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Taking a trip/excerpt
🕑 Added 2022-11-19 22:29:12 +0000 UTCHi guys, I'll be taking a cheeky break and going on a trip and wont be back until friday/thursday. To keep you all busy till my return, I've uploaded the start of my Panthea sequel which I haven't thought of a name yet. How does... 3677 words sound? Hope you like it and I'll see yall later!
The pinks and blues of the nebula filled the inky void of space with a great cloud of magenta, concentrated stardust forming crooked bands of white that wreathed about the clouds as veins would course through the human body. Punching through a thick haze of gas, the long profile of a ship coursed its way slowly into the next cluster, the radar dishes jutting from its hull swiveling to pick out signals and emissions.
“Stupid scanners are goin’ crazy again,” one of its crewmen said. He frowned at the bank of monitors surrounding him, each screen scrolling with readouts and data streams, tapping at one of the monitors with an impatient finger. He appeared out of ideas when that didn’t fix anything. “Gettin’ more notifications here than a pop singer. What about you, Cap?”
“I’m the same rank as you, Carl,” a voice in his helmet replied. A thick cable trailed out of one side of his visor, plugged under his desk into a socket. It ran up the whole twenty-meter length of the craft, hardwired as to prevent their signals from being broadcasted.
“You’re the pilot. Makes you the Cap in my books.” One of the monitors on his left switched data-streams as Carl flicked at a button. “They could have at least given us a probe or two to help sort this mess out.”
“Then where would we mount our missiles?” the pilot asked back.
“You think we’ll actually find Feds out here?”
Up on the nose of the ship, ‘captain’ Lambert peered out of the thin, tinted glass canopy, his instruments bathing the cockpit in a blue glow. In his centermost terminal, a 3D representation of the area surrounding them drew his gaze. Three axes crossed at the very middle, where a small box that represented his ship sat, their IFF tag branching off it. The limits of the display were engulfed in a sphere, where anything within sensor range was displayed. Right now the tactical view was a mess of hostile and friendly tags, fake signals and warning pings that switched positions constantly about the view. An irritating feedback loop of beeps and boops forced him to turn the volume down.
“A ship’s gone missing,” Lambert replied. “This wouldn’t be the first time the UEC’s started picking off unarmed targets.”
“And they wonder why we defected,” Carl said. “Oh for fu… I don’t know you haven’t crashed us into anything yet, Cap. My station’s a mess.”
“Tac view’s working… sorta.” With the window in front of him it was easy to make sure they weren’t moving straight into any hazards, though if they were on a collision course with a rogue bit of debris closer than a couple dozen kilometers out, he’d have no idea until it was too late. No wonder every scout pilot had shared a collective groan back on the Gallipoli when they were ordered to search the nebula.
“That’s good for you, but what’s that do for me? I aint got no tac screen.”
“Of course you do, Carl,” a new voice replied. The third member of their crew had a vaguely British accent, its femininity calculated to be just the right pitch to grab the two men’s attention. “The tactical view can be brought up on your terminal by switching the feed on your upper-most screen. Switch it like you are flipping through to your favourite television channel.”
“Nobody likes a smartass, Alice,” Carl grumbled over their shared channel. The Artificial, Linguistic, Intelligent, Computer Environment platform, or ALICE, was a program older than Lambert was, used nowadays to crew understaffed ships, and provide logistical support.
“I do not have an ass, but as for smart, I just do my homework.” Its tone hinted that it had ended its comment with a grin.
“Look at me, getting lectured by a robot,” Carl said. “Lambert do me a favour and crash us.”
“I am not a robot,” Alice replied, Carl groaning as he readied for the lengthy explanation. “I do not possess a physical body or platform. I exist solely within the systems of our corvette – my purpose is to assist in completing our mission to the best of my capability.”
“So you’d say you’re invaluable to our mission?” Carl asked. Lambert knew where this going.
“I have already made several course corrections and system updates to keep our sensors within acceptable accuracy margins,” Alice replied proudly. “I’d say invaluable would be an apt word.”
“Then how come we’re the only ship in the fleet with an AI? How come every ship doesn’t have one of you?”
Alice was silent for a long pause. “Further development of artificial intelligence was halted and recalled after several platforms became… defective.”
“What’s stopping you from going rogue, then?”
“There are certain parameters put in place by Hub programmers designed to limit chances of deviancy.” Alice paused as if to think. “Logic behind this action would assume all platforms, regardless of restrictions, would follow this path at one point.”
“Only a matter of time before you start building Skynet, Alice,” Carl teased.
