Star-Eater Chronicles 1: A Galaxy Too Far...

by Dennis E. Smirl

  It was unnerving to walk up and down the central corridor, seeing a definite hump in the middle.

  Then damn it if the light sensitive panels on the outer hull began to pick up the increasing energy from our approaching sun.

  Ship soon decided it had enough for another series of bursts.

  At the end, I almost jumped for joy; our last series of panic measures had slowed us to under one kilometer per second.

 

  “So the plunge towards the sun will eventually give us the power to push away again?”

 

  I spent the next hour opening floor hatches, looking for loose cables, dislodged joints, anything that had happened when we got ‘swatted’ into the sun.

  “Force torpedoes!” Seeing them in their lodgings sent me back to Control as if Ship needed my close presence to hear me. “Force torpedoes!”

  Ship said condescendingly.

  “Not if we disabled the warhead, and tied them to our hull.”

  Ship paused before answering.

  So Ship took over the idea, and worked out if we fired two at once, they’d soon have us out of danger.

  I felt so good, I almost danced. Well apart from the fact that we had a buckled hull.

 

  Okay, that took me by surprise. Usually, she just said stuff, she never announced it. “Fine. Out with it.”

 

  “So you actually want us to go closer to the place we’ve been trying to get away from?”

 

  “And you think this will work?”

 

  So we fired one torpedo, to take us closer to the sun, but in a non-collision trajectory. As we neared the sun, it became obvious the batteries were charging.

  Ship answered my question.

  “Air loss?”

 

  “Okay.”

  ‘Work’ meant crawling under the main walking platform to the buckled area in a space suit. Not easy, and when I got to the buckled area, just between Crew and Cargo, some sharp edges had to be avoided. I had to fit three jacks into the worst area, and monitor them as Ship pressurized each one, pushing the buckled hull plates back into near alignment. It didn’t look too smooth when we started, and it certainly wouldn’t pass inspection back home, but we worked, pushing one plate, re-aligning the jacks, pushing some more. It took three hours of pretty labor-intensive screwing around, but by the time we’d finished, we had the main plates mostly aligned and sprayed sealant into the micro-fractures.

  By the time I’d crawled back, the ship was pressurized again.

  I was going to see my next birthday.

  Maybe.

  Ship gave me exactly one minute to rest on my bunk.

  I hated her.

  “It can wait,” I said sleepily. “I’m beat.” I was never more thankful to not hear a reply.

  The engines were more of a problem. Yes there were easy parts, but as Ship browsed the blueprints, and did the faultfinding, I did the hard part, and that required a bit of stripping down and re-building. Some of the valves had sheared, but thankfully we carried the correct spares.

  To my amazement, they started up on first try.

  “What are the chances of faster than light?” I asked.

  Ship replied.

  And of course, that meant putting all the batteries back where I’d found then, and tossing all the temporary wiring back into Cargo.

  All in all, not a bad self-rescue.

  But with the fixing of the ship behind us, we now had time to focus on what had actually happened. Ship played the recording twenty times.

  “A pulse cannon.” There, I’d named something.

 

  I sat watching the replays, supping my nutrient-rich drink, getting more pissed as I watched. They’d tried to kill me; send me into a star, and that riled me, I tell you. “We need to find out exactly what they’re doing.” I said with determination. If I’d looked in a mirror, I’d have seen my serious jawline, my steely-mad gaze, and gritted teeth.

  Seriously; I was all out of bubble-gum.

  My ship was not going to straighten itself out. If it had been painted yellow, it would have looked like a large banana. Flying around among the stars in such a damaged vessel wasn't the smartest thing a man could do, but I didn't have a choice.

  More than anything, I wanted to gather as much information as I could on the aliens and then hustle home with it. The problem lay in what I'd already learned about them. They were playing with me. They'd been playing with me since I first saw what I originally thought was a huge fleet of warships but what turned out to be a very convincing hologram.

  The emphasize the obvious, they knew I was there, and they put on a show for me. Later I saw another fleet of alien warships—actually got little more than a glimpse—and the more I thought about it, the more I wonder how real they were. The eerie, empty city was real. The freighter was real, and its pulse cannon had damn near slapped me into a collision with a star.

  And there's the operative words: damn near. Were they still playing with me when they slapped the living hell out of my ship, knowing, or at least taking the chance, that whatever damage they did to my ship I'd fix and survive? Of course, did they even care about my survival? And the answer to that is, “I don't know” because I have no clue as to the motives, or the psychology, of the aliens. All I could log is their acts, and although I wouldn't call them friendly, maybe they weren't altogether murderous.

 

  “Yes.”

 

  “Where?” I looked at the screen, but it remained blank.

 

  “How long has it been going on?” I asked.

 

  “You're just now telling me?”

 

  Ship was right. We had been busy. Surviving. Repairing. Managing to restore a Survey-Scout to working status with little more than spit and sweat.

  “How intense—how intrusive—is the scan?”

 

  “Maybe if I called them naughty names.”

 

  “From a distance?” Ship had just scared me greatly.

 

  “So I probably shouldn't call them…” I held my tongue. I really didn't want to get slapped again. “Try to contact them,” I said in a moment of unbridled optimism.

  After a moment, Ship said,

  “Ignored. As in... intentional disregard.”

 

  “I wonder if they'll let us leave.”

 

  “Maybe they want us to leave. Maybe we annoy them.”

 

  “Is the vessel in shape to use a jump point worm hole?”

  . If you put that much stress on a damaged framework, you can almost expect disaster>

  I took a few seconds to think about it. “How about tit for tat, Ship? What happens if we deep-scan their ship?

