Things Fall Apart: Chapter 10, Part 3
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Starship Bellerophon was minding its business, on a long return cruise from an exploration and mapping mission, when it suffered disaster, ripping a chunk out of the ship and leaving most of the senior officers and crew dead. Most of the ship's AIs are missing from the network, also presumed dead, with evidence pointing to a massive, internal "attack" by those AIs.
The survivors' mission, now, is simply to hold their ship and their people together; figure out what happened to them, and why; and get to a safe port! En route to the nearest beacon on the time-compression network, in hopes of finally calling for aid, Bellerophon receives a distress call, and discovers that they are not the only ones to suffer catastrophe
Singer had debated whether to lead the side party to greet her guests herself, or send Alexander. There were nuances behind either protocol. Certainly, if she were welcoming a higher ranking officer, she would be there herself. As the host of civilians, however, it was entirely proper for her to send her XO, with as suitable a Marine honor guard as they could scrape together, to greet and escort their guests to wherever the commanding officer was waiting.
Alexander had argued for this protocol, not so much as a message to Señor Espinoza as to his yacht’s captain. Singer found she could not argue the point. She did not really want to antagonize either person, but Sankovich had already provided plenty of antagony himself. Cordé’s note just before they’d caught the distress call from Grand Despot of Mauritania still needed to be considered, and now, there were other people, civilians, to involve in the next level of decision-making.
The end result was that Singer had acquiesced, and now sat, trying not to fidget, in a meeting room not far from the boat bay. She had never even known this room was here, until now. Apparently, it was not at all uncommon to meet with people flying in and out, and dragging them up to the usual main briefing room up by the main bridge (both now part of the gaping hole in the ship) was usually unnecessary. There had been one up by the dorsal boat bay, as well, despite that being closer to the old command deck.
Singer was beginning to speculate that far more of her ship than she had previously known was made up of meeting rooms.
This bit of whimsy passed through her mind just as the doors parted to admit first the honor guard of two marines, then Alexander, with the two guests behind them, one of whom was not the apparent gender Singer had been expecting. “Skipper, here are Señor Ari ben Yosef Espinoza, and pilot Neera Goldsmith,” Alexander said, with great formality, and then, “Señor Espinoza, Ms Goldsmith, Lieutenant Eylah Singer, commanding Bellerophon.”
Singer rose and did her part, letting her surprise slide for the moment. “Gentles, please sit and be comfortable. If you desire refreshment, the replication station there,” she pointed, “is available to you. Lieutenant Alexander, please stay.” This last was just formality. It had already been arranged that Lieutenant Cadotte would take the watch, much to that officer’s chagrin. They had been hoping to finally get time to apply the NDI to the question of Castor and Pollux, the two AIs still sleeping off their trauma from the last moments before the cataclysm. There were many questions, Cadotte felt their experiences could answer, if only they could be brought back to coherent wakefulness without further trauma.
Right now, however, the needs of the physical world came first. There were guests, two in number, so two needed to stand for the ship’s honor as well. Given their thin resources, either one would have to be Cadotte, or Cadotte would need to take the watch so Alexander could take the meeting with the skipper. Unsurprisingly, Cadotte had chosen the watch.
All of which meant Alexander came further into the room, the honor guard went out of it, presumably to stand at the door, and the door closed behind them.
If either guest thought it rude not to simply be offered prepared refreshments, they didn’t show it. Espinoza moved smoothly to the replicator and asked for coffee, black; while his pilot ordered ti kuan yin, hot. Alexander also helped zirself to a coffee, and Singer already had a mug. Orders satisfied, everyone took seats, Alexander appropriately to Singer’s right on one side of the oval table, Espinoza mirroring Singer and pilot Goldsmith mirroring Alexander.
All quite civilized, so far, Singer thought.
Seated, Espinoza began, “First, Lieutenant, I want offer my thanks for coming to us when you did. On the way here, I saw the damage your own ship has sustained. The excellent pilot assigned to bring us here was somewhat tight-lipped about the circumstances. Not rude, mind you, not at all, but he made it clear that we would need to apply to you for any answers.
