Tyche's Ghosts_A Space Opera Military Science Fiction Epic

by Richard Parry

  “This makes no sense,” said Algernon. “If we get the Judge, it’s likely the Service-class machines will continue to fight.”

  “Maybe,” said Nate. “But they’ll fight free. Or maybe, we can get ‘em around a table. Have a conversation. The Empire’s different these days.”

  “It is different,” said Hope. “But I have a better idea.”

  “Dear God, we’re going to die,” said El.

  “It’ll be great,” said Hope. “I need a few seconds to talk to someone first.”

  • • •

  Saveria wasn’t thrilled about being woken, but she perked up a little when Hope held out the steaming cup of coffee. “Here,” she said. “Drink this.” She helped Saveria up, dragging the esper toward Engineering.

  “What time is it?” said Saveria. She stumbled in Hope’s wake, the churn of the waters making her steps unsteady.

  “It’s past time for sleeping, and well into time to avoid dying,” said Hope.

  Saveria sipped the coffee. “This is good,” she said. “It’s really good.”

  “Algernon made it,” said Hope. “I guess he’s good at stuff.” They passed through Engineering’s airlock, everything where it should be. She clicked her console on, the holo stage bright with potential. The room hummed, drives quiet, but the reactor ready. A whole space ready to make great things.

  “So are you,” said Saveria. She lowered her eyes. “I saw you. You made a person whole. You took wires and machinery and connected it to El. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Providence helped,” said Hope. “Without her—”

  “Without you, El would still be missing an arm.” Saveria sipped more coffee. “Wait. You said ‘avoid dying.’”

  “Yes,” said Hope. “I need your help with something.”

  “You need my help,” said Saveria, voice far away like she was still dreaming. “What could an Engineer need with someone like me?”

  “Oh,” said Hope. “I need you to tell me what’s right and wrong.”

  “I killed a space station,” said Saveria.

  “I almost killed the human race,” said Hope. “I made a machine out of my dead lover, and I thought it would bring her back, but she was a monster. And I think, I don’t know but I think, that she’s always been a monster, but I’m not good at people, Saveria. I’m good at wires and machines and reactors, but I’m terrible at people. I’m so bad I almost made an eternal killing machine that would have ended everything, except for October, and Ebony, and you, who were all there, and saved us.”

  “And Algernon,” said Saveria.

  “Right,” said Hope. She rubbed wetness from her cheek. Am I crying? Why am I crying? “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you think you should do?” said Saveria. She sipped coffee, like it would help them both find the answer.

  “I think I should make more Reikos, but with different people as blueprints. And I don’t know what makes a good person, Saveria. But you do. You see it. You see inside people. You see what makes them shine.”

  Saveria leaned forward, kissing Hope on the lips. It was soft, gentle, and tentative, like a moth’s wings. Hope smelled vanilla, sadness, and joy, and wanted to cry again. When they broke apart, Saveria lowered her eyes. “I see nothing but the brightest light inside you, Hope.”

  Hope thought about saving the universe. She thought about it for a second because it was important. It was where everyone she loved was. It was full of things yet to be done. And that would wither if they couldn’t get this right. But then she looked into Saveria’s eyes, lonely, hungry, sad, and broken with loss. Hope wondered if her own eyes looked like that. Hope took Saveria’s coffee from her, setting the cup aside.

  She sealed Engineering’s airlock, then pulled Saveria in for another kiss. They leaned into each other, Hope’s ship suit falling to the decking, followed by Saveria’s. Cloth whispered as they sank to the floor. Hope kissed Saveria’s neck, tasting salt, and breathed the scent of vanilla.

  The esper pulled Hope’s undershirt off, caressing her side. Her hand ran up Hope’s skin, causing the Engineer to shiver, running down her arm to where Hope’s bracelet sat.

  Hope pulled it off, tossing it aside. “No secrets,” she said. “See me. See me.”

  “But the Ezeroc—”

  “Aren’t here,” said Hope. “No secrets.”

