Destiny Rising - A Hard Military Space Opera Epic: The Intrepid Saga - Books 1 & 2
Page 61
Bob said.
“I just call it like I see it,” Tanis replied
Joe stood, and Tanis wrapped him in an embrace. “It’s nice to wake and see you…without some emergency.”
“Holy crap!” Joe exclaimed and pulled back. “Why are you so cold?”
“You could have taken the time to get some clothes. They are stasis pods, after all… I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Tanis felt herself flush. “Sorry, I just got caught up in the moment.”
Joe smiled and leaned in for a kiss. “This is about all of ice-cold Tanis I can handle right now.”
Tanis laughed softly. “I’m starved. Let’s get some food—I think a B.L.T. would really hit the spot right now.”
Joe pulled a pair of shipsuits from storage. “I could use a bite too, but let’s get dressed first. I don’t want to lose any bits on the way to the officer’s lounge.”
“Is that really what’s up, Bob?” Joe asked as they walked through the slowly warming passageways. “You a bit worried about being alone?”
Joe laughed and nudged Tanis. “You’re his lucky charm.”
“I think I resent that.”
Half an hour later the pair sat at a small table in the officer’s lounge, working their way through a light lunch.
“So let me get this straight,” Joe said after taking a gulp of his coffee. “You plan to wake Tanis every so often—randomly—to have her check things over and make you feel better, and, because she can’t live without me now, I get woken in the deal too?”
“Are we going to be the only humans up this entire time?” Tanis asked. “The captain won’t be woken at all?”
“Awww…he’s like a city-sized puppy,” Joe chuckled.
“You seem to think this is amusing,” Tanis gave him a sour look. “You’re forgetting that this essentially works out to years and years of extra work.”
“You’re looking at it glass-half-empty,” Joe replied.
Joe paused for a moment. “Damn…never thought of that. There goes logic—ruining another perfectly good figure of speech.”
“You were saying?” Tanis asked.
“Right. Anyway, we’re going to have long walks in the park, and by the beach—if we wanted to, we could have decades to spend with just one another. Maybe I could even teach you to fly.”
“Yeah, and maybe I could teach you to tell a joke,” Tanis stuck her tongue out at Joe, then paused. “So Bob, you really just want us to do whatever we think we need to do, to check the ship over, hang out for a few days or a week and then go back under?”
“How often do you want us to do this?”
Tanis nearly choked on her B.L.T. while Joe dissolved into hysterical laughter.
* * * * *
“We should walk the ship—the whole ship,” Joe said later as he and Tanis relaxed in the officer’s common area. “It’s just the sort of thing that could give us a fresh perspective, and something to do.”
“It may take more than a day or two,” Tanis mused.
“I’ll bring a snack, and I bet there are lots of quarters along the way we could crash in.”
“What the hell,” Tanis sat up. “But first, let’s get armored and armed, at least lightly.”
“No argument here. I imagine I’m going to hear rogue bots around every corner for the first day at least. Not to mention, armor has built-in heaters.”
An hour later, they sat aboard a maglev train, riding to the bow of the Intrepid in silence. Both Joe and Tanis sported light armor, several sidearms and multi-function rifles. Packs rested on the floor beside them, containing food and supplies.
Bob’s voice came over the Link.
“Sorry, Bob,” Joe said, “Memories of dark corridors with no power and no comm are still too fresh. To us that was just a couple months ago.”
Tanis turned to look out the window. She watched as the train entered a vast, dark chamber. Emergency lights in the distance showed the space to be hundreds of meters wide, and many more long.
A light slid into view far below the train, and Tanis saw a bank of superconductor batteries in its dim green glow. Several other similar lights winked on and off in the distance, as the train raced on.
She looked up the cavern on the ship’s schematics, and saw that it was the power storage and regulation chamber for the particle accelerator. The sparsity of green lights revealed that most of the batteries still were offline, as a result of the damage to the primary ramscoop.
“I can’t believe I’ve never been here before,” she said to Joe.
He nodded. “Me either. Though it’s not that surprising, I guess. I just checked, and apparently I’ve only set foot in about five percent of the ship.”
Tanis checked the places she had been. “I’ve got you beat. I’ve been in six percent of the ship.”
“Always have to be one-upping,” Joe laughed.
“I don’t see how stating a fact is one-upping.”
“Um, Tanis, you even said, I’ve got you beat.”
Tanis grinned. “I have no recollection of the events to which you are referring.”
A minute later, the maglev slowed and stopped at a small station. The end of the line, or the beginning, depending on how you looked at it.
