by Marko Kloos
To his left, Lieutenants Robson and Armer, the communications and weapons specialists, turned their couches slightly behind their consoles to listen to what he was about to say. He knew that Robson was the most junior member of the operations team, but even she was a senior lieutenant like Armer. There were no new midshipmen on this ship, no junior lieutenants, and no enlisted crew members fresh out of tech school. Everyone was at least one rank above where they would be if they were doing the same job on any other ship in the navy, including Dunstan.
“I’ll get right to the point I know you all care about the most. This is not going to be a scrap hunt. We are not going on antipiracy patrol. We’ve been tasked with bigger things. We are going to track and neutralize the people who have been setting the trade routes on fire for the last few months. The people who managed to get a nuke through our planetary defenses. They call themselves Odin’s Ravens, as you know. Brothers and sisters to Odin’s Wolves on Gretia. We’re going to go out and clip their wings.”
There were no exuberant cheers, but Dunstan saw satisfied smiles on the faces of Robson and Armer, and there were at least a few approving whistles coming up the ladderwell from the decks below.
“That’s not to say that we won’t deal with pirates if we happen to come across them. But we’re not going to be out there to play police. We’ll tag them and call in the nearest Alliance guns to deal with them. There’s no place for prisoners on this ship anyway. We have bigger prey to hunt. So let’s get on with it. Commander out.”
He terminated the transmission with another tap on his comms link.
“How was that?” he asked. “Too long, too short, just right?”
“Just right, I think,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “All they need to know and nothing they don’t.”
“I don’t think this crew needs much in the way of motivational speeches,” he said.
“Did you really take a frigate up against a heavy gun cruiser, sir?” Lieutenant Armer asked from the tactical station.
Dunstan nodded and took another sip of coffee before answering.
“With Minotaur, three months ago,” he confirmed. “I’m sure you’ve read the reports.”
“We ran the scenario in the sim a bunch of times for training, with the same parameters. We got turned into scrap four times out of five. The fifth time, we were dead in space and had to take to the pods.”
“They had us in every way. Size, armor, gun barrels, firing rate, caliber. Frigate’s not made for that sort of close-range joust. But their point-defense AI hadn’t seen an update in four years. Ours was up to date. We wiggled around through their gunfire long enough to get a missile into their stern. They decided to break it off at that point and run.”
“If the fight rides on AI, it won’t be a contest,” Lieutenant Robson said. Dunstan looked over at her and grimaced.
“I’m happy you’re confident about that, Lieutenant. We took just two hits from those two-hundred-millimeter rail guns, and they damn near broke my old ship in half. And she was four times the size of this one. That’s a day I don’t care to relive.”
“Have you read much Old Earth military history?” Lieutenant Hunter asked.
“I have,” he replied. “Mandatory reading at the command academy.”
“Back when the navies of Earth were fighting each other in steel hulls on the surface of their oceans, there was an arms race with battleships. They were super expensive. More like national prestige objects than weapons systems. And then one nation designed a ship with so many smart innovations that it made all those other expensive battleships obsolete overnight.”
“Dreadnought,” Dunstan said. “I remember that. But I think she became obsolete in a few years’ time. After everyone else had caught up.”
“Everyone had access to steel and gunpowder back then. And Dreadnought’s superiority was all in her gun layout and her engines. Easy for others to copy,” Hunter said. “This ship isn’t like that. Nobody else can put anything like it into space. If they have the tech and the shipbuilding skills, they don’t have access to enough palladium. If they have the palladium, they don’t have the ability to build a ship around it. We’re the only ones in the system who can do both.”
She nodded at the tactical station and Lieutenant Armer.
“We don’t look like much on paper as far as weapons go. Just a dual thirty-five-millimeter gun mount and a single missile tube with six birds. But that’s not our big gun.”
Lieutenant Robson looked up from her station.
“Rhodia One just sent our undocking clearance. We are go for undocking and pattern entry, fifth in line to depart.”
“Very well.” Dunstan leaned back in his chair and slipped into his harness. “Sound maneuvering stations. Number One, initiate undocking sequence at your discretion.”
Lieutenant Hunter talked herself through the checklist. “All supply lines retracted. The hull is clear. No personnel present in the caution zone. Initiating undocking sequence.”
The docking pad was a giant airlock that turned on its base to rotate the ship outside the station hull. It was a slow turn, just one degree per second, and they sat through the three-minute rotation silently, looking at the screens showing the external view. Dunstan watched as the space dock’s interior gradually slipped from view until the ship stood in darkness in the space between the inner and outer hulls of the station.
“Docking rotation complete. Dock is depressurized. Opening outer dock hatch.”
The outer hull opened in front of them, revealing the busy space around Rhodia One. Dunstan couldn’t see the planet’s surface because the military section of the station faced away from it to prevent easy observation of coming and going traffic from Rhodia’s surface. But this was a station where hundreds of ships arrived and departed every day, and it would be hard to stay unnoticed with an unmarked ship that looked like nothing else in the fleet.
“Once we’re off the boom, it’ll be about twenty minutes before there are some beauty shots of us somewhere on the Mnemosyne,” Dunstan said.