  In the heart of the Tyche, Hope and Saveria made love. Reiko wouldn’t have come in here. She wouldn’t have wanted grease on her skin, wouldn’t have liked the smell of the machinery, or being so close to the reactor. Saveria? She wanted to be next to Hope, no matter where that was.

  It was enough. It was everything.

  • • •

  “Okay,” said Saveria, looking at the holo stage. She’d pulled her ship suit back on but tied the arms about her waist. Hope smelled vanilla and wanted Engineering to smell like that for always. “The problem is your ex was an asshole.”

  “I think you’re supposed to say that,” said Hope.

  “Maybe,” said Saveria. “But the memory model doesn’t lie.” She pointed to the holo, where a complicated latticework of lines hung in the air, thousands upon thousands of connected points. “If you look at the memory model, it tells us she had more bad than good going on.”

  “Right.” Hope looked at her feet, her own ship suit now on, boots done up just like they should. “I guess she—”

  “She was your wife,” said Saveria, a bit too fast, but it didn’t matter. “She’s gone. That’s not the point. The point is we need a better model.”

  Hope tried to ignore how that made her feel, because life was complicated and short. She focused on the Engineering problem. “Building people is hard.”

  Saveria nodded. “My parents thought so.”

  “I pulled in a lot of data when I was building Reiko two-point-oh,” said Hope. “I needed to understand how people lived. People are not just hard, but weird.”

  “No kidding,” said Saveria. “You should try seeing inside their heads.” She paused, then picked up Hope’s bracelet, slipping it over Hope’s wrist. “Here.”

  “I don’t need to hide from you,” said Hope.

  “Not today,” said Saveria. “But we’re going to their world, right?”

  “The Ezeroc? Yes,” said Hope. “And on that world, there will be thousands of other AI. They’re all not quite people. Almost, but not all the way. So, we’ll give them memories. We’ll make them people.”

  “Brainwash?” said Saveria.

  “No,” said Hope. “There will be a facility, like this one here on Mercury. Algernon thinks they want me, because I know how to build thinking machines. They will want me to do it for them.”

  “Are you crazy?” said Saveria. “We can’t give them what they want.”

  “No,” said Hope. “But we can give them what they deserve.”

  “Oh,” said Saveria. After a minute, her eyes widened. “Oh!”

  “Right,” said Hope.

  “But—”

  “Yes,” said Hope. “That too.”

  “But what about—”

  “It won’t matter,” said Hope. “Algernon will be there to welcome them.”

  Saveria nodded, thinking. “So…”

  “We need good people. I need you to tell me who is a good person.” Hope pulled the console closer, then tapped on the keyboard. She pulled up the data from the other people she’d modeled, then ran a search on the database. Thousands of names spooled up.

  “Stop,” said Saveria. Her finger jabbed the air above a name, hovering in blue light. “That one.”

  Hope leaned closer, then smiled. “Ah.”

  “Yes,” said Saveria. “But we’ll need more than one.”

  Hope spun the console back toward Saveria. “Here. Look. Tell me. Not all are complete. But some. Maybe enough.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Saveria. “There’s too much here.”

  “Do what you can,” said Hope. “For as long as
you can. We can’t win this without them.”

  “Without who?” said Saveria.

  “The ghosts of our valiant dead,” said Hope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NATE SAT BESIDE El on his acceleration couch on the flight deck. “Helm.”

  “Cap.”

  The sun-hammered surface of Mercury sat in front of them. The bright silver strand of the solar collector still reached hungry fingers for the stars. “How’s the arm?”

  “How’s yours?” she snorted. “It’s fine.”

  “Good,” said Nate. “Mine wasn’t. Not for a long time.”

  “It’s because you fought the network,” said Algernon, from the ready room. “Don’t fight it.”

  Nate craned around. “Did it look like I was talking to you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Good,” said Nate, turning back to El. After a moment, he leaned closer. “I don’t think you should fight it.”

  She laughed, and his heart lifted at the sound. El had been purpose-built by the universe to fly starships. Without her arm, she was still better than him, but no longer what she’d been made for. Every atom in her body had been forged in the heart of a star, billions of years past, to fly solar wind. And now, thanks to Algernon’s gift, she would again.

