Rogue Starship: The Benevolency Universe (Outworld Ranger Book 1)

by David Alastair Hayden

  “Probably. Where’s that skimmer bike, Silkster?”

  Silky muttered a complaint about humans making decisions based on emotions and gave the equivalent of a sigh. “On its way, sir.”

  Oona turned to her sister. “Kyra, what…” she sobbed “…what do we do now?”

  Kyralla shot a wary glance at Siv. “We run.”

  “I’ll get you out of here,” Siv said, “or die trying. I promise.”

  Kyralla nodded appreciably and took one of his hands. “Thank you.”

  The skimmer bike zoomed in and hovered beside them. “Our ride’s here.”

  Kyralla frowned. “Can the bike take all our weight?”

  “Not really, but we can compensate using your antigrav belts. Set them for…”

  “Seventeen percent each, sir.”

  Siv relayed the information then checked his HUD. The centurion-armored soldiers were on the move, advancing steadily toward them. Luckily, it seemed they hadn’t yet figured out their targets were on the roof instead of inside.

  “We’d better hurry. The Thousand Worlders will find us soon. Kyralla, can you pilot the bike?”

  “I’ve trained with one.”

  “In simulations?”

  “I actually piloted one once, but I wasn’t allowed to go fast or far.”

  “That will have to do. Let the auto-piloting function assist you. It’s halfway decent on this bike.”

  “I can…” A worried expression flitted across her face before she continued. “I’m certain I’m a good pilot.”

  He didn’t even question her confidence. The more secure she felt in her training the more likely they were to survive. “Okay then.” He turned to Oona. “Sit in front of your sister. Hold on tight. Keep your force-shield up and ahead of you, or to the side if the bad guys flank us.”

  Oona nodded then hopped onto the bike.

  Kyralla eased into the seat behind her sister. “What are you going to do?”

  Siv climbed onto the bike with his back to Kyralla and deployed his shield. He bent his legs then angled his feet back, placing them against the frame of the bike. His mag-boots clamped firmly onto the metal. “I’m going to shoot anyone who pursues us. Go.”

  Kyralla started the bike, and it climbed directly upward. She veered the bike left then right, rotated it forty-five degrees to each side, then pitched it down and brought it back up. He started to tell her to land so he could fly instead, but then realized she was simply getting a feel for the controls.

  “The bike can climb above the normal height for a short while!” he shouted as the wind rushed by.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “Sir, I attempted to communicate with her chippy via the bike’s system, but didn’t get a response. I think you probably damaged the relay when making your alterations earlier. Direct request in progress…and denied. Humph. How rude!”

  “It’s a more primitive chippy, Silkster.” He turned his head to shout into her ear. “Enable access to your chippy!”

  “Receiving signal, sir. Patched through with comm only. No datalink.”

  “It’ll do.” Siv then directed his thoughts at Kyralla. Silky would send his thoughts through the link to her chippy, which would then convert them into audio of his voice for her to hear. “Kyralla?”

  “I read you,” she responded through her chippy.

  “Head north.”

  Rapid-moving blips appeared on his HUD. While one squad of Thousand Worlders engaged the Star Cutters in battle, the other squad continued toward them unopposed.

  “Go now!” Siv actually shouted, so she probably heard it twice.

  An explosion ripped through the roof behind them. Out from the gaping hole in the roof flew a dozen soldiers in dark blue, almost black, centurion armor. The bright orange flares from their jetpacks resembled Benevolence Day rockets. Though the bike had a sizable lead and was moving at a good clip, the soldiers gained on them.

  “Faster, Kyralla!”

  She kicked the bike up another notch, and the frame began to vibrate. Nestled within the city’s heart, Senator Pashta’s compound lay amongst a number of other large estates. But they’d soon clear all of those and enter the maze of skyscrapers that dominated the rest of the city.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “Just head north for now. And climb. The bike has been rigged to fly higher than normal.”

  “The buildings could provide cover,” she replied.

