by Marko Kloos
“Once we are across, the real fun starts,” she added in Private Khanna’s direction. “Two hundred kilometers of countryside. Anyone who wants to do anything to us will see us coming a long way out. And they won’t have to worry about collateral damage.”
The bridge ahead carried several automated traffic lanes across the river that wound its way around Sandvik in a wide arc. In front of the Badger, the civilian transport pods sorted themselves into a single lane and then filed onto the bridge in precise AI-controlled intervals. The driver of the armored vehicle took his place in line for the crossing, then slowed down to force a gap in the interval that would be wide enough for them to cross the bridge at high speed. The traffic AI switched the color of the roadway behind the Badger from green to red, and all the pods on the red portion came to a stop to give the military transport priority. Idina saw that the faces of the passengers who bothered to look up from their work or morning entertainment seemed less than happy when they spotted the reason for the delay.
They rolled up the access ramp and onto the bridge, and the driver accelerated. The bridge was a slender and graceful structure, elegant in its simple functionality like most Gretian architecture. Twenty meters below the road surface, the water of the river glittered and sparkled with reflections from the morning sun. The stream was roughly two hundred meters wide at this point on its way to the far-off ocean, and the embankments on either side were wide strips of grass interspersed with walking paths. On both sides of the river, residential buildings lined the waterfront, their architecture taking advantage of the view with a multitude of terraces and balconies. Behind them, the traffic AI turned the roadway from red back to green, and the civilian traffic started to flow onto the bridge behind the Badger.
“Have you ever seen so much flat water in one—” someone said to Private Khanna just as the front of the Badger heaved up in a violent jolt. For just a moment, it felt to Idina as if they had run up against a solid object on the road, but then the familiar smell of burning propellant spread out in the mission module, and the fire suppressant system removed all doubt when it activated near the front of the vehicle. The Badger nearly flipped on its side, and Idina’s stomach churned with the motion. Then the vehicle dropped back onto its honeycomb wheels and skidded sideways. They came to a stop with a grinding sound from the front of the hull.
I fucking told you so, Idina thought wildly. Gods, I hate it when I am right.
CHAPTER 7
DUNSTAN
Assuming a new command always felt a little like meeting a prospective new partner for the first time, but in the presence of their entire extended family and all their friends. And as with first dates, Dunstan knew that first impressions set the tone when meeting a new crew. Every leader had a different command style, every crew had a different dynamic, and starting off on the wrong foot could introduce a sort of harmonic dissonance that would take weeks or even months to settle.
Hecate was docked in the military section of Rhodia One, and her crew was still on leave for another two days, which gave him the perfect opportunity to get to know the layout of his new ship without having the eyeballs of the entire crew on him. The standard uniform for reporting in was the service dress, the smartly tailored tunic that had all the decorations on it, but Dunstan dressed in shipboard utility dress on the morning of his trip up to Rhodia One. It made him look less like he was trying to impress the crew with his pins and ribbons, and he intended to check out every nook of the ship and maybe get a little dirty in the process.
Her docking location was all the evidence he needed that Hecate wasn’t just a regular corvette. She was moored in one of the station’s space docks, the cavernous interior maintenance sections inside Rhodia One’s hull. Ships that got a space dock spot were either in need of more extensive service than was possible with EVA facilities, or they were sensitive technology the navy wanted to keep out of view as much as possible. The final verification of her special status was the gauntlet of security checks he had to pass just to get close to Space Dock 5.
“Sorry for the delay,” said the officer in charge of the final checkpoint just outside the dock’s main access door when he handed Dunstan’s ID pass back to him. “You are cleared for entry, sir.”
“No problem. I know how the classified business works, Lieutenant.” He took his ID pass and pocketed it. “Do I need a guide? I haven’t been to an air dock up here in a long time.”
“No, sir. There’s only one ship docked in SD5 now. You can’t miss her.”
“I suppose I can’t.”
The armored access door opened to admit Dunstan, and he walked through it and into the vast space beyond. The dock wasn’t a place for anyone with a fear of heights. It was a vault-like compartment that measured sixty meters from the deck to the massive bulkhead above, and the access walkway he stepped out on was more than halfway up. There were three docking spaces alongside the curve of the compartment’s wall, each designed to hold an entire ship upright and aligned with the gravmag field generated at the top of the station. Two of the spaces stood empty, their massive hull clamps retracted and their service catwalks folded up. The third space, directly in front of Dunstan, held a ship unlike any he had ever seen. It was so tall that the blunt nose of the ship almost brushed the ceiling bulkhead.
Hecate was modest in size, a little larger than an escort corvette and only a third the size of his old frigate, but standing in a cavernous air-filled room with her and seeing the hull standing on end right in front of him put the scale of even a small warship into perspective. All spaceships had the same basic shape dictated by physics—a blunt cylinder with a heavily shielded pointy or chisel-shaped top and a massive drive cone at the bottom. This one didn’t quite break the mold, but it managed to look more like a sinister piece of munition than a crewed vessel. The hull had thick protrusions on four sides that looked vaguely like guidance fins for a missile, but they were irregular in length and width, so they gave the ship a strangely asymmetric appearance. The coating on the exterior armor plating was so nonreflective that it seemed to swallow the light from the many overhead lamp arrays.