Joe led the way to their destination, a small observation deck above the main scoop emitter, and the furthest forward they could get on the bow, without crawling into maintenance tunnels.
They stepped through the entrance and both stopped, looking at one another in surprise. The observation deck was dimly lit, soft music played over a physical sound system and a servitor stood beside a bar with a selection of food and wine.
Joe pulled off his helmet and let out a low whistle. “One heck of a posh lounge, I was expecting a maintenance viewport or something.”
“These couches feel like real leather,” Tanis sat and leaned back, clasping her hands behind her head.
“Quite the view,” Tanis said as she gazed out the large bay window that wrapped over half way around the lounge.
“Can almost see behind us,” Joe laughed, as he handed Tanis a glass of wine.
“I can’t quite make out The Kap.”
“I can’t either, but there’s Canopus to the right,” Joe pointed at the white-blue star.
“And Sirius up there to the left. Just a bit further around and we’d be able to see Sol over there,” Tanis pointed at the rear wall of the observation deck.
“Huh…I just checked, and we’re actually farther from Sirius now than we were back home at Sol—thought it looked brighter.”
“And we’re traveling further from New Eden every minute—seems counter-in
tuitive,” Tanis sighed.
Joe nodded and sat beside Tanis. They enjoyed the silence for some time, simply staring out into space, arms around each other’s shoulders. Eventually Tanis looked at Joe, “We’ll have to do this often during our thaws.”
“Absolutely.”
After finishing the glasses of wine, they discussed the route to the stern of the ship. While serving on the Intrepid, they had spent the majority of their time in the dorsal arch. As a result, they opted to work their way down through several dozen decks below them, and travel through the sections of the ship directly above the particle accelerator.
The utilitarian corridors outside the observation deck were even more jarring on the way out of the luxurious lounge. Their HUD overlays led them to a wide vertical shaft, which dropped over thirty meters, and rose several hundred more above them. It was lined with various pipes, waveguides, and conduit. Several bots flitted up and down, a few swerving out of the way, as a lift rose to their level.
Tanis punched the button for the lowest level, and the lift dropped down the shaft. With the low gravity—due to the particle accelerator running on empty—there was a moment her feet lifted off the platform.
“That’s a bit disconcerting,” Joe said.
“You’re telling me. It’s quite the drop.”
The bottom of the shaft opened into a chamber, which appeared to be at least a hundred meters wide and several hundred long. The ceiling was punctuated by several other shafts, like the one they had just entered through. Bots were flitting in and out of them, appearing to be working on the large object below.
“This must be the main scoop’s field generator,” Tanis said, as the realization dawned on her.
“I’ve never seen one that looked like this before,” Joe commented, as the lift settled on a catwalk.
“You’ve never seen one that can emit a field over ten thousand kilometers wide.”
“Touché.”
They stood a moment longer; looking at one of the Intrepid’s many hearts.
“Well, let’s roll,” Tanis said, as she picked up her bag. “We have a long way to go.”
* * * * *
The rest of the day was spent passing through endless kilometers of corridor, bay, and chamber. The posh lounge, looking out over the ramscoop emitter should have prepared them, but they were still surprised by what lay in the nooks and crannies of the ship.
Rounding a corner, near one of the hydroponics chambers, they stumbled upon a statue in the middle of an intersection. It appeared to be a life-sized goat made of solid crystal. Upon closer inspection, they realized that the crystal was data storage, containing the DNA and all knowledge associated with every known bacteria going back to the twentieth century, cross-referenced with every time each bacterium had been found in a goat.
There also appeared to be a personal 2D vid collection of goats stored in the crystal. Many of them depicted people yelling at goats, which seemed to cause the goats to seize up, and fall over.
“Wow, someone really likes goats,” Joe commented.
“Maybe a bit too much,” Tanis chuckled.
Not long after, they entered another corridor that was a clear tube surrounded by what appeared to be a brownish substance. Tanis leaned close and let out a small cry.
“It’s just dirt!”
Joe frowned and peered closer. “What? What for?”
“I think it’s a giant ant farm.”
Joe walked down the tube, running his hand along the plas. “Huh, so it is. The sign down here says it’s the personal property of some guy named Pete, and that no one's to mess with it.”
Tanis laughed, “well, I guess we’d best be on our way.”
After several more kilometers of ship, Joe yawned and stretched. “I know we’ve only been at it for a few hours, but I’d worked a full day before stasis, and I’m bushed. What say we find some place to crash?”
“Sure,” Tanis agreed. “Ironically, we’re not far from my quarters, just sixty-two decks down.”
“That would take all the fun out of the adventure!” Joe looked shocked. “We need to bivouac somewhere exciting.”
