by Luigi Robles
Kya directed one of Sodenia’s powerful radiocommunication antennas towards the planet Venus. She used the largest signal that the antenna could muster. Eight minutes later, the signal came back, much, much weaker but without significant interference. Since it had prevailed, clearly there was no issue with signals from Earth, meaning that Earth might be in trouble.
Just as Kya was going to wake Fain, a message directed to Fain with a high-priority tag did it for her—it was Colonel Green. Kya had insight into the colonel. Unlike anyone else on the ship, she had seen the colonel in his most vulnerable times. She knew that he was an honorable man. The message alarm woke Fain from his sleep. Only high-priority messages were allowed to give any sort of alarm during the night.
Fain got up halfway from his bed and let the message play as he slid a screen in front of him.
“Fain, sorry to wake you at this time,” the colonel’s message said. “I do realize that it must be late on board Sodenia, but this message could not wait. We are just a few hours away from brokering a deal that would allow Sodenia to return to Earth. I will be receiving new orders about two hours from now, and I will message you then. It looks like Sodenia disappearing from Earth’s view helped in the negotiation. Just be patient. I will send you another message with more details as soon as I get them.” The colonel looked to his right side and continued. “By the way—” The message ended.
“What, that was it?” Fain said, alarmed. “Kya, can you check if that is the entirety of the message?”
Kya checked the origin of the message, and it appeared to be untampered with. It had been sent that way from the source.
“It appears that is the full message,” Kya said. “It was sent that way from Earth.”
“That’s really odd,” Fain said. “Could it be that Green just slipped and cut the message before he was done? I didn’t think he was that clumsy. But it can happen. Kya, can you please run diagnostics on our communication systems? I just want to make sure everything is OK.”
Although Kya had already run diagnostics beforehand, she decided to do as Fain said. She thought that perhaps the results would be different, but they weren’t. They came back the same as before: Sodenia was functioning properly.
“The ship’s communication systems are functioning properly,” Kya said.
Should I inform him that the communication rate between Sodenia and Earth has dropped drastically? But why worry him? It’s better not to. I won’t tell him as long as there are still incoming messages coming from Earth.
“Well, anyways, Colonel Green did say he would message me again two hours from now,” Fain said, lying back down in bed. “Maybe I should try and get some sleep while I wait for his message. Kya, can you please wake me up in two hours? Or if there’s another message from Colonel Green?”
“That won’t be a problem,” Kya said as she set an alarm for Fain.
Kya spent the next hour and a half checking and rechecking the ship’s communication devices, as the message rate kept dropping. She ran her own experiments on the devices just to make absolutely sure it wasn’t them. Sodenia’s message rate had dropped from thousands per hour to one every fifteen minutes. And the messages that did make it in were scrambled and incomplete.
Kya began to feel another human emotion that, until now, she was unfamiliar with: worry. She took some time to analyze what she was feeling, and then the feeling amplified. Her AI machine mind was dedicating too many resources to it, so she decided to wake Fain. Once she had made the decision, the feeling eased back into just annoyance.
Kya played a series of alarms so that he’d be woken up slowly, instead of all at once. She had found that humans woke up with a better response time when she used this kind of alarm.
“What? What is it?” Fain said, getting halfway up and rubbing his eyes. “Is it time already? Did Green already message me?”
“No, not yet,” Kya said. “But I felt the need to wake you up regarding other matters.”
“And what are those?” Fain asked as he yawned.
“The messages between Earth and Sodenia have steadily been declining,” Kya said. “Now, the only messages coming in are scrambled and unintelligible even for me.”
“Have you checked our communication systems?” Fain asked as he got up from bed.
“Since the anomaly began, I have been running multiple tests on all our systems,” Kya said. “I have also run experiments to account for the possibility of magnetic or solar interference.”
“Do you think that us being so far away could affect the messages?” Fain asked, rubbing the back of his head.
“At our current distance,” Kya said, “any messages from Earth should take no more than ten minutes. There are other factors that could impede a signal, such as space debris, or a solar storm. However, I have already checked for those, and they do not appear to be playing a part in this.”
“We’ll wait another half hour before we start panicking,” Fain said as he walked to his kitchen. “In the meantime, bring the ship to a full stop. I don’t want to keep pulling further away from Earth.”
Kya did as Fain said, although the task was more complicated than it sounded, but she managed just fine. While Fain went about his morning routine, Kya continued searching for anything that she might have missed.
But there was nothing; at least, there was nothing wrong with the ship’s hardware or programming. Then she thought about one place that she hadn’t looked before: herself.
That’s going to be a problem. How am I supposed to know if I am malfunctioning? she thought. Because I could be. It could be that I just don’t want to see the reports for what they are, or that my subconscious is manipulating the diagnostics in order to be hopeful. That could be it. Ugh, I hate being an AI. It’s a lot of hard work. Now what? Could I be malfunctioning?
