Sentient: Evolution

by D. R. Rosier

  She wondered for a moment if all her attachments to the past made her obsolete, but she didn’t think so. Her daughter was just more than her. After all, she hadn’t designed the old ships either, she’d simply recruited the talent to do so. No, she still had her purpose, and that purpose was just as relevant now as in the past, if not more so. Her original purpose was to uplift and protect Earth, so she had evolved, because she was determined to protect the entire galaxy from this menace.

  But at the same time, she was extremely proud of her daughter, and her choice for a host couldn’t be more perfect either.

  The sensors set off an alarm, and she saw ships start to pop in all over the galaxy. One point one million ships to be exact. She initiated the protocols for defensive formations, all of the upgraded ships meant they had a little under a two hundred fifty to one advantage in this battle. It would just have to be enough.

  Tim got dressed and on the bridge in under a minute, and started to monitor the skirmishes around the galaxy. They sent twenty-five ships to each enemy ship initially, just to see the results. The twenty-five ships attacked one of theirs, and the enemy’s shield strength went up incredibly high, higher than theirs were capable of, but didn’t overload.

  The ship they’d scanned must have had their shields at a low idling level, when he looked at the strength of their containment for the dark energy force field he knew they were in trouble. The ship fired twenty-five beams at once, each at one of their ships. The ships survived the attack and managed to drain off the shields fast enough. But then the enemy ship fired again, just three beams, and the shields overloaded in about half a second, and then the three ships were torn apart by the dark energy beam.

  Then it attacked the next three, as it continued to absorb punishment from the rest, as if their shield could take and drain off that much energy easily. Not as if he thought, they were clearly doing it.

  He shook his head, “Send in another seventy ships, have all of them fire at once.”

  Aide didn’t respond verbally, but made it happen.

  Seventy ships arrived through wormholes surrounding the enemy ship and fired at their adversary, after a couple of seconds when it seemed the ship would finally overload, it fired seventy beams. Perhaps a last ditch effort to stop their shields from overloading, he couldn’t think of another reason for them to change approaches.

  Some of his ships started taking damage despite the shield holding. Others started to explode one at a time, without apparent reason.

  “Report! What the fuck is going on?”

  Aide sounded stressed as well, “The ones that are exploding are being hit by some kind of missile. If I understand it correctly, it’s a very small ship, maybe a foot long and a few inches wide and tall, filled with dark energy. The whole ship is a containment vessel with a very small range dimensional drive. The missiles are travelling through Dark space, then opening an aperture inside our ships to come through. I should have thought of that; we all should have.”

  “And what’s slowly disintegrating our ships?” he demanded.

  Aide frowned, “They’re launching microscopic amounts of dark matter down their dark energy beam. Dark energy doesn’t have any effect on dark matter, so while our ship’s shield is absorbing all the dark energy, the dark matter continues through as if that shield wasn’t even there. Our gravity deflector shields behind the dark energy shield is deflecting the matter away, however when the dark matter is pushed away, there are some particle interactions that releases a small amount of dark energy.

  “Not enough dark energy to do major damage, but it’s disintegrating the ships a very small piece at a time.”

  She paused a moment and added, “I hope those two weapons are the only new ones we see.”

  He asked, “Can you track the missiles?”

  She replied, “Not in any useful way, at this close range the travel time is measured below a nanosecond, by the time I see the data, it’s already inside the ship and exploding.”

  “Can you block it?”

  She hesitated, “Not yet, I believe with the new ships in four days, the new dimensional drive will be able to create a field to stop objects from jumping dimensions inside the ship.”

  Well that doesn’t help them now.

  “If we move in the remaining ships now, will we have enough to break their shields?”

  She replied, “Unknown.”

  He sighed, “Do it, we don’t have a choice. We’re screwed if it doesn’t work though.”

  She didn’t reply, but he saw another one hundred fifty-five ships appear through wormholes, and fire at the enemy ship. He knew this was playing out in various ways over a million more times, it was boggling to the mind. At first when all the ships started firing dark energy he thought they were screwed when the enemy’s shields held, but several seconds later the enemy ship’s shields dropped, and the ship started taking damage. A few seconds later, it was gone.

  He sighed and rubbed his forehead, “Report,” he said in a tired voice.

  She replied, “All enemy ships were destroyed. Now that we know the extent of their shielding system, it would have taken just over a hundred ships to overload them.”

  He nodded, “How many did we lose, I know it was necessary to test in this first battle but…”

  He winced at her reply, “We lost a hundred million ships, less a few thousand. After the new upgrades though, we’ll still have eight hundred billion of the new ships.”

  Okay, so maybe not the end of the world, “Did you manage to get a database?”

  She replied, “Yes, I’m going through it now, I managed to pull it off several thousand ships, though they seem to be identical except for the private messages. Their race is the Meliax.”

  Hope interjected, “We should change the upgrade, to include the better reactor and more efficient dark energy containment system for the shields, as well as the dark matter accelerator weapon. We would be able to face them on even ground if we do.”

