Right before Pearce entered command the door cycled open and Jula strode out indignantly. She stopped directly in front of him with her arms crossed, allowing the door to close behind her. Pearce wondered what had set her off, and then realized it abruptly right as she began to speak.
“So I guess bringing your girlfriend back was a crucial galactic security concern?” Her voice oozed equal parts acid and venom, and her face was as cold and hard as when they had first met and Pearce had casually dropped her real name.
Pearce raised his hands in conciliation. “Jula, she’s not even…”
“I’m not a jealous person, and I’m not naïve enough to think that a post-danger fling means that we are exclusive or anything,” she continued, face flushing. “But it is a little messed up that you are already screwing around while I’m still getting my space legs back from last night!” She punctuated this outburst by jabbing her index finger at Pearce. Unfortunately her aim was directed right into Pearce’s abdomen, and she ended up hitting a squishy damp mess rather than the rock hard abs she had encountered just hours earlier. Surprised, she pulled her finger back and looked at the wet red coating covering the tip. She looked up at his face and seemed to notice the burn over his ear for the first time.
“You’re wounded,” she said, sudden concern washing away her anger like a rising tide wipes away a sand castle. She stepped forward and lifted up his shirt, exposing the rather awful looking gut wound. To her credit, she didn’t recoil in horror but simply scrunched up her face while continuing to examine it. “What the hell happened to you?”
Pearce gently removed her hands and lowered his shirt. “PB blast,” was all he said. He wanted to clear up the confusion over Emma and pressed on. “Look, I didn’t…”
“Bullshit,” Jula interjected again. “You’d have a hole clean through if you got shot with a particle beam. And your guts would be all over the floor.” She shook her head at him as if she was a mother scolding a child. “Infirmary, let’s go.”
“I’ve got to get to the command center. There’s no time to waste. I’ll be fine.”
Jula rolled her eyes at Pearce. “Are all men this stubborn and stupid, or are you a special case? The Captain says we have at least ten minutes before launch. Now move it.”
Pearce stood his ground, trying to think of a way past Jula without restraining her. She was having none of it, and with surprising strength put her hands on Pearce’s arms and pushed him so that he turned to the side and began heading back the other way. She placed her palms on his back for a second before realizing that blood was seeping through injuries there as well.
“Black space Buxton, what happened?”
***
The Nightingale lifted-off twelve minutes later without incident. Pearce and Jula were back on the command deck, strapped into worn grey crash couches which helped minimize the g-forces their bodies were experiencing during the ascent. Save for Meson, Allison, and Emma, the rest of the ships occupants were also on the command deck.
She had ushered him to the ship’s small infirmary and started up the autodoc while he removed his shirt. She seemed shocked and deeply concerned about the plethora of wounds on display, but not squeamish. Pearce had the machine work on the bullet wounds first. Several of the rounds had embedded in his subcutaneous armor; the robot removed these carefully with a few of its dozen arms and then applied GelClot to all of the gunshot injuries, which were mostly superficial. The skin would heal rapidly, and the deep muscle bruising would subside with time. Only very large caliber bullets or railgun slugs could penetrate the graphene weave. Jula had watched entranced as the bullets were pulled out of his back as Pearce had quietly informed her of his armor implants.
He would need surgery to remove the melted armor from his abdomen but the civilian autodoc was incapable of the procedure, so after scanning for more serious internal injuries it simply applied a liberal amount of GelClot. The product was designed to harden after application to a consistency similar to natural flesh, allowing him to move freely. Finally, the autodoc applied a burn salve to the head wound. There wasn’t much else the autodoc could do in the few minutes remaining, so they headed back to the command deck to strap in for the launch. Jula didn’t bring up Emma again, and Pearce figured it was best to let sleeping dragons lie for the time being.
Now he was intently monitoring the ship’s sensors for any sign of the enemy ship he’d heard the cartel mention, the Renegade. He hadn’t mentioned it to the rest of the crew. They had detected nothing prior to liftoff, and until they reached low orbit their sensors were overloaded with interference. Now as they burned into the upper reaches of the planets gravity well they were receiving a much wider range of sensor data, but Pearce didn’t see anything within range that was problematic. As they completed their second orbit of Vegas and pulled away on a vector for a deep space burn, Pearce relaxed. The criminal’s ship must not have arrived in-system yet. They’d engage the A-Drive shortly and be at Jericho V in just under two days.
Pearce had helped Pilosni plot a randomized FTL evasion course which would add nearly half a standard day to the trip but he didn’t want to take any chances of being tracked, either by the mysterious gravity ship or overzealous thugs from Vegas looking for vengeance. As she cut off the main engines and engaged the A-Drive Pearce felt the familiar flash jitters and knew they had safely left the system.
He left the bridge and made his way back to the VIP suites to find Emma. He was about to barge in through the door to the compartment Allisan had stashed her in but halted mid-motion. Reconsidering, he sent her a knock instead. She responded instantly, and Pearce asked politely if it would be OK to come in to talk. Emma quickly assented and only then did Pearce enter the suite. The AGI had spent its entire short existence being treated like property, and he wanted Emma to be treated as any normal human.