In order to perform the most accurate diagnostics on herself that she could muster, she needed to shut down most of her powerful AI mind. Her subconscious mind would be first, the part of her mind that handled all the tasks on board the ship. Then she would try to shut down more than half of her machine mind.
Here goes nothing, she thought as she shut two key parts of her mind down.
She felt a rush of leftover information flooding the side of her mind that was still active. She felt like screaming at the initial pain it caused her. But her mind was fast to categorize the information and put it into files for later use. Then the silence came. The world around her had become silent; things weren’t busy anymore. She only heard Fain as he walked from one place to another inside his quarters.
That must be what humans sound like up close, breathing, their hearts beating, and blood flowing through their veins. Whoa.
She snapped out of it and ran a self-diagnostic right away. The results were clear: it wasn’t her. She wasn’t malfunctioning.
So, if it’s not me, that can only mean one thing, she thought. At the very minimum, it has to be the Acram interfering with the communication system. This isn’t good. I thought it would be a bad idea to go this far away from Earth.
Kya reversed her mind’s temporary shutdown and went back to running as normal. Along with her augmented brain capacity came the noise. She had yet to decide which she liked best—being able to know everything or knowing just enough.
“Kya, is there still nothing from Green or Earth?” Fain asked.
“There are no incoming messages from Colonel Green,” Kya said. “The last inbound message from Earth came in sixteen minutes ago, and it was also scrambled. Other than that, the only noise coming from Earth is static.”
“This is not good. This is not good,” Fain said as he finished putting on his uniform. “I’m going to head to the bridge. In the meanwhile, can you try to pick up any kind of Earth communication? I need to know what’s happening over there: TV, news, messages, noises, whatever.”
“I will try my best,” Kya said.
Fain spent his time on the bridge pacing back and forth, while Kya tried ever
y tool at her disposal to try and find out what was really going on back on Earth. But there was no luck. A little later, Pycca joined Fain on the bridge.
A short time later, one of Sodenia’s antennas picked up a noise. It was definitely not just static, but it was also not clear.
“I’ve found a communication attempt from Earth,” Kya said through the bridge’s speakers. “Should I play it?”
“Play it,” Fain said right away.
The noise coming from Earth was only a few seconds long, and there was a lot going on.
“Again,” Fain said as the noise stopped.
“Play it again,” Pycca said as the noise stopped for a second time. “But this time, keep it on a loop.”
The noise played in a continuous loop, but they still could not understand it.
“Slow it down to half speed,” Pycca said.
“Wait,” Fain said. “Go back and loop only the first half.”
“What is that?” Pycca asked as the noise played.
Kya tried to cross-reference with other noise patterns and words she had heard from human speech. After a few hundred tries, the noise began to form the shape of words before her.
“I believe I have deciphered the meaning of the message,” Kya said.
“What is it?” Fain asked.
“I believed that it’s saying, ‘help us,’ followed by many other people screaming in the background, along with explosions of some sort.”
“DEFCON 1, I need all hands on deck,” Fain said. “We are heading back to Earth immediately. Dammit. Those bastards.”
17
Battle Fleet
Fain didn’t think twice about reversing course and heading back to Earth at full speed. It was the first thing he did after hearing the noise that came from Earth. For the first time since he became captain of Sodenia, Fain was terrified.
“I need everyone at their stations now,” Fain said, trying not to shout.
People were coming in from all sides, rapidly populating the bridge.
“Kya and Pycca,” Fain said, turning to Pycca. “We are about three days away from Earth, almost at Sodenia’s top speed. We don’t have three days to get back. In three days, there will be no more humans left on Earth. What can we do?”
Pycca sighed and closed her eyes. With that, Fain knew the answer. But Fain wasn’t ready to give up.
“No, you can’t do that, not now,” Fain said with a softer voice. “I know that there’s something we can do. There has got to be something. It’s Earth. It’s everyone we know. It’s everything we’ve ever known.”
“Kya, how fast are we going now?” Pycca said, looking like she was trying to concentrate.
“We are traveling through space at 300,054 miles per hour and rising,” Kya said. “Without a speed limiter, we can reach Sodenia’s theoretical top speed of 350,000 miles per hour within the next ten minutes.”
“That won’t be fast enough,” Fain said.
Pycca nodded and pressed her lips together. “I need time to think.”
Larissa, August, and Eora came running onto the bridge at the same time, along with a slew of other crew members, who went straight to their stations.
“Double check everything,” Fain said, directing his words to the flight crew. “And prepare for the worst.”
“What’s happening?” August asked when he neared Fain and Pycca. “We came as fast as we could.”
“We are heading back. We think Earth is under attack,” Fain said. “We aren’t sure at this point; all we have is a recording. We are doing everything we can to find out what’s happening, but there’s radio silence.”
“Is there something blocking the coms between Earth and Sodenia?” August asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” Fain said. “But we aren’t getting any signal. Green told me last night that he would message me with new orders early in the morning, and I didn’t receive anything.”
“This is bad, this is really bad,” August said.
“Pycca, anything?” Fain asked.