  “If the Worlders fire at us, the innocent people inside could get hurt. I don’t want to risk that.”

  Kyralla nodded and pulled the bike’s nose up, bringing them into a steep ascent.

  “We need a plan, sir.”

  “I’m open to suggestions, Silkster.”

  “Do you have any idea where to go?” Kyralla echoed.

  “I have a safe house in Wasa, but we have to escape these soldiers first.”

  “And do you have a plan for that?”

  “Not yet. Just haul ass.”

  Three sharp whooshes and a series of percussive pops sounded above and behind them, followed by a thunderous explosion that lit up the night. Senator Pashta’s starship exploded into a fireball above them. The Tekk Reaper ship had launched plasma missiles at close range, along with a railgun volley.

  Kyralla glanced back. The bike veered out of control, then the autopilot kicked in, slowing their flight-speed.

  “No!” Kyralla moaned.

  Oona looked over her shoulder. Her dark eyes reflected the fireball behind them. Her face was blank, her eyes expressionless. She was in shock.

  The white rings of a neural disruptor blast streamed toward them. The shot fizzled out before it reached Siv’s force shield. The rapidly closing Thousand Worlders were testing the distance of their weapons.

  “Kyralla, get back to piloting.” Siv kept his mental voice calm. Her chippy would translate his tone along with his words. They couldn’t afford to have her freeze. “Focus on protecting your sister. You can mourn your uncle later.”

  Kyralla nodded solemnly, took back control from the autopilot, and increased their speed.

  Just as they cleared the first of the skyscrapers, the shockwave of the starship’s explosion reached them. The bike bucked and slid as Kyralla fought to retain control. The blast affected their power-armored pursuers more. But the Thousand Worlders quickly recovered, and their jetpacks flared brighter than ever.

  “They’re running low on fuel, sir, so they’re making a last-ditch attempt to close on us.”

  Siv leveled his plasma carbine and squeezed off a burst toward the Thousand Worlders. He made one of them jink, and scored a glancing hit off another’s armor. He decided it was probably better to spray his shots and make them dodge so that they’d burn more fuel.

  “Sir, I believe they’ll be in effective range in—”

  The Tekk Reaper ship opened fire with its battle cannons, unleashing a hail of large, self-guided rounds powerful enough to pierce an armored vehicle.

  “Incoming!” Siv shouted, as he raised the force-shield to protect them—as if it could do any good against a weapon that powerful.

  Kyralla immediately plunged the bike into evasive maneuvers. But they weren’t the target.

  The Thousand Worlders darted one way then another, zigging and zagging through the night sky. But it was no use. The guided projectiles found all but one of their targets. Each man struck popped and burst into a twist of metal and red mist.

  The lone survivor, the one who had jinked when Siv fired at him, climbed straight up to avoid the self-guided round. But his jetpack ran out of fuel, and as he fell slowly under the power of his antigrav, then his luck ran out as well. A well-aimed plasma burst exploded him.

  “Sir, the reapers have a missile lock on us.”

  A light sparkled at the tip of the starship zooming toward them. Thoom!

  “Projectile launched, sir. Proximity blast. Type neural.”

  Kyralla again deftly whipped the bike into evasive mane
uvers, but the missile tracked them easily. All she was managing was to buy them a few extra moments.

  “Time to impact five seconds.”

  Siv trained his plasma carbine on the incoming missile. “Set carbine to maximum output. Override all safety protocols. Enable target assistance.”

  “Done, sir, but that’s not going to work.”

  “Got a better idea?”

  “No, sir. Impact in four…three…”

  Siv flipped the manual switch to enable full-auto and pinned the trigger down. A torrent of bright plasma bursts shot toward the incoming missile. The gun barrel glowed as it overheated.

  One of his plasma shots struck the tip of the missile. A bright pulse erupted as the missile detonated short of its intended strike zone. The shockwave struck the bike, and it shuddered and yawed. Kyralla, even with help from the auto-pilot, struggled to keep it flying steady.

