very remote system to get away from war torn Sol. The history books were torn on the subject as to why the founder had chosen a system nearly fifteen thousand light years from Sol to come home. Some had thought it was because at the time Eden had been one of the few Terran style worlds. Others saw it as an escape from war and ever increasingly sophisticated society. Some had cynically pointed out that the decades long journey had allowed the founder to use banned medical science to restore his youth in order to form a monarchy of his own with his own laws.

  War however had eventually followed the colonists anyway. One of the battles of the First Terran Interstellar War had been fought there, which was why the Tauren battleship had been left to drift there, and would eventually be recovered by him and the navy to be rechristened the Bismark.

  Eden had been quite a beautiful world when he had visited it, almost living up to its name he thought with a pang. Now it was rubble, the inner Eden belt of the system that had spread out into a ring around the Pyrax star, denser than the Atens belt had been. All its industry destroyed by the Xenos or pulled out by their corporate backers after the Xenos had left. Only Anvil had been left to rot on the vine, not worthy of recovery for some reason.

  But, back before it's planet's destruction, Pyrax had been the largest population and industrial system in the sector so it had formed the center of a sphere of space several thousand light years in diameter. Many of the systems were dead, only a handful of stars were the right type to not only have planets, but have a Goldilocks zone and have the right set of variables to support a life bearing planet. And of course the Xenos had taken a hand in shortening that list considerably.

  Still, the Rho sector was big, and he hadn't been to all the planets, but Sprite had at least confirmed a surprising number were still out there. He wondered sometimes if there were systems off the map, systems that had been written off by the Federation Interstellar cartographers that refugees had fled to in desperation. He shook his head, setting the thought aside.

  There were six ways into the sector since the sector wormhole gate had been confirmed destroyed; one was in the North, which led to the Federation core world sector. It was in the chain of dead systems between Senka and Beta 953ac.

  Clockwise from it, in the North East was Horath and south of it Finagle. Finagle had a link that went North East to another sector, the Sigma sector that also boarded the core worlds. In the East was Hinata, another world most likely conquered by the Horathian Empire. It led to the Omega sector in the outer arm of the galaxy beyond the Perseus arm.

  He was headed to the South East. Just south and a couple jumps beyond Beta 101a1 was the Crellis system and one of the gateways to the Xenos in the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy. The Fleet had destroyed or damaged that wormhole. Maybe. It was all speculation at this point, something he needed to nail down soon.

  He frowned and moved on. In the South West along the Seti Alpha 4 chain there was Aiera 3, a system that linked to Tauren space. That sector was named Tau; most likely someone in the charting department had a sense of humor... or just got it right.

  And finally, in the North West was a dead system that linked to Syntia's World. The dead system's chain of jump points led to the Pi sector of the galaxy.

  The sector's inhabited systems, or at least those known to exist were quite small, shrinking the once thriving community. Sprite had also confirmed that the sector's Dyson sphere and wormhole gate had also been destroyed early in the war, wiping out many systems in the surrounding area. That explained why down on the Z axis was a mostly a wasteland.

  Sprite was right; he was risking it all on Bek and the absence of any information on the system over the past seven centuries.

  Absence of negative reports
yes, but also positive reports as well he realized. He really didn't know what he was getting into. It could be dead. The Xenos could have inserted a nano weapon into the system and decimated it, killing everyone without anyone getting a word of warning out.

  The more he thought about it, the more that thought preyed on him. He didn't like the implications, but also knew the only way to know for certain was to go and find out.

  The Rho sector had been hammered in the early phases of the war. At one point it had had a massive fleet presence since it had been one of the gateways to the Xeno galaxy. When the wormhole had been destroyed or disabled, the war front had shifted to other sectors and the area had been left to die on the vine.

  Die, or hide. He wasn't sure which. For some like Bek... it could go either way. A star system could be self sufficient if set up right. Or it could devolve to the point of self-sufficiency as some had in this sector. Trade had alleviated that crushing problem, but not by much he knew.

  Bek had no outside trade, another point for him to consider. He was attracted to it by his personal knowledge and history. However it had a limited population before the war, under ten million. There was no telling what it was now, seven centuries later.

  The Admiral had a history with Bek; he had taken a small support task force in to the system to set up a hidden redoubt in the area during the early phases of the war.

  Bek was hard to get to, it had only one safe zone in and out of its area and the jump to Crellis was practically suicide for any navigator other than a Ssilli or Cetacean. When Irons had been stationed there, he had brought in a small ancient mobile shipyard to build the system up, and as an asset to tuck away in case of future need.

  Now he was uncertain if the mobile yard and any of the facilities built in Bek were still there. He'd left orders to leave the yard behind, it was too dangerous to fly it back out. The population could have abandoned it, they could have triggered a self-destruct... any number of possibilities played out in his mind, not many good.

  “But, if they did keep a hand in space...” he murmured.