As Dunstan walked toward the ship on the metal service catwalk, he tried to spot hull markings, but failed to find any. A normal warship hull had the pennant number painted onto the armor, along with dozens or even hundreds of various smaller labels and service directives: NO STEP, ACCESS PANEL, DANGER: CLASS IV RADIATION EMITTER. The hull of Hecate was devoid of any such visual clutter. When he was in front of the ship’s main airlock, he looked at the coating on the hull. Dunstan reached out and put the palm of his hand on it. It felt soft and slightly warm, and he pushed against it to find that it was slightly yielding to the pressure of his touch. The sensation was not unlike touching a living thing. He withdrew his hand and walked into the airlock.
Inside, Hecate was so obviously new and pristine that it felt slightly disorienting. He had never served on a brand-new ship. His newest unit had been RNS P-7501, the orbital patrol ship that was his first command assignment, and she had already been in service for half a decade when he took her over. On Hecate, every surface looked like the titanium dioxide paint had just dried on it yesterday. The interior of the ship even smelled new to Dunstan, a distinctive blend of air from new filtration systems and deck liners that were still outgassing the residue molecules from the manufacturing process.
He brought up a projection of the ship’s deck layout and let it float slightly to the left of his field of view so he could glance at it and use it as a guide. With the crew gone, the ship was peacefully quiet. Even the ever-present hum of air exchangers and powered-up electronic equipment was far more subdued than he was used to from his old frigate. He looked around in the airlock deck. The walls were crammed with equipment lockers and control-panel screens. Minotaur had two main ladderwells to traverse the ship from top to bottom; Hecate only had one, and it was narrower than the ones he was used to.
Dunstan climbed up the ladder to the next deck. I
t was the ship’s command deck, the section that would have been called the Action Information Center on a bigger warship. Here, the schematics labeled it the CONTROL DECK. He rarely stepped into a ship’s nerve center without someone else present, and seeing the compartment devoid of personnel felt a little eerie. Hecate’s control deck was much smaller than Minotaur’s had been. On the old frigate, the helm station was on a catwalk-like half deck above the AIC. Here, it was integrated into the control deck, and it was a single station tucked into a nook by the compartment wall instead of a double station in the middle of the deck. All the distances and scales in this ship seemed half the ones he was used to from other ships. Space was always at a premium in a warship, but this one felt far more confining and cramped than any other he had ever seen.
Guess I’ll get to know my new crew really well, he thought.
Dunstan consulted the schematic from his comtab. There were only two more decks above the control room, the officer berthing deck and a compartment labeled AI CORE CONTROL. He went back to the ladder and resumed his climb. The berthing deck was the usual arrangement of sleeping compartment modules, ten cubic meters of private space per segment, each only slightly bigger than a capsule bed in a transit hotel. He climbed past the berthing deck without pausing. The hatch to the next compartment was locked, and the access pad next to the latch was blinking red, indicating a security protocol was in effect. He used his biometric signature to unlock it. The status field changed from red to green, and the hatch unlocked with the authoritative click of retracting titanium bolts.
A waft of cool air greeted Dunstan as he climbed up into the top compartment and stepped off the ladder. When he turned around, there was someone in the middle of the compartment, and the unexpected sight startled him a little. It was a woman in a shipboard flight suit, with the two stripes of a senior lieutenant on her shoulder sleeves. She looked over at him and straightened up, and the screen projection she had been looking at disappeared at once.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt you, Lieutenant,” he said. “I didn’t realize someone was already back on the ship.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Just running a stress test on this beast before we go live again.”
“And how is it going?”
She looked around the compartment and ran a hand through her hair.
“This ship has some wrinkles to iron out. But the AI core isn’t one of them. I’ve never seen anything like it. Haven’t had the slightest bit of trouble since we left for the shakedown cruise.”
She wiped her hand on her overalls and offered it.
“I’m guessing you’re the new CO. I’m your first officer, Bryn Hunter. And also the information warfare officer.”
He shook her hand. Her grip was firm and purposeful. There was a faint but recognizable accent to her speech, marking her as a nonnative speaker of Rhodia despite her perfect diction.
“Dunstan Park,” he said. “I’ve taken over from Commander Stone.” He looked around at the various control consoles and the unfamiliar equipment in the compartment. “You’re the expert. Give me the basics on this kit. I know it’s a big deal. The admiralty gave me the big picture. But I’m a space warfare guy, not an AI specialist.”
If she thought he was trying to gauge her expertise, she seemed happy at the opportunity to demonstrate it. She brought up a screen and flicked through a few data pages until it showed a diagram of the ship, with the AI components highlighted. A stern red warning flashed across the top of the projection: OPSEC LEVEL 1—AUTHORIZED COMMAND PERSONNEL EYES ONLY.
“I’d try to compare it to another ship, but like I said, there’s really nothing like it. Four data cores with one thousand independent segments each. Forty-five tons per core. And every single digital pathway in this ship also runs on palladium, not just the emergency systems.”
