| |
“We are damaged,” the ship said. “Badly.”
Krieger could have gone without this update; his screen was a rolling tide of red text showing the massive systemic failures rolling through the vessel. “Is it...fatal? Will you live?” He wasn’t sure whether the computer was a true artificial intelligence when not possessed by Blue, but it seemed polite to err on the side of caution.
“No,” the ship replied at once. “My core system is located just below your control interface. I am protected by numerous backups and firewalls. The overwrite protocol cannot penetrate them. I am located inside a black box. I will survive the complete destruction of this shell. Though I do not enjoy the idea of floating out here forever, unable to sense the universe around me.”
“No, I would imagine not,” Krieger said. He tried to conceive of the way the computer viewed the void of space around it. Not through the disconnected flow of information laid out on a computer screen and translated into a form a human mind could easily process, but as raw oceans of data. Pure sensory information its mind was written to understand. The vacuum of space pressing against its skin just as atmosphere enveloped human beings.
“I won’t let that happen to you,” Krieger said, and surprised himself by meaning it. The ship had kept him alive when it all went horribly wrong. And this—the cascading failures which left them adrift one moment or limping the next—were what victory looked like.
Everything had been going well. He and Iona piloted in graceful loops around the giant planetesimal from which the vast nebula’s gasses were emitted and controlled. It was fifty kilometers in diameter and not alone; gravitational systems installed on its surface hauled in other floating chunks of ice and rock for processing. How that worked, Krieger could not even guess. What he knew was that the loose cloud of debris formed a perfect minefield to drag their enemies through.
It worked right until a pair of ships managed to either predict his path through space or simply got lucky. It didn’t much matter which; the result was the same. Both collided with the Ab and caused catastrophic damage.
Yet those two ships were the last of the Originator vessels chasing them. In the fracas, Iona and Crash managed to pick off the handful of remaining enemies.
Krieger brought up the self-repair display. It was troubling not to see a readout with an estimated time for completion. “Are you damaged beyond your capacity to fix?”
The ship hesitated before answering in an uncertain voice. “I do not know. My repair nanites can rebuild any part of me, but I have lost mass. Pieces of my hull are gone, and with them more delicate systems beneath. The elements and compounds in some of the nodes drifting out in space are not raw materials I keep a stock of. For full repairs, we need resources.”
Krieger glanced at the view screen. The shrouded planetesimal below hung like the ghost of a world behind its curtain of white gas.
“At least we know where we can get some,” Krieger said.
But they would need a little help getting there.
––––––––
“I do not like this,” the ship said, in Krieger’s opinion somewhat petulantly.
Krieger ignored it. The thing was programmed such that he could take complete control in non-emergency conditions. After a quarter hour planning with Iona during which the computer argued incessantly about the danger in letting a mere human handle the delicate maneuver, Krieger flipped the proverbial switch and began tuning out the stream of complaints.
The planetoid was of course much larger than the ship, but its gravity was negligible. The systems in place on its surface sent out massive fields to draw in distant icy bodies from what he was now sure was an Oort cloud—though how such a thing existed here without a parent star baffled Krieger and went against everything he knew about stellar mechanics—but those fields were directed. This too flew in the face of physics as he knew it, but that technology was a mystery for another time. He didn’t care how it was done, only that the fields themselves were narrow and detectable. And thus avoidable.
The surface of the Ab was covered in small, single-use thrusters. Each was a meter across and a quarter of that thick, their tanks filled with pressurized nitrogen. The net force of every thruster package together was barely enough to move the ship, but Krieger didn’t need much. He had used the main engine to nudge the vessel into the delicate orbit he needed, then worked from there by hand.
The ship moved slowly, drawn in by the almost nonexistent gravity of the rock generating the nebula. Its secondary gravitational system was much more powerful than the tethers used to draw in raw materials, but that power was spread across an unimaginably large swath of the surrounding void. From what he had been able to determine, a loose net of artificial gravity extended from this point outward to hold the gas in place and prevent it from drifting off.
It was engineering and technology on a scale he would have thought impossible if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.
“We are going to crash,” the ship complained.
Krieger tweaked a trio of thrusters with a feather-light burst as his eyes darted endlessly across the readouts. “Yes, we are. We will simply be doing it very, very slowly. And with luck, we will not damage you any further in the process.”
As he spoke, his fingers continued to dance over the controls. It was true that the machine could have calculated the landing with far more accuracy. It would have measured every factor a thousand times a second and reacted instantly to any change or unexpected shift. Yet there were realities the thing was not prepared for, which was the excuse Krieger gave for wresting control for this maneuver away from the increasingly neurotic AI. The modular thrusters were useful tools for rescue operations and sometimes even as weapons if you could sneak them onto the hull of an enemy ship, but their latching systems often left much to be desired. He had used them many times and had a feel for when one was loose or about to break free on a side. A wobbly thruster was unreliable at best.
In short, he had a feel for them that no machine, no matter how intelligent, could wrap its digital brain around. With time and practice the ship would learn. Probably after this single experience it would have enough data to understand exactly how precarious control of those notoriously unreliable thrusters could be. But that was later. On this approach, an experienced hand was needed.
With an anticlimactic beep, the proximity sensors alerted him that they were within a few dozen meters of the surface. The spectrographic array informed him that the patch of ground they were aimed at was rich in exotic metals and silicates, exactly what was needed for the onboard printers to begin fabbing new parts and components.
Three meters from the surface, Krieger goosed the thrusters on their belly. The approach was slightly faster than he hoped for. Their velocity diminished rapidly, almost bringing them to a standstill with half a meter to the surface.
Which was when the four harpoon ports opened and metallic darts lanced out to pierce the skin of the tiny world below. The ship was pulled tight against it with a muffled shriek of metal on stone and Krieger let out a sigh of relief when it was finally over.
He keyed the mic. “Iona, Commander, thank you for the thrusters. We should be in fighting shape in ten hours—”
“Eleven and a half,” the ship corrected.
Krieger shot a sour look at the nearest speaker vox. “Eleven and a half hours. Fifteen to full hull integrity. Twenty until we are able to replace the ammunition we spent on the way in.”
When the response came, it was the Commander who spoke. “That works for us. Um, how many probes can you spare for a refit to ferry raw materials up to us? We’re low on torpedoes and missiles. Propellant for their engines we can manage, but we need the basics for our fabricator to put together new casings and engines.”
“Stand by,” Krieger said, and waved a hand at the computer. “Can you work out those logistics, please? I am a pilot. That kind of thing is above my pay grade.”
“I can,” the machine said. “Though I will say before I come to any hard conclusions that doing so will slow down our own repairs to some degree, even if it is just the loss of a few drones that would otherwise be scraping the rock out there for the elements we need.”
“Noted,” Krieger said. “Keep in mind that when we do finally leave here, it would be better for us both to have a full armed Seraphim at our back.”
The computer made a low musing sound. “Your point is valid, yes.”
Which was as close as any AI other than a sim was likely to come to admitting they only saw in the very short term and missed an obvious point completely.
But Krieger decided he’d take the win even if the words remained unsaid.