Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1)

by James S. Aaron

  “Where?” Andy demanded, voice harsher than he’d intended.

  “Wait. Are you ready to copy?”

  Andy switched to a new display and pulled up the astrogration map. He nodded.

  Fran read off the coordinates and the mapping software flew through the solar system, past Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Andy expected the blinking point marker to slow down at some point but it only sped up, blurring past Uranus. It stopped on Neptune and shifted right to a moon which the NSAI identified as Proteus.

  Staring at the display, Andy blinked in disbelief. “Read that again,” he said.

  Fran read the numbers. He’d entered them correctly.

  “We can’t go that far. It’ll take months. Just the fuel alone would wipe me out. I don’t have the funds. And Starl hasn’t paid me yet for all this crap we’re going through right now.”

  “Proteus,” Fran mused. “There’s a research station out there. That’s all I’ve ever heard of. Probably something else related to the drone mines on Neptune.”

  Andy switched screens and pulled up the public information on Neptune and its flurry of moons. Several private companies had listings for mine operators and one travel agency offered trips to Makemake, ‘The diamond of the Scattered Disk.’

  Andy shook his head. “Solve that problem when it’s closer,” he muttered. “I can’t get spun up about this now. We need to get out of here.”

  Nodding, Fran said, “They’ve identified a vanguard to break toward Mars 1. Lowspin is going to provide us cover.”

  “How many ships?” Andy asked.

  “Fifty at first. Then all of them. Everything is going to Mars.”

  “Has the TSF said if they’ve made any headway against the drones?”

  “Apparently, they’re running against close attack fighters now, so they think they’re getting closer to the Benevolent Hand.”

  “So, there might be some piracy today after all?”

  “I’m surprised nobody’s breached yet. All the dogfighting has been perfect cover to drop EV teams on the skin of their ship.”

  “Maybe no one’s talking about it?”

  “Not on the Lowspin net. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was kept quiet. If you’re trying to get a head start on everybody else, you don’t want to talk about it on the open channel.”

  “Right. Is there a timeline to move yet?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Fran said. She tapped the console and a countdown timer appeared above the holo of Cruithne.

  “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes?” Cara said. “Is that when we’re going to burn, or just getting ready?”

  “Once we’re outside Cruithne’s rad-free zone, we’ll burn,” Andy said. “Have you guys stowed everything you need?”

  Tim got a guilty expression. “We didn’t put away the things in the kitchen.”

  “You need to check all that,” Andy said. “Then your room. You go do that, and I’ll check on you.”

  Cara nodded, and Tim huffed, but they both turned and left the command deck.

  “You think we should dose Petral again?” Andy asked when the kids were gone. “I don’t want her coming-to in the middle of some hard g.”

  “Probably be good for her,” Fran said. “Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t hurt.” She had switched off the holo of Cruithne and its roiling space traffic and brought up the engine diagnostic display. “I’m worried about a couple checks on the engines if we’re going to bring them up to full burn. I didn’t get to run full diagnostics.”

  “Is there anything we can do about it if we get failures?”

  Fran gave him a hurt look. “I’m disgusted you would say that, Captain Sykes. I can fix everything but that containment failure you managed to bring about. You might as well have set off a bomb in your containment bottle.”

  “I tried,” Andy said.

  Fran looked from the console to Andy, giving him a crooked smile. “I’m teasing you. Listen, can you leave the command deck to help me with this? It’s really a two-person job.”

  Andy checked the timer. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  In the background, Starl continued to moan and babble, keeping up his performance.

  Leaving the command deck, Fran led the way out of the habitat to the inner airlock. She checked her tool harness as they waited for the lock to cycle. When she appeared satisfied, she ran her hands through her hair and retied the band around her pony tail. Once again, she caught Andy watching her.

  “Keep your eyes to yourself, sailor,” she said.

  Andy shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere else to put them. You’ll have to deal with it.”

