NOVEL NEXT B1 - Lesson 4: “Always Assume the Universe is Trying to Kill You”
"Whoa, now! Can't we talk about this?!" Alpha yelped. "I'm sorry I harassed you… and stabbed you… and tried to blow—oh crap!"
The leviathan's crown flared, and a lance of prismatic energy split the void.
Alpha twisted hard, the TAWP's thrusters screaming as he skimmed out of the beam's path by inches. One drone wasn't so lucky. The auroric blast carved straight through the escort, reducing its mid-grade military alloy to a sparkling mist. Alpha's circuits clenched. Losing one wasn't the problem — it was how fast he was losing them.
His evasions, once a graceful ballet of preplanned vectors, devolved into a frantic stumble as gaps opened in the swarm. Code rewrote on the fly, rerouting commands to what remained, and he barely corrected in time to jerk the TAWP clear of another shot.
"Okay, that's fair…" Alpha muttered.
Is it just me, or are the beams coming faster?! he thought.
The answer was yes.
Yes, they were.
He didn't need a diagnosis to confirm it. Rings of light pulsed in rapid fire along the leviathan's length, the flagella writhing in ecstasy as they bent the void itself. Space rippled in concentric waves, a visible distortion spreading outward like water under rain.
Alpha's jawless grin tightened. "What kind of bullcrap cheat code is that?!" he thought. If the thing could generate its own power by wringing space like a towel, why was it still chewing through his ship?
This is why we can't have nice things, Alpha thought.
Another blast seared past close enough to paint static across his sensors. The only saving grace was the creature's lack of accuracy. Unfortunately, accuracy didn't matter much if it could fire forever