“Second,” he said, a little rushed, clearly wanting to get both is opening points out on the table together, “I absolutely must apologize for the rudeness with which you were greeted. I myself was not on the command deck at the moment your exchange with Yuri began, and by the time I was, the damage was clearly done. Sankovich has been my lead pilot for many years, but I’m afraid he will be taking a rest leave, beginning more or less immediately, as his nerves appear to have gotten the better of him.”
And thus, the presence of Goldsmith explained. Very well. Singer had a couple of doubts about Espinoza’s story, but was not getting any obvious vibe from him that those doubts were justified, so she would leave that alone for the moment.
“As for the rescue, untimely though it must seem to you, you’re very welcome. We have recently answered another distress call, and that a much more dire case—only three survivors, in a life-pod, about which more later.
“With respect to the apology, I accept it gratefully, although I also hope Captain Sankovich will recover himself sufficiently to offer one of his own.”
Espinoza only nodded at that, while Goldsmith got the most fleeting of wry faces. Singer read them both. Doubt. Sankovich, apparently, had really not taken stranding well at all.
Singer decided at that moment to count herself very, very lucky that Bellerophon had proven mobile after its own wounding.
Singer decided the ball was still in her court, and continued, “Here’s the news as far as we know it, which is not as far as we like. About three megaseconds ago, now, this ship experienced an…event. That’s all we can really call it right now. All but three of the ship’s AIs rioted, at full AI speed, and succeeded in doing considerable damage, including overloading Fusion One. This should have destroyed us. Of the three AIs that did not join the riot, one was, as far as we can tell so far, immune by virtue of not having been updated to a particular version of the baseline software; the other two by virtue of being newer than the rest, by virtue of having had to be completely reset. In addition, the ship’s late XO appeared to suspect something was awry, and had laid some groundwork against what wound up occurring. As a result, Chef, Castor, and Pollux were able to throw up structural shielding and take other actions to limit the damage. This is why we’re still flying at all.
“The incident, however occurred during our Alpha shift, which is why you find yourself greeted by a Lieutenant out of the communications department, and another, slightly more junior, out of sciences.”
She tried not to let too much wryness show in this self-deprecating comment. She didn’t owe him that explanation, particularly when he’d mostly worked it out for himself already.
Espinoza was impassive, calmly accepting the tale. Goldsmith looked a little more agitated, and looked like a person doing a math problem in her head.
Her boss, though…he’d already done the math. “We’re well within range of a relay, now. Our secondary fusion drive couldn’t have actually sunk us into hyperspace, but it was more than enough for time-compressed radio to reach that relay with our distress call.”
Singer took a deep breath and responded, “We were just coming to a similar conclusion when we received your distress call. We had been en route to that relay when we got your call, with the plan being to announce our own status to New Norfolk and then continue on under our own power. Our own time compressor is compromised. We can make about 75:1 right now. We keep hoping for 100:1, but not quite being to pull it out. None of our remaining personnel are TC experts.”
Just a moment before she spoke that last sentence, she remembered to whom she was speaking, and allowed herself to meet Espinoza’s eyes so as to convey both irony, and a request.
Espinoza lived up to her current opinion of him. “I believe I may be able to assist with that, or at least assess the situation. I think you’re aware that some of the materials that go into a time compression system cannot be replicated. Fortunately, those the parts that least often need to be replaced. In addition, since our own TC drive is, as I’ve said, useless without refurbishing—probably replacing—the primary fusion generator, it seems to me to be in everyone’s interest to get your TC system running at as close to full capacity as possible, even if that means cannibalizing my ship to do it. Best case, you can take us into your field like your current tow; worst case is the same as if I can’t help at all: you can find bunks for us aboard and we all get home at 75:1.”
And then, he said the quiet part out loud. “Assuming, of course, there’s still a home for us to get to.”