“Layman’s terms, Lieutenant,” Dunstan said. “I’m afraid that AI and network theory wasn’t my strongest suit at the academy.” He hoped she thought he was playing dumb just to keep checking how much she knew about her business, but the reality was that he really didn’t know more than the academy basics about the magic and alchemy that was modern artificial intelligence.
“Right,” she said after a moment of consideration. “I guess I will compare it to another ship after all. What was your last command, sir?”
“RNS Minotaur,” he replied. “Olympus-class frigate.”
“Olympus class,” she repeated. “Not too many of those left around. Fourth-generation data cores, I think, with supercooled nonemergency trunks.”
“That sounds familiar,” Dunstan said even though it didn’t. He had her accent figured out, but he wanted her to keep talking just to be absolutely positive.
She brought up a subscreen and queried for the data processing values of his old ship. Dunstan noticed that every bit of information popped onto the screen instantly, as if it had been waiting for the mere touch of her fingertips to reveal itself.
“All right. If an Olympus-class AI core is the baseline at a value of one hundred, this ship is a four point six million. And that’s per core. We have four of them, and they can run in parallel.”
Dunstan let out a low whistle.
“I may not know much about AI cores, but I understand ‘forty-six thousand times better.’”
“She has more processing power than all the rest of the fleet put together. I still can’t believe all the things this ship can do.”
He smiled at the obvious excitement on her face.
“I’m old-school, Lieutenant. I like ships with lots of ordnance in the launch tubes, and lots of gun barrels to point at the enemy. I know that faster AI gives our point defenses an edge. I don’t know what it’s going to buy us when we stare down a heavy gun cruiser that’s ten times our mass. But I’d like to think I’m teachable.”
“The point defenses are amazing,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “But if we use this boat right, we won’t need them. We can break encryption on a missile’s AI while it’s still in the launch tube. We can make it inert. Or take it over as soon as it launches and turn it against the launching platform. You don’t need a lot of ordnance in the launch tubes if you can borrow theirs.”
“If it all works as promised,” Dunstan replied. “Under combat conditions.”
Lieutenant Hunter shrugged and slipped her hands into the side pockets of her overalls.
“That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “That’s what our deployment orders say. Tell me more about the wrinkles that still need to be ironed out. How about you give me the bow-to-stern tour and point them out along the way? Unless you’re tied up right now, of course.”
“Nothing that can’t wait an hour or two,” she said. “Follow me, sir.”
They went through the ship from top to bottom, stopping in every compartment so Lieutenant Hunter could list the features and tell him the little bumps and deficiencies she had identified. Hecate had ten decks for a crew of five officers and twenty-three enlisted personnel. The general layout was like every other ship he’d ever served on, dictated by the physics and the technologies involved. The airlock deck was always the equator of the ship, with the command and executive decks above the airlock and the crew and technical decks below. The engineering and propulsion deck was always at the bottom of the ship because it sat closest to the radiation shielding for the fusion reactor and the ship’s drive section. There was little freedom for designers to mix up what was in between the nose cone and the drive cone. The crew berth decks were usually split above and beyond the medical deck, where the ship’s sanitary facility was located, or the mess deck where everyone ate, to limit traffic jams in the narrow confines of the ship and allow for the division of crew into rest and watch cycles.
“Crew deck A,” Lieutenant Hunter said when they were climbing past it on the way down. “That’s the choice one. Sits right between the mess and medical, so it’s only one hop to either. Crew deck B is below medical, and they
have to climb up three decks to get to the mess. But they’re close to engineering, so that’s where we put the propulsion and reactor crew.”
“What’s the watch cycle?” he asked.
“Two watch crews. Six hours on, six hours off. They pulled most of the shakedown crew from recon and long-range escort ships, so they’re used to the six-hour cycle. Got some from bigger ships, and they needed some time to adjust. But it’s all smooth cruising now.”
“Glad to hear it. I may need a little time to adjust myself. We ran triple eights on Minotaur.”
“I’d much rather do those,” she said. “I tried to figure out how to split the crew that way in the beginning. But we don’t have the numbers or the facilities for triple eights. This ship’s a weird size. Just small enough to lack the amenities of the bigger ships. Just big enough to lose the advantages of the smaller boats.”
They stopped on the medical deck, which held three treatment stations and the sanitary capsules where the crew could take showers. Just like on the other decks, everything was designed in the most efficient way he’d ever seen when it came to maximizing the use of available space, without a cubic centimeter of volume wasted on decoration or frivolities. It was like someone had built the prototype of the ship, then gone through the entire hull deck by deck to mark up spots where weight could be shaved off or storage space added.
Below the medical deck, there was another crew berth deck, rows of individual bunk capsules stacked on top of each other like the honeycomb cells in a beehive. The officers on the ship got actual cabins, small as they were, but the same deck space that was divided into six private spaces on the officer berth deck had to accommodate twelve crew bunks down here. Being an enlisted crew member on a Rhodian Navy ship was not a job for anyone who put a premium on privacy, and serving on a small vessel also filtered out anyone with claustrophobic tendencies. On deployment, everyone lived and worked in close quarters, and it took a very resilient personality to cope with the hardships of this kind of duty.