  “You’re getting a stress response.”

  “Stress response?”

  “It happens when people think they’re going to die. They have sex.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Tell me it never happened in the TSF, then? There’s a lot of sex in the TSF.”

  “There’s a lot of sex in any huge organization.”

  “I’m talking about places where people are in danger all the time.”

  “So, you’re saying you don’t think we’re going to get out of this?” Andy asked. “Weren’t you calling me a pessimist not too long ago?”

  Fran dropped her hands from the back of her head and smoothed out the front of her coverall. “I don’t want you getting any ideas, is all.”

  “I’ll be honest,” Andy said. “Sex is the last thing I’ve been thinking about.”

  Fran rolled her eyes.

  The airlock opened and they kicked off into the zero-g section of the ship. Passing the locker where he had stashed the TSF weapons crate, Andy noticed the lock was untouched.

  “Hey,” he said, pointing at the locker. “I forgot to say anything about it before. This locker has weapons in it.”

  “There you go being a pessimist again,” Fran said.

  “I’m just letting you know.”

  Andy kicked off to catch up with Fran, already halfway down the corridor. They reached the chute between levels and descended toward the engine control decks. Fran led the way past two sets of open doors that could provide containment in the event of another bottle breach in the engines. Then they passed through the third, which opened into a large u-shaped space with the engine diagnostic panel jutting into its center, and she pushed the door closed and rolled the locking wheel.

  Floating behind her, Andy said, “Why’d you do that?”

  “I wanted privacy,” Fran said.

  She pushed away from the door and floated into Andy, grabbing him around the waist to press herself against him.

  “Are you drunk?” he asked. They rotated together until she bumped into the control console.

  “Shut up,” Fran breathed.

  She reached into Andy’s hair and pulled his face toward her. Her kiss was confident and hot, even hungry. Seated on the console, she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him in closer.

  “You’re not letting me get away, are you?” he asked, wiping a corner of his mouth.

  Fran unfastened the clip on the front of her harness and unzipped her coverall down to her bellybutton, showing only caramel skin underneath.

  “It’s the zero-g,” she said into his neck. “You can’t be tentative about this sort of thing.”

  “Does this mean you don’t think we’re going to make it?”

  “You need to stop saying that.”

  Fran unbuttoned the front of his shipsuit and drew the zipper down so she could put her hands on his chest. She examined him like an interesting piece of equipment.

  “I didn’t expect chest hair,” she said.

  “That’s my poor-kid-on-Earth upbringing. No time for cosmetic surgeries.”

  She dragged her hands down his chest, warming her palms. “I like it. You’re like a puppy dog.” She reached inside his coverall to grab the top of his ass, then pulled her hands back around, dragging her palms across his skin.

  “You, with your kids
and your ship, and these abs,” Fran said, pressing her thumbs into his stomach. “You don’t even realize how hot you are. God, I love it.”

  “I was thinking it was malnutrition,” Andy said, smirking.

  Fran kissed him again, biting his lip, and let him push her coverall down around her waist.

  Her shoulders, breasts and stomach were covered in fine white scars, standing out like crisscrossed needles against her tan skin.

  Before Andy could ask what they were from, he stiffened in surprise as Fran pushed a hand down the front of his coverall and grabbed him.

  “I’d say we should hurry,” Fran said, kicking off the rest of her coverall and then reaching with her free hand to pull his off as well. “But I don’t want to.”

  Andy took the band out of her hair and flicked it away so her hair floated around her shoulders, half-covering her gray-blue eyes.

  Fran wrapped her legs around Andy’s waist again, locking her heels together. She reached behind her to grab at two handholds on the console, holding them in place as their clothes floated free around them.

  “So, this means the engines are good to go?” Andy breathed into her neck.

  “Yes, you dolt,” Fran said.

