Katherine- Forged in Exile

by Will Crudge

  “Live and at one hundred percent capacity!” Anonymous NCO #2 reported back.

  “Shield status?” She asked again.

  “Full shields, generators at capacity.” Anonymous NCO #1 reported back.

  “Firing solution on the SK?” Conrad asked, but no answer would be given. I was hurled to the deck, and I slid across the slick deck plate until I collided with something hard.

  The world was black.

  ***

  I open my eyes. Everything is blurry. My ears are ringing. I shake it off, and a moment later I find myself in the fetal position on the deck plate. I stand up to see the emergency lighting on, and there’s a banner flashing above the main display.

  [Emergency Safe Mode!]

  I don’t have to be a certified space-farer to know what that means. The SK has struck, and the Nova has seen better days. I scan the bridge, and I see the command crew is still disoriented. One of them is still out cold. Anonymous NCO #2, if I was to guess.

  Conrad taps me on the shoulder. “Are you alright?” She asks, but her voice was slightly muffled.

  “Huh?” I ask. I heard what she said, but the muffled voice through me off, and I replied that way out of reflex.

  “Sorry.” She said as some kind of invisible energy shield snapped out of array around her head. Pretty cool actually. I guess it’s a backup system to prevent head injury. “I was asking if you were alright.” She says with a clear voice.

  “I am.” I say. I gesture towards the rest of the bewildered command crew. “But they may not be.”

  Without another word, Conrad and I begin to check on each of the crewmembers. The ones with the lighter armor were rocked pretty hard. Apparently, they either don’t have the cool protective head shielding, or they don’t deploy automatically. Anonymous NCO #2 is finally stirring though. Good. I was beginning to like him… err her. My bad. ‘He’ is actually a ‘she.’

  “Master Sergeant!” Anonymous NCO #1 calls out.

  “Report!” Conrad sounds off.

  “Navigation went into an emergency cycle. Three minutes until reboot. Another two to three before we can re-plot for FTL!” He replies. At least I can now confirm that I got his gender correct.

  I look at the scan suite display. We’re now well within gunship range, but Throat is succeeding in drawing their fire. Please don’t get hit! Please don’t get hit! I repeat in my mind.

  Then the audio net crackles to life. “I can’t keep this up much longer!” It’s Throat. “I’m low on ammo, and their beam-fire solutions are beginning to dial in on me. I can only evade them for another forty-two seconds before I either have to let myself get hit, or burn out of range!”

  Shit! We don’t have time! I realize. “Do you think the Nova can buy you time?” I ask. I don’t know why I didn’t ask Conrad, but it was a knee-jerk reaction.

  “Negative!” He replies. “They have over-powered thrusters, and the Nova’s thruster array has taken damage. You’ll be lucky to reach cruising speed without causing the main reactor to meltdown!”

  Conrad just stands there with no shortage of stoicism. “Blind jump! Initiate!”

  The helmsman looks over his shoulder at her. His eyes are as wide as planets. He doesn’t even notice the blood dripping from his head wound, and down into the corner of his mouth.

  “I said, blind jump!” Conrad shouted as she pounded her fist against the console.

  “Yes, Master Sergeant!” He replied with a flurry of nervous blinks. He rotated his head back to his workstation and began to hand-jam.

  “Trixie, advise the Mercy that we’re about to jump. I suggest they do the same. I’ll belay the order to execute on our end until they’re in slip-space.” Conrad says solemnly.

  I just stand there. All I can do is watch the visual of the LRF. I wince as its shielding takes a glancing blow from a proximity warhead. He’s about to lose his shields. He’s about to become a martyr.

  “Mercy is jumping in three… two… transition complete!” Trixie reports.

  “Throat,” Conrad says. She pauses to swallow her feelings. “You’re a hero.”

  “Then don’t make me a stupid one, and jump already!” He scoffs back. By the time he finished his sentence, his energy shield had flared out. A white flash from a beam strike erupted from the edge of his thruster array, and he went into a flat spin.