  Hope added a little smugly, “Their targeting systems and dimension drive software however, is inferior to mine.”

  He snickered, and then asked, “What about the missiles?”

  Aide answered, “They have protective systems for it, and so will we shortly. They must only use them against lesser races. Go ahead and add those three things Hope, it’s your design.”

  Aide suggested they needed to get with everyone else on the new information, and met shortly in the conference room. The others had been monitoring the battle, so she didn’t need to share the system upgrades, and they could look at them later.

  “The Meliax evolved on a planet with ninety percent water, and rough weather, on a small planet close to the core of galaxy M87. Their racial ancestors were much like the squid currently on Earth, except for a much higher intelligence. Their current form is,” she put a picture up on the display, “not bipedal like the rest of the races we have met. They’re bodies are round and squat, with one eye, and a mouth. They don’t have a head as such as you can see, they don’t have ears either but pick up sound vibrations on the sensitive side of their tentacles.

  “Their mouths are incapable of human speech, it’s more a clicking and squawking bird like sound than anything else. Their eight smaller size tentacles are used to move around, manipulate their surroundings, and also responsible for the body language part of communication, which is much more complex than any of ours. The last tentacle, the main one, houses their sexual organs. The size of it also appears to greatly vary, and the… noble class are the ones with the largest.”

  She smiled wryly at everyone, and turned off the screen. When no one took the obvious joke fodder she continued.

  “They were a peaceful race for the most part, at least until six thousand years ago, when they got to the stars. They tried to make some friends, and started a war that lasted over six hundred years when they met their very violent neighbors. Obviously they won, but not without a cost. Much like us, they realized most civilizatio
ns were too violent to get into the stars, knowledge always seems to come before evolution, but their solution was rather more violent than what we are doing in this galaxy.

  “They decided no races should be allowed in space but their own, and started conquering all the systems in M87. The most violent species they simply wiped out, the ones that weren’t as aggressive they turned into slaves. It took thousands of years to conquer all of those planets, and then they started to look at other galaxies and wonder what dangers could be lurking there.

  “So they went to find out, and had conquered eight more galaxies, they had a lot of ships, more than the eight hundred billion we will, but one of the emperor’s nobles decided he should rule, and staged a coup. The civil war was brutal, but the noble failed, and as a result the emperor cut down on the amount of ships allowed by a great many, for fear someone else would try.”

  She continued, “Since then, they’ve only conquered two more small galaxies, because they only had a little over five million ships left. Right now, their last four million is spread out between ten galaxies. That small number only works, because they are usually much more powerful than the people they find, and their ships can go anywhere they want so quickly they don’t need localized forces. At least, not until they met us. I’m sorry to say, if they had sent all their ships we probably wouldn’t be here anymore, it will take a little under four days for that no longer to be true.”

  Everyone was silent so she got to the main point, “I guess what we need to decide in eight days’ time, when the upgrades are complete, is are we going to go after them? They’d have destroyed Earth and Alion without a second thought, and the Dreniel would be a slave race, those that survived anyway. If we leave them alone, we risk them building up, researching and upgrading their tech, and coming after us later. The problem with going after them, is does that make us responsible for protecting ten more galaxies from predators?”

  Ari asked, “How many civilizations are confined and enslaved?”

  Hope answered, “Fifteen thousand, eight six of which would both pass our definition of worthy to reach the stars and have the knowledge to get there. There are about four hundred I wouldn’t even lend a shuttle to. The majority, a little over fourteen point five thousand, are just too primitive so far.”

  Kate frowned, “Do we have the right though?”

  Aide shrugged, “Right now they’re all confined and enslaved. We would free eighty-six civilizations to the stars, with much more coming when they can. Also, we only confine aggressive conquerors, but unlike the Meliax we don’t destroy them, or enslave them. Your question? I don’t know if we have the right, but if we simply stop the Meliax, we would have the responsibility. I’m not sure if we can afford not to take out such a serious threat.

  “The Meliax’s inherit nature is peaceful as well, deciding everyone is an enemy and destroying them is a learned habit and how they are brought up, so who knows how long we’d have to confine them before they were ready to rejoin the stars, next time as peaceful neighbors.”

  Ari smiled, “The Dreniel, unlike our Human and Alion friends, are grateful for what you do Aide, so if it was up to me I’d say yes. Yes, you don’t let us kill each other, but otherwise we live as we wish. As you’re an A.I., I don’t fear you becoming greedy for more power. Still, ten galaxies and fifteen thousand civilizations is a lot to keep an eye on.”

  Aide nodded in agreement, “Hope will make that much easier. I can control eight hundred billion ships, but it is getting close to my limits, anything past a trillion would be… very difficult even with the support systems on the ships being smarter.”

  Hope asked, “What do you think Tim, you’re the only one who hasn’t spoken at all.”

  Tim frowned, “I’ll let you all decide. As long as I don’t violate the Aide’s protocols, and try to truly take rule, I’m essentially in command of all of this. I’d be lying if the idea of playing peacekeeper for ten more galaxies wasn’t attractive, it seems too self-serving for me to have a say, even if I’m the one giving the order after the decision. Where does benevolent intent leave off, and my own desire for more power to start? I can’t really tell to be honest.”

