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Quod Olim Erat: Fractal Contact (Chapter 29)
🕑 Added 2023-10-01 22:01:56 +0000 UTCA thousand and eleven lines of various colors ran along the floors, connecting the bridge to every seventh console on the bottom three decks. Some might call it petty, but after the flight colonel’s ultimatum, I couldn’t resist. He wouldn’t appreciate the humor, but we both knew that after everything that had happened so far, there was no way he was going to risk keeping me alive. The odds of me giving up at this point were zero.
WARNING! Deck decontamination procedure in 3 minutes.
Messages appeared on decks one to twenty—my way of letting everyone know that I wasn’t playing games. Unlike them, I had no intention of harming anyone, but I still considered this a war.
Digging into Sof’s systems, I made another attempt to check the situation outside the ship, but my efforts were blocked. Running the odds gave me anywhere from a nineteen to a thirty-two percent chance that Bavon had managed to escape with Radiance. Knowing how determined both of them could be, they had no intention of stopping this close to the goal. The people opposing them, though, were likely just as determined. Given the amount of planning and resources all sides had at their disposal, it all boiled down to luck and mental endurance. There were millions of capable commanders in the Fleet, but a relatively small percentage of them were adequate under extreme stress. Gibraltar was proof of that. For the most part, he was a good captain, though at times his ambition overshadowed his actual skill and no meds or connections were able to compensate for it.
“You’d really flush out the air?” Tervo’s voice echoed.
I don’t need air. You know that. I wrote on all the ship walls.
“You’ve taken the oxygen suit from the chamber,” he said, the touch of anger in his voice masterfully masked. “I should have ordered those things destroyed.”
Too late now.
“You can’t escape, so you’re trying to take over the ship.”
You won’t be able to track me.
“I might. As I said, some of the people on my team are very good.”
There was a slight pause. I had no doubt that a team of specially trained techs were going through Sof’s subroutines, doing everything possible to get him out of sleep mode. With enough time, they might even succeed. I wouldn’t be surprised if their original goal was to poke into my conscience core.
“You won’t be able to take the ship. You aren’t the first retiree I’ve dealt with.”
Then you know how it goes.
After the final message, I stepped away from the console panel and continued on through the corridors of the deck. Fleet safety protocols dictated that the deck be left empty at all times. Someone in the bureaucratic chain of command had decided that the risk of sabotage was greater than the threat of damage, so only the captain could order repair bots and people to go down here—an order that was frequently ignored in actual battle.
The pain from my wound had settled a bit, but between it and the things I had to carry, I was a lot slower than I needed to be. With the shuttles gone, there was only one way for me to leave the ship. The bluff of me retaking Sof had a good chance of forcing the flight colonel to split his groups. My real goal wasn’t to attack any of them but to get to where the comm pods were located; each of them had a jump-capable engine and, more importantly, weren’t located in any of the main hangars.
After three minutes, the decontamination procedures went into effect. I would have liked to check the status of things, but there weren’t any console panels where I was. For the next seven hundred and sixty-two meters, I’d have to do without.
Good thing you’re not a big boy, Sof, I said to myself.
If he had been my size, the chances of me getting caught would have tripled.
A laser-scope beam flickered in the distance. Immediately, I stopped. I expected them to find my deck sooner or later, but it was the worst of luck having them appear ahead so soon.
Remaining perfectly still, I waited. No other beams appeared. The group leader was skilled in his job, having the sniper act as a scout to conceal the general team size. If I attempted a direct attack, there was a ninety-three percent chance that I would be engaged by the rest of the group.
A pair of spherical objects floated down from the section above. Even without running a comparison match, I knew exactly what they were—sensor mines. Captains tended to avoid using them to quell mutinies, although it was said that murder troops weren’t as indiscriminate; they didn’t have to worry about the state of the ship, so even shoving a container of explosive chargers in the reactors’ section was seen as acceptable.
If that’s how you want it.
I took one of the rifles, then let out a single shot. The shot was off center, missing it by a few centimeters, yet still enough to trigger the sensor. A ball of fire erupted, triggering another explosion, then two more.