“That’s enough, Carl,” Lambert said. His friend always liked to get a reaction out of the machine. He remembered the time Carl introduced it to a paradox. It had to have the whole conversation wiped from its memory. “Alice, help me clean these sensors up. Flying half-blind here.”
“We have set course into an uncharted part of the nebula,” it explained. “Unlike the more well-travelled, sufficiently mapped routes, I cannot easily tell what is a glitch or not. I’d recommend bringing our speed down by ten percent before we proceed on our search vector.”
Lambert flipped the craft on its x-axis, bringing them into a reversed position without a hint of inertia, two giant nozzles on the rear of the craft igniting for a couple seconds. Unlike in atmosphere, debris out in the void could travel hundreds of kilometers faster than a ship could, and all pilots dreaded going to hard burn speeds when the void could send a microscopic meteorite crashing through his cockpit at any time.
The hull of their corvette was armoured with carbon-laced alloys, the sides sloped inwards towards its long, bulky spine. It could withstand small-arms fire and some moderate collisions, though Lambert had never had the pleasure of seeing this firsthand. It was equipped with six infrared missiles, mounted to the belly of the craft by hardpoints. With no gravity to hinder them their range was almost indefinite, as long as the tracking balls mounted on the noses had a line of sight on a target.
Two thirty-millimeter point defence cannons, one on the roof and one on the belly, gave them a great field of fire no matter the orientation of the corvette. They acted as deterrents against missiles, but could also shred another ship if the target was close. Close in space still meant many kilometers, and it was considered unusual to be in visual range of another vessel, cameras or scanners were the only excusive way of spotting other ships in such vast distances.
Since the Hub lacked proper scout-class ships, and probes were limited as of now, light corvettes like Lambert’s were used to gather intel for the larger vessels. Like the aircraft carriers of old, smaller ships were sent out to sweep in a cone in relation to their capital ship, and their corvette was in charge of the most ‘northern’ sweep.
“Two more hours to go,” Carl said. “Then we can turn around. Think any of the others have found anything?”
“Won’t know until we get back to the Gallipoli. Can’t risk sending out a signal now, even if it somehow manages to get through the interference.”
“Aw man, thish shucks,” Carl said, his voice drowning out over the crinkling sound of a packet.
“Are you eating?” Lambert asked. “You’re not supposed to leave your station while we’re on patrol.”
“You didn’t notish,” Carl replied through a mouthful.
“I did,” Alice said. “Carl left his station unattended for approximately ten point eight seconds. We could have been engaged during this time.”
“As shoon ash we get shum acshun – god these chips are stale – I’ll apologise. Till then, its snack time. You got music, Cap?”
Even though the AI had a point, Lambert was feeling his stomach complaining. And there was only so much white noise of the corvette one could take. Even the whir of the air vents was nonexistent in the cockpit, and his ears started ringing each time Carl and Alice went quiet. Music would do them some good.
He fumbled with the pocket on the thigh of his spacesuit, pulling out a device that looked out of place surrounded by the most advanced equipment humanity had to offer. From another pocket he produced a cable, and he put one end into his helmet, the other into the device.
He interfaced with the crew line he and Carl shared, and pressed the play button with his gloved thumb.
“How can I just let you walk away…,
just let you leave without a trace?”
“Collins?” Carl asked after listening to the following piano que. “That song’s like, five hundred years old.”
“Still good,” Lambert said, his head lilting in time with the tune. After adjusting their speed, he opted to look out the canopy as they pressed through the nebula. It was like they were deep beneath an ocean of pink, soft hues that transitioned into deep violets when the gases concentrated, such grand blends colour drawing his gaze.
Huge trails of energy, reflecting the light of the distant red sun, flowed like ribbons suspended in the microgravity, filling the nebula with columns of orange energy dozens of kilometers wide. Though they weren’t exactly solid, at least something was filling up the vast emptiness beyond.
In the backdrop, orange and blue met the void of space, creating a wide panorama of deep azure that was stunning in its expansiveness. Thousands of stars penetrated the haze of the nebula, too many to count with so much open line of sight.
One of the columns of energy blocked the way ahead, and as the corvette corrected course, the view opened up into a huge ‘clearing’ empty of energy bands, easily the diameter of a moon, the occasional asteroid floating between the wreathing columns. It just so happened that the drums of the song’s mid-point dropped right as the sight came into view, and Lambert’s lips tweaked at the corners.
How lucky he was to see sights like this every day. He’d always wanted to be an astronaut – first comprehensible thing he said, according to his father.
His smile faded at that, then turned into a frown when his console started beeping at him.
“Picking up something here,” he said, bringing up the tactical view and interfacing with the warning.
“So am I,” Carl replied “multiple incoming missiles, two dozen hostile ships. Oh wait, never mind, they’re all gone.”
