Seven days?
“Commander Flkk’Sss, I need you to organize a cleanup crew to compartment 14/31/17. I’ve left a small mess, which is why I’m taking a 20-hour rest. Contact me only in extreme urgency.”
“Acknowledged. I’m very glad to hear you say that, Captain.”
“Once we reach hyperspace, assign control to Lieutenant Konchill. You know how ambitious the little snail is, and we need to give him a chance to step up. Meanwhile, you and I, Flkk’Sss, will need to work on some command protocols so I don’t overstay my watch again.” She flicked a blob of vomit from her uniform. “I seem to have developed a problem.”
* * * * *
PART 4: THE GREAT ENGINE
Chapter Sixty-Four
CIC, Midnight Sun, Aneb Emergence Area
She fell through the emergence point with weapons hot and a hunger for action. Preferably Veetanho rat extermination action.
There was a familiar jolt as she appeared in normal space, a flip in her stomach. But this time…this time her stomach kept on turning.
Instinctively, she flailed her arms in the gel cocoon of her command station. She was falling…sinking…but she didn’t know why.
“All stations, report,” she growled.
She tried to remember the coping strategies her instructors had given her when she’d first experienced zero-G, but she had acquired her space legs years ago. This was an altogether different trauma.
The crew reported an entirely safe and uncontested entry into the system, with Gloriana and the two Goltar frigates formed up behind as expected.
She relaxed.
Letting her guard down opened up a fresh assault on her guts. It was coming across the space from the main settled world of this system: Aneb-4.
Something was wrong with Aneb-4.
She winced at the immense and sickening power of the planet. It felt like fingernails scraping across an unpainted bulkhead and then amplified a hundredfold by an alien high priest of the Cult of Sadism.
“Sensors,” she gasped. “Probe Aneb-4. I’m detecting…”
What was she detecting? That the planet gave her tremors? That the planet made her want to throw up? After the episode above Scapa Prime, that wasn’t something she wanted to admit to.
“I can’t see anything out of the ordinary,” she pin-whispered to Midnight Sun. “Is there really something there?”
“I can’t either,” said the ship.
Blue gasped, gulping a mouthful of the oxygenating buffer gel.
These weren’t thoughts and feelings she was picking up from the ship, half worrying she was inventing voices on the edge of her sanity. This was the ship talking to her directly for the first time.
Why now?
“We both felt it,” she told the ship. “So why can’t we see anything?”
“Because that thing,” the ship said with disgust, “is threaded through cracks in reality. It’s hiding. With great effectiveness. But not from us.”
“Some kind of hyperspace bridge?”
The ship replied with a sense of negation. Whatever had enabled or encouraged it to form words had eased off.
A hyperspace bridge? Where had the idea come from. Her? The ship?
No, she realized. It was Jenkins. Her sister had gone on a jolly vacation jaunt supposedly to search for Jenkins’ mystery girlfriend, but really to stop Branco’s incessant whining about his imminent death.
What had the Jeha talked about? Something about an energy tunnel.
Gloriana would know. The big Goltar secret. The Infinite Flow. Gloriana had told her the key was a limitless supply of energy. Last time Blue had checked, there was still no such thing as a free lunch. But something had gotten the Goltar thinking there was, and it was down there on Aneb-4.
She opened a channel to Gloriana’s frigate, the Uzhan.
The Goltar responded. “Do you detect our Veetanho foe, Captain Blue?”
The damned Veetanho! Gloriana was always so eager to remind Blue of their involvement.
She was lying. There were no Veetanho here. The Midnighters were operating an extended contract to defend the Goltar Infinite Flow from whoever those people were with the flag of fifteen stars.
“Blue? Answer me.”
Why was Gloriana lying? It had to be something to do with what was down there on Aneb-4.
Which meant Gloriana was the last person to ask about it.
“My apologies, Gloriana. Just processing fresh sensor data.”
“I see. And what have you detected?”
“Standard commercial traffic. Nothing remarkable.”
“Very well. We shall take up orbit around Aneb-4. Dispatch two companies to the coordinates I am transmitting. They are to assess the defenses they find there and bolster them. Our ships shall maintain combat readiness and you shall remain vigilant. Our enemy will try to take this place. It is possible they are already here.”
“Roger that, boss.”
Our enemy is already here, she mused. I don’t know about that, but I’ve just found someone of interest.
The docking manifest for Aneb-4’s main orbital included the ship Crazy Notion. Blue had never entirely got to the bottom of the Betty’s Bitches games her sister had played, but that was the ship Sun had left to pursue. Maybe she was aboard now?
Blue issued orders to comply with Gloriana’s wishes. But that only required her surface mind. She put most of her energies into figuring out how to get inside Crazy Notion without getting caught.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixty-Five
Control cut-off established, came the message in her implants.
Removing simulation restrictions.
What she was about to do was insanely dangerous…
Connecting simulation to live systems.
Which was why it felt so damned good.
“Commander, is your override active?” she asked Flkk’Sss.
“Yes, Captain. I can shut down your station and assume command any time.”
“Let’s hope that won’t be necessary, for all our sakes. You did remember to use the bathroom before you came on deck, didn’t you?”