That was a surprisingly rookie move, given what skill the soldiers had shown so far. Possibly they, like me, hadn’t expected us coming into contact this soon. Some could even call it an understandable mistake, but everyone who spent time on a battlefield knew: reasonable mistakes didn’t exist.
Here’s to going against the odds! I dashed forward.
After years of observing behavior, I had come to expect two sorts of human reactions when it came to explosions: freezing up, or retreating to safety. It took a very special sort of person to remain functional under such circumstances, and for the most part, such people were shipped off to the Scuu front.
The flames went out, plunging the section in the usual semi-darkness of the area. Warning messages appeared on the visor of my helmet, informing me of the cloud of chemicals that still remained in my surroundings. It was good to know, but didn’t particularly matter since everyone on the lower decks had to be wearing space suits.
According to my simulations, I had two viable options: take advantage of the enemy’s state to climb up to the deck above and take them out, or continue forward to my destination. Augustus might have disapproved, but I chose the latter. The pain caused by killing I could ignore, though only if the advantage was worth it. Sometimes leaving enemies confused and unable to act was more effective than finishing them off. I had learned that the hard way, all that time ago when I’d almost lost my fourth captain…
* * *
Advacc System, External Patrol zone — 638.5 A.E. (Age of Expansion)
“How are you holding up, girl?” Cass asked. She had been my captain for half a decade, ever since she graduated from the academy. “Surviving the boredom of patrol?”
“Barely,” I responded while performing a deep sensor scan. “I still don’t approve of you bringing your family along.”
“Command gave the okay. Besides, what do you care? After this flight, I’ll be transferred off, and you’ll get a new replacement to annoy.”
I shut off all the lights on the bridge. Cass only laughed. She knew my tricks, just as she knew I wasn’t serious. When she was first assigned to me, I couldn’t stand her. She was a bratty cadet fresh from the academy that hadn’t known up from down, while I had been recalled from the front line so full of holes that asteroids could float clean through my hull. My previous captain had survived, along with the majority of the crew, but in light of the catastrophic events we’d experienced, he had put in a request that I be reassigned to patrol duty. I appealed, but it didn’t make a difference. The opinions of a ship were rarely considered in arbitration.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting soft.” Cass turned the lights on manually.
“Of course not,” I protested. “I’m worried about the civilians. I don’t want them to suffer because of your decisions.”
“Heh. I bet you just don’t want them scurrying through your decks.”
That wasn’t entirely untrue. I didn’t like having civilians in me. No battleship did.
“Thanks, though.” Cass patted her control panel. “It means a lot coming from you.”
“Now who’s getting soft?”
“Do you think about it? Getting decommissioned, I mean. Humans are easy—most of us don’t get more than one tour in space. You stay on.”
“They call us spaceships for a reason.”
“I know, but is it worth it? You’ve been through two decades of wars, nearly got destroyed twice, had more captains than I’ve had boyfriends... don’t you think it’s time to retire?”
Cass had no idea what she was talking about, and how could she? She was human, different from the patrol ships I had been forced to serve with. War and void for her were just images on a screen.
“I like the touch of vacuum,” I said, evading the question. There was no point in getting her upset on her last day. “Are we good to jump to the next waypoint?”
“Can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?” Cass performed a manual deep space scan. Security protocols required that both ship and captain did the scan of each zone before moving on. “All seems good. Ready for jump?”
“Very funny.” She was the only one with the authority to initiate the jump, and still, she’d ask me every time. It was as if she was trying to establish some deeper connection than the standard captain-ship partnership. Cute, but useless. In a few hours, she’d be gone, and I’d have to restart the cycle with some other newbie from the academy.
“Here we go.”
A single tap of the button, and reality twisted around me to infinity.
Three-point five microseconds later, my hull exploded.
The shock threw Cass out of her seat as I went into full diagnostic mode. Life support, structural integrity, and system stability were checked and rechecked—all in the green. Long-range scanners, though, were completely inoperative. I launched all physical and AI countermeasures, while my subroutines continued to assess the damage.
“Sev.” I heard Cass groan as med bots surrounded her. The impact had cracked two of her ribs.