“There’s a security duty station, not far from here, that had some bunks for folks pulling back-to-back shifts,” Tanis offered. “Does that satisfy your sense of adventure?”
“Humph… I guess it’ll have to do.”
* * * * *
The next day brought them to the ship’s transverse cargo corridor. A memory of that first trip, through the kilometer-wide portal came to Tanis. She remembered a younger, somehow softer Amy Lee leading her through, while she tried not to gawk at a cargo hatch that a star cruiser could fly through.
“I remember when they were building this thing,” Joe said, apparently on the same train of thought. “I flew a fighter in here, and buzzed a bunch of haulers that some MOS guys were driving. They were a bit upset, to say the least.”
Tanis laughed. “No wonder they knew you weren’t up to running security and brought me in.”
“You act as though that wasn’t my master plan.”
“Angela, girl!” Joe said. “I was beginning to wonder if you were still with us.”
“Which ‘us’?” Tanis asked. “Organics or AI?”
“Uh…forget I asked,” Tanis laughed.
From the transverse corridor they debated whether to go through one of the cylinders, or to take the maglev that ran along the particle accelerator to Engine.
In the end, they opted to take the maglev, because they could stop at Earnest’s observation lounge, which would give them a great view of Sol, and a last glimpse of Estrella de la Muerte, before its dim red disk disappeared from view.
Arriving in the lounge a half hour later, Tanis remembered how much she loved seeing the Intrepid from here. It was only a dozen decks above the SOC, and she had come often to collect her thoughts.
Below, the two habitation cylinders rotated, reflecting starlight onto the dorsal rail, cargo cubes, and lattice of struts that wrapped the rear half of the ship.
Just over sixteen kilometers away, the engines rose up beyond the cylinders, one side still blackened and twisted. The main engines were inactive; without the main scoop, there was insufficient fuel to light them up, and without the port side A1 fusion engine, a balanced thrust was impossible.
Instead, the two smaller engines were running at low power, pushing the ship ever faster toward The Kap.
“Looks a little worse for wear,” Joe said.
Tanis nodded. “We’ve pinned a lot of hope to this ark, drifting alone in the black.”
“Not really an ark,” Joe mused. “It’s not as though Sol is drowning.”
“Are you so sure?” Tanis asked. “I’m here because I’m fed up with the TSF and Sol politics, but many believe Sol is doomed.”
“I know some people think that, but I didn’t know you did—at least not in so many words,” Joe replied.
“Thing is, Sol doesn’t really need humans anymore—but there are trillions of them. Pretty soon, they’ll all be able to live forever, but heavy elements are getting rare enough to cause concern.”
She paused contemplatively. “Unless something changes, they’re going to have some very big conflicts, and soon.”
Joe nodded. “You’re not wrong. But there have always been shortages and conflicts. They’ll survive.”
“Some will,” Tanis agreed. “But that makes this an ark. We’re taking the best of the best, and the tools to build a new Sol.”
“What New Eden will be like?” Joe replied.
The Kap, what we’ll make there,> Angela paused.
Tanis nodded slowly. “You wonder if we’ll end up staying; if Terrance and the Reddings will crack open the picotech.”
Joe leaned against the window and ran a hand down his cheek. “Do you think they would? They’d risk letting the whole crew and colony know.”
“Hard to say,” Tanis replied. “It may be that repairing the scoop emitter and the annihilator would be a lot easier with pico. I imagine the annihilator would be. I’m more concerned about building around a red dwarf.”
“The Kap is an old, old girl, I doubt she has much kick left in her,” Joe said.
Tanis reached an arm around Joe. “Let’s hope she takes it easy for the next couple of centuries.”
“Centuries?” Joe gave Tanis a startled look. “I thought we were only going to be there for fifty years or so.”
“It’ll still take seventy to get there,” Tanis replied. “Either way, let’s hope a temperamental red dwarf is the worst of our problems.”
Continue reading about Tanis and the crew of the Intrepid in book 3 of The Intrepid Saga: Building Victoria.
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APPENDICES
Be sure to check http://www.aeon14.com for the latest information on the Aeon 14 universe.
TERMS & TECHNOLOGY
AI (SAI, NSAI) – Is a term for Artificial Intelligence. AI are often also referred to as non-organic intelligence. They are broken up into two sub-groups: Sentient AI and Non-Sentient AI.
c – Represented as a lower-case c in italics, this symbol stands for the speed of light and means constant. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant at 670,616,629 miles per hour. Ships rate their speed as a decimal value of c with c being 1. A ship traveling at half the speed of light will be said to be traveling at 0.50 c.