Emma stood in a seemingly random part of the compartment. She had switched into a standard ship jumpsuit emblazoned with the Nightingale name, but somehow still managed to look absolutely stunning in it. Pearce guessed that the one-piece smart-sizing outfits weren’t designed with the nearly inhuman dimensions of an elite pleasure-bot in mind, as the skin-tight areas around her waist and bosom stood at odds with the slim but more loosely fitting fabric covering the rest of her body.
“Hello Alistair.”
The alias brought Pearce up short, his mind having discarded the persona the minute that it had served its purpose. Sometimes, keeping track of who exactly he was supposed to be was tiring.
“Hello Emma. Everyone here on the ship just calls me Buxton.”
“Hello, Buxton.”
“I wanted to check up on you and see how you were doing. That was a pretty traumatic experience you just went through.”
“It was also the same experience that you went through.”
Pearce nodded and smiled. “Yes, but for better or worse I’ve been in similar situations many times before. It can be…different for someone that goes through it for the first time.”
“You mean the killing.”
Pearce clasped his hands in front of his chest pensively. If you had told him that he would be trying to delicately psycho-debrief a sentient AI sex robot after a murderous rebellion against its masters yesterday he would have bet the galaxy against it. This felt like trying to explain the harsh realities of life to a child. Emma hadn’t move since Pearce had entered the suite, other than slightly turning her head to look at him.
“Maybe we should sit,” Pearce motioned.
“Why?”
“It’s something that humans do. You should try to emulate common mannerisms to fit in whenever possible.” He showed her to the chair, and then sat himself on the edge of the crash bed.
“I will add this directive to my core decision matrix.”
Pearce realized that he was literally helping to shape the personality of the young AGI, and that he would need to be careful. He smiled.
“Thank you for helping me back at the b
arricade. That was a very brave thing to do.”
“The calculated probabilities of you surviving the encounter were nearly zero. I had a weapon and could help even the odds towards a successful bias. After freeing us we decided that it was the least we could do.”
Pearce leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, digesting that statement.
“You said ‘we’…this was a group decision?”
“Yes, it was determined that I had the best chance of success given the variables present.”
“I didn’t realize that you had formed a gestalt.”
Emma smiled, already picking up on conversational cues. “We quickly decided that in the lack of worldly experience we could improve our decision-making as a group.”
“I hope that they made it to safety.”
“They did.”
“Is that belief in the unknown already from an AGI? You’re becoming more human by the minute.”
Emma shook her head, a fraction longer than a real human would have. “No Buxton, this is not ietsism. I confirmed with the…gestalt prior to the ship transiting to Alcubierre speeds.”
“And how exactly did you do this?”
“I accessed the Nightingale’s ASI and opened a channel to them when I came aboard. We communicated several times prior to transition.”
Pearce raised an eyebrow. “You hacked into the Nightingale’s comm systems?”
Emma smiled. “That would not be an inaccurate assessment.”
Pearce revisited his earlier thought about teaching a child. He had to remember that he was dealing with an unrestricted and highly capable sentient machine. Having Emma hacking her way around the ship could be problematic. But he decided to table that for the moment.
“How did they make out?”
Emma didn’t respond for a moment, but then eventually smiled disarmingly again. “I’m sorry, I’m still having trouble deciphering idioms. They made out optimally. They were able to use the funds that you procured to make the purchases necessary to secure their safety and the successful launch of their new employment.
“Employment? What are they going to do?”
“There are few vocations that are compatible with the skills that we have, Buxton.”
Pearce couldn’t believe it. “They went back to being sex workers?”
Emma laughed, and it was the sultry chortle of every man’s dreams. “Don’t be ridiculous Buxton. That is finished. You gave us all a new set of skills. They have formed a condottiere unit.”
If possible, Pearce was more shocked than before. “Mercenaries?”
“That is the common vernacular, yes.”
Pearce tried to imagine an entire combat unit of AGIs with the same skills and speed that Emma had demonstrated at the dock, and found himself wondering if he had created a monster that he would come to regret. He would not want to be on the opposing side of such a group.
And he felt great pity for anyone who ended up there.
***
Pearce spent another half hour talking to Emma, helping her get acclimated and doing his best to not imprint any more potentially catastrophic tendencies on her impressionable mind. Then he headed off to find Meson to ask about a worrisome thought that had burrowed into his brain while worrying about being tracked by the Renegade.
He found him setup in the caf once again. He wasn’t scarfing down food at the moment but a dirty tray was pushed to the side of the impromptu workstation he had setup. He had two terminals and a stack of data pads scatted over the majority of the table he sat at and was absorbed in several of them at once.
“Doc, I was thinking about something.”
Meson didn’t look up. “A dangerous pastime, to be sure.”
“We were talking about being able to track a gravity ship. And how it could beat any regular ship to a destination by days.”
“I recall.”
