Showtime at last.
Concorde moved. The ship was a Corvette class, and thus fairly small, although her gun turrets were very obvious. She was the most lethal ship of her class ever built though. For this task, she was enough.
Jane opened a channel.
"This is Admiral Jane of the Kingdom of Hunter's Run. You are the last. Do you have any last words for posterity?"
Silence.
"Come now. I know you're there. You can hide within that asteroid all you want, but there is but one way out, and it is through me."
Still silence.
"I'm serious about you being the last. The Brotherhood is at an end. Every member except you are dead. Everywhere."
"We will kill you."
"Not today, and not ever. Is that your final word? A threat you can't make good on?"
"We have a Battleship. You have a tiny thing. Prepare to die human."
"As I said, not today, and not ever. I can't say it's been a pleasure hunting you down, but it's been necessary. Without you, this part of the galaxy will be a lot better place to live in."
Concorde was now stationary, just inside torpedo range of a mid-sized asteroid. Doors opened. The front end of a ship could be seen coming out.
Jane closed the channel. She had nothing else to say to them.
She pressed a button, and a pre-loaded firing pattern of Missiles began to launch.
She checked her alignment, and began firing torpedoes.
The Battleship hadn't even passed out through the doors, before torpedoes tore through the front hull, and continued to rip through the length of the ship. Jane kept firing.
It took a half hour, but when she ceased firing, the entire asteroid had been reduced to chunks no bigger than a fighter. In amongst the dirt were the smashed walls and furnishings of a sizable base. Jane sent out the salvage droids, and they collected the bio matter. She confirmed several of the bodies were Brotherhood. It was just routine, part of documenting the action, and confirming its success.
The feeds and records went back along the coms network.
In the council chamber, Jane once again stopped talking, cocking her head slightly. The chamber went silent.
"I'd like to thank everyone for their patience. It's been a marathon session, one you didn’t know was coming, and I'm pleased to be able to say it's come to an end."
She looked around the room, showing them her serious face.
"The Brotherhood are ended."
Twenty
Cosmos down jumped into a completely unknown system. Walsh breathed out in relief. The blind jumps were always the most stressful.
It wasn’t her first by any means. She was a Behemoth class Command Carrier, belonging to Jane's Apricot Mapping Service, of which Walsh was CEO and Admiral. Not really an Admiral, but he was in command, and he sat the center seat. Cosmos made the Relentless class Dreadnaughts look small. She was even bigger than Intrepid, the Behemoth class fleet Carrier, which previously had been the largest human made ship.
Around the front of the Bridge sat Sagan, Druyan, Soter, and Tyson. Each was the avatar for a Drone Exploration Cruiser, docked beneath Cosmos. Between the five of them, six Walsh mentally corrected, since his wife Darlene was aboard as well, they'd completely explored all of sector ten. The resulting windfall of Gals from the sale of the new systems and resources found, had made the six of them very rich, and added a significant amount to the Kingdom's coffers.
Both he and Darlene were both Barons of the Royal Court now as well, for services to the realm.
The four sitting in front of him had done good work, and he was as proud of them as if they were his kids. In a way they were, since the guys were his clones, and Druyan was Darlene's.
His real kids still didn't know what had happened to him and Darlene, and that was one conversation neither of them were looking forward to. But they were independent, and the time since the memory wipe hadn't made any real difference. They knew what the old man did, and had accepted it a long time ago, even if they didn’t remember most of it. They'd managed a rapid visit with both as they passed through HR3 on their way to the Federation end of space. Both kids were now living on the ground, in the new city springing up there.
The timing of things had worked out really well for him. Seasprite discovering the lemur mediators had resulted in his being allowed back into Federation space just as he'd finished exploring sector ten fully. They'd met a lot of the species in the sector now, including spending some time with Ganshura's people.
Walsh had always had the impression they'd missed something in human space. It had been searched hurriedly, by Corvettes, and the first of the Drone Cruisers, and Walsh had an itch he couldn’t scratch. It became worse and worse as they re-searched all the systems recently cleared of purple plant, now being colonized, and found nothing new.
Their arrival in Gaia had made the media bigtime, and resulted in the local military getting the jitters. They'd been shadowed closely the whole time they were there, and Walsh had made a point of limiting how many drones he dispatched to those areas of a system not normally covered by exploration teams. Of course, this was why the AMS has been started up, since jump points were sometimes in very non-standard positions.
One ship was hard pressed to cover an entire system's outer extremities, and so blanketing with drones had proved to be much more reliable. The new and improved drones even looked like drones now. The originals had been light fighters, their cockpits removed, and additional armament fitted. They looked like war machines. The new ones didn’t. They still had all the armament, but unless someone started firing at them, you couldn’t tell to look at them.
Jane's influence of course. Having started off with a war with the owls, she'd decided it was best to keep a low profile while exploring, and while Cosmos was being built, she'd completely redesigned the drones, so civilian governments wouldn’t have a fit when they saw so much firepower flying through their systems.