“I am ready to perform my function,” came the MinSha’s deadpan reply. She adored Blue’s sense of humor, really. Probably. “And Lieutenant Konchill stands ready to relieve me if necessary.”
“This course of action is unwise,” said the ship.
“I’m a thrill addict, sweetie,” Blue replied. “That’s why you love me.”
Her eyes wild with the joy of the thing, she released control of Midnight Sun to the Goltar simulation and rose out of the command station. She nodded to Flkk’Sss and turned to leave the CIC. It was weird, but the guilt she felt was from failing to formally hand command over to the MinSha commander, not because she had relinquished control to a simulation of herself intended to fly ancient antimatter bombs.
Dammit. Stop calling it a simulation, it’s an AI.
Behind her, her command station folded over itself and assumed the configuration of the acceleration cocoon.
Her stomach flipped. She hadn’t ordered it to close, but it was too late to turn back now. She glanced at the MinSha she trusted to keep an eye on the AI.
The alien’s enormous ruby compound eyes regarded her impassively. She was the only one who did. The rest of the crew were trying hard to not notice something strange was going on. Strange, even for their eccentric captain.
What would Sun say about this plan? Blue no longer knew.
She marched out of CIC and hurried the short distance to her rarely used ready room. With every step she took, the sense of guilt that she was forcing her crew to be co-conspirators in an illegal act was replaced by the ecstasy of adventure.
The simulation suite she frequently hooked up to now took up half of Deck 12.
The Goltar had underestimated the combination of Blue’s will to meddle and explore where she was not supposed to go. Even when the sim suite had been aboard Blunt Justice, Blue and the ship
had sneaked themselves out through the data feeds to look around the simulation system.
Now that the suite was aboard Midnight Sun, it was a little easier. Allied with the enormous talent of the ancient warship, together they had tiptoed around Goltar security walls, dissolved encryption protection, and collapsed multidimensional quantum computers whose task it was to thread vast quantities of data into a handful of slugs of vital information.
On its own, the ship was unfocused, like a device operating in safe mode. That was why the Goltar had recruited her. Only Blue could bring the crazed ancient warship to its full potential. But Midnight Sun could do more than fight battles in physical space. She was as much a cyber warrior as anything else.
When Blue had wormed out of Gloriana that the most common scenario was for a Keesius hellburner assault to obliterate the Veetanho home world, the Goltar assumed Blue would stop there. But Blue never stopped at anything. Her only direction was onward, deeper into uncharted unknowns.
There was one thing in particular that had bugged her. If she was such a valuable asset for the Goltar, why did they allow her to fight battles in the Spine Nebula?
She was completely amazing, but Blue acknowledged that even she could be killed.
It took a change of perspective to realize the answer.
While she and the ship were learning to defeat the Veetanho, the simulation was learning how they thought and fought together. This system wasn’t just a wargame simulator, it was also learning to simulate its players.
Which explained why Blue and the ship were becoming dispensable.
Gloriana had spoken of fleets of ships based on Midnight Sun.
At first, she had scoffed at that. How would anyone simulate Midnight Sun? How, for that matter, could anyone be like her?
AI-powered ships. That must be how.
If you kept a strategic reserve of ancient AI-powered antimatter ships, you were already harboring a deadly secret. Why not go further? Why not build a new AI fleet?
That was why Midnight Sun’s Deck 12 was heavy with the computing power Gloriana had brought on board, and why Midnight Sun delivered such enormous encrypted data packets at regular intervals.
Blue gave a feral grin as she opened a makeup pack and painted eyebrows onto her hairless skin.
Using the Goltars’ own simulation against them. That was delicious.
She opened a storage locker and contemplated the wigs on display. Electro-lash midnight blue topknot? Jet black bob? Or the big hair option—a blonde bubble perm straight out of the late 20th century.
“I’ll ask the simulation to choose,” she said with a laugh, but she thought better of it just in time.
The simulation had a job to do. It would command the ship while impersonating Blue. As far as everyone outside of CIC was concerned—and most especially Gloriana herself—they had to believe Blue was still inside her acceleration cocoon, because she was skipping school. There was something down on the planet Gloriana didn’t want her to know about.
Blue fixed the big blonde wig onto her head. She took out a scent spray and pumped liberal quantities over her neck and hair, then lifted up her shirt to spray underneath. This was not a decorative perfume but a concealing one. It was as natural a Human scent as could be—just not hers.
She pulled her cap low over her big blonde hair and looked at herself in the mirror function of her wrist slate.
It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew her well, but to the crew they’d recently recruited on Station 5—especially the aliens for whom Humans all looked and smelled pretty much the same—her disguise was complete.
Keeping to the less-frequented corridors of Midnight Sun, she made her way to Marine Country and CASPer Armory 3. There she was met by a trio of recent recruits: a pair of four-armed Lumar from the ship security branch, and a Zuul wearing the sword and hammer insignia of an armorer.
“About time,” the Zuul snorted. “We’ve been ordered to gear you up and escort you to your company planetside.” He took a step closer and sniffed her neck, but it was just common Zuul behavior. Her scent didn’t seem to mean anything to him. “Are you the right person? You seem too small to pilot a CASPer. Do you have an identification label?”
