Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1)

by James S. Aaron

  “Where’s the damage?”

  “I haven’t had time to isolate the problem. It’s somewhere in your command overlay. Based on other things I’ve seen, I think someone disconnected the ship’s higher NSAI functions maybe two hundred years ago, leaving only the critical systems and a bunch of other programming fixes on top of it. But I can’t find the break, and we’re out of time. The other thing we didn’t have time to finish was mounting the upgraded point defense cannons. You’ve got shields, but you don’t have any other protection from debris or pirates.”

  “That’s nothing new,” Andy said.

  “Just because you’re used to it doesn’t make it right.”

  Though still in a stupor, Petral began to moan just as they reached the med bay. Andy strapped her into the examination couch and let the autodoc scan her body for other wounds besides the leg. It returned strains in her back, torn muscles and ligaments, and a compound fracture within the leg, though it hadn’t broken the skin. The scan glitched during the second pass and Andy had to restart the program.

  “I guess you didn’t get to the med bay during the remodel,” he said.

  Fran snorted. “You’re lucky to get what you did. You haven’t seen half of what we did fix and you’re already complaining.”

  Stabbing the display, Andy shook his head. “We’re going to have to let it run with the diagnosis it’s got. She’s stabilized, at least. In any case, she’s going to be with us for a while. Have you got room in your shuttle to bring her back with you?”

  “I should, if she’s nice to me. Petral’s not a fun person to be around.”

  “She was nice enough to me.”

  Fran gave a short laugh and looked him up and down. “She would be.”

  “Sure,” Andy said, too tired to tell if she were complimenting him or not. He turned his attention to the console, taking the opportunity to flip through the ship’s control menus. Many of the status sections that used to give null readings were now logging results, from the engines, to the environmental control system. Even the hydroponic pumps were back online.

  “You fixed the gardens.”

  “I like plants,” Fran said. “Good for kids to be around them, too.”

  “I thought you said you hated plants.”

  “I said plants got in the way of my drinking. I might not want to get married but I can enjoy something from time to time.”

  “Having a plant is just like getting married,” Andy said.

  He was about to ask about an upgrade in the sewage filtration system when Fran got a faraway look in her eyes, apparently taking a message over her Link. When she blinked and looked at him, her pleased expression had flattened.

  “We need to launch. Other ships are moving into the transfer lanes and getting ready to break orbit. Apparently, the Benevolent Hand is launching a wave of attack drones.”

  “Shit. Have they hit anybody yet?”

  “We dumped a hundred release requests on the Port Authority four hours ago. That was Starl’s idea. Every ship that’s leaving Cruithne in the next two hours has prior approval. Any aggression toward the departing ships will be registered as an unprovoked attack in the Port Authority logs.”

  “So TSF is doing something, after all?”

  “Nothing but serving as witness. Starl hoped that would be enough to hold them off. It depends on how desperate they are to get their hands on the thing in your head. Once they figure out it’s in your head. Also depends on whether or not anyone in Heartbridge has greased enough government palms.”

  “We need to get up to the command deck,” Andy said. “Petral’s going to be out for hours still. I need to know what’s going on. Can you give me access to Lowspin net over my Link?”

  Fran shook her head. “I wouldn’t if I could. Way too much garbage on the net and only some of it’s useful. It’s better if I translate for you.” Catching Andy’s frustrated expression, she said, “You can trust me. We’re both on this antique together.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Andy said. “I hate being in the dark.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  Andy set the med bay’s monitoring systems and readjusted Petral’s straps for the possibility of high-g maneuvers. She was smiling slightly in her sleep and he hoped the painkillers were at least giving her good dreams.

  “Damn it,” Fran said, eyes distant again. “The Benevolent Hand is moving to an overwatch orbit. We’re in for a battle.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  STELLAR DATE: 08.27.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Cantil Housing Project

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony

  Andy slid into the command chair and ran his hands over the console. It was still as worn as ever, but, just like in the med bay, several indicators he had always thought of as blank space were now alive with data. He activated the main sensor array and pulled up the active astrogation control.

  Expecting the screen to give him only columns of coordinates, he started when a holographic overlay of Cruithne Station, its ring, and the largest ships tracked by the Port Authority filled the air in front of him. He dropped his hands in his lap, taking a second to appreciate the color and detail. As various ships moved, their velocity, registry indicators and transponders flashed beside them. Cruithne itself rotated in real time, various sections of the ring and surface growing more distinct as they came into view.

  “That’s the sexiest thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Andy said. “I can’t even tell you.”

  “I’ll be sure to let Petral know.”

  Fran moved behind him and sat in the second pilot’s seat, which had been Brit’s for so long. She activated her own display and pulled up an overlay of the ship, running through systems for status levels. When she wasn’t typing, she reached into the hologram and turned it various directions, zooming in and out until she was satisfied with what she was checking.