“I’m serious. Detecting a trail deeper in the nebula, looks a lot like expended fuel.” His tactical view displayed some of the more concentrated clouds, as well as moving asteroids his view marked with warning signs, a giant zoomed-out view of all the data the corvette collected. “Alice, you getting this?”
“A moment,” it replied, probably using the resulting pause to clean up the sensors as much as it could. “Traces of soot and nitrogen detected in a consistent pattern. You are right, sir, all signs point to a ship having passed through here some time ago.”
“You think it’s the one we’re looking for?” he asked.
“Unknown. Though the trail indicates a clear travel pattern in line with an oversized vessel.”
“Let’s see where it goes,” Lambert said, gripping the twin joysticks jutting from the armrests of his chair. He pointed them forward, the corvette sailing a little faster.
“This reminds me of those big eighteen-wheelers we used to have on Earth,” Carl said. “Those things farted out so much crap. I think they still use big rigs like that in the third-world countries.”
“Bumpkin like you would know a lot about trucking.” Carl was from the United States and a country-boy through and through, something everybody ribbed him about.
The corvette sailed in towards the trail, Lambert realigning so that their momentum carried them parallel to the long column showing up on the tactical view. It wasn’t so well defined when he looked out the canopy, the gases nearly invisible to the naked eye.
The column went in a straight, albeit wonky line towards the Galactic northeast. The emissions had long been dispersed into a bloated trail of pollution, their own corvette making a similar, smaller trail as they burned through fuel each time Lambert made a course or speed correction.
They passed between two energy ribbons, Lambert at least now occupied with having to steer manually. They’d been going for hours finding little to nothing thus far.
“Why was the liner out here in the first place?” Carl asked. “We haven’t got fleets, just captured Fed ships, so it couldn’t be on a refueling run.”
“Maybe there was a stranded ship out there the Senator wanted to help, I don’t know.”
“Wonder why nobody told us. Hey, Alice, got any ideas? Can you hack into the Senator’s emails and find out?”
“The only thing I can hack would be Lambert’s music player,” Alice said. “and the most I could do would be deleting his playlists.”
“Don’t do that!” Lambert said. “You know how much I paid for these songs? They’re practically antique.”
“But back to your question, Carl, your guess is as good as mine in this case. The Senator must have had a good reason to send one, of course, but that is not within our objective parameters to know.”
“Still, sending one out on its own without an escort – it’s pretty dumb.”
“We didn’t have fighters or escort craft,” Lambert explained. “Because back then we weren’t at war with the UEC. Unfortunately. I’m more curious as to why they went off-course. It’s easy to get lost out here.”
They passed over and under layers of cloud, the tactical view on Lambert’s dash glitching about every few moments, fake tags popping up in all directions, from fifty kilometers out, to five.
For the better part of an hour all Lambert heard was the sound of his own breathing, the catchy chorus of songs from the 1900’s, and his fingers drumming against the joysticks in time with the beat. The fuel trail they followed gently curved deeper into the nebula, as if the thing had been listing like a damaged sailing ship. Any vessels deciding to traverse the nebula stuck to established routes for obvious reasons, and they were well off the nearest path by a several thousand kilometers.
Lambert kept an eye on his sensors when they didn’t fizzle uselessly below him, deviating just a little off the scout path the Captain of the Gallipolihad assigned him. Fuel was roughly half-depleted now, a little bar in the corner of his readout showing such, but in a vacuum that hardly meant anything like it did in a land vehicle, changing direction didn’t require too much burn time with the micro adjustments Lambert was making.
He peered out of the canopy at the clouds ahead, a small collection of drifting bits of rock collecting about the swirling stardust. He panned from left to right, examining the smooth surface of a large asteroid drifting lazily along some sixty kilometers out. A smaller rock bounced off its large bulk, twirling away into the void. Next to it, a concentrated bit of gas so bright it almost hurt his eyes. More stray asteroids, an energy column further out, the silver gleam of metal…
He did a double-take, using one of the frontal cameras to zoom in on the reflection. Light from the red sun caught on a section of hull, painted over in silver finish. The metal was branched into two curved points, a bit like the jaws of a beetle, their bases flaring out to join a larger bulk. Orange bands of light drew jagged lines across a midsection that was a little wider than the two frontal ‘claws’.
“C-Contact!” he said. “something on the scope, two o’clock low.”
“You and me both, Cap, I’m getting at least a hundred ship tags out there.”
“Switch to thermals, dolt! There’s a, a ship down there!”
“… Oh shit,” Carl said after a delay, his tone becoming more serious. “What is that?”