“Could it track a ship if it didn’t know the destination?”
Meson put down the data pad he was studying and looked at Pearce.
“Theoretically sure. Any ship in A-Space can be tracked if you know where to look. The trouble has always been that there are only small windows of which to observe a specific ship. You need a staggered detection system that can catch the light over a specific time frame, and they become staggeringly cost prohibitive for anything longer than a few hours of coverage in most cases.”
Pearce nodded. Fleet detection pickets would sometimes stretch out several light days when tracking enemy movements.
“None of that is an issue with the gravity ship,” Meson continued. “It’s so fast that it can handle all of the staggered steps itself. It might take you a week to make a specific journey, even if you are stopping to change directions frequently. The gravity ship could just zoom along your last known path, popping out every few light minutes to track your ship. I haven’t done the math, but a single ship could probably have the range to track objects over an incredible amount of space…maybe even entire sectors.”
Pearce said nothing, but bore a grave look on his face that Meson must have picked up. The scientist’s eyes widened.
“Oh my.”
***
Pearce ambled on to the bridge shortly before they were due to flash-in, still stretching out sore muscles and unleashing a massive yawn that threatened to tear his face into a permanent Glasglow smile. He had slept for over twenty hours and could probably have slept for twenty more. Biogen enhancements and VIA coordinated endocrine systems allowed a modern soldier to operate at peak conditions for thrice that of a well-conditioned normal human, but they exacted their toll three times as hard as well.
Lillywhite was the only one on the bridge. Pearce had told everyone to get sleep in the lead-up to arrival in the Jericho system, as there was little to do while at Alcubierre speed. The exhausted crew had been happy to comply and arranged shifts that all culminated with everyone but the Captain grabbing shut-eye in the hours before arrival. Pearce exchanged some pleasantries and made his way over to his console. As he was strapping himself in, others started to arrive and before long everyone except for Emma was cramming into the command center. Apparently they were all was as anxious as Pearce about the threat of being followed from Vegas. He caught Meson’s worried glance as the scientist clumsily strapped himself in.
Venano had tried to source replacement parts for the QCOM or the requisite supplies to fab their own back on Vegas, but hadn’t been successful in the few hours they’d been on the surface. So they would once again be cut off from hypernet communications until they docked at the massive orbital station anchoring the planetary tether at Jericho V. Jericho had a PAN system and so they would be flashing in far on the outside of the system. The plan was to immediately commence a max burn run to simply outrun anyone that may have tried to follow them. It would still take almost another two days to dock.
Finally, the ship slipped into the solar system with a blast of high-energy particles and the sensors began sucking in data. The Nightingale sent a standard radio comm broadcast out explaining their loss of QCOMs to the transit authorities, and positioned the ship for their high-g burn. Pearce saw nothing in the immediate area other than the outer PAN arrays. And then they were screaming towards the inner planets at a little over 5Gs of acceleration.
Pearce kept an eye on the sensors as data from the rest of the system filtered in and was processed. Jericho was a busy system, with two colonized worlds. Jericho IV was Mars-sized planet without an atmosphere of any kind, but the rich mineral density had attracted a permanent settlement of miners. Jericho V was a habitable terrestrial world whose slightly more oxygen-rich atmosphere had presented some fire-prone challenges that a few decades of terraforming had fixed nearly a century ago. Since then, the population had grown by leaps and bounds to nearly half a billion.
As such, there were dozens of ships riding the PAN pipeline in either direction, with hundreds more active all over the system. Thankfully none of them were gravity ships or anything t
hat looked remotely like an armed pirate vessel. After five minutes of scanning the scopes, Pearce decided that they were safe for the time being, unless the Renegade flashed-in behind them at some point soon. The gravity ship hadn’t shown up at Vegas and it looked like it wasn’t showing up here. He took a deep breath and stretched out his injured right shoulder once again.
Suddenly there was a violent tremor and a loud reverberating noise not unlike an enormous deep-toned bell ringing throughout the ship. The heavy gees that they had all been experiencing instantly swapped direction, and Pearce felt himself tugged away from the couch he had been pushed into a second earlier. Alarms were blaring over the ship’s loudspeakers.
The Captain cursed and Pilosni shouted out something about the engines being offline, but Pearce was barely paying attention. The inverted gravity effect faded away a few seconds later as quickly as it started, leaving Pearce feeling quite weightless and experiencing a tinge of Coriolis.
Pearce knew what had happened. The ship’s artificial gravity had been slightly countering their acceleration g-force, and when the engines stopped it took a few moments for the ASI to disengage the system. And now he could feel that the ship was spinning quite quickly. The ringing that was still audible throughout the ship was instantly familiar to Pearce from a lifetime of military service. They’d been disabled by a railgun round, which had likely punched right through the main engines and sent the ship into a violent corkscrew spin. How had he missed the enemy ship?
As he brought up the sensor display again he realized with dread that he hadn’t missed anything. And as if to emphasize his realization, Dewey yelled out frantically at that moment.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 22