by Isaac Hooke
“Even if we could do that, I don’t think having one inertialess drive ship in our inventory would make much of a difference in the battle for Earth,” Jain told her. “Sheila, listen to me. You can’t stay. You know I’m right. Have the Void Warriors swing my vessel into the path of those incoming blobs, and cut me free. That’s an order.”
When she looked at him, her eyes seemed moister than ever. “I—” she began, but couldn’t finish. Her voice was quieter than he’d ever heard it. Her chin quivered slightly. She looked down, unable to hold his gaze.
“Let me go,” Jain said gently.
Her chin quivered for a while longer, and for a moment he thought she was going to cry, but then she straightened and met his eye. “I’ll do it. Sir.”
She winked out.
Jain exhaled. The tension in the room had been almost palpable, but it was gone now. All gone.
Just like his friends would be, soon.
He glanced at the overhead map, and watched as the Void Warriors changed directions, positioning him directly in the path of those blobs. Well, if anything, that should convince the pursuing Mimics that he was on the alien side.
Then the Void Warriors released their grappling hooks, and accelerated away toward the waiting rifts with the remaining Hull Burners; only a few of those rifts were still open. Warships from the Manamas fleet had stayed behind to offer covering fire for their retreat.
“I’ve finished the emulation layer you need to access the external camera equivalents,” Xander announced.
Jain pulled up the interface for one of those cameras and allowed it to fill his vision. He saw the blobs—the so-called Terriers—heading directly toward him. All of them attempted to swerve past him, but it quickly became obvious that because of their speed, and his breadth, most were still going to hit him head-on. He was relieved when the blobs dispersed before striking.
Flashes drew his attention to the left, and he jumped to another camera and zoomed in. He was amazed by the magnification those lenses were capable of.
He realized those flashes were the rifts winking out as the Void Warriors and remaining vessels passed through them.
His friends were gone.
Well, at least they had made it in one piece.
Alien vessels surrounded him. They fired grappling hooks into his hull, and dragged him into another rift of their own making.
Goodbye, my brothers and sisters. I hope one day I’ll see you again.
25
On his external camera equivalents, Jain could see the constellations floating by. He was in a completely new system. According to his tactical display, it was a binary with two suns and three terrestrial inner planets, and the same number of gas giants in the outer system. There was a dense asteroid belt between the second and third terrestrial planets.
“An odd location,” Xander said.
“For the asteroid belt?” Jain asked.
“That’s right,” Xander replied. “It’s almost like there had once been a planet in that location.”
“You think it was once their homeworld?”
Xander curved his lips thoughtfully. “Maybe. It’s hard to say until we unlock more of these files.”
The aliens that grappled his vessel continued to be marked in green on the tactical display, as did the other members of the Mimic fleet that had jumped here. Their combined calculated trajectories ended in another green dot nestled on the outskirts of the asteroid belt, about four hours away, according to the “time to arrival” section.
There were five more such dots scattered throughout the belt, roughly equidistant apart. The display automatically grouped like types together when viewed at standard magnification, so he focused on the destination area and increased the zoom. Sure enough, the single dot became multiple, forming ranks of green that were distributed in long rows, like the irrigation canals of a hydroponics farm.
When he zoomed out and increased magnification on each of the remaining dots in the asteroid belt in turn, he saw similar formations.
“I’m willing to bet those are the so-called hive ships Maxwell spoke of,” Jain said.
“Probably,” Xander said. “The question is, are these Mimics taking us there for repairs? Or questioning?”
“Can’t be the latter,” Jain said. “They could have questioned me already if they really wanted to.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Xander said. “Depends on if they have the tools to peer into your AI core.”
“Well, we have to be ready for anything, that’s certain,” Jain agreed. “By the way, have you noticed how they haven’t said a single word since transporting me through the rift? I have no idea what to think of that.”
“From what I’ve read in the cloud so far, those Mimics chosen to be part of the Nurturer warrior caste are mostly loners, valuing solitude above company,” Xander said. “They prefer not to operate in a shared virtual environment, like your team, for example. They also communicate as little as possible, with any messages they send tending to be terse. This is entirely at odds to those who live in the hives; the city Mimics are much more sociable, on the whole.”
“It sounds like you’re going through some kind of cultural database,” Jain said. “Where did you find that? I had a look in the cloud and most of the file formats were unreadable.”
“It was in the appendix to the blueprints Maxwell shared,” Xander said.
“Oh, I must have missed that,” Jain said.
“I am working on decoding the file formats you mentioned, by the way,” Xander said.
“Good.” Jain stared at the video feed, studying the grappling hooks that connected him to the Mimic ships. “No termites.”
“Hmm?” Xander asked.
“The grappling hooks,” Jain said. “There are no termites on them. I was kind of expecting the aliens to lend me their micro machines to help complete repairs, as we’d do for a fellow Void Warrior.”