  Nate pondered that for a second. “Algernon?”

  “Nathan Chevell.”

  “It’s just Nate,” said Nate. “My friends call me Nate.”

  “Are we friends?” said Algernon.

  “I sure hope so,” said Nate. “Otherwise I’m carrying another death robot in my ship. It’d suck to be wrong twice in a row. Anyway. Did you give El your dead buddy’s arm because my Helm has a gentle touch with machines?”

  “Emberlie wasn’t a ‘buddy.’”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” said Nate.

  Algernon didn’t answer.

  El snorted again. “Sounds like a yes. Don’t worry, Algernon. Emberlie and me, we’re going to fly. We’ll fly the stars. For as long as she’ll let me.”

  The machine still didn’t answer. Nate worked his console. “You’re good for this?”

  “Flying down a tunnel thirty meters to a side?” said El. “No problem.”

  “The Tyche is wider than thirty meters,” said Nate.

  “Do you want to do this?” said El.

  “No,” said Nate. “I don’t think you should do it either. But I appreciate making the Guild Bridge in this system, let alone subverting it to let us through, and thus announcing our destination to everyone, would be not just difficult but stupid.”

  “Great,” said El. “Shall we do it?” Her golden arm gleamed under the flight deck’s lights.

  “Helm, you have clearance,” said Nate. He felt the gentle lift of the ship as it rose from the crust, Mercury falling away beneath them. The Tyche’s holo showed the cueball surface of Mercury below them, solar collectors, structures, and underground roads all input by Algernon. Four klicks away, the entrance to the tunnel yawned.

  The Tyche grumbled, drives firing, and the ship gained speed, hungry again for the chase. Nate put a hand against the console. She’d been through a lot, his Tyche, and he’d tested her luck more than he should. Nate had thought they’d die together, back in Cantor, but it wasn’t to be. Grace hadn’t been ready to let him go, and he was happy about that. He wasn’t happy about flying back to the Ezeroc homeworld with Grace here, but he’d promised her. From now on, together. For everything.

  The tunnel approached, a square thirty meters aside, bored into the rock. El brought the ship up away from Mercury’s surface, looped in the sky, and pointed the nose right into the black depths. They approached, the drives roaring, and the Tyche’s holo said COLLISION ALERT.

  “You see?” said Nate. “Even the ship thinks you’re wrong.”

  “Problem with machines is they think in straight lines,” said El.

  “I heard that,” said Algernon.

  The ship plummeted toward the surface, picking up speed. At what felt to Nate like more than past the last second, El gave the sticks a little twitch. The ship now lay along the diagonal made between two corners of the tunnel. The collision alert faded from the holo, the Tyche slipping into the dark, easy as putting on a comfortable set of gloves.

  “Fuck me,” said Nate.

  “It was a little close,” said El. “Now we’re in here, it feels roomy.”

  The walls of the tunnel hurtled past, reflected lights from the Tyche’s drives giving a hint of illumination as they fell toward the planet’s core. “There going to be any molten lava?”

  “What?” said El. “Like Earth?”

  “Yeah.”

  The comm chimed. “Earth has an iron core,” said Hope.

  “This isn’t a science class,” said Nate. “This is an are-we-going-to-die class.”

  “It’s fine,” said El. “Mercury’s a geologically dead husk.”

  The Tyche continued to map the tunnel as they descended. They passed several weapons emplacements, all dead as Algernon said they would be. Not that Nate doubted the machine, but mistakes could be made. There wasn’t room to do a U-turn down here, the walls so close Nate felt he could reach out and touch them.

  “Coming up on target,” said El. “We’ve got, uh, a big ring.”

  The Tyche broke into a massive cavern at Mercury’s heart. The walls had been milled to what Nate suspected was precision only a machine could manage. Slender spires reached from the walls toward a massive Guild Bridge in the middle of the space. Except, it’s not a ‘Guild’ Bridge. It’s an AI Bridge. The Bridge was empty, the transfer ring not aligned with any other target.