And firepower Walsh had. Cosmos had the armament of two Dreadnaughts, with the appearance of being a big Battleship. The Explorer Cruisers had more firepower than the Pocket Battleships did, although with smaller main guns.
But it was the drones which turned this small fleet into a real threat. Cosmos carried two thousand of them, and each Cruiser carried another five hundred. Each drone was effectively a heavy fighter with six heavy guns, a twenty shot anti-fighter missile launcher each, and a fifty shot torpedo launcher. And since they didn’t have life support, they had a range which could take them out beyond the Oort clouds and back.
Collectively, Walsh had the firepower to reduce the entire sector back to the Stone Age.
And no-one knew about it except the AI's.
All the same, a ship so large made any military commander nervous.
Much to his disappointment, they found nothing in Gaia. The jump point which once connected this galaxy to the Earth galaxy was truly gone. And there were no others connecting around the rim.
As a PR gift, he had his drones completely catalogue the asteroid fields in G01, sending the report to Jane, to present to the Federation council by her Ambassador Meg Henman avatar. Since they'd been mining it in a hit and miss fashion, this was of enormous value to them, and scored points for the Kingdom in the eyes of many.
In the Japanese system, formally called G006, Walsh finally found what he expected to find. A new jump point. It had made no sense to him how the galaxy extended out to Gaia, but a bit further along the rim, there seemed to be a big chunk missing. He'd looked for a way in there from not-dog space, and also from much further around the rim where sector ten bordered sector eleven, and found nothing. Yet he knew there were stars there.
In the new system, they found a planet capable of supporting several billion people. As soon as she had the survey results, Jane had taken the Japanese ambassador aside, and quietly sold them the system. Since Nippon had only a planet needing a decade of terraforming, the Japanese had delightedly paid a premium to obt
ain it before anyone else knew about it. They also paid a deposit on any system found beyond it, refundable if no jump points were found.
It turned out the Japanese had chosen G006 precisely because it was believed there must be another jump point there, and they'd turned down moving to one of the new systems, so when the jump point was found, no-one could deny them the claim of what lay beyond. They hadn't been able to find it themselves, and had been the most vocal in council for letting the AMS back into Federation space.
Now it had paid off for them, and their stations were already on the move. No-one yet in Gaia knew anything about this.
Cosmos was now five systems beyond, having found jump points zigzagging along the edge of the rim, in one long wonky line. Several of them had habitable planets, and Jane was deep in negotiations with the Japanese, who now wanted to set up their own arm of space, as they now knew they'd once had. Like other groups, they'd eventually found written and printed records, which showed a lot of their history, and they were busily recreating as much of what they'd once had as they could.
Jane was all for helping them.
And besides, her cut of the AMS discoveries were allowing her to wage a war against terrorism, without worrying about the price tag.
Twenty One
Cosmos launched a comnavsat for this side of the jump point, and tested their coms through it.
"Brotherhood are done," said Darlene, over ship coms.
"About time," answered Walsh. "Did you figure out where all the intel came from?"
"No. Jane has never let on what her sources were."
"I know she said it was all gathered from four sectors," said Carl Sagan, "but I never did buy that. It was way too specific."
"Agreed," said Anne Druyan. "I guess she'll tell us when the time is right."
"Or never," joked Steve Soter.
"There will be a good reason," said Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Walsh smiled to himself. Cosmos had been the perfect name for an explorer ship, and while so immensely out of date, when he'd found the square screen and flat screen original series in the Hunter library, he'd found it fascinating what was known and surmised six hundred years earlier. He'd immediately known if Carl Sagan had been picked up and taken to the future, he'd be out here doing what Walsh enjoyed doing most. Exploration for the sheer love of space.
He named his subordinate ships for the four people most responsible for those series, and was delighted when their avatars had chosen to emulate how they looked. It wasn’t a necessity, but as soon as they met other AI's who'd done the same, they'd had no hesitation.
Walsh brought his mind back to now.
"Nothing on sensors," he said. "We'll continue on as usual. Prepare to drop in about two hours."
The others acknowledged.
Over the months, they'd developed a routine. Dock for jumping into a new area. Continue straight in for several hours, developing a map of the outer system, including the plane it existed in. The Cruisers would drop, and two would proceed to the likely place around each side of the system. The easy to find jump points were in the four cardinal directions, usually one on the opposite side of where they jumped in, and ninety degrees around. Secondary positions were somewhere between them, so they covered the likely positions first, moving around the extreme edge of the system.
Cosmos would continue inward, looking for signs of life in the system itself, and mapping it as she went. If a habitable planet was found, drones and comnavsats were deployed to do a major survey. While they hadn't found one yet, if they found a planet with intelligent life on it, the plan was to covertly survey it, and determine if contact should be made or not.
In systems not containing a higher species, Cosmos would launch all her drones, programmed to explore everything from the center of the system outwards, mapping and surveying as they went, ultimately looking for jump points in very non-standard places.