Xander shrugged. “Different cultures. Besides, they’re probably busy repairing their own damage at the moment. They took some solid hits in that battle... take a look at the blast craters marring a few of those hulls.”
Xander was right. On the video feed were more than a few pyramids flaunting battle scars in the form of blast craters and severed segments. They would be needing their own termites, as well as the stocks of metal the ships carried aboard.
As soon as Xander had the emulation layer to the repair swarm online, Jain activated the associated subsystem and had the units concentrate on the inertialess drives. He assumed the drives were resisting his current alien escorts, creating drag just as they had the Mind Refurbs, and he suspected the Mimics probably didn’t like that very much.
He switched on his internal camera equivalents and watched as the termites that swarmed the inner conduits and corridors of the ship made their way toward the drive area; those termites were the Mimic equivalent of the Mind Refurb repair swarm, and acted as multipurpose micro machines capable of repairing and building alike.
“I wonder what we should call the ship?” Jain said.
“Unlike Mind Refurbs, Mimics don’t actually name their ships, as far as I can tell,” Xander said. “They simply refer to the alien entities occupying the AI cores when addressing one another. You are 529.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jain said. “But since I’m a Mind Refurb, my ship needs to have a name. Even if I only refer to it internally.”
Xander inclined his head. “I understand. Part of the quirks of having your mind based on an organic entity.”
“No, part of the quirks of being a former human,” Jain said. “You forget, the Mimics were based on organic entities, too, and we already established that they don’t name their ships.”
“True enough,” Xander said. “So do you have a name in mind?”
“Hmm,” Jain said. “It needs to be something that evokes a sense of... fear, in the hearts of my enemies.”
“Fear?” Xander said.
“That’s right. I think I’l
l christen her the Devastator.”
“A warrior’s name,” Xander agreed.
Jain smiled at the Accomp. “Glad you approve.”
Xander cocked an eyebrow. “I never said I approved. I was merely observing that the name is very warlike in nature. It will most definitely evoke the fear you desire in your enemies.”
“Half the time I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, or serious,” Jain said.
“That’s the way I like it,” Xander quipped. “By the way, you’ll be happy to know that the alien architecture will allow me to continue controlling the time sense of my neural partition independently of yours.”
“That’s good to know,” Jain said.
Thus, while the aliens continued dragging the Devastator across the system, Xander, operating at high time sense, fleshed out the emulation layers for all the placeholders Sheila had populated the code with, allowing Jain to interface with the inertialess drives and the weapons using the standard interfaces that already existed on his HUD to pilot the ship in the same manner he had learned to control the Talos. Of course, until the termites finished repairing those actual components and brought them online, he couldn’t fire any weapons, or use his drives.
During the journey, he cycled through the camera equivalents available to him, scanning the different hull areas and internal decks, and familiarized himself with the ship’s layout, comparing it to the blueprints Maxwell had provided.
The external hull was covered in what looked like a series of overlapping pipes, but those were actually an intricate network of holoemitters, thermal maskers and LIDAR absorbers that granted the Mimics their unique ability to hide their innate thermal, visual and LIDAR signatures, replacing them with that of a given target ship. The technology wasn’t one specific device per se, but rather constituted the entire hull, so it would be difficult to copy.
That network of hologram and masking tech also served to protect the ship from micrometeorite impacts; each device had multiple redundancies in case of failure from such impacts, and an army of dedicated void-capable termites waited in storage bays located at regular intervals just inside the hull to repair any serious damage. They utilized an intermediary layer of metal located just underneath the hull to source their repair materials.
Underneath that, the ship’s actual combat and radiation armor composed roughly thirty percent of the vessel’s total volume, and existed below all five exterior sides. That armor, and the hull on top of it, was made of a flexible material that could part on demand in sections, allowing the ship to seemingly “engulf” any smaller units that touched the exterior. Those swallowed craft would promptly be disabled by the termites, and their materials harvested for repairs.
Beyond the armor layer and running into the guts of the ship were power distribution blocks, as well as network repeaters responsible for transmitting all the local data packets used by the vessel. Both components ran the length of the alien vessel.
Wait, it’s not an ‘alien’ vessel anymore, but my own body. I should probably stop thinking of it as alien.
Then again, he couldn’t help it. His body was alien.
At the bottom of the ship, decks one and two contained the vessel’s powerful gamma wave communications arrays. The comm system had its own power source, a fusion reactor of some kind, which was shared between both decks.
Above that, at the center of deck three was the main reactor core; it was connected to a well that ran the entire length of the ship, from the base to the tip. That well existed independently of the reactor core, and could draw upon the power source from decks one and two if the main core failed. It was used to power the ship’s main weapon systems.
The well utilized an inversion layer design. Charged particles became energized by the reactor at the bottom, and traveled in a zig-zag pattern to the top of the well, reflecting off the containing walls along the way. Those particles eventually bounced all the way back down, where they repeated the process. Over time, the repetitions caused the energy those particles contained to build up by several orders of magnitude. It took sixty seconds for those particles to reach their highest possible intensity, and when that power was used, it had to build up from scratch again.
