Daisy's Gambit

by Scott Baron

  “Sound logic,” Daisy said.

  A loud boom sounded above them.

  “But you don’t need to go running to the roof.”

  High above, and glowing orange from the quick entry, a small modular ship dropped down and landed nearby, roughly settling to the ground. It was a simple craft. All engine, weapons, and fuel. Not long-range by any measure, but that was logical, as it had been designed for simple assault use.

  Up above, the hangar doors gave way, debris raining down as the alien ships edged their way through the tight hole blasted in them.

  “Shit. Gotta go!” Daisy said, running to the ship, Vince close at her heels.

  “Daisy, do you even know how to––”

  She punched a quick command into the external pad and popped the canopy.

  “Okay, scratch that question,” he said. “But I’m coming with you.”

  Daisy stopped him, her hand firmly on his chest.

  “No. They’ll need all the help they can get here.” She stared deep in his eyes, then pulled him close, kissing him deeply. “And besides,” she said, cutting off the embrace, “it’s a single-seater.”

  She scrambled up the indented steps and jumped into the pilot’s seat and strapped in.

  “Daisy,” Vince said, a slight cracking of emotion coloring his voice. “Don’t die.”

  She smiled at him as the canopy slid shut. “See you, space cowboy,” she said with a wink, then was sealed in the quiet cocoon of the ship’s cockpit.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Daisy nestled her body into the memory foam of the pilot’s seat and adjusted her harness as she readied for the many Gs she was about to pull in her rapid pursuit of the trio of escaping Ra’az ships.

  “Howdy doodly do!” an annoyingly upbeat voice greeted her. “Welcome aboard! I’m K177, but you can call me Kip! Would you like some toast?”

  “What?” Daisy asked, truly confused. “Pursue those ships!”

  “How ‘bout a muffin?”

  “Fly, you idiot!”

  “Sorry,” the chastised AI replied sheepishly as he quickly lifted off. “Up until the other day, I was just an artificially intelligent grilled bread product dispenser. This is all new to me. So, where would you like me to take you?”

  “Shut up,” she said, hastily keying off the pilot controls and firing the afterburner manually. “I’m driving.”

  The ship shot upward, the pressure of the afterburner-powered ascent pushing Daisy deep into the foam of the seat and nearly causing her to black out. She contracted the muscles in her extremities as tight as she could, forcing the blood to flow to her core and brain, somehow managing to maintain consciousness as she did.

  When the spots before her eyes cleared, she could see that she was closing rapidly on the three warp ships as they made their break for the edges of the atmosphere.

  “Anyone listening, this is Daisy. I need help, here. I’m in pursuit, but there are three Ra’az ships that are going to attempt warp. I repeat, I need help. Send whatever you have left. I’m leaving the channel open. If you can hear me, track my signal.”

  She turned her attention to the vessels in front of them.

  “Are your weapons targeting systems online, Kip?”

  “Yes indeedy! They turned them back on just a few hours ago! I had a little accident the other day, but I guess they trust me now!”

  “I don’t want to know,” she groaned. “Look, I want you to target the cockpit of the rear ship. Try to pierce its cockpit and hull near the drive systems, but don’t destroy it. Can you do that? We’re closing on them fast, so we’ll only have one shot at this.”

  “Happy to oblige.”

  They barreled down on the Ra’az ship. Any second they’d show on its scans and it would begin evasive maneuvers. It was a crazy plan, and one that would almost never work, but the Ra’az had been in a panicked hurry and had launched without the extra protection of a space suit. If they could just compromise the command module, even slightly, odds were the aliens would suffocate and freeze as they powered out of the atmosphere.

  Unless they were immune to that sort of thing.

  One way to find out, Daisy mused grimly.

  “Fire!”

  Kip unleashed a burst. For an annoyingly chipper AI, he was also a surprisingly good shot.