Singer nodded ruefully. “And that’s a point I’ll admit I’ve been avoiding thinking about, but I think we four, in this room, should recognize that this is definitely bigger. I hadn’t gotten around to telling you yet, but we already rescued a single escape pod off of that other ship, Almaty. We know, or at least strongly suspect, she was affected by the same scenario. The tow we currently have is that ship’s disaster beacon, physically powered down because it's aware that it was compromised, and it told us as much of the tale as it knew. None of the three we rescued from wreck of Almaty are awake yet, so further details are still pending. But, we already know two ships were hit. And we’ve already discussed, albeit not yet widely, that we’re well in range of where a relay should be, but have encountered no message traffic. Not even routine handshakes. My comms officer tells me she’s hearing nothing right now background noise.”
Goldsmith stirred at this, nodding. “Same here. I was starting to doubt navcomp’s report of our position and drift, but…”
Alexander answered, possibly figuring it maintained parallelism, but also because ze had the more cogent answer. “I don’t think so, Pilot; that’s a system we’ve been over very carefully, and taken old-fashioned telescope sightings for on top of it. We’ve got a few people who had that kind of thing as a hobby, and of course, we’ve got charts. There should be a relay close enough to our current position for us to be able to smell it.”
The pilot and Espinoza exchanged a look Singer needed no empathic powers to interpret. From her to him: I told you so.
Out loud, Goldsmith said, “So as to clarify the timeline, we lost contact with that relay about 20 kiloseconds before our engineering casualty. At the time, we assumed it was a glitch and we’d pick up the net when we got to the next relay anyway, only, of course, we never got that far. Relays do glitch out occasionally on their own, after all.”
Singer involuntarily rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know it! Not this cruise, but the one before, was mostly about going around reseeding sunk buoys.”
“Right!” said Goldsmith, the formality in the room suddenly gone for the moment. “Space is harsh on equipment, after all, even if it’s just in orbit around some rock somewhere. So we just didn’t worry about it much. Then we lost the engine, and we couldn’t reach anyone at all, even trying to tight beam to where other beacons should have been.”
“And Sankovich? What was his problem?”
Espinoza looked a little uncomfortable, clearly not wanting to speak ill of someone not present. “I’m afraid my usual captain has a chip on his shoulder with Fleet, and began to assume we were being deliberately left in the cold. I never harbored any such notion, myself, although I also never suspected an issue quite this broad. It hasn’t come up yet, but let me be clear that I don’t believe our engineering issue had anything to do with the AI problem. We have exactly one AI template on board, it’s running the latest version of the basecode civilians are allowed to run, which is several behind, and it’s also a Chef personality template. Why wasn’t your Chef up to date, by the way?”
“Something about that quirky personality matrix isn’t compatible!,” Alexander said. “We thought it might just be our instance, but it sounds like it’s the whole line.”
“Clearly,” Espinoza said, “it was just as well. Certainly in our case, having the AI that specializes in maximizing resource efficiency functioning probably saved our lives. I’m not going to lie, I do not tend to carry emergency rations in great quantity on my ship. Until this incident, it never seemed necessary.”
There didn’t seem to be much more to say to that, and one of those periodic silences seemed to drape itself over the room. Sensing it was on her to move things along, Singer said, “Here’s what I propose. If you’re ready and willing, Señor Espinoza, Lieutenant Alexander can take you directly to TC control to have a look at things. Pilot Goldsmith and I can assess what makes the most sense for your ship and crew, and bring it back to you when you’re finished. Does that suit?”
“Skipper, it does.”
Singer blinked. Espinoza smiled.
“I did a five year stint as a crew on a Fleet ship as my weird idea of teenage rebellion. I wasn’t completely dumb. I did it under a pseudonym. Fleet was just as happy to keep my real identity quiet to avoid any weirdness. About half-way through, on leave, dad saw it had done me some good and decided he wouldn’t disinherit me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, and Lieutenant Alexander is ready, let’s find me some coveralls and get me started!”
They both rose and left the room, leaving the remaining two to sort out the yacht and its complement.