“I would not bet on that, sir,” Lieutenant Hunter said. “Permission to stretch the regs a little?”
Dunstan raised an eyebrow.
“Does that stretch have the potential to endanger my crew or ship?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Permission granted,” he said, his curiosity kindled.
Lieutenant Hunter tapped her comms.
“Engineering, Ops.”
“Ops, go ahead.”
“Would you bring the reactor up to thirty percent, Lieutenant Fields? I need a bit of extra juice for a little technology demonstration in Ops.”
“Affirmative. Going to thirty percent power output.”
Hunter leaned back in her chair and brought up a screen and expanded it in front of her face until it covered a 120-degree arc, matching the view they had from the open docking hatch. Then she projected a control panel and let her fingers fly across the screen, touching data fields and entering instructions. On her screen, dozens of icons were in her field of view, each overlaid on a ship’s position lights in the distance. Next to each icon, there was a short data readout with the hull number and the vital information about the ship. Lieutenant Hunter tapped another control field, and all the icons on the screen went from white to green in a ripple that took two seconds at most.
“Handshake complete,” she said. “AI core utilization is at eleven point one percent.”
She looked over at Dunstan and smiled dryly.
“And now comes the fun part.”
She spent a few seconds paging through data fields, then selected one and flicked it up onto her wide-screen viewer, where it multiplied and seemingly went to every icon on the screen at once.
“And done.”
Lieutenant Hunter picked a ship icon from her screen and moved it over to the situational display on the top bulkhead of the ops center, then expanded it. It showed a ship standing in the opening of the space dock, just like t
hey were right now, but it looked nothing like Hecate. Instead, it was an orbital patrol corvette, with weathered hull paint and blinking running lights.
“I just picked a ship at random out of the ones in our field of view. It’s a merchant. RMV Thornbird. This is what their optical sensors are showing when they look in our direction.”
Dunstan leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me how you just did that.”
“Our AI core connected to their comms system and hacked past their firewall to take control of their ship systems. It’s overriding their sensors to show them what we want them to see, not what’s actually in front of them. Just a beat-up little patrol corvette about to launch for a watch.”
“You hacked into their ship in that short amount of time?”
“Not just theirs,” Hunter said. “Every ship in our field of view right now.” She checked her data readout at the bottom of her viewscreen. “Fifty-two in total.”
“We hacked into the AI cores of fifty-two starships in five seconds,” Dunstan said.
“That’s affirmative, sir. Three point nine seconds, to be precise. Seven of them are warships, and their firewalls are much better than those on the merchants.”
“Good gods.” He looked at the image on the viewscreen. Everything was right about the corvette the AI had placed in their spot for the merchant vessel’s sensors: the lighting, the reflections, the scraped and faded paint scheme. It looked as real as any ship Dunstan had ever seen with his own eyes.
“They’ll figure it out if they have a physical viewport over there and get close enough for eyeballs. But from beyond visual range, we are whoever we say we are.”
“There are fifty-two ships out there who now see that same image when they look at us?”
Lieutenant Hunter shook her head. It was obvious that she enjoyed his reaction.
“They’re all seeing a different ship. The AI created separate entries for each target ship.”
She picked another ship icon off her screen and flicked it over to the situational display, where it resized itself and slid next to the image from RMV Thornbird ’s sensors.
“That’s one of the warships, RNS Halberd. To them, we are the civilian luxury yacht Sun Empress. And if they check their Mnemosyne data, there’ll be a full record. Flight plan, crew manifest, passenger list, recent movement. All generated on the fly by our AI and squeezed into the legit entries.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
“Nobody has, sir. I’ve been working with this hardware since we started the shakedown cruise. And I don’t think I’ve ever taxed the AI core past twenty percent utilization. It’s a paradigm shift.”
She removed the sensor images from the main situational display.
“Do you want us to keep up the masquerade while we depart, sir? We can put them back to normal in half a second. The AI cleans up after itself when I drop the tether. Deletes the fake records and restores everything to the way it was before. Like we were never there.”
Dunstan shook his head.
“Let’s stay secret for a little while longer. At least until we’re out of visual range of the station. Give your AI a bit of a workout.”
“This is child’s play for that core,” she said.
Dunstan shook his head and grinned. “You sure know how to sell this ship, Lieutenant.”
“Once you’re used to what she can do, you start thinking of combat power in different ways, sir.”
Overhead, the zero-g alert sounded, and the docking boom began to lower the ship into launch position. The gravity couches on the ops deck followed the movement precisely, lowering their occupants into an inclined position to prepare for the imminent loss of gravity. Dunstan felt the familiar floating feeling in his stomach as the ship moved away from the station and its gravmag field. Then they were at the end of the docking boom, and the ship rotated around its dorsal axis into launch position.
“Ready to release docking clamps on your mark,” the helmsman said.
“Stand by on thrusters,” Dunstan replied. “Release on my mark. Three—two—one—mark.”
“Release confirmed, standing by on thrusters. We are loose from the station.”