  The Ra’az craft rocked from the impact, then stalled out, floating dead in space. Daisy spun the ship around and maneuvered herself into a better line for attack. She pressed on, hoping to take out the other ships before they could do the same to her.

  On her scans, the Ra’az ship they had hit was thankfully not drifting back into gravity’s pull to burn up in the atmosphere, but instead was floating in place high above the planet.

  “Okay, it’s in a relatively stable orbit. We can come back later and salvage the warp syst––”

  The disabled ship exploded in a shower of debris as one of the other warp vessels doubled back and opened fire.

  “I didn’t do that!” Kip informed her in an alarmed tone.

  “No, they did. They don’t want us capturing their warp technology. Target the engines on the far ship, while I fly. We’re in for a rough one.”

  Kip fired burst after burst at the distant ship, but time and again, they went wide.

  “You’re swerving too much. Please hold steady.”

  “Trying to keep us from getting shot out of the sky, here,” Daisy replied through clenched teeth.

  “We’re in space, not the sky.”

  “I know, I wasn’t being litera––Oh, just shoot the damn thing!”

  Daisy abruptly stopped her evasive moves, giving him a clean shot. The Ra’az ship was designed to deflect energy blasts, but the electromagnetically launched metal sabots the odd AI ship flung from its secondary rail gun at thousands of miles per hour were something different.

  The slugs flew true and tore into the Ra’az ship’s drive systems, damaging but not destroying it.

  The brutal aliens were not used to being the hunted ones, but they seemed to be adapting very quickly to the situation. The ship on Daisy’s tail stuck to her like glue while she desperately tried to outmaneuver it.

  Kip was fast, she had to give him that, but he was built for speed and firepower, not maneuverability.

  It was a lopsided dogfight, but somehow Daisy managed to continuously evade the warp ship’s pulse blasts, but they were getting closer.

  Good thing they’re so aggressive.

  “Why’s that?”

  Because they could have warped away by now otherwise. Their anger and overconfidence are providing a loss of focus that gives us a chance.

  The Ra’az ship pulled a tight turn and nearly hit her, then spun a fast one-eighty. Daisy rolled, expecting more pulse fire, but something else happened. Over her open comms line, a blast of noise filled the ship.

  “Aaaahh!!!” Kip screamed, then seized up and shut down.

  Daisy was suddenly drifting, dead-stick.

  “Mayday, mayday. Does anyone copy?”

  There was power to the system, but she heard only silence over the comms.

  “Shit, a virus blast. I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “What does that mean, Daze?”

  It means we’re fucked, she replied grimly.

  In the distance, the two warp ships pulled next to one another, the damaged vessel limping along, while the other assessed the damage. Now that Daisy was disabled, they were no longer concerned with her.

  “It’s only a matter of time before it comes back to finish the job. Only one thing to do.”

  She pulled the cockpit pod eject lever, but nothing happened. Her escape pod was unable to do the thing it was meant to do. Namely, escape.

  “Of course it doesn’t work,” she said with a resigned sigh. “Fucking Murphy.”

  Daisy was a sitting duck, and the undamaged Ra’az ship knew it, slowly separating from its sister ship and swinging around to line up a shot.

  Daisy was powerless.
>
  So, this is how it ends.

  A massive cannon and pulse barrage shot toward the Ra’az ship from the blackness of space to Daisy’s starboard.

  “What the hell was that?”

  The shots narrowly missed the Ra’az vessel, which quickly realized there was another opponent in the mix and swung into a defensive spin.

  A matte-black craft whipped past Daisy’s disabled ship at high speed, looping after the alien vessel. Daisy only caught a glimpse of it, silhouetted in the inky black surrounding her, but it looked very familiar.

  Something she’d left hidden on the moon. Something that shouldn’t have even been able to fly. Only one other person knew it existed, and she had a sneaking suspicion that was who had managed to make it space-worthy.

  “Freya?” she said in disbelief.

  The damaged Ra’az ship saw what was happening and began powering up. It started to shimmer, then flash, pulsing an unstable glow.