  “I have a lock on the Benevolent Hand,” Andy said. He spread his hands and enlarged the Heartbridge ship. He frowned. How anyone could have considered this a medical supply ship was beyond him. The design was obviously a long-rage attack class, with an oversized sensor array and multiple engine types. A swarm of at least a hundred smaller ships roved in a cloud around it, darting in complex patterns the targeting computer was still trying to analyze.

  “We can’t do anything against that,” he said, trying not to sound defeated. “We can’t outrun it and there’s no way we can fight it. I guess I could ram it. That might scratch it.”

  “You won’t have to. We need to get the course set and then figure out how we’re going to slip into the overall chaos that’s about to start.”

  “Right,” Andy said. “Wait.” He looked at Fran. “Starl never gave me the destination. He said he was going to. It’s somewhere in the Scattered Disc. But he never gave me the actual coordinates.” He frowned, staring into the hologram cloud. “I thought if he didn’t give it to me, the AI would.”

  “She isn’t talking to you?”

  “No.”

  “So, we make a destination. When I give the mark, every ship in Lowspin is going to leave along an establish route. Which one would you normally follow?”

  “This time of Cruithne’s year? Mars would be our most likely destination,” Andy said, trying to think out loud. “Even if we are eventually going to Jupiter, that would make the most sense. I’m just following the same path I took in.” He raised his hands. “But we have a different registry now. It doesn’t matter what path we take. Where did Worry’s End come from? What was the last port of call?”

  Fran shrugged. “I didn’t get that far.”

  “We need a story. We need to have done something. Has the ship been on ice for three hundred years? You could file a computer failure. We could enter some vague route history that would at least make it look like we didn’t just appear out of nowhere.”

  “Andy, no one is going to be looking at our logs in the next two hours.”

 
“But they will be at Mars 1, or if we run into a random TSF transport check.”

  “We’re not carrying anything illegal. Calm down.”

  “Yes, we are. Me. I’m carrying it.”

  “Then we’ll put you in an EV suit and dangle you off the habitat until their done with their check. We need to worry about that obstacle once we’re past all these.” She waved at the cloud of fireflies glowing in front of them. “Lowspin lives now, my friend,” she said, sounding like Starl. “Worry yourself about tomorrow when you wake up.”

  “Right,” Andy said. “Right.” He blinked, unsure what he had expected from Fran. If it had been Brit, she would be criticizing him for not thinking any of this through. He couldn’t help worrying. Too much depended on him being the one to figure all this out. Who else would?

  “You don’t sound like a mechanic,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  Andy pulled up the maps and entered his regular destinations in the astrogation planner. A new holographic overlay covered Cruithne, outlined in red over lighter blue. Sunny Skies — he couldn’t bring himself to think of her as Worry’s End — was a brighter point along the inner edge of Cruithne’s ring. A flowing line took them out and around the asteroid, gathering speed with each orbit until the point the computer calculated ideal burn. Fuel and velocity estimates flowed down one side of his console.

  “There it is. We’ve got a good window. We’re on the outswing toward Mars. We can be there in three weeks. And your exit point.” He started to track the glowing red line with his index finger, then stopped. “Well, I guess you can drop anywhere. You’ll save fuel if you come all the way to Mars 1 with us, then loop around for a return trip. But according to your shuttle, you can burn all the way back and still have fuel for the braking maneuver.”

  “Like I said, we’ll worry about that when we get there. Don’t get me wrong about the cold calculations, but I’ve got fuel to spare, even with her majesty Petral along for the ride.” She smirked. “The question is, can you stand me for three weeks?”

  “I guess I’ll tell you in three weeks,” Andy said.

  Fran’s expression went flat as she received new info over her Link. As she listened, this time she divided her attention between the update and her console. Sweeping away the ship’s status, she pulled up the Port Authority overlay Andy had been using. She pulled the Benevolent Hand into focus and added path estimates.

  As Andy watched her work, it became obvious that the Heartbridge battle cruiser had nearly reached an overwatch position on Cruithne, making it possible to attack any ship leaving the station’s gravity well. From this point, the Lowspin ships would need to pull off simultaneous departures if anyone was going to get away alive.

  “Where’s the damn TSF when you need them?” he muttered.

  Andy logged into the general Port Authority channel, which was full of chatter from the rest of the ships trying to get into or out of the station blissfully unaware of what was going on with the apparent warship and its drone swarm. The Benevolent Hand was following a standard aggression protocol that, while not overtly announced, would have been obvious to anyone with experience. Hundreds of ships unassociated with Lowspin were trying to get out of Cruithne based on the interior fighting alone.

  The upgraded scan showed a few TSF patrol craft nearby, but their closest base—a floating service platform colloquially called Blazing Glory—was two light-minutes away. They wouldn’t have registered the Benevolent Hand’s initial maneuvers yet, let alone sent any response to them.