  When Andy came—Fran gasping in his ear, their sweaty bodies clutched together, the muscles in her thighs and calves taught as he pushed deeper into her—he heard a whisper in the back of his mind, what might have been a surprised “Oh,” that didn’t rise to actual thought, a feeling, a recognition.

  he asked.

  Like a coin falling, flipping, drifting to the bottom of a long well, the spark of thought disappeared in the dark, leaving him uncertain it had ever existed at all, feeling only a vague sense of loneliness and fear that he couldn’t touch a part of his own mind.

  PART 5: BURN

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  STELLAR DATE: 9.10.2963 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: TSS Aggression’s Cost

  REGION: Near the Mars Protectorate Border, InnerSol

  Eighteen Years Earlier

  Waiting in the hallway prior to mission briefing, Andy shot Brit a smirk. “You know,” he said, “you never did tell me why you decided to help me out back during first year?”

  “In the academy? Yes, I have.” Brit completed the functions check on her pulse rifle and slung it over her shoulder, then ran through the pockets on her uniform touching each of the various knives she insisted on carrying.

  “I don’t remember you mentioning how hot I am,” Andy said.

  “Sure,” she said, sliding a K-bar with a black blade half out of its sheath before pushing it back home and fastening the leather handle in place. “You want to know why? Here it is. My family had a brown lab growing up. You reminded me of him.”

  Andy frowned. “Brown lab? You had a dog on High Terra?”

  “Lots of people have dogs on High Terra. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “I guess I never thought about dogs in space before.”

  Brit rolled her eyes. “High Terra isn’t really space. It has more land than Earth. Besides, dogs went into space before humans did.”

  “Sure, professor. I’ve never seen a dog on High Terra.”

  “You never leave the TSF post. Maybe I’ll take you home one of these days. There are plenty of dogs in my parents’ neighborhood.”

  Andy made a show of staring into the distance as if the opposite wall were some vista. “I think humans leaving Earth just became real to me. I never thought about pets in space before.”

  “There have been dogs on settlements from the beginning. For seven hundred years at least.”

  “Just because you say that doesn’t mean I’ve seen them, or that I believe it.”

  “You’re such a lab. Next you’re going to tell me the Earth is flat.”

  “High Terra’s flat. That kind of makes you a flat-Earther.”

  “Shut up,” Brit growled. “Plus, it’s not really flat.”

  Assigned to the TSS Aggression’s Cost, an InnerSol battle cruiser with ten on-board light fighter squadrons, a rail gun and a stand-off missile range of a half an AU, the ship had been completing interdiction missions to disrupt the piracy between Earth and Mars.

  They had been on the anti-piracy task force for three months since leaving the Academy and yet sometimes she seemed like a different person. While most people would call them a couple, she still refused to call him her boyfriend even when crawling into his bunk after lights out to push her face into his chest. They had been sleeping together since the second year of the Academy, sneaking off to find hidden places in the surrounding woods, but something kept Brit from admitting to the world that they had paired off.

  For Andy, the arrangement wasn’t much different from what he’d seen in Summerville growing up. His parents had been the exception when it came to adult relationships. Most of the people in his apartment building, or those nearby, fell into and out of affairs, had kids, stayed together or didn’t. That was how people had been living for nearly a thousand years. Even though he didn’t want to be with anybody else, he didn’t own Brit any more than she was willing to commit to him. He could do what he wanted. And he did at least once a month, which led to Brit sulking and picking fights without admitting what was truly bothering her.

  After a year in flight school, which included body augments to allow higher g, their sorties made Andy feel like a demi-god. Most of the enemy ships couldn’t stand against a coordinated TSF attack. Even though they had flown in the black dozens of times, their missions started with a briefing, going over intercepted transmissions, personnel data if known, followed by ship capabilities—then as much time, often more on anyone who had fallen victim to the pirates. The TSF seemed to fear their pilots and soldiers would stop caring about the mission at some point, and went out of their way to make sure everyone understood just why they were on a year-long deployment to keep shipping lanes safe.

