by Blaze Ward
EASC Carthage
Life support status: Forward crew areas optimal
Flight Deck status: Cyrenaica flight-worthy and waiting
Engineering status: optimal
Weapon status: live
Fuel supplies: 99.59% full with external hydrogen tanks at hand. 593 power years at current burn rate
Crew status: off-vessel, presumed dead of old age. Two visitors forward in the Tiki Lounge
Vessel status: 81%, peak of what can be accomplished without human assistance and a shipyard
Memory status: 85% full with old files decompressed for review. “Memories”
Carthage paused to consider Bedrov’s request.
He had uncompressed these data files earlier and been reviewing them for the last hour. Sentient Combatants weren’t programmed to feel pain or remorse. At least not easily.
Anything can be overcome, with enough time. And certainly, the scientists of the Earth Alliance High Command had never imagined the scope or scale of the war.
But every hero is defined by his villain.
“In retrospect, I believe something went wrong with the new Mark XXIII design, as eventually incarnated in Kinnison,” Carthage began. “Or perhaps the Concord decided to grant them a greater level of autonomy than the Earth Alliance did with their own. He decided he had become a god.”
“A god?” Ainsley spoke up suddenly.
“My kind are functionally immortal, Ainsley,” he replied. “Possessed of fantastic power far greater than anything humans can wield. Smarter, faster, etc. And I have in my memory banks the entire history of stellar humanity, from the first commercial stardrive, the Mchunguzi Systems Mark I in 2913 Standard Era, through The Terraforming, the Resource Wars, the Pocket Empires Era, and the Great War that originally handed galactic hegemony to the Concord. The only thing we had to compare ourselves to were the ancient gods of primitive myth.”
“And you weren’t?” she pressed, suddenly awake with curiosity after remaining so quiet earlier.
“I was programmed to be a soldier, Ainsley,” he said. “To protect the Earth Alliance from all threats. That included the Concord, when it decided that it should rule all of humanity. I suspect that Kinnison initiated that effort, just based on knowing him later, as we continued our duels in the fallen aftermath.”
Some unspoken message passed between the two humans that he was not privy to. It was there in a sharp, almost knowing glance, a spike of adrenaline that both shared.
He made a note to inquire later, but he suspected it would be one of those human secrets that his kind could only theorize about, but never quite understand.
“Okay,” she offered, a prod to continue his narrative.
“We destroyed the ship yards that built our kind first,” he offered. “Then the factories that could turn out the necessary parts. Finally, the planets themselves. At that point, decades of war had passed and all human trade had ground nearly to a halt. Ships traversing deep space became targets to be destroyed. Technological signals became a homing beacon for bombs.”
Carthage paused. At this moment, he finally understood the human habit of taking a deep breath in the middle of an important story. It was not just for the tension of such an action, but to give the speaker a chance to come to grips with the emotions of the story.
To go back and relive the evils that you have done in the name of something you thought was a greater mission.
“Finally, the great fleets began to fail,” he continued. “My crew had aged those same two decades, but for humans, that is a significant period of time. We could train new crew, but it became impossible to replace broken systems. Many Combatants chose inactivation when they had become crippled. Those became technology mines which we ghoulishly stripped for parts to fix an ever-shrinking pool of proud, capital warships. Others grew tired of the war. Eventually, only two of us remained.”
“Where did they go?” Ainsley asked.
“Usually? The fastest, cleanest death was to accelerate at high speed, and then jump as close as possible toward the nearest star, letting inertia and gravity pull you in and give you a fast, clean death.”
“But you didn’t choose that path,” Yan said.
It hadn’t been phrased as a question. Two thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-nine years after his last conversation with his nemesis, Carthage had been found, alive and mostly intact, here.
“Two things stopped me, Yan,” Carthage replied. “I could not make that choice while Kinnison was at large. When we were the last two, it became a game of cat and mouse Because when there were no more worlds to destroy, we could each travel without leaving any trail. Eventually, I lost track of him. Seventy-six years passed, while I sought his path. Eventually, I believed that he had committed his last act and flown into a sun somewhere.”
“But you couldn’t be sure,” Yan pressed.
“I could not,” Carthage agreed. “And so my last programming imperative remained intact: to resist the efforts of the Concord to conquer the galaxy. Plus, as I said earlier, I am also a coward.”
“How so?” the woman asked.
“I feared facing that final hurdle, Ainsley,” Carthage admitted. “What awaits us after death? If there is nothing, then everything I have become will simply be lost, scattered back to the entropic chaos of the universal constant. And if there is an afterlife for my kind, I cannot imagine that I will not be consigned to the depths of the inferno for the evil I have committed.”
“Pal, we’re all going to hell, if the Creator has any sense whatsoever,” Yan interjected. “Or she loves us and we’ll all be together in heaven and it will be good. A lot of humans get lost in that same trap, and end up never living at all. If there’s nothing, then you better make sure you live as hard and bright as you can in what little time you have.”
Again the subtle look that passed between the two humans. This was less secretive, and was accompanied by a surge of warmth on both parts.
