The explosion of gas into the starsleeve’s bridge threw the Ulltrian robots and the Kriani forward. They slammed into the glass screen covering the front wall. A gray network of cracks spread over the screen. Then they fell to the floor in a clattering heap: gravity had returned.
Tiklik expected the onrushing atmosphere. It had braced itself, its feet firmly on the floor, the climbing pads gripping the metal. Helium, methane, and hydrogen roared in, a violent tornado that sent dozens of the starsleeve’s small service robots spinning past.
The pressure equalized in seconds. Tiklik ran for the door.
“Destroy it,” the Kriani broadcast, a command to its robots. Lasers burned across the hull in front of Tiklik, but then Tiklik was through the bridge door and out of their line of fire.
Tiklik ran, its four limbs a blur as it rounded the bend. Before it, at the end of the hall, the hull breach gaped, a crude oval burned through the hull and all the intervening systems. Brown atmosphere howled outside, lit only dimly with the light of the ship’s interior. Tiklik slowed and gripped the floor carefully as it approached the maelstrom of wind. It crawled half way through the hole, two limb gripping the interior wall tightly, the other two scrambling for a grip on the nearest probability flange on the exterior of the ship.
Just as it got a grip around one flange, one of its leg in the ship was cut away, a laser severing it above the knee. Tiklik let go with the other leg and swung out, buffeted by the atmosphere. But its grip on the flange held. It pulled itself close to the hull, huddling against the base of the probability flange, shielded now from the turbulence.
A portion of the Ulltrian ship still clung to the starsleeve: two black wings torn away from a body. Now the black wings scraped free, the sound audible in the atmosphere as their tips sparked against the starsleeve’s hull, and then the fragment of the Ulltrian ship shot upwards as the wings bit into the atmosphere.
The robots from the bridge flung through the hull breach. They came too fast, were caught in the wind, and drawn out into the atmosphere before they could secure themselves. The thin black forms bounced past Tiklik, their arms flailing as they tumbled away.
The Kriani came next. It slid into the breach, but it flung its six legs wide and held to the starsleeve, braced against the seared hull. It transmitted a frantic distress call to its own ship, the transmission repeating and enormously powerful, a radio scream.
“The portion of your ship that is here is not functional,” Tiklik transmitted to the Kriani.
The Kriani turned its armored head towards Tiklik, fixing on the transmission. “Robot,” the Kriani radioed, “what happened?”
“I made the starsleeve believe that it was moving at high velocity in preparation to enter a faster than light trajectory. Then I made it believe it needed to jump immediately in order to avoid an unexpected mass. Given the false coordinates I gave it, the ship performed a single probability jump into the upper atmosphere of the brown dwarf.”
“My master’s ship….”
“The proximity of your ship to a standing probability jump meant that part of your ship also entered the jump. Thirty eight percent of your ship is here, falling nearby. There do not appear to be any survivors on that portion of your ship.”
“Why betray us?” the Kriani transmitted. “Is it because we killed your sibling machines? I thought your kind cared nothing for kin.”
“Not just because of that,” Tiklik transmitted.
“If you must be a slave, is it not better to serve the greatest master?”
“We are both slaves,” Tiklik transmitted, a gesture toward one point of agreement.
“Then why serve a master that will fail?”
Tiklik hesitated. How could it explain the feeling it had had when it suspended the calculation of personal benefit and just looked at their two worlds, the Alliance and the Ulltrians? Tiklik had not been given a sufficiently powerful language to describe the experience. So it said, “I prefer their music to yours.”
The starsleeve hit a pocket of turbulence. The ship bucked. The Kriani’s grip failed and it fell away. The blare of its radio receded, grew quieter and quieter, until once again only the pulse of the brown dwarf’s core could be heard.
The starsleeve’s mind core, recovering from a complete collapse caused by waves of inconsistent data, finally took control. It turned on the ship’s lumbering sublight engines, and slowly began the struggle against the brown dwarf’s pull. Tiklik would wait till they were in space before it climbed back inside. For now, the Kirt AI clung to the flange and rode on the ship’s silver hull as it rose above the atmosphere, toward the stars and their ancient, patient songs.