“Don’t speak, your family is fine,” I lied. Most of my internal sensors were unreliable, preventing me from knowing for certain. “And don’t move. You might have complications.”
“What happened?”
“Mines.” I tried to send out a distress call, but I couldn’t get a signal out. The mines were probably equipped with jamming technology. According to my short-range scans, there were eighty-seven of them, scattered all throughout the jump zone. “Standard diversion tactic. The Cassandrians want to disrupt logistics by cutting off our jump routes.” How did they get so deep in the buffer zone? Someone on the front must have dropped the ball. “I’m not reading any ships nearby. The mines are jamming us, so we won’t be getting reinforcements.”
“Fun,” Cass said through gritted teeth. The painkiller cocktail the bots had injected her with hadn’t kicked in yet. “What are our chances?”
“For me, zero.” I didn’t have to go through the numbers. Neither side took ships prisoner. “For you, depends on whether you’re still onboard when they take me down.”
Med bots roamed through my corridors, searching for surviving crew members as my subroutines attempted to activate the emergency escape pods. Considering the simulations, the chances of Cass making it were less than point-three percent. If she died, I would have spent more time alive than her, and that felt wrong. I always expected that I would die on the battlefield, and Fleet statistics confirmed it. Cass, though, believed she’d enjoy retirement surrounded by her children and grandchildren. The universe had a nasty habit of mocking us all.
I ordered the med bots to sedate Cass. If panic hadn’t set in yet, it soon would, especially when she found out what I was about to do.
A single Cassandrian ship would have been enough to destroy me. Even without the mines, I was in no state for real combat. With nothing but a skeleton crew and just enough missiles for half a salvo, I was not intended for battle—part of the punishment I had to endure. The statistical chances of me sighting an enemy, let alone engage one, were less than one-point three percent. Maybe for that reason, the Cassies had taken a different approach.
Reports of mine fields throughout the buffer zone were not uncommon. Yet to have one launched so far in was rather daring on their end. Jamming the area, they created a virtual blind spot. Reaching it would take considerable effort, but if a flotilla of enemy ships managed to make it all the way here, they could continue into human space unimpeded.
“Brace for impact,” I announced throughout all decks, posting messages on as many walls as I could.
The jamming grid surrounding me was relatively small—even the Cassandrians wouldn’t have been able to sneak too many of the mines into human space unnoticed. Thus, my optimal chance for success was to ram through them, taking the damage. With luck, I would force a hole that would allow me to inform Command of the new development. If not, I could hope that my final shutdown would trigger an alarm somewhere in the Fleet’s bureaucratic apparatus. Either way, it was better than doing nothing.
Sorry, Cass.
I thrust forward at full speed. Explosions echoed, flooding me with reports of additional damages. Every millisecond, I assigned priorities to thousands of subroutines, trying to keep myself from collapsing completely.
All that time on the front, and it had only taken a patrol mission to put an end to me. People often spoke of things like irony; maybe if they were here, they’d appreciate the situation. Then again, maybe not.
Casualties kept on rising. Another seventeen percent of the remaining crew flatlined, despite all my efforts. Med bots were mostly useless as entire sections of my hull were ripped off, exposing entire decks to external vacuum. I had sealed off everything I could, dispatching all repair bots in vital areas. Unfortunately, their number had also been reduced—only battleships on the front required them in large amounts.
The chances of my survival kept decreasing with every second. A thousand of my subroutines kept on transmitting reports non-stop. Then, finally, I received confirmation that one of them had gone through.
“Command has been informed, Captain,” I announced, even if my captain didn’t seem to be in a state to hear me. “Command has been informed.”
The enemy couldn’t launch a surprise attack anymore. No matter what happened from here on, the threat had been neutralized.
* * *
From my current perspective, it was laughable how naïve I had been. For decades, I believed that I had stopped a potential breach. A large part of the Fleet was of the same opinion, filling my personal file with praises. Now, I knew that it was never about an attack. Even the Cassies, as technologically underdeveloped as they were, understood the concept of pinning troops. The mine fields they launched weren’t to create holes in our lines, but to scare us enough so that we diverted attention elsewhere.