“I’ve got a name, if that’s what you mean, Fido. It’s Mary Jane Garbo.”
The Zuul bared his fangs. “Less of your attitude, Mary Jane Garbo, or your CASPer’s waste system might develop an embarrassing critical failure.”
Blue shrugged, wondered whether she should apologize, but decided that the persona of someone who apologized was too big a stretch for her to maintain. “Suit yourself,” she said instead. “But can we get moving, please? I want to get in my mech straightaway, so I don’t miss the dirtside party.”
The Zuul stared at her through keen yellow eyes that looked as if they’d been smeared with sulfur. “What exactly is this…party? The more I know, the better I can configure your loadout and other options.”
“How should I know?” Blue replied. “I’m Private Garbo, not Admiral Garbo. They don’t tell me shit.”
The Zuul relaxed and beckoned her to follow. “Shame,” he said. “The boss made it clear this was strictly need to know, and it seems you’re no higher up the food chain than we are. Come with me, little Human, you’re in luck. There’s a Mk 8 configured for smaller Humans. By the time I’ve finished, you’ll fit right in. Almost as if it was built for you.”
Blue grinned. If only he knew.
* * * * *
Chapter Sixty-Six
Pilots often said the canopy of a modern CASPer was like being inside a goldfish bowl, the curved interior usually displaying wraparound Tri-V images fed from the CASPer’s external cameras. But on her journey to the Romalin factory, she’d set the Tri-V input feeds to the fore and aft cameras of the D-Clock dropship as it journeyed beneath the water to join 3rd Company.
As soon as they’d arrived in orbit around Aneb-4, Gloriana had told Blue to dispatch two companies to bolster the defenses of the island facility of Romalin.
She hadn’t volunteered what the facility’s purpose was, or why it was so important.
Blue didn’t ask.
She didn’t need to; she’d traced the twisted violation of nature in the system down to Aneb-4 and Romalin Island. It had to be the wellspring of the Infinite Flow.
Aneb-4’s surface was thirty percent land, but most of that constituted a continent far away on the other side of the planet. The land here was mostly made up of ancient volcanic islands, and the floating towns and harbors that surrounded the most important ones.
Such as Romalin Island. There was a five-mile exclusion zone around the island through which only authorized personnel were allowed to pass if they didn’t want to be shot up by the armed motorboats that prowled the perimeter.
Other islands had similar “Keep out!” policies, but Blue knew Romalin was different.
Now that she was away from Midnight Sun, she no longer felt the abnormality of the place, but the memory of narrowing down the source of the perverse emanation was so visceral that this close approach made her sick to her stomach.
This made the underwater goldfish bowl a useful distraction. A mile beyond the perimeter, she began to see underwater townships of water-breathing species mixed with military redoubts. Most of the races going about their daily business resembled squid and octopus from Earth, but others had canopies like jellyfish from which dangled gripping appendages. Others propelled themselves through the water by throwing S-shapes like a water snake. It worried her that her pinplants couldn’t identify any of these races.
The aft view was weird, but also strangely calming. The seven tentacles the D-Clocks used to spread decoys in space now pulsated hypnotically in the pearly illumination of the underwater highway, bunching together then squeezing pulses of compressed water behind the craft.
It was the same form of motor propulsion the Goltar used themselves. It was an unreal experience to hitch a ride inside a dropship that she had to use words
like fluid and graceful to describe.
The mission objective Gloriana had given her and the Midnighters was to bolster the defenses around Romalin and other key points on the planet. She had assumed those defenses would mean a perimeter of armed security guards underwater to match the boats on the water’s surface, but what she found was a small army.
She saw gun emplacements and missile tubes not quite concealed behind netting and underwater foliage. It was difficult to be sure, but she guessed the intent was to deliberately allow trespassers making it past the perimeter to glimpse the weapons. Any potential thieves and pirates would be scared away rather than forcing the defenses to reveal their true strength.
And, of course, as a lowly CASPer private, she didn’t have the authority to demand access to the planet’s true defensive deployment.
All the same, she was surprised Gloriana was so adamant the Midnighters needed to shore up these defenses. Everything she’d seen so far told her the local forces had no need of bolstering.
Two miles out from the foothills of Romalin, they passed through the first large town, which consisted of concentric rings of geodesic domes with most of their volume buried beneath the seabed. It was impossible to tell how extensive the underground buildings were. She’d never visited an underwater settlement before, but it seemed to her that she was viewing an old town, well established.
Citizens moved between the domes using ducted fan rafts. She watched the scene outside a market stall where jellyfish analogs haggled over fresh fish.
Her pinplants still couldn’t identify any of the aquatic species. Most people thought the brain augments carried universal knowledge, but Blue knew more than most that they only knew what the Information Guild wanted to be known via GalNet. Her pinplants hadn’t even been able to identify Goltar until Gloriana had announced they were returning to an active role in the galaxy. Now GalNet carried a few crumbs about the Goltar, but not as much as Blue had figured out for herself.
Endless Night (The Guild Wars Book 3) Page 30