  All I can do is bury my palms in my hands and cry. By the time I open them again, we’re somewhere in slip-space.

  Nobody said a word. There was no point. There was no sensor data to analyze. No way to know where we’re going to end up. No way to know much of anything.

  After several solemn moments, Conrad breaks the silence. “Take us out of the black.”

  The stars snap back into the visual scan, and the gut-wrenching transition to normal space made my guts bubble. Bubble too much. Ouch! Something isn’t right.

  The klaxon sounds once more, and the A-grave goes berserk. I go from floating one second, to being slammed down onto the deck the next. Sparks are flying. Crewmembers are dolling out well-crafted obscenities, and I struggle to latch on to a nearby jump-seat.

  “The shielding went into a flux cycle as we came out of slip space!” Trixie reported. Even I know what that means. There must have been some kind of power surge when the FTL drive was disengaged. It must have cascaded into the shielding system somehow. Normally there were electronic safeguards to prevent that, but the ship had taken combat damage, and something obviously malfunctioned… In a big fucking way.

  The violent effects of a massive object slamming into our laws of physics without an electromagnetic barrier have caused catastrophic damage. The hull breach alarms are overtaking the klaxon, and according to the main display, we’re tumbling uncontrollably through space.

  Then the source of the problem becomes apparent. We came out of FTL close to a rocky planet of some kind. The gravity of it must have compounded the violent emergence into normal space. We just won the lottery in reverse, as it would seem.

  “Thrusters are flaring out of control!” Trixie shouts. “I’m doing an emergency shutdown of the main reactor!”

  Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. Without thruster power, we’re going to inevitably be pulled into the planet’s atmosphere. Granted, we should be safe from the heat of atmospheric friction. Warships are built to withstand it with ease. But only so far as the emergency energy shields can keep the hull breaches secured. One centimeter of a gap and the heat will ignite the atmosphere inside the ship, and we’ll literally be toast in a fraction of a second. Yay.

  There’s nothing to be done. Trixie’s efforts are the only thing that we can hope will pull us out of this mess. We meat-sacks can only hang on and pray.

  The A-grav must be out completely. Random objects are spinning out of control around the bridge. A coffee cup slams into my thigh and shatters on a nearby bulkhead. Ow.

  Lights are flashing. Klaxon is sounding. But at least the hull breach warnings have disappeared. Yay.

  I don’t remember much of anything else. I just know I survived. But I was the only one who did.

  And I wouldn’t wake up for five more days.

  EXILE

  It took me a month to bury the dead. The planet’s soil is relatively soft and only has a few rocks here and there. The hard part was the fact that all I had was a shovel. I salvaged it from a pioneer kit from a smashed ground transport vehicle. Too bad I couldn’t just use the vehicle to haul the deceased.

  Trixie is my only company. Luckily she survived along with me. Turns out that the impact of the Nova triggered an EMP pulse. It instantly fried the crew’s med-nano, and they had nothing to save them from the fatal impact.

  I should have died too. But superior genetics won the day. My body was mostly healed by the time I woke up. Of course, I was wracked with pain, but when Trixie guided me through replacing the fried power unit of my sub armor, she was able to remotely inject me with additional healing agents and pain relievers.
>
  I’m fully recovered but have had no time to reflect on much of anything. Forty-seven UAHC Soldiers died, and thirty-four are still unaccounted for. Many of those had likely been either sucked out into the vacuum or vaporized via combat damage. We’ll never know for sure.

  Trixie only survived by retreating into her crystalline core. It was shielded from the EMP pulse, and since the main reactor was powered down during impact, she was able to get it back online.

  The Nova will never fly again, however. Neither will its array of smaller craft it boasted. The main hull is wrenched and ruined. The thruster array is a smoldering heap. Only a small section of the ship is functional. Fortunately, there’s enough uranium and plutonium left to fuel the main reactor for a few centuries. It’s encouraging, considering we have no idea where we are.