  “Here’s hoping — hah — this works,” said Hope over the comm. The plan was simple.

  Step one. Get to the ring without dying. Nate figured they could call that complete.

  Step two. Have Algernon disable the weapon defenses on the ring. Nate didn’t know what the weapons were, but fine, the AI could handle whatever it was.

  Step three. Use the Bridge’s link to its surface comm array to hack into another Bridge. It didn’t matter at this point whether they were detected, because after lining up the Bridges, they’d be on the wind. Hope had talked about an old radio driver that was out of date on the Sol array. She would use some kind of hack to get in, jimmy the system, and away.

  Step four. Get the ring aligned with the new one Nate’s Empire had funded next to the bug world.

  Step five. Punch it.

  One down, four to go. “Algernon?”

  “Uh oh,” said the machine.

  “No,” said Nate. “That’s not how this works. Not on my ship. What I want to hear is, ‘It’s fine,’ and if it’s not, I want to hear, ‘I’ve got a solution.’”

  “I’ve got a solution,” said Algernon.

  The Tyche’s holo lit with BRACE BRACE BRACE TARGETING LOCK BRACE BRACE BRACE, which didn’t sound a whole lot like a solution. “You sure?” said Nate.

  “No,” said Algernon. “I was told what you wanted to hear.”

  “Fuck!” said Nate.

  “No sweat,” said El. “Look, what we’ve got here is your basic missile guidance system. Four pods, ready to go. There’s another six, but they look, and this is a technical term, proper fucked.”

  “Six hundred fifty-three years—” said Algernon.

  “Point is this,” said El. “We only need to dodge missiles from four pods. Twenty rockets to a pod, which gives us a mere eighty rockets.”

  “You can do that?” said Nate.

  “Hell, no,” said El. “The no-sweat part is where we go straight to hacking Earth’s Bridge, and just dive on through.”

  “We have a problem,” said Hope.

  “Were you listening to what I said to Algernon?” said Nate.

  “The problem is simple,” said Hope. “The antenna link down here is broken. So, we need to go back to the surface, hack the comm from there, and then come back down.”

  El leaned forward. “
Down the tunnel with rockets at the end?”

  “Umm.”

  “I have a solution,” said Algernon.

  “Is this the same thing as last time?” said Nate.

  “This is a real solution,” said Algernon. “Your Helm will bring the Tyche around to that point there.” The holo pinged a location on the Bridge. “That is the antenna relay. I will fix the relay, and then hop back on board.”

  “We’re moving at Mach six,” said El. “Are you nuts?”

  “No,” said Algernon. “If you need me to spell out all the parts of the plan, I will, but I thought it would be obvious you would need to slow down.”

  Nate thought he heard El say something like motherfucker under her breath. The Tyche blared an alarm as the first missile pod sparked, then exploded before the rocket left the launcher. The ring shivered against the struts that held it in place, one of them breaking free.

  “Oh, great,” said El. “Now we’ve got fucking debris.” Nate knew what she meant. This close to Mercury’s core, the gravitational pull of one half of the planet was close to that of the other. The debris would eventually ‘fall’ toward the walls, but they would do it in their own sweet time.

  “Glass half-full,” said Nate. “No rockets.”

  “Get your ass to the cargo bay,” said El. Nate heard Algernon clanking away.

  “How you going to pick him up again?” said Nate.

  “One problem at a time,” said El.

  An alarm appeared on Nate’s console, saying the cargo bay airlock was open. He cleared the error. El spun the ship to engage a braking burn, the Tyche shuddering as the drives roared. “Go,” she said. She didn’t let up on the thrust, the ship moving back the way they’d come.

  “Gone,” said Algernon.

  El said fucking fuck, and Nate saw what she meant. They were next to the ring, and inconveniently next to one of the missile arrays. Designers had no doubt installed it here to dissuade attackers from going for the comm array. Unfortunately, they weren’t attackers per se, but try telling an ancient machine that.

  The rockets fired.

  “Comm array is back online,” said Algernon.

  “One sec,” said El, her voice strained.