Archaea (8 page)

Just another drill, has to be. Still, I am not going to mess around with this ship, and I dutifully palm my hatch shut and latch a grabber as the floor drops out from under me.

"All hands, secure from General Quarters and stand by for Condition Yoke. We are currently in slipspace and will arrive at Europa Station in about ten minutes."

Ten minutes? Impossible... I palm the lock and kick up through the ring to the weapon deck.

*****

I was up to my eyeballs in equations trying to double-check the new limits Janis had set for the main gun, and looked down in shock when the fire-control lock slid shut on Zebra. Slipspace is not for in-system passage, not unless you have a cesium clock and a bot at the helm.

If we were actually in slipspace, and this wasn't some sort of drill. Granted, our captain is a wily one, but this would be a pretty strange drill.  Ten seconds for general quarters? That's just not his style.

I hoped Yak was not floating away somewhere with a bleeder.  

We didn't really have time to bring our passenger up to speed on our situation, or clue him in to the type of ship he was on. In fact, he went from shaking the Captain's hand, to hand to hand combat in about 5 minutes, and he just dove in as if he's always been in the team. 

Some people seem to have a sense of self-determination that allows them to assert themselves into any situation, to rise to any occasion. Yak seemed like that kind of man.

*****

I found myself suddenly adrift in the middle of engineering without a grabber handy, slowly drifting between the tokamak windings and the forward bulkhead, like a groundhog fresh out of boot, swimming for a handhold and cursing this stupid drill.

What a way to show our new passenger what sort of ship he's signed up for!

First, a rousing bare-knuckle fight against three-to-one odds, a frenzied dash through pre-flight, an almost immediate 2g burn after blowing dock like it was on fire, and now General Quarters with a ten-second Zebra. Ten seconds isn't hardly enough to grab on, case very much in point, see also: yours truly, floating free and waiting for Coriolis to spiral me down.

"Gene, what's the status back there?" the captain asked, at the worst possible time.

"Oh everything is just ducky back here skipper", I snarled. "I'm just hanging out, you know..."

I swear, Dak had eyeballs on me, I could hear the barely unrestrained mirth in his tone.

"Enough about you, Gene. This is important. Do you realize we're the first people to make an Earth to Europa run in fourteen minutes? This is historic, mister!"

"Captain Smith, I appreciate the humor, and the levity of the moment, but don't you think this is in rather bad form to throw a drill like this after our new passenger bloodied his knuckles helping us raise ship? With all respect, have you lost your damn mind...sir?" I added - after all - friend or not, I was talking to a Captain.

"But you don't understand Gene. This isn't a drill. We are in slipspace now. How is it that you don't know this? Aren't you at your station?"

"Great bloody hell! I am not at my station damn you! I am floating abaft a bulkhead waiting for Sir Issac Newton to rise from his grave, and help me touch down on deck! How the hell are...no, wait.
.. Why the hell are we in slipspace... Actually, how and why, if you please!"

"Why? Because I was losing a negotiation with a delusionally brevetted midshipman who is somehow the captain of a destroyer sent by the Darkside stationmaster to load us to the brig and return his ship, if you can imagine... He had matched vector and was about to grapple us in, and I wasn't thinking you'd take kindly to seeing if we could outrun a destroyer inside of 10 minutes into our first-ever cruise."

"You're damn right on that... I can't imagine anything else more terrifying than seeing you try to firewall the reac drive, in fact. That is, except... Oh, I don't know... trying to kill us by slipspacing into Jupiter at superluminal velocity. So we have, what... at best maybe five more minutes to live?"

"Well, I am not sure... But Janis had a good solution, and offered to autopilot it... Pauli tells me her clock speed and pre-active response time is more than adequate, and...
well, I know we don't really trust her as such, but my options were limited. Being captain isn't just about getting to wear a fancy hat you know, it means I sometimes have to make a decision or two."

I was momentarily speechless, and slowly rotating closer to the nearest bulkhead. For the first time in my career, I was left without options. I had to face up to the fact that I just received the proverbial punch in the nose that I didn't anticipate in all my planning, and there wasn't anything I could do to change it. I took some comfort in the fact that for better or worse, we wouldn't have to wait too long to find out if we were going to become highly energetic plasma wrapping around some asteroid on the way to Europa Station.

My mind was trying to calculate the odds of a hyperluminal impact with an unknown object in space, and wondering if our mass gravimetics were accurate enough for the machine in control of our destiny. Even being able to pre-act to conditions, would there be enough time to react? Would we have enough power to affect enough delta-v to alter course if needed?

I was in the middle of solving a pretty complex bit of panic math, substituting guesses and approximations for variables I didn't have the data for and not liking the results, when the captain came on the 1MC and let us know that we were out of slipspace, and currently approaching an L5 docking orbit with Europa Station.

My feet touched the deck, and I considering following them all the way down and taking a brief nap.

Chapter 8

"Europa Station, Archaea, requesting a docking solution. We have couriered cargo on delivery, please advise", said the captain behind me, as I worked on code for diagnostics and analysis of the last ten minutes of our course.

“Captain, on our run out, Janis adjusted course seven separate times - and each correction was made in excess of the original slipspace solution variances.” I said across the bridge.

“Very well Pauli, how close were the calls?”

“Sir, as best as I could determine, the changes were perfectly executed, and resulted in very acceptable margins for safety.”

“That's good to hear. It sounds like there are some pretty lucky rocks between Luna and Europa. I can't imagine anyone on that destroyer would have given us million-to-one odds of survival for an in-system jump.”