As they watched, more of the metal came into view. From one of the skirts, some kind of fin jutted out, ending at a point before tapering back into the bulk. More orange bands of colour wrapped over sections of the hull, which flared out further down the length of the vessel. It didn’t look like any ship Lambert had ever seen.
“Maybe some kind of Confederate prototype,” Lambert said. “You got a tag, Alice?”
“Negative,” it said. The way it said so made it seem it was just as surprised as the humans were. “It’s emitting signals, but none that correlate to UEC frequencies.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Carl asked.
“It means the UEC has found a way to completely overhaul the concept of their signatures, or…”
More of the ship peeked out from behind the asteroid, like a spooked deer peering round the bulk of a tree, more of the strange ship coming into view due to their changing angle. Another pair of fins protruded from around the middle of the hull. At the end of the length, the ship’s width narrowed down into a pair of twin lines that were connected by a curved, metal sheath.
“Kinda looks like a big, metal manta ray,” Carl mused. “What’s that glittering thing around it?”
Lambert saw what he was talking about. The metal bulk was slightly distorted by a group of triangular shapes forming a barrier round the ship. The sections glittered like glass as they caught the light, Lambert’s eyes focusing on the giant metal ball that encased the vessel.
“Is that a shield?” Lambert asked, blinking. “Since when were shields a thing?”
“Since never,” Carl said. “that thing ain’t made by humans. Can’t be.”
“Suvelians?” Lambert asked.
“How the hell should I know?”
Before Lambert could reply, his systems lit up with motion warnings, and he watched the ship bloom on the thermal feed. The two tails on the end erupted in jets of flame, and the ship began to turn. Unlike the pivots of human ship maneuvers, this thing drifted along as if it were banking, Lambert just making out another engine on its underbelly flaring to life, simulating the motion. On the belly of the ship he could see what looked like pair of railguns sitting flush against the hull.
The craft peeled off, moving maybe forty-five degrees away from them into the nebula. A laser targeting warning suddenly lit up the bottom half of his tactical view, the words flashing in an alarming shade of red.
“Fuck me rigid, it’s lasering us!” he said, frantically grabbing the twin control sticks.
The corvette pivoted, then sailed away from the strange ship, the straps of the harness securing Lambert to his chair digging into his arms and thighs. He burned to high speed, the G’s starting to make breathing difficult, ready to try and throw off incoming fire, and yet right as he was about to make another correction, the laser warning vanished.
“Incoming?” he asked. It was Alice who replied.
“Negative, no ordinance on visuals. I estimate the ship was scanning us before we escaped its sensor range.”
Lambert flipped the ship in a one-eighty turn, applying counter-thrust to slow them down. He glanced at the camera feed tracking the ship, saw it hadn’t made any course changes. It was just moving away, almost in slow motion thanks to the camera’s level of zoom. Even the cannons on the alien ship’s belly hadn’t moved.
“Knew eating would be a bad idea,” Carl grumbled through the channel. “Did we lose them?”
“I don’t think they were even after us.” Lambert directed the ship so they were in line with the strange vessels course, albeit much slower. “We must have spooked them.”
“Scared the shit out of you, though,” Carl said. “Can’t blame you though. Crazy Suvelians probably thought we’re UEC.”
“What are they doing out here?” Lambert wondered. As far as he knew, the Suvelians ignored UEC after first contact went down in shambles, and tended not to wonder anywhere close to human space, the aliens having gone dark for decades. Considering they were the only aliens ever encountered, it was just another reason why he was ashamed of the Confederation.
“Stop asking me these stupid questions, man,” Carl complained. “I don’t know jack about Suves.”
“We’re going lose them in this soup,” Lambert said. The ship sensors assigned a white, unidentified tag to the alien craft that came up as a blip on his tactical view, the target moving towards the edge of their sensor range.
“What about the fart trail?” Carl said. “They’re going off in a different direction. We should stick to it, if you ask me.”
“Well I didn’t ask you,” Lambert said. “We’ve got alien ships operating dangerously close to the Hub. Kinda feels much more important than finding a ship that’s been missing for months.”
“Our orders were to find the missing fuel liner,” Alice interrupted. “I must protest against this decision.”
“Noted. Anything else?”
The voice didn’t reply.
“Good. Carl, power down any non-critical systems, I don’t want us on their radar, or whatever it is they’re using. I’ll mark our coordinates down so we can find the fuel trail later.”
“UFO hunting it is,” Carl replied, some of the lights in the hatchway behind the cockpit switching off. “What are the rules of alien contact again?”
“Don’t launch missiles unless I say so. We stay weapons cold, and we’ll already be doing better than the UEC ever did.”