When jump points were found, two of the Cruisers would go through, and begin to survey the next system the same way. Once Cosmos had finished its work, and a system rarely took more than twelve hours, decisions would be made on which way they concentrated on next.
So far since leaving Nippon, the systems had only had the single jump point in fairly standard positions, so they'd dock again for the next jump.
Two hours later, just as Walsh was about to give the drop order, they discovered a habitable planet on the sensors. Not only habitable, but inhabited, and sending out old style radio signals.
Darlene appeared on the bridge, and took her place at a console specifically set up for her. She began throwing up screens.
"They have something like old style square screen," she said, "as well audio only. Seems their tech level is around mid to late nineteen hundred Earth level."
"That’s way behind the rest of this galaxy," said Steve.
"Possibly because they’ve been cut off from it," said Neil.
"Any signs of space travel?" asked Walsh.
"Basic satellites by the look of it," said Darlene.
"How can you tell at this range?" asked Ann.
Darlene pointed to a screen where a rocket was boosting up from the ground. It was quickly followed by a graphic of the nose deploying a very basic satellite.
"Oh," continued Ann. "Will they detect us as we get nearer?"
"Hard to know," said Walsh. "Depends on if they think there's life anywhere else and are actively looking for it or not."
"What's the next step?" asked Carl.
"We tell Jane," said Walsh, "and she decides if she wants to join us for the first contact decision. Darlene, better fire up the cloning alcove, and send her the detection package."
"I did the alcove already. Email will be off short… Hang on. What the hell is that?"
"What is what?" asked her husband, knowing she was insatiable about anything different.
"There's another signal under all the others."
"What sort of…"
He stopped.
They all froze.
"What the fuck?" yelled Walsh.
It felt like a wave of static was rushing through his ship. He started losing touch with parts of it, which began to increase exponentially.
Darlene staggered away from her console, lightning seeming to dance up her arms. She fell to the deck, screaming.
Ann did the same. One by one they simply stopped moving.
Walsh couldn’t believe what was happening.
"NO!" he yelled.
Everything went black.
Twenty Two
Jane was in a meeting with the Japanese ambassador, on the recently completed Gaia Council Station.
As the official ambassador to the Human Federation from the Kingdom, Meg Henman rated a significant suite to live in, as well as having her own well-appointed embassy office.
Since the Japanese were negotiating with her for access to the new systems the AMS had found, the meeting was in her own office. It had already been a long session.
An email icon dropped into her visual HUD, flashing a rapid red.
"Excuse me, ambassador. An urgent matter has come up. Can we continue this tomorrow?"
"I hope nothing is wrong?"
"It's possible. But nothing to concern you I'm sure. I'll have my assistant reschedule as soon as I can."
The old diplomat stood, bowed, and headed for the door.
Jane waited for him to leave, and threw the email to a wall screen.
It was from Darlene, and was headed with one word.
Help.
She opened it, and began to read. They'd found an inhabited planet at last, one unknown to the rest of the galaxy, and …
The message stopped.
Jane wondered why the help header, and the urgent icon. The email had a data dump on it. She opened this, and started popping up screens.
Radio? Wow, that was really backward.
Hang on, there was something else here. She pulled up an attachment list, and found something different at the bo
ttom. It wasn’t something she'd ever seen before.
Becoming worried now, she isolated the file, and ran diagnostics on it.
Suddenly, she deleted it, and the email, before purging her inbox. She did the same with the embassy email receiver, and pulsed a command along the line of comnavsats between her and Cosmos, ordering each to completely purge all email, and reinitialize their mail systems with completely new files.
When the one closest to Cosmos was back up, she sent an email to Cosmos asking for clarification of what had happened.
She waited for twice the time it should have taken to get a reply.
Nothing.
Now feeling really worried, she sent a probe ping along the network, looking to determine if coms was active on the ship or not. No response. She requested a navmap from the closest comnavsat, and threw it up on the wall.
Cosmos was still there, on the outer edge of what the comnavsat could see, seeming to still be heading in-system. But the ship was dark. There was no id beacon, no information about her, nothing at all to suggest what had happened. Her speed was simply ballistic.
In only minutes now, the ship would pass out of range.
She sent frantic probes now, trying to find anything active on any of the five ships. When she found nothing at all, she searched for any of the smaller ships docked in them. Nothing.
No, wait. The captain's gig was powered down in the secondary hanger of Cosmos, since Walsh never used it. Its coms array was in standby mode. She pulsed it to turn on only for her. It pinged readiness.
Jane sent her consciousness down the network, and streamed herself into the gig's main computer. It accepted her, and she cast around for anything she could use. The only thing she could find was a cleaner bot, powered down. She powered it up, and transferred a limited amount of herself to its computer, and she proceeded to the airlock.
Her ship self, cycled her bot self through the airlock, and she moved to the hanger deck doors. They were open, and she continued on towards the nearest armoury.
A.I. Destiny 6 Leader Jane Page 7