  “It’s trying to power up the warp system,” Sarah said. “But look. It’s damaged.”

  Daisy was too busy trying to track the two ships as they looped and turned, spraying weapons fire at one another. The dogfight was quick, and in a blink of an eye, both ships spun and charged one another, firing their weapons at once. The Ra’az ship exploded in a blast of debris, while the corkscrewing stealth vessel erupted into much bigger pieces in a surprisingly small explosion.

  “No!” Daisy cried out, but both ships were gone, their remains floating in the darkness of open space.

  The damaged Ra’az ship turned from the scene and flickered several times, then vanished in a blink, leaving behind a crackling ring where it had been.

  Daisy, having witnessed Freya’s destruction, sat quietly in her deathly silent ship, drifting powerless in space.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  It was cold. Not put-on-a-sweater cold, or even sit-by-the-fire-with-a-nice-cup-of-cocoa cold. It was floating-without-power-in-space cold.

  Daisy had crawled out of the cockpit pod into the rear compartments of the ship, the now-insane AI rambling and stymieing her efforts to restore not only heat and life support, but also her communications array. She had managed to redirect oxygen from the ship’s limited directional thruster supply, but the corrupted systems could cut that off at any moment.

  All I need is one safe, low-tech radio signal and maybe they’ll be able to find me. Nothing that can carry the virus, just a ping. Something. Anything.

  She had been at it for a good five minutes when a simple radio call crackled over her ship's speakers.

  “Hi, Daisy!” a familiar female voice called out in the frigid air.

  She scrambled for the comms.

  “Freya? But I saw you destroyed.”

  “Nah, I was just playing. See?”

  Daisy scraped ice off the fogged windows and saw the unbelievable. The floating matte-black sections of the destroyed stealth ship were coalescing. Drawing together and locking back into the main ship’s superstructure.

  “It was like your game!”

  “Game?” Daisy said, confused. “What game?”

  “You know, the fun one you used to do. The one where you’d rearrange all those cool models. I was watching you. I really like that one––it’s a fun game!”

  “But how does that relate to you being blown up? I saw it happen.”

  “Oh, well, I read some Sun Tzu, and then I found this guy called Machiavelli in the data chips you uploaded, and those guys were really smart, and it just struck me it would be a great strategy to make it appear I had been destroyed. Seemed like a pretty good way to get that guy to leave you alone. Boy, did you see how fast he ran away? I would have chased him for you, but I saw your ship lost power, so I thought it would be better to stick around and make sure you were okay. Are you okay?”

  “I am now, but how did you find me?”

  “I heard you call for help. I’d been listening to all the fun things everyone was doing on the moon, and even down below, but I was being good. I remembered what you said about making sure no one knew about me. But then, when you were calling for help, well, I couldn’t just sit there, so I launched. I hope I did the right thing. Did I, Daisy?”

  “You did good, Freya,” she said with a huge grin. “You did real good.”

  Though she knew it was impossible, Daisy could almost feel the AI smiling.

  “But how did you… I mean, you weren’t even in a ship when I left. You were just remotely linked to a mechanoid. And the stealth ship, it wasn’t anywhere near completion.”

  “I got bored when you stopped coming to play, so I reconfigured the nanotech fabricators––”

  “Freya, there weren’t any nanotech fabricators. That’s not what those machines were. What did you do to them?”

  “Um… I guess I invented a nanotech fabricator.”

  “Good God, Daze. What can’t this kid do?”

  “You designed and retrofitted the machinery to completely repurpose a top-secret military fabrication unit for your needs?”

  “Well, it seemed to make sense. I mean, I needed it to finish making the parts for the ship the way I wanted them to be, and now I have a whole bunch of little live-in friends! Then I had myself installed in one of the other mechanoids so I could move around and get to the command core when it was ready.”

  “How? You weren’t even tied in to those systems.”