Around the reactor core, and the well, deck three also incorporated the inertialess drive, a massive, disk-shaped apparatus that filled up the remaining available space on the deck. It drew power directly from the main reactor, not the well. It was essentially a particle accelerator, with a large coil spiraling in upon itself before inverting and unraveling again. From the viewpoint of the particles traveling inside the coil, the path was continuous. He wasn’t sure on the precise physics behind it—Xander hadn’t unlocked the necessary files yet—but apparently the motion of the particles generated a directional field that intersected reality and somehow folded space around it: the usual mumbo jumbo of the kind a hack sci-fi writer might invent. The overall effect was that the ship didn’t actually use propellant or any other force to move, but simply shortened spacetime in the direction it wanted to travel.
Deck four contained the lightning weapon, which wrapped around the central power well that passed through that deck. It drew power straight from that well, and was able to direct the generated plasma channel into one of four conduits that traveled to each corner of the pyramid, allowing the vessel to decide which side it was going to fire from. The sixty-second recharge period of the well explained why the lightning weapon could fire only once per minute.
Deck five contained the massive server farms that formed the AI core and cloud storage partitions. Jain’s brain. Deck five was at the center of the ship, so it made sense to place the AI core there, where it was the most shielded. The server farm drew power not from the central well, but from the power distribution blocks that were continuously fed by the main reactor.
Deck six harbored various cargo holds. In them where different blocks of refined metal, arranged by element type. Termites had created those blocks—they were capable of smelting raw metals with their built-in lasers. A network of conduits led away from those holds, through the armor, to the aforementioned storage bays that dotted the hull, where termites waited for deployment. Jain had directed a good quantity of termites to repair the inertialess drives, and members of the repair team could be seen marching to and fro on the conduits leading from the storage bays to the drive on deck three, ferrying raw materials back and forth.
He zoomed in on an individual termite, and watched as the insect-like creature carried a small, jagged chunk of metal away from the storage bay on its back. Apparently, the termites received charge wirelessly from both the reactor on deck three, and each other. Again, the physics behind it weren’t entirely clear, but the latter method had something to do with converting the motion of the horde into energy. Because they also received charge wirelessly from the reactor, individual termites could separate from the horde and travel much greater distances alone than the micro machines the Mind Refurbs possessed. Jain had always wondered why Cranston had to keep the Forebode’s micro machines together in clumps.
The seventh deck contained the launch bays for the alien boarding party units, or Skirmishers, if one went by Maxwell’s terminology. There were dedicated termites in those bays, ready to produce the units in realtime. Direct conduits to deck six ensured a continuous supply of available metals. The launch bays were currently empty—the vessel had exhausted its Skirmisher supply, and instead of producing more, the previous Mimic in charge had elected to concentrate all resources on repairs. At least that was the conclusion Jain had drawn. It made some sense: the Skirmishers were more of a nuisance than anything else, readily repelled by the Void Warriors, and the alien would have known that. Rather than risk exhausting essential elements that could be better utilized for repairs, the alien had chosen to abandon boarding party unit construction entirely.
Deck eight consisted of the blob generation weapon, the so-called Terriers. Like the lightning weapon, the blob generators drew power from th
e central well that ran through the ship, and therefore also couldn’t be created when the well was drained. However, generated blobs could be stored in pre-launch staging areas for up to two hours, and so the pyramids usually had dozens of them prepared in advance. The staging areas of this ship were currently empty.
There were other issues with relying on the central well for power besides the sixty-second recharge matter… in order for the power regeneration system to work properly, every portion of the well had to remain intact. And because the well ran through the vessel from top to bottom, and the upper most decks of the Devastator had been sawed off, that meant Jain couldn’t summon the power necessary to use the lightning weapon, or create blobs.
There wasn’t enough metal in his inventory to restore that upper portion. He’d be able to repair his inertialess drives, and a couple of the blast craters drilled into his hull, and that was about it. He supposed all the elements he could ever want were waiting for him in the asteroid belt that was quickly coming up, which might explain why none of the escorting Mimics had offered him materials. And as mentioned before, they were busy repairing their own damage.
Then again, maybe the reason why they hadn’t offered anything was because they weren’t yet certain he was who he said he was, and they were leading him to his trial and summary deinstallation.
The final decks—nine through eleven—had been lost with the upper portion of the ship. According to the blueprints, those decks carried the hardware responsible for rift generation, so without them Jain had no ability to create a rift on his own.
Though cutting off the upper portion of the ship hadn’t directly impacted the drives, apparently the sudden loss of pressure in the well caused damage to the interconnected reactor core on deck three. This caused a drop in power output, and since the drives relied on the main reactor for energy, that explained why the ship became slower after losing its topmost section.