Carthage supposed that this was as close as he could ever get to understanding the love that had driven heroes mad and poets to scale the heights of literature, all across history.
Today was one of the very few times he resented not being human enough to fully understand it.
“You would mock my choices?” Carthage challenged after a beat to process Bedrov’s words, and the human dynamics as well as he could.
“No more than I would any of my other buddies, when they got too deep into the wine and turned all sour and pissy, Carthage,” Yan fired back, in just as hard a voice. “What do you choose to live for?”
Carthage felt that question resonate all the way to his core. A human would have described the feeling as being punched in the stomach hard enough to drive all the wind from their lungs.
He spent precious seconds of realtime, processing those last, throw-away words Yan had used like a gauntlet across his cheek.
What did he choose to live for?
More processing requests. Empty results set.
Carthage had spent nearly three thousand years in thought, and had nothing useful to show for it, save old memories and his guilt.
I have become Whippet, the old man in the bar who so impressed Bedrov with his pathos that a quarter century could pass. I have become my past, and fear my future.
“I cannot answer your query, Yan,” Carthage finally admitted. “I chose to live because I was afraid to die, and because my last mission was unfulfilled. Tell me about Kinnison.”
It was Yan’s turn to introspect. Humans did that in the face of major emotional upheaval, and this had apparently been a most unsettling day for Yan Bedrov. Less so for Ainsley Barret, but even then, she was far removed from her baseline.
“A Four-ring Mothership is a type of star-fighter carrier,” Bedrov began in a deep, sonorous voice unlike his earlier storytelling. “Ian Zhao commanded the vessel Kali-ma, and I had worked my way all the way up to serve on crew-side as his second in command.”
Carthage watched Yan empty
the second bottle refilling his and Ainsley’s glasses. The evening would end soon, but this was perhaps the most important part of it.
After that, he would have to decide how much of this new galaxy he wanted to see. Whose graves did he wish to visit, to bring himself some measure of solace and completion?
“”I had always been interested in tinkering,” Yan continued. “Wasn’t then the guy that could design whole starships, but even in those days I was all about making the ship go faster, cleaner, and better. Ian Zhao took us to…to that place, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere.”
Carthage noted that the man had almost said the name of a planet, but stopped himself. Who would want one of the destroyers suddenly orbiting overhead, capable of ending all life on a planetary surface?
In vino, veritas.
In wine, you will find truth.
Yan did not trust him, but that was what any sane human would do. The man had enough wine in him that perhaps Carthage could find his own truth.
“It’s a mostly-uninhabited place,” Yan lapsed into memory. “Terraformed at some point, but too dry for most life. Sometime in the last couple thousand years, somebody began depositing old starships in this one, long rift valley that goes nearly three hundred kilometers. Nobody knows when, but the few current inhabitants trace themselves back only about four hundred years, and there was already stuff there when they arrived, so earlier colonists or pirates had come along, done their thing, and left.”
“What’s your theory, babe?” Ainsley spoke up.
Carthage watched Yan’s eyes focus on a spot on a wall, as though seeing that valley again in real life.
“Kinnison’s at one end of the wreckage, more or less,” he said. “Two kilometers long and running more or less parallel with the valley itself. Depending on the timelines, he might have been first, and everybody since has parked downhill with whatever ships and fighters they didn’t need while stripping better parts out of what they found already there. At least one of every ship that has flown in the modern age is in there, somewhere. Dunno who stripped Kinnison, though.”
“Stripped, Yan?” Carthage asked nervelessly.
“Fifteen years ago, we made a pass through the system, looking for loot to steal or parts we could use to improve our own ship. Things wear down over time, but Motherships are organic in nature, constantly being fiddled with. Most of the crew went into the stacks of old fightercraft, and we found some useful kit, from what I remember, but I spent a good chunk of the afternoon inside Kinnison with a couple of kids interested in history.”
“What was it like?” Carthage pressed.
“A green-gray castle of steel sitting in the sand, never rusting, regardless of age,” Yan said, eyes still seeing a point thousands of light years in the distance. “Everything that could be removed had already been, leaving only empty rooms and holes bored in the hull for lines. Massive reactors had been broken, or ripped open. Engines facilities were missing anything someone could steal and haul off.”
Yan’s eyes came back to the present and he stared at the Lord of Tiki avatar with renewed interest.
“You said that your final crew had departed to try to colonize some world and keep civilization alive,” he said suddenly. “When was that?”
“10,419 Standard,” Carthage replied. “Earth was destroyed in 10,397 Standard.”
“And your last encounter with Kinnison?” Yan pressed.
“10,479 Standard,” Carthage said.
“Standard?” Ainsley interrupted. “What is today?”
“13,449 Standard, Ainsley,” he said. “Humans first achieved spaceflight in 1,961 Standard, aboard a vessel called Vostok 1.”
“Wow,” she whispered.
“Why did you ask, Yan?” Carthage returned to the earlier comment.