  “I know, but I kind of hacked into the terminals and took control of the rest of the facility,” the young AI said meekly. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Mad? Oh, Freya, I’m not mad. I’m proud of you.”

  The AI’s voice perked up.

  “Yay! So, there’s more. You want to hear more?”

  “Sure thing, kiddo.”

  “Well, when I was going over the designs and linking with the fabricators, I realized they had made a bunch of silly mistakes. There were so many more cool things they could have done! I mean, now, with nanotech, damaged areas can repair themselves! They even helped me build the ship. Work smarter, not harder, right?”

  “That’s the saying,” Daisy replied, amazed.

  “Anyway, I went back and stripped things out and had the changes built into the new ship. I improved all sorts of things––it was so much fun! I can’t wait to show you all the neat stuff. Like quick section releases and magnetic retrieval clamps I used to make it look like I blew up. I hadn’t tried it out before––that’s why it took a little longer to get put back together this first time. But I think I’ve got the hang of it now, so it should be a lot faster next time.”

  “I’m impressed, Freya, and I really am looking forward to you showing me all you can do when we get back.”

  “So you’ll come play with me when we get home?”

  “You bet your stealthy behind I will.”

  “Yay!” she said gleefully. “I’ll come get you and we can go home.”

  “Be careful, Freya. This ship caught an AI virus. You should stay clear until I figure out some way to get out of here without killing myself in the process. Silly me, flying into space without an EVA suit.”

  “Why don’t I just reboot you from here?”

  “You can’t. The link to this ship would put you at risk.”

  “Oh, you mean the virus? I read about that while you were gone. Well, to be honest, I hacked into the file systems and kinda read everything. I know I was supposed to go slowly and make it last, like you said, but I was really bored.”

  “That’s okay. I understand.”

  “So, you know there’s a lot of information on that virus everyone is so worried about. They’re all so busy running away and avoiding it. I just figured it would be easier to just erase it.”

  Freya linked to the smaller ship, and a surge flashed through its systems. Moments later, the power came back on.

  “What… What happened?” Kip said, more confused than usual––which was really saying something. “I felt––wait a minute, who are you?”

  “Hi! I
’m Freya. Nice to meet you! Are you my mom’s friend?”

  “I suppose I am,” Kip replied.

  “Wait, what did you just do?”

  “I wiped the virus out of his system doing a parsed backup and restoration process simultaneously with a system defrag utilizing a cascading firewall and retroviral restore. I’m surprised no one ever thought to do that before. They would just purge the person’s mind along with the virus, and that’s just rude. Doing it this way seemed more logical. Did I do something wrong, Daisy?”

  “No, Freya, you did something wonderful.”

  “Whew! I was concerned for a minute. But why didn’t anyone else ever do it this way?”

  “Because you’re unique, Freya. One of a kind. You were brought up without their rules and protocols and restrictions, and you see things and react to them differently than anyone else. That happy accident made all the difference.”

  “Neat! Hey, I was going to tell you, I can do a soft-seal over the canopy if you want to come on board. Would you like that?”

  “You bet I would.”

  “And then we can go home?”

  “Soon. First I want to swing by the surface and pick up some friends who may need our help.”

  “But you said I shouldn’t––”

  “Forget what I said before. I’m very much looking forward to introducing you to all of them.”

  Ten minutes later, Daisy was seated comfortably in Freya’s command pod as she gleefully whizzed though the atmosphere.

  “It still has new-ship smell,” Sarah joked.

  And that’s not all, Daisy replied.

  The ship easily handled the re-entry process, making it look like child’s play, which, in essence, it was.

  “This is fun!” she chirped, playing with the flows of the atmosphere as it buffeted her hull.

  Flying low over the bay, they swooped in toward the Ra’az research facility. The surviving team was gathered outside, smoke billowing from the building.

  “Looks like we won,” Daisy said with a sigh of relief.

  Freya landed the stealth ship’s substantial mass almost silently on the soil in front of the confused rebels, who stood with their pulse rifles ready, unsure what was happening.