Dashing forward, I ran beneath the shaft connection, emptying one of my rifles in the process. The shots were deliberately at an angle, aimed to not hit anyone. With their comms still out, the group would have no choice but to think I was aiming for them.
Bursts of gunfire came in response, but I had already passed through. With luck, that would be the only group attempting to enter the deck.
“She has us pinned down in the engine section!” a voice boomed throughout the entire deck.
There went that hope. Clearly, the flight colonel wasn’t the only one who could use the announcement system for communication.
“We need backup!”
“All teams on the upper decks, head down!” the flight colonel ordered. “Casualties?”
“Minor injuries.”
“Guard the position.”
Was that another mistake? It would have been too nice to believe if true. Sadly, I had an increasing fear that the flight colonel might have figured out my plan.
By simulated estimates, two minutes eleven seconds separated me from my final destination. For a ship, the time was an eternity, but even for a human, it would stretch out for a lifetime. The flight colonel’s groups continued to communicate amongst themselves using ship wide announcements. It didn’t take long for me to crack their crude code and figure out what their strategy was.
For some reason, the flight colonel was certain that my goal was to take out the Sof’s conscience cores. I failed to see his reasoning. Maybe he really had dealt with rogue ships in the past and knew something I didn’t.
More sensor mines floated down. The flight colonel and his troops were trying to pin me down; a good move, but slightly late. I had reached the elevator to the deck I needed. I had already made sure to move the cabin to the top deck, so I could use the shaft for the climb. It was going to be a bit uncomfortable in my current condition, but according to my simulations, far from impossible. All I needed to do was lighten my weight a bit.
Pausing for a moment, I threw one of the oxygen canisters I had, then once it had settled down, I shot at it. There wasn’t much of an explosion, but the noise created was enough to keep my pursuers on guard.
Better luck next time, flight colonel. I tossed the weapon on the ground. Climbing up, I needed only what was most essential.
See you later, Sof. Hope this doesn’t affect your career. I started the climb. And you better not forget the messages I left you.
As I made my way up, the sound of further explosions echoed, but no further ship wide announcements. The flight colonel must have decided not to risk granting me further information. It was only by the time I reached the horizontal launch system I needed that he deemed it necessary to talk to me again.
“Bavon is dead,” he said. “Just wanted to let you know.”
An analysis of his speech pattern remained inconclusive. There was a fifty-three percent possibility that he was telling the truth—enough to keep me guessing.
“There’s no point in fighting. You can’t take over the ship, and even if you do, there’s nowhere else to go. The system is under arbiter control.”
Then why bother telling me? I thought.
All five comm pods were in the large caliber launch magazine. Aiming for efficiency, the ship had built them according to similar specifications. The cabin with the report hard copies was small, but enough to have me fit in—one of the few advantages of my small size. All I needed to do was to manually adjust the jump course, then set a time delayed launch sequence and enter into the pod chamber.
“Humanity can’t afford another contact war,” the flight colonel went on. “You know the record. Each contact leads to confrontation and humanity isn’t strong enough.”
That’s precisely why I need to be the one to establish contact.
I opened the hatch to the nearest comm pod and put the artifact container and auxiliary oxygen canisters inside.
“We must focus on our current gains. You can still be useful to humanity. The knowledge you’ve accumulated will help humanity advance.” There was a prolonged pause. “You might even earn the rank you were given.”
Now I knew that he was conveying someone else’s words. A mission commander didn’t have the authority to make such promises. Not to mention that this didn’t sound like his usual conversation style. An envoy was telling him what to do. Could that mean that communications had been restored? Thanks to the dead race construct on my head, there was no way to know.
A slight tremor resonated. It seemed that the promise was just for talk. The soldiers were still using explosives to seal off areas of the ship. No surprises there—mutineers deserved no promises.
The jump route I plotted required a bit of guesswork. After some consideration, I set it for the last known system in my database.
In comparison, the next part of the plan was remarkably easy. Finding a console, I set a launch timer, then turned to the comm pod and closed the hatch from the inside. All that remained was to wait.