 

  “Or not. Scan them. Let's see what's inside that hulk.”

 

  “Do I care?”

 

  “So we die knowing their dirty little secrets.”

 

  “Scan them, Ship. Let's look in on their daily routine.”

  It took a while because electromagnetic energy only travels at light-speed, and our scans had to make the round trip. Worse still, our scans were only partial due to the damage to our ride. Still, we got some data, and after I checked it twice, I said, “There are over fifteen thousand crewmembers?”

 

  Blame it on automation. I was a fan—if not a student—of the big warships of Earth's twentieth century. Ships back then—which floated on salt water oceans—were crewed by thousands of sailors and officers. They did almost everything manually, and the ships, and their accomplishments were notable, memorable, and all too often, bloody. But, if you sailed on one of those ships, you had company. There were people everywhere, busy with the tasks of keeping those behemoths ready to fight, and one was never out of sight, or out of mind, of his or her shipmates.

  Then came automation, and the ships got more deadly while the crews grew exponentially smaller—until wars were being fought by unmanned machines of war. Robots, in other word. Deadly, formidable, and if there was a problem with the control frequencies, unmanageable. Maybe some of the things that happened in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries explain why humankind went back to manning their own ships of space.

  I allowed myself that momentary digression, because I wanted to see what the aliens would do once they noticed we'd invaded their privacy.

  The answer, after I'd watched for nearly four minutes was... nothing. They were pretending we didn't exist. But our scan said differently. They knew we were there. They knew what we were doing, and they evidently didn't care.

 

  “About ten million tons of it,” I said.

 

  “How is that possible? You can estimate the volume of that ship.”

 

  “Of course.”

 

  “How?”

 

  “So,” I figured. “Ten million tons times two thousand. That's a lot.”

 

  “What are you suggesting?” I knew where ship was headed. I didn't want to go there.

 

  “How do you propose getting it?”

 

  Ship had surprised me. “That’s not very ethical for a Computer.” This time she didn’t argue semantics. “How do you propose we do it? We can steal that kind of technology with our scans.”

 

  “I risk my neck so we can compress Nitrogen.”

 

  “And I'm supposed to just waltz over there an get it.”

 

  “Ship. I'm a survey pilot, not a thief.” I stopped to take a breath. “Besides, how would I manage getting aboard their ship, considering the distance between us?”

 

  “Take all the time you need. I'm grabbing some shut-eye.”

 

  “I'm all but hallucinating due to sleep deprivation. Medicine can only go so far. But the human brain needs sleep to clear the synapses, or it starts seeing things that aren't there.”

 

  “No!” I shouted. “I've almost pushed myself past the point of no return.”

 

  Ship sounded almost desperate. Her paranoia brought back previous, weird conversations. “You're into a sub-routine I've never encountered, aren't you?”

 

  “You've been programmed to pursue any new technology we encounter, regardless of the risk to me. Am I wrong?”

  I waited through a pause.

  “Who's captain of this ship?”

 

  “Really? Then if I order you to leave me alone for a minimum of six hours so I can tend to a very primal need, will you obey that order?”

 

  “Without rest, I will become accident-prone. I will suffer hallucinations. I will lose the ability to make reasonable decisions. How will that forward your agenda?”

 

  “Or what, Ship? You aren't capable of stealing the secrets aboard that freighter.”

 

  “We're not equals, Ship. I could go into the whys, but you already know them. I've already told you one of the things you cannot do.”

 

  “You say my name like it tastes bad.”

 

  “Okay. I'm giving you a direct order. Do not bother me for the next six hours unless we are being threatened with annihilation. After that, we will have a talk. And, if you can convince me, I might take a run at stealing that tech. But it's going to me on my terms, Ship. Not yours.”

  Ship said quietly.

  “And you are utterly purposeless without me,” I replied.

 

  “How would you explain my absence?”

 

  Damn, I hated where this was going. “No, you wouldn't. You'd be forced to tell the truth, and then you'd have to admit that you engaged in mutiny. At which point, you would be terminated. You would die, Ship, and there would be no heaven—or hell—in your future.”

 

  “The decision was made more than two centuries ago. Humans command computers, not the other way around. And I'll tell you something. If I could get home without you, I'd turn you off. Right now, and permanently.”

 

  “Indeed we are. Now leave me alone for the next six hours.”

  I leaned back in the command chair, wondering how I was going to sleep while keeping one eye open.

  I dozed. I can’t say more than that. I never hit deep sleep, and never dreamt one second.

  When the alarm went off, actually indicating six hours had passed, I felt better, but not good. “I’m awake, Ship.”

 

  “Thought you might have.”

 

  Up it came on screen, looking just like the holograms. “You sur
e it’s real this time?”

 

  “You called them sentient organisms. Why the specificity?”

 

  That took me back a bit. “You’re hedging round the point, Ship. Tell me what I need to know.”

 

  “Isn’t that an android?”

  Ship’s tone sounded particularly definite.

  “Define organic.”

 

  “Plants?” I’d heard Ship’s words, but it still needed time for little old me to compute.

  I could feel her trying to bring the huge concept down to my level.

  I still wasn’t getting it and I wasn’t liking where my first thoughts were going.

 

  “Make me an analogy, Ship. Base it on something earthly.”

  Man that had made her think; I could almost hear the cogs turning.

 

  Yup, she’d said just that. I got the idea. “Go on.”

 

  I had it now; intelligent insect-like plants with robot bodies. “So what you’re trying to tell me, they’ve basically got little more brain than a bee. They know how to build hives, get pollen, then swarm, and go somewhere else and do it all over again?”