  The door to the briefing room slid open and the off-going shift walked into the corridor looking dirty and fatigued. Two pilots Andy knew from flight school slapped him on the shoulder and winked in Brit’s direction. She kept her hard blue eyes on the opposite wall, ignoring them. When the group had passed them by, it was time for their squadron to file into the narrow room.

  Andy took his preferred seat in the second row and waited as the mission planner—a captain named Transon whose face had been burned in combat and purposefully left half-melted—made notes on the chart holoprojection shimmering against the front wall. As usual, the target area looked like empty space until Transon turned his back to the seats and made some view adjustments. When he stepped out of the way, the center of the holodisplay showed the misshapen lump of an asteroid tumbling in space.

  “We going mining, sir?” one of the other pilots called from the back of the room. “I’m no good at that shit.”

  The captain didn’t answer. When he was satisfied with the chart, he turned to the room and crossed his arms, waiting for everyone to file in and take their seats. “Hurry up,” he said. “I’m not waiting all morning.”

  Brit liked to sit in the front row at the side of the room during briefings. This meant Andy could watch her expression as she absorbed the information. Something about her face as she nodded with the briefing, graphics from the holodisplay reflected in her eyes, wiped out Andy’s ability to focus. He was lucky that some part of his mind did pick up the attack vectors, munition types and release zones as he watched Brit from the corner of his vision.

  He knew, even then, that something in the core of their relationship wasn’t quite rotten but was off-balance just enough to leave him dizzy when he should have been sure of himself. He wouldn’t recognize the flaw until years later, even then only remembering specific times and realizing how they hadn’t been working.

  During the mission briefing for Object 8221, the base of operations for a pirate gang calling themselves the Mortons, Andy was too far gone in the shape of her body, the memory of her sweat and breath and
how she gripped him and barely let him go, to understand that anything could ever go wrong. The future didn’t really exist for him then. There was the mission, the fight, and afterward Brit’s body to work off his unspent adrenaline.

  “All right,” Transon said, glaring at the group of cocky pilots. “This is going to be different than all the other sweep-and-burn playdates you lazy idiots are used to. They’ve got hostages.”

  He motioned at the wall and the faces of three kids appeared next to Object 8221. “These kids are Kylan, Yandi and Urvin Carthage. You might recognize that name from Carthage InnerSol Shipping. Their mother, Kathryn Carthage, is owner and CEO, and these three curtain climbers are the only living scions of the family. They die, the company’s future goes into the shitter, along with its stock prices. They can’t guarantee stability for the thousand-year contracts they’ve sold, and all hell breaks loose in the shipping industry.”

  He waved the pictures away. Scratching the mottled skin next to his mouth, he said, “I don’t pretend to understand that shit. What it means for us is that the usual MO of carpet bombing a pirate home base isn’t going to work in this situation. Insurance isn’t going to pay out the cargo you burn up. We’ll be dividing the squadron into fireteams. Fireteam One will establish a base of fire to draw off the mobile defenses, which looks like a mix of heavy freighters and light attack ships, while Fireteam Two takes on the fixed defenses, breaches the base and recovers the hostages.”

  Silence followed his statement. The spinning asteroid in the middle of the holodisplay immediately became a thousand times more interesting than it had been. It had gone from a faceless bit of space rock to their potential grave.

  Eventually, someone from behind Andy said, “We got Marines for this, sir?”

  “Marines? You’ve been trained in urban combat, right? It’s in all your files. Nothing special about this.”

  Andy nodded, biting his lower lip as he considered what had been said. The captain was right: they’d had the training. He’d spent three weeks breaching the interior corridor of a mock freighter in stick team formations, checking doors and corners, lobbing flash grenades, using interior sonar and other scanning devices. He’d been team leader on several training missions and done well enough. What he’d taken away from the training was that he never wanted to fight any kind of urban combat.