  The navigation system is smashed. Trixie can’t even access its mapping archives to cross-reference bodies in the night’s sky. All we know is that humans have been here before. The signatures of artificial terraforming are all over this place.

  Early terraforming enterprises made their money by terraforming Earth-like planets, and them selling the colonial charters. It was very lucrative about three thousand years ago. Early commercialized FTL terraforming ships would scour the stars for worthy candidates. But the vast expanse meant that they had to act first, and try to sell later. Apparently, this planet was beautifully terraformed but never sold. It happened more often than you might think, and there are thousands of uninhabited, yet terraformed worlds out there.

  This planet was likely terraformed over the course of several decades, but by the time it was ready for colonization, trade routes, wars, or even shifts in the economy meant that it was no longer commercially viable for settlement. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re on the fringes of the human sphere, but for some reason or another, we may be in a region with few neighbors.

  There’s no evidence that anyone has been here since the terraformers left. But that’s far from conclusive either. Trixie doesn’t have the scanning range to properly survey the entire globe, let alone launch a satellite. We just don’t have the resources. All we can tell is that the hopes that there’s a bustling civilization of the far side of this rock is non-existent.

  There’s no known human habitat that doesn’t have some kind of low orbit satellite floating around. We would have detected the RF or microwave radiation if there were. Nope. We’re alone.

  I’m finished burying the dead and giving the Life Temple burial rites. I have no idea what the religious backgrounds of the Soldiers were, but most UAHC Soldiers have some kind of faith. It’s an interesting demographic, to say the least.

  In my time, spiritualism or religion isn’t as prevalent as it was in the past. Roughly fifty percent of modern humanity is devoid of spiritual belief. There are a number of factors that contribute to it, but none that someone in your own time may expect.

  It was an ancient belief that the more advanced humanity became scientifically advanced, that the less spiritual they would become. It was as if reason would over-shadow superstition. But that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, there was a huge religious surge a few millennia back, and over eighty percent of humanity had some form of spiritual belief. In the greatest irony, even our most brilliant scientific minds tend to be the most devout.

  The true cause of the decline of religion is probably religion itself. Religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive, but it’s all one big dumb superstitious package as far as most atheists are concerned. But the human construct of religion tries to organize spiritual beliefs into a strict code of rules to be adhered to. Not to mention some of these beliefs are largely divisive and exclude certain people for things that are beyond their own control. This is the main argument an atheist may bring to the table.

  Soldiers are different though. Most adhere to the Life Temple. Some even still hold true to the classical disciplines. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam still exist but are very rare. They don’t even oppose each other anymore. In fact, since they are such tiny minorities, they often work together to preserve their traditions. One of the most common efforts is to appeal to the military.

  Men and women who spend decades away from home, often need some kind of spiritual foundation to cling to. This helps keep them grounded, and it helps them to reconcile their daily dose of brutality with something greater than themselves.

  War Masters are basically clergy, so performing a funeral is as easy as breathing for me. There was once a great schism between the Life Temple and the War Master Guild, so the former no longer recognizes the latter. But that’s because our form of faith is less rigid and much more intuitive. Our mutual founder, Victor Allen Livingston, was appalled at the fact that his message was becoming institutionalized into a formal religion. He and the War Master Guild broke off to forge a new path.

  Back then the Guild wasn’t so much a knighthood of warrior monks, but more of spiritual students who believed they couldn’t just deny their violent human tendencies. So, they embraced them. They proceeded to champion the cause of encouraging warring entities to fight with honor and minimize innocent bloodshed. Over time, Victor’s genetic gifts were transferred in-part to his core disciples, and they inherited the gifts that would elevate the War Masters into legendary status.