“Lateral thrusters, five-second burst, bring up the main drive and go to maneuvering speed. Take us out to departure lane Delta Three,” Dunstan ordered.
“Aye, sir.”
Hecate moved out into the traffic pattern for her assigned vector. All around them, Rhodia One was as busy as ever, dozens of ships maneuvering into position to dock or depart, thousands of lives and billions of ags’ worth of cargo from all over the system. There were a dozen ever-changing transit lanes between the planets, many hundreds of millions of kilometers, and an almost infinite volume of space between them. Keeping all this commerce safe from pirates and the new insurgency had been an impossible task with the postwar navy. Recommissioning old ships had been a stopgap, and building new ones took a long time.
Maybe we needed that paradigm shift, Dunstan thought as he sipped his coffee and watched the traffic all around them. A new way of thinking, instead of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I suppose we’ll find out if this works better than the old guns-and-missiles approach.
He turned the coffee mug in his hands and looked at the ship’s crest engraved into the stainless steel.
“You know your Old Earth military history, Lieutenant Hunter,” he said. “What about your mythology?”
“I know some, sir. We had to slog through a lot of the classical stuff at university. But my degree is in AI development and mathematics. I’m more the engineer type.”
He held up the cup and turned it so she could see the crest.
“Hecate,” he said. “What did you learn about her?”
Lieutenant Hunter shrugged. “Greek goddess of the night, I think.”
Dunstan nodded.
“She’s the guardian of roads and crossroads. Protector of travelers,” he said. “And the goddess of witchcraft and magic. I’ve been on a lot of ships over the years. But I think this is the first one I’ve served on that has a fitting name.”
CHAPTER 12
SOLVEIG
When Solveig stepped out of the skylift capsule, she saw Anja waiting and at the ready by the executive reception, her ever-present compad cradled in the nook of her arm.
“Good morning, Miss Ragnar,” Anja said and fell into step next to Solveig as she headed for the Alon archway that separated the hallowed halls of the executive floor from the rest of the building. The nearest set of doors slid sideways to admit them.
“Have you recovered from the trip yet?” Solveig asked her assistant.
“Not quite,” Anja admitted. “How about you, Miss Ragnar?”
“It was fun, but I don’t want to see the inside of that ship again for a good while. I just skipped two weeks of running, and this morning it was like I was starting from scratch all over again.”
“The hardest part for me is getting used to the daylight rhythm again,” Anja said. “I wake up too early or go to bed too late for a few days after.” She pulled her compad out from underneath her arm.
“Sorry to pack your schedule on your first day back in the office, but the director would like to have you in this morning at nine for a post-trip update. And there are three more meetings that I tried to space out over the day as much as I could. Legal, finance, and the security debriefing.”
“It’s fine,” Solveig assured her. “I didn’t come into the office to sip tea and stare out of the window all day.”
She crossed the executive floor, returning greetings and respectful nods along the way. On most days, she still felt wildly out of place here. She was the only one with an office up on the executive floor who was under the age of forty, and everyone here who was close to her age was an assistant or someone from corporate security. Nobody had ever said it to her face, and she was sure that none would even hint at it in her presence, but everyone knew that she would not
be up here yet if she weren’t her father’s daughter. She knew she’d have to prove herself every day, until their politeness came from genuine respect and not just from the fear of getting thrown out, and that was not a process that could take place in just a few weeks or months.
Her office felt almost palatial after spending the last few days on the VIP deck of the corporate yacht. When she walked in, the room’s AI recognized her presence and set the temperature and lighting to her preferred levels. Anja stopped at the threshold of the office door the way she always did, as if there was an invisible force field in the door that only Solveig was allowed to step through.
“Your meeting with Director Pettar is scheduled in thirty minutes. Is there anything you need this morning?”
“Just some tea, please,” Solveig said. “A strong one, from Pallas. Or some North Coast blend.”
“I’ll have some brought to you,” Anja replied.
“Thank you, Anja. I’ll call you if I need anything else.”
Anja nodded and walked off to put in the tea order. Asking her assistant to bring her a beverage still made Solveig feel like a bit of a pompous ass, but the one time she had gone to the refreshments lounge herself to fetch her own, it had caused a bit of anxiety among the lounge staff because they thought she’d been overlooked somehow. Nobody up here got their own food or drink, and it had taken a while for her to understand that it wasn’t the status thing she had thought it was in the beginning. The executives were expected to spend their attention and time on the important work, and taking five minutes to go fetch some tea could turn that five-ag mug of leaves and hot water into a five-hundred-ag one in the long run.
She walked over to the window and looked outside. The gouged Alon panel damaged by the shrapnel from the insurgent bomb explosion on the square below had been replaced by the maintenance team in her absence. On Principal Square, the daily demonstrations were in full swing again, but this time with a different tone than before. In the spring, it had been reformers versus loyalists, people ready to move on from the old ways against people who wanted the old order and the traditional institutions back. Now it was almost all anti-Alliance rhetoric. For the first time, Solveig looked at the crowds and felt some sympathy after the treatment she had received by the Rhodian marines, who were exercising power because they could, being harsh because it was fun.