  Aide got really turned on by his little speech, it made her love him even more, and it took her point zero two seconds to plan an immediate withdrawal to their suite so she could demonstrate how she felt quite thoroughly.

  “Let’s wrap this up, we shouldn’t decide something this big on the spur of the moment right after a battle. We’ll discuss it more in a week when the upgrades are almost done. Tim, I need to see you alone for a minute.”

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the door, and no one stopped them, she loved it when a plan worked that well…

  Chapter 15

  Andil was worried as he worked the fields. He glanced over at the village in thought. His mate… or rather the woman that shared his home, refused to answer his questions this morning. He’d heard stories of a resistance while he’d grown up. People that secretly searched for technology that could free them from the Meliax. He knew they must be true, because every once in a while stories spread of one of his race being killed for having advanced technology.

  Could Erza be involved in something like that? He went over the conversation from this morning in his mind, she had actually implied she was sneaking out to fuck around on him, and he should stay out of it. He couldn’t think of many things that would be worse than betraying a marriage oath, perhaps only breaking the slave laws the Meliax had them under. He didn’t like that Erza was putting herself in danger, but what could he really do about it? He wasn’t even a real mate, only in name, and even if he was that wouldn’t give him the right to demand things of her.

  He heard an explosion and looked at the village again. There was smoke rising from the smithy and a dust cloud hiding the actual building. Had the bellows exploded, or was this the Meliax? Not knowing sure exactly why, he ran toward the village. He couldn’t help it, he had a bad feeling and didn’t want Erza to be dead. The dust started to clear as he approached, and he could see the smithy was completely leveled. How could anyone have survived that.

  He looked around for the Meliax, it took him a minute to find it, since it was in multiple pieces, parts of it splattered against the building next door. He walked forward into the wreckage, and started to search for survivors, knowing in his gut that there couldn’t be. He realized then, that he had cared for Erza, even if she had not cared about him. He’d been holding out hope that she would eventually accept him, but that hope was… ashes beneath his feet.

  He heard a strange noise and took a few steps forward, the wood beneath him started to crack ominously, and then he was falling through the floor. It felt like he fell forever, but was probably only a second or two. His head rung like a bell when he hit the ground, and he quickly passed out…

  Aide woke herself up when the alert came in. Only her body had been asleep of course, and she put on a skin tight ship suit that was completely transparent. She still looked naked but it would protect her just as well as any other ship suit. She went into the closet that she hardly ever used to pull on a pair of jeans, shoes, and a clingy sweater shirt. She looked over at Tim, and decided she should let him sleep. He would come with her if she asked, but she didn’t need him for this.

  She wished she wasn’t going anywhere either.

  She left him a message in case he woke up while she ran down to the hangar deck and took one of the armed shuttlecraft. She wasn’t sure if she would need weapons or not, probably not, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone on Earth had tried to control her through her family. It had always been a worry, since the families had moved back to Earth, but the two times in the past it had been tried, she’d worked it out easily enough.

  Still, it was harder now, she had superior tech, but Earth was much closer now, with quantum connections, plasma tech, advanced weapons, and scanners. Her shuttle was state of the art for her tech, or rather her old tech, she su
pposed she needed to design a new shuttle, or just park one of the new ships on her command ship.

  Her ship was cleared, she had priority clearance granted for her automatically by the system, and rocketed down into the Earth’s atmosphere to some empty land in Colorado close to the land her family owned. She came down fast, and stopped instantly two inches above the ground. There were several emergency shuttles there, as well as another shuttle that was twisted wreckage.

  They were related to her, related by blood. The man who was Darren Parks had been her grandchild, with forty-five greats in front of it. Her family was huge now, there were so many branches going back a thousand years, she had an extremely large database of her descendants, along with Olivia’s, Nate and Paula’s, as well as Stacey and Kris’s.

  She’d never met Darren, she tried to stay away, afraid that meeting her family would cause… problems. Make them targets. But Darren and his wife Karen were dead, the sensors in her own body told her that. But her five-year-old granddaughter Kristin, with forty-six greats in front of it, was alive… barely. Humans had come a long way with nanotechnology, but they still weren’t as good as the Alion’s tech a thousand years ago, and nothing compared to what her nanites could do.

  As far as she could tell, this looked like a normal accident, they were much rarer in this day and age, but they still happened. Still, she queried the recorder in their shuttle, and downloaded the flight data as she walked over to the med shuttle and peaked in.

  The med technician asked without looking up, “Who are you?”

  She released the nanites she’d been making on the way here, and then answered, “Her family.”

  The technician grunted, but didn’t look away from his screen.

  She was tightly connected with her processor back on the ship which interfaced with the crashed shuttle, and found out the shuttle’s gravity systems had malfunctioned and caused the crash. That in turn was caused by nanites that were no longer in optimum condition. She was alarmed by that, and started checking into their financials. They had the money to do it, and had in fact replaced the nanites six months ago.