  There was an early generation War Master, would have been consumed by his gifts and went rogue. Obsessed with adding lethal instincts to the gene pool, he experimented on predatory animals. He altered their genes, made them larger, stronger, smarter, etc. Then he spliced his raw isolated genetic gifts into the creatures. Through misguided insanity, he ended up creating the first generation Zodiacs. So aptly named for the twelve species of animals that were used in the experiment. We get the term ‘zoo’ from the same root word that zodiac comes from. But his was a zoo of horrors.

  When the War Masters defeated him and rescued the poor creatures, something had to be done about his house of horrors. At first, it was decided to kill them out of mercy, but Victor decided against it. He sensed an opportunity. It was a rogue War Master who succumbed to his lack of control of cosmic energies that caused the Zodiacs to come into existence. But he had inadvertently created the cure for his own madness.

  It became readily apparent that the Zodiacs could meld into a deep bond with the humans who shared their genetics. In doing so, they balanced each other out, and both species would benefit from the other.

  But alas, I’m rambling. The bodies are buried. I have no outlet to satiate my wild mind. I need to find an outlet. Something to keep me from being insane.

  Training.

  One of the reasons why I am among the best at core swordsmanship is because I practiced more than everyone else. I did so to focus my mind. We’re all trained on how to meditate, and we master it early on. But not all meditation is simply focusing on breathing and being one with the universe. Mine was more tactile.

  I focused on every cell of my body when I held a training sword. I would spend days, or even weeks mastering a sing swipe or slash. It was my version of masturbation.

  Even though I did some of that too.

  “Trixie.” I say.

  “Yes, dear.” She replies.

  “Do we have any hardwood laying around?”

  “Lots, why?” She says.

  “I need to carve some training swords.”

  “Um, ok?”

  “Seriously! I need to train. I need to keep my brain focused on something. I don’t want to become a crazy recluse.”

  “Kat, you have me to keep you sane!” She says with a motherly tone.

  “Of course I do. I’m grateful for it. I just need something physical.” I press.

  She informs me that some of the fabrication machines are still functioning. I’m eventually able to have a variety of different wooden swords made. Each with a specific training goal in mind. Now I’m ready.

  ***

  Six months into my daily routine, and I’m only slightly less frustrated as
I was when I started. I’ve managed to sharpen up a few movements, transitions, and stances. I’ve even packed on a few pounds of muscle. But I’m still missing something. Something important.

  I need a sparring partner.

  “Why the long face, girly?” Trixie must have been tracking my every facial twitch. She can read my mind by measuring my brainwaves, body chemistry, and even my pheromone levels.

  “I need an opponent.” I say flatly. I stand inside the little training room that was once a platoon sergeant’s office. The soft carpet makes a great training surface, and the gentle cool breeze from the gash in the hull makes for natural air conditioning. The natural lighting from the soft sunlight helps as well. Hooray for binary stars!

  “Build one.” She says.

  “Build one?” I scoff.

  “We have piles of infantry drone parts that we secured from the Crimson Alliance. I can help you piece one together.” She says casually.

  “I want an opponent to train with. Not a robot that’s pre-programmed to kill me in my sleep!”

  “Katherine McAlister!” Damn, she used my full name. “I’ll guide you through it. It would also be handy for making repairs, growing food, or anything else that needs to be done.”

  “Why would I grow food? You have enough raw nutrient base to feed me for a century!” I say.

  “Forty years.” She replies with a scolding tone.

  “Wait, what? What happened? Did you miscalculate your stockpile?”

  “Me? No, dear.” She laughs. “I properly calculated everything. But my variables didn’t factor in a War Master’s metabolism and grueling exercise routines.”

  Makes sense now. I have probably been burning twelve thousand calories per day. And that’s a light day. The additional muscle I’ve built isn’t helping either. ‘A bigger engine burns more fuel’ is what weight trainers always say.

  “Well, I’m not a War Master. I never will be if I don’t get off this rock. And I can’t pick up where I left off to become one if I don’t continue to preserve the skills I’ve already learned.”