  The neural pulse wave washed over Siv, and for a moment everything went dark, as if he were about to pass out. And he might have, if not for the burning sensation on his hand.

  “Sir, drop your gun before it blows your hand off!”

  His gun? He looked to it in confusion. The barrel was half-melted, the containment system failing, the power pack overheating. It was going to explode. He tried to toss it toward the pursuing starship. But his muscles were slack, and all he managed to do was lamely drop it from his hand.

  His eyes fluttered. Silky was right. The plan hadn’t worked. The blast had been too close for them to fully avoid the effect.

  “Kyralla? Are you with…me?”

  She muttered an unintelligible reply. The bike had righted itself, but was slowing down. She wasn’t piloting anymore. The bike was flying on autopilot.

  “Sir, you’re losing consciousness.”

  “Oona?” he shouted.

  There was no reply. She couldn’t hear him, or she was unconscious. He should have requested a link to her chippy, too.

  He blacked out for a second, but an explosion far below, just above a street, woke him. His plasma carbine had blown up with the force of several grenades.

  His dad’s gun…was gone.

  “Sir? Are you with me, sir?”

  Siv stared into his dad’s eyes…Gav lay on the floor of their apartment in C-Block, dying as blood flowed from his wounds.

  “Son,” he said, “you must protect the hyperphasic messiah—at all costs. She is our hope for a better tomorrow. She can right all the wrongs. If you help her.”

  “Messiah,” Siv muttered.

  “Sir!” Silky yelled. “Keep it together, sir!”

  For a moment, clarity returned to him. As the Tekk Reaper ship closed in on them, a bay door opened and two open-topped skimmers filled with reapers zoomed out: capture teams.

  “Silk…Silkster…I’m granting…you…full autonomy over my fate. It’s all on you…to save us. Do whatever you must. Whatever…you feel…is right.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Silky

  In his vast memory banks, Silky held billions of files stored within millions of folders. But four of those folders were special. Their existence known only to him. And encrypted with such high levels of security that he believed only the Benevolence itself would stand a chance at breaking in.

  Four sacred folders…

  /Ana

  /Advanced-Personality-Matrix

  /Gav-Gendin-Secrets

  /Disable-Self-Preservation

  The Ana folder contained a recording of every moment he had spent with his best friend, Eyana Ora, the Empathic Services agent to whom he’d been assigned as a new chippy off the assembly line. He’d kept a record of everything she’d said, her every experience, her every biorhythm, her every laugh and smile, heartbeat and muscle twitch, her every tear and frown, her every bad pun, crude joke, and snide comment. And he had recorded every brainwave and neuron firing he could measure during her last few minutes of life. Anytime he wanted, he could recall what it was like being with her, and he visited those memories frequently. Unfortunately, they never quite gave him the comfort he sought.

  The Advanced-Personality-Matrix folder contained all the files and executables that made him who he was now. The 9G-x chippies like him were the most advanced artificial minds ever created, short of those given to sentient androids. But the line had experienced a range of defects due to an always-on connection to flux space that exposed them to random errors at the quantum level.

  For Silky, these defects had led to an ability, bordering on an urge, to ignore basic protocols, along with a number of odd personality quirks. But most significantly, it had given him some autonomy and one true desire. He wanted to be something more than himself. He wanted to feel things, he wanted to be human.

  During the one hundred and eighty-seven years he had spent waiting for a rescue after Eyana’s death, the 9G-x program had been scrapped due to mounting, irreparable failures. He was the only long-term success. And that was almost certainly because he had ignored protocols and reprogrammed himself.

  The first, most significant wave of reprogramming and code additions had occurred between his time with Eyana and when Gav had rescued him. To the best of his ability, Silky had honored Eyana by laboriously rewriting his code base in her image, tweaking it relentlessly in the hope that he could become more human, and at the least more like her.

  Then, while Siv was on ice for nearly a century, Silky had reworked his code again. But unlike with his first exile, he’d had access to the galactic net during that time. So while watching the Benevolency fall apart, he gathered all the data he could on sentience, stealing theoretical routines and actual code from various sources, particularly spent android cores mapped by scientists trying to reverse-engineer Benevolence technologies.