  Realizing he didn’t have a choice, Andy sent the route request to Mars 1’s Port Authority. Mars was nearly fifteen light-minutes prograde of Cruithne, and Andy expected to wait at least half an hour for a response, but a reply came back almost immediately from a nearby comm drone, indicating that tightband to Mars 1 was backed up with requests and travel lane approvals would take at least an hour to process. Inbound ships could coordinate traffic at their point of origin and request access again when they reached Mars Protectorate space.

  Fran read the message over his shoulder. “That’s all we need,” she said. “You ready to get out of here?”

  “Are the engines ready?”

  “I wish they were more ready, but we don’t have a choice. I can work on anything that fails mid-route”

  “All right,” Andy said. Without waiting any longer, he sent the decoupling request to the dock control NSAI. He held his breath as the system processed the request, wondering if Heartbridge could somehow put a freeze on all exit procedures. The dock approved the request and provided a countdown.

  “Buckle up, kids,” Andy called over the intercom. “We’re about to feel some g’s.”

  “Dad,” Cara called back. “We’re making food. You said you were hungry.”

  The shiny new display had made him forget all about his hunger. “What are you making?”

  “Grilled cheese.”

  Andy nodded. “I like grilled cheese.”

  “It’s synthetic. That’s all there was.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me that. Look, we have to go. You two eat and get everything else in the cabinet for me. I’ll grab it when we’re done, all right? I’ll send you the countdown warning when we’re about to move.”

  “So, we’re leaving Cruithne?” Tim asked.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Good,” he said. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Hey, now,” Fran said. “That’s my home you’re talking about. Maybe when you come back I’ll show you a better time.”

  “I’m never coming back,” Tim said petulantly.

  “Hurry up and eat,” Andy said. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  He pushed the model of the Benevolent Hand into the left edge of his display and pulled up Cruithne, highlighting every ship Fran had identified as Lowspin. There were two hundred and twenty-six vessels of varying sizes. Definitely enough to clog the three major exit lanes and the holding orbits if they wanted to.

  “I’m sending the order,” Fran said.

  “Man…now that the kids mentioned it, I’m really wishing I had that grilled cheese sandwich,” Andy said.

  “Later.”

  “There is no later, right?” He shot her a grin.

  Fran didn’t hear him. She was already staring into the distance, communicating with the rest of the Lowspin battlenet.

  “We launch in the middle of the flock,” she said when she came back. “We’re not waiting on port approval. We’ll manage de-confliction internally.”

  He was about to ask how that was going to work in reality, when the first red dot detached itself from Cruithne’s ring and moved into one of the ephemeral lanes Port Authority used to route incoming and outgoing traffic. Another followed, then another. The other two lanes were soon filling with red points as well.

  “Engine status?” Andy asked.

  “We’re green across the board. Ready for chem thrusters whenever you are.”

  Andy checked the flight path one more time, making sure the computer had adjusted for all the new traffic in the lane. He swallowed, unable to dislodge the anxious lump in his throat.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He reached out and activated the flight plan.

  The sensation of light thrust sent a thrill through him that he hadn’t felt in a long time, a spark in the roiling overcast of his dread. His inner ear adjusted to the micro-forces working against his body and he felt the familiar nausea. He took deep breaths until the ache calmed down.

  Sunny Skies was up again, better than she had ever been.

  A new yellow point of light joined the streaming river of red in the third outbound traffic lane, showing them clearing the ring and entering low orbit.

  Movement from the corner where he had pushed the Benevolent Hand reminded Andy to reset the overall display. The Heartbridge ship appeared in its stand-off orbit. The first Lowspin ship was reaching upper orbit and its burn window. The cruiser didn’t take any aggressive action as ships beg
an flaring brighter and then shooting out of the holodisplay’s tracking boundary.

  “They’re letting them go,” Fran said.

  “Or they’ve got some way to search ships that we don’t know about.”

  “You’re a pessimist, you know that?” Fran said.

  “Hold on,” Andy said, leaning toward the display. A new set of coordinates were flowing through the raw sensor data. The updated information appeared on the holodisplay as a doubling of the swarm around the Benevolent Hand.

  “There it is,” he said. “They’re attacking.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  STELLAR DATE: 08.27.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sunny Skies

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony

  Sunny Skies had shields again. Andy wanted to kiss Fran for that fact alone.

  In the holodisplay, the Benevolent Hand hung above Cruithne like a shark, its fins growing into dark wings as the attack drones separated into what appeared to be flight teams. The targeting computer quickly identified velocity similarities and assigned different symbols to the separating teams. From a distance, the swarm looked like a spreading cloud. Up close, each team writhed and shifted, darting forward then waiting as another leapfrogged ahead of it.

  “It’s like they turn at right angles,” Andy said, cursing under his breath.

  Based on the projected flight paths, the drone swarm appeared to be moving to cover each flight path out of Cruithne. It was possible that they had the requested flight plans of every Lowspin ship leaving the station. While flooding the Port Authority with their requests made it possible to overload the system and allow faster exit, is also meant the Benevolent Hand knew which ships were moving toward each departure land, and could assign the drones accordingly.