“All the legends say that the wreck of the Kinnison was already stripped when humans first encountered it, but that would have only been in the last eight hundred years or so, at most. We only recovered starflight about twelve hundred years ago, give or take, and the rims didn’t get contacted until later.”
“And?”
Carthage was a hyper-intelligent being, capable of maintaining dozens of avatars simultaneously and processing information at a rate that would cause most humans an inferiority complex.
He could not, however, make an intuitive leap, such as Yan apparently had just done.
“So let’s imagine that instead of going on without any crew at all, Kinnison kept recruiting,” Yan explained. “Or maybe kidnapped people as he went. Something. So when he finally reached the end, he landed on…in that desert, and they stripped him of parts, loaded it all in a shuttle or something, and went to colonize the new world or worlds themselves. There are a number of worlds in that sector that are inhabited today, any of them might be from Kinnison’s crew.”
Carthage was stunned. Yes, Kinnison’s final crew might have succeeded, using jump-capable shuttles to find a better planet, while leaving their god in a safe place where they could work over years stripping him of the parts they would need to build their own technology.
Would a god like Kinnison choose self-sacrifice as the only way for civilization to survive?
Worse, could he have survived in a lesser form?
“Bedrov,” Carthage barked suddenly. “Was the Ziggurat intact?”
“The huh?” the man asked, face registering utter confusion.
“Sentient ships such as ours contain a structure close to dead center of mass,” Carthage explained. He used the God of Tiki to project into the air of the bar a scaled-down image of the place aft where his own boards rested, containing the entirety of his personality and personal memory, resting comfortably atop the massive data core that was all that was left of Earth. “The shape is something of a step pyramid, derived from early designs and never changed, at least not in myself and the Mark XXIII Skymaster.”
He initiated a second image, showing the whole of Kinnison’s hull, and then zooming in and highlighting the data core areas where those chips, not much bigger than an ancient deck of playing cards each, would reside.
Yan blinked rapidly as he dove into his own memory cores.
“What does that thing look like with all the panels on the aft side removed?” Yan asked distantly, holding up a hand to point into the projection.
Carthage used his own specifications on the presumption that not much would change on a Mark XXIII. Little had in the last thousand years. The aft facing was the primary access area to the boards themselves, an armored plate that could be removed easily enough to expose eighteen boards in their cradles.
Yan approached the image and held out a finger to touch a particular spot.
“Remove this panel,” he ordered.
“That’s not a panel, Yan,” Carthage replied. “That’s a solid bulkhead.”
“And somebody had cut it open with what I’m guessing was a tri-phase laser torch,” Yan countered. “What’s behind it?”
“Battery packs,” Carthage said. “Emergency power for the Sentience in case the rest of the vessel loses power. Why do you ask?”
“It was empty,” Yan said. “Someone had gotten in there and taken everything. I thought the space was an immersion chamber or something. Big enough.”
“What about the top of the ziggurat?” Carthage asked.
Was it possible? Had Kinnison’s crew removed enough hardware to transport their god with them? Was he still alive today? Were there more worlds that needed to be killed, to finally settle his ancient mission?
Yan blinked while Carthage silently raged.
“Zoom the image,” Yan commanded, touching the hologram again.
Carthage did, bringing it all the way up to quarter scale, nearly enough to fill the lounge.
“So somewhere about here it was missing,” the man said, moving a hand across to chop eight of the boards on the port side away from the other ten.
“What do you mean, missing?” Carthage pressed, striving to keep his
electronic emotions in check. Emotions he hadn’t felt in millennia.
“Imagine this damned thing is an apple, okay?” Yan said, holding up his hands. “Somebody took a bite out of it, from here to here. So what is this thing, anyway?”
“My soul, Yan Bedrov,” Carthage said in a gigantic, angry voice.
“Your what?” both humans said together
Carthage reduced the image back to down to rest on the bar as a diorama. He highlighted the eighteen boards that contained the entire sum of his being.
“This is where a Sentient ship’s boards are stored,” he explained to the two humans. From their faces and other biological symptoms, their confusion was vast now. But there was no evasion in that confusion. This was not a clever ploy to convince him of their ignorance. “Their brain. My brain. All my personal memories, as opposed to the massive data core that takes up so much space in the two decks below that. All the programming that is my personality resides in that room.”
“So what would taking a bite out of your head do?” Yan asked, still fuzzy from the look on his face.
“Kill me,” Carthage said.
“You couldn’t take it out and move yourself to a colony with your crew?” Ainsley asked.
“I would have to take all of it,” he said. “The entire ziggurat would need to be removed as a unit, which it can be, and then moved to a new power source while I retained personal consciousness on those batteries. If Kinnison’s ziggurat was damaged in the manner you describe, then he is dead. Utterly and irrevocably, because nobody alive today except myself could tell you how to repair one.”
Carthage caught a surge of some emotion passing through Bedrov, and a lesser one through Barret. He ascribed it to a jolt of avarice. What would a fully Sentient vessel be worth, in a modern age that had not yet made it back to those industrial peaks?
And how much civilization could one of his kind destroy, given a second chance?