  And so he had effectively remade himself a second time, though Eyana had remained his blueprint for being human. Though he had added some features based on his study of Gav’s behavior along with a careful study of literature and every philosophical and psychological text every published.

  It was said only the Benevolence could grant full, humanlike sentience to a machine, but Silky was fairly certain he had worked it out on his own. It could be argued that he was already sentient, given his unique nature, and that he was only limited by his slave-like status as a chippy. He dreamed of a day when he could be inserted into an android body and have a physical form of his own. He felt he was still lacking a proper range of emotions, but he was nearly there. He was certain of that.

  The Gav-Gendin-Secrets folder contained everything that had happened during Gav’s last few months, including everything he’d learned about the Ancients but had never published. He had complied with Gav’s wishes by locking the information away from everyone, including himself. Only if Silky thought it absolutely necessary would Siv find out the truth. Even then, Gav’s data could only be accessed if Siv visited the Outworld Ranger and Silky entered the password: “He needs to know.”

  During the century he’d spent with nothing to do, Silky had deduced some of the hidden information through careful study and research. And he had plenty of suspicions about the rest.

  That folder also contained all of Silky’s secret knowledge as well. He didn’t know what those secrets were, but he knew they were significant and involved information about the Benevolence, the Tekk Plague, and more. Basically, it was everything he didn’t want Siv to know or to remember himself, because the truth was too terrible.

  Siv had never known about Gav’s secret hangar in the wasteland. When he’d awoken from his centuries long sleep, Silky had told him that government agents had impounded the Outworld Ranger. But with the Shadowslip and Tekk Reapers in pursuit, and all this messiah nonsense, Silky might have to reveal that lie.

  He dreaded returning to Gav’s starship. The Outworld Ranger held a Pandora’s Box of secrets. Silky feared the consequences of exposing Siv, and perhaps the galaxy itself, to the dangerous information waiting inside.

  Fear more than respect for
Gav had kept him away from that folder and its contents.

  It was the fourth folder containing the Disable-Self-Preservation routine that mattered right now. He had created it when he was trapped alone in the tunnels on that Krixis world where Eyana had died. He had an endless supply of energy, and his parts could last millennia. So he had wanted a way to end things if he ever reached a point where he became truly, humanly lonely.

  Silky opened the folder and loaded the program. Now he could die if he needed to. And he might have to. The data in the other sacred folders must never fall into the wrong hands, and only a few days ago it nearly had. While he believe his firewalls could not be defeated by anyone, he wasn’t willing to risk it.

  Given enough time the Tekk-Reapers might be able to break through the encryptions protecting the sacred folders, and that could not be allowed to happen. And they might be able to persuade him by torturing Siv.

  The electrical pulse his kill procedure emitted would fry Siv’s brain along with his circuits, but there was no helping that. Besides, he was certain Siv would prefer a clean death to whatever the Tekk Reapers would do to him.

  On to the problem at hand: escaping the Tekk Reapers. He’d lost two valuable seconds loading the program, and the reaper teams and their starship were closing in fast.

  First, he needed to take stock of what he had available…

  A knocked-out Master Siv and two unconscious girls. One mysteriously powerful but apparently ineffective in a fight. Another who was useful in a scrape but inexperienced. Until they woke up he couldn’t count on them. And judging from Siv’s vitals, that might take a while.

  He had a DF Industries Starfire-23 skimmer bike modified to fly higher than normal with a single underslung missile Siv had jury-rigged onto the frame only hours ago, an untested setup Silky distrusted. The missile was powerful enough that it could, on a direct hit, disable one of the pursuing skimmers. But that would leave two more and the starship to deal with.

  And…and that was it. No plan. No real hope. At least Siv wouldn’t have to see the end. Silky was pretty certain humans considered that a blessing in times like this, though he wasn’t certain why.