“The problem is that we know so little about Sodenia’s quasar,” Pycca said. “I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do.” She pulled up a screen showing how the power in the ship was being distributed. “The quasar is a constant, distributing the same amount of power all over the ship. Now the propulsion system and maneuvering engines are consuming all the power being fed to them.”
“What if they had more power?” Larissa asked. “Would the ship be able to handle it?”
“I have no doubt about it,” Pycca said. “But the problem is where to get the power from. There is just so much that we don’t know about this ship.”
“The weapons’ battery modules,” Eora muttered.
Fain and the rest turned to look at her as if they had heard the one thing that would save them. Everyone, including Fain, was familiar with the massive battery modules around the ship’s vast weaponry.
“What are you saying?” Pycca said attentively.
“The weapons’ battery modules are always full,” Eora said. “Even back when we were fighting against the second of the Acram subspecies, we hardly made a dent in the battery modules. That’s because they are being constantly fed by the ship’s heart or quasar. They don’t have to be fed; they are battery modules.”
“Eora, that’s brilliant,” Pycca said. “But can we divert the power that’s going to the battery modules to the propulsion system? I’ve never thought about that before.”
“It won’t affect the weapon systems as long as we have power in the batteries,” Eora said.
“Kya, can we do this?” Pycca asked.
“It is possible,” Kya said. “However, I cannot guarantee that the gravity machines will function properly during the surge of speed.”
“How much more speed are we talking about?” Fain asked.
“If done successfully,” Kya said, “I calculate a twenty-eight- to thirty-one-fold increase in propulsion.”
“That will put us near Earth…” Pycca said and paused for a second. “Within a few hours.”
“Can we do it?” Fain asked, looking at Pycca.
“Yes, I just need a few minutes to adjust the gravity machines,” Pycca said. “Kya can start working on the power output reroute.”
“And Sodenia?” Fain asked. “Can she handle that kind of speed?”
“If there’s one thing in the solar system that can handle that speed, it’s her,” Pycca said. “She was built for this.”
“OK, let’s do it,” Fain said. “We have to get back to Earth as soon as possible. Hundreds of thousands, heck, even millions of lives are depending on that. Eora, I need you in the weapons bay. Get every weapon ready, and calculate how long they can fire without a power supply. Larissa, get everyone to strap up and hold on to something, just in case. August, I need you to have all stations ready to engage the enemy. All hands on deck.”
“Yes, sir,” they said at the same time and then went to their stations.
Fain reached over to the flashing blue button to communicate with the ship. “This is your captain speaking. It is our belief that our absence from Earth’s orbit has triggered an attack on our home planet. As of now, we have lost communication with Earth. We are not sure if it’s an attack or not, but until we find out for sure, we will treat the situation as a high-level threat. We will be heading back to Earth at around twenty-eight times our previous speed; it might be a bumpy ride. I need everyone on board this ship to cooperate to the best of your abilities with your commanding officers.”
Fain ran to the pilot’s command station and strapped himself in while it adjusted to him. The station quickly rose as the ceiling opened up to receive Sodenia’s pilot. The room began to light up within seconds with the view of the outside. He had a front-row seat to the vastness of space. The only thing he couldn’t see was a small spot below his seat. He could see the colossal ship in its entirety. All around his command station dashboard, an array of gauges appeared, letting him know the
ship’s status.
“Captain,” Pycca’s voice said, a name tag appearing next to her voice on the station’s dashboard. “I believe we are ready for the speed surge. I’ve tried to adjust the gravity machines as best I could, but we might still feel a pushback. Kya can activate it at your command.”
“We’ll be leaving in t-minus ten seconds,” Fain said. “Kya, maximum power. Make it happen.”
T-minus ten seconds appeared on the command station dashboard. Fain watched intensely as the timer counted down. As it neared zero, he gripped the pilot’s controls. Then Sodenia began to roar to life with the full unleashed power of the stars. Fain felt the rapid acceleration pressing him deeper and deeper into the pilot’s seat. It was unlike anything he had felt before; he had trouble breathing, and every inch of his body felt a hundred times heavier.
As the ship settled into her new, extreme speed, the effects of the acceleration began to die down. Although Fain’s body still felt heavier than usual, it was merely an annoyance.
“Pycca, talk to me,” Fain said.
“Aside from almost having the gravity machines overheat on us, it went better than we thought, although we have a few people on the bridge who blacked out.”
“Keep me informed,” Fain said. “And keep an eye on those machines; the last thing we need is to be turned into puree before we get to Earth.”
“I’m on it, Captain,” Pycca said.
“Kya, how many people blacked out during the acceleration?” Fain asked. “Is there anyone who needs immediate medical attention?”
“There was a total of 506 blackouts,” Kya said. “One person needs medical assistance, but I have already alerted the medical bay.”
“Good call,” Fain said.
Sodenia was moving through space at a staggering speed of 10,822,000 miles per hour. At its current rate, they would reach Earth in less than two hours. Fain knew that he had to be ready for the worst.