The view outside the forward port was magnificent. The reflected light from Jupiter bathed the moon of Europa in an auroral glow, and Europa Station glowed like a bright star in a Lagrange point between Europa and Jupiter, hanging like a spider in the complex web of gravity in the Jovial system.

As overwhelming as it was, the task in front of me required my full attention. I was attempting to attach debug statements to code I hadn't written so I could output a glimpse of the processing and logic occurring inside our swiftly mutating AI.

The code was really amazing, elegant to the point of abstraction, and very hard to understand, even for me. The  structure and patterns looked familiar, like a framework that had been extended into multiple iterations that carried a signature of the original into later generations - I could recognize mutations and extensions of the original routine rulesets and core logic structures I had built into the underlying code, but it had been architected into new, beautiful structures that were almost completely foreign. 

I was trying to hook into threads of logic to tap into the inner functions of the system, to attach debuggers - but mostly what I was doing was learning how much I didn't know about code.

"Europa Station, Archaea requesting docking approach for hang-on transient berth. Please advise, over..."

As I worked, bathed in the ruddy glow of Jupiter, I couldn't help but think of the path my life had taken and the choices I have made leading up to where I am now.

When I sat down to start coding an AI, I had no idea at the time my very existence would be someday controlled by the work I was doing, but that's where I found myself, approaching Europa Station, neck-deep in logic I barely understood.

"Archaea, Europa Station- we show you on course for intercept in 543 seconds. Please come about to 235 and burn for course to ring 20, port 5. You will be met for clearance and sludging, over..."

"Copy Europa Station, we are translating to 235 and making course for ring 20." The captain yawed the Archaea and fired an insertion burn to match vector with ring 20 of this massive, ancient station.

The view forward as we approached the station was that of a series of rings, 20 in all, orbiting a center cylindrical hub that remained at null-g.

Built on the old centripetal ring model, Europa station started as an out-system refueling depot, a role it fills to this day, but had been expanded over the centuries to house trans-ship warehouses for various gloms vying for profit margins on the surface and subsurface stations on Europa.

The discovery of water ice, and later surveys of liquid water under the ice, led to a boom of exploration and mineral rights acquisitions, as various gloms raced each other to gain a foothold in a moon that was found to be rich in trans-uranics and other heavy elements trapped in solution in the ebon depths.

Maybe it was due to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Europa, or the spartan accommodations on or under the surface, but Europa Station was never developed for amenities or tourism – not even the more extreme adventure tourists sought out Europa as a destination.

Aside from commercial research stations, labs, trans-ship ports and other materials processing facilities, there was not much else.

Europa Station was all business, and no pleasure.

*****

I had been in far worse places – muddy foxholes, frozen corn stubble smelling cordite and diesel, or huddled in an icy bivvy sack listening for incoming arty through the shriek of a howling arctic storm. Compared to having sweat and sand for a bed, the accommodations on this ship were luxurious - far better than the rentables on Luna Farside, where I'd spent the past few months. My stateroom was clean, solid, with a decent drop bunk, a comfortable console station, and an enclosed head that was almost big enough to stand up in.

I noted the maneuvering alert on my console and felt the thrust of a slight course change, a slight feeling of disorientation as the port-side bulkhead became 'down', but nothing to worry about. I kicked loose from my bunk and looked around my stateroom.

I drifted a little amidships of the grabber I had hold of, feeling the shift and changes in inertia as the Archaea translated to a new heading. We must be coming in on approach to Europa Station, though I am having a hard time believing it. Less than an hour ago I was shaking the captain's hand and just moments later, we were five AUs out-system. I hardly had time to sit in my bunk and this mission was damn near wrapped.

I sat down at the com station and posted mail through the Unet to my contact, to try and find out where to meet and when. Practically the same moment I hit send, a response came back flagged ultra-priority, encoded of course.

"Confirm arrival, meet 2345 local ring 10 at lock 5. Eyes on, be careful", it read. I am not sure what those directions mean, but the captain ought to be able to orient me. Eyes on must mean I'll be watched, but by who?

As these thoughts were running through my mind, I was checking the charge on my railer – a wicked accurate and deadly weapon - easy to conceal, fast to fire, and a perfect close-in combat weapon. I had it loaded with sodiumite needles that are explosively reactive when the dart hits the moisture content of the human body, but reasonably safe against structures due to the small projectile size.

You have to make sure the muzzle velocity is kept low, of course, as that prevents the plasmic reactions from a hypervelocity shot that would blow a mammoth hole through just about anything. That wouldn't do on an orbital station.

On my way to the top hatch, I checked to make sure my K-Bar was easy in the sheath, as any Marine worth his salt knows when good goes bad, bad goes in locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

"Yak, Captain Smith here – just wanted to let you know that we're on final approach to ring 20. Do you know where you'll need to meet to deliver your cargo?"

"Thanks, Captain. I need to get to ring 10, lock 5 - is that going to be easy to find?"

"Sure thing Yak, it'll be pretty easy. When we arrive at ring 20, you'll disembark from the top hatch of the Archaea, and just keep climbing upwards through the ring into the hub. The hub is null-g, so you'll just kick left and count to 10. When you climb down into ring 10, you'll just go either direction until you hit lock 5. Shorty's been here a few times and I know she wanted to run down some reactives – mind if she tags along?"

Of course, my instructions were clear
enough; avoid detection and move as if a giant Indian carrying a locked case belongs wherever he's headed. A pretty lady on my arm wouldn't hurt to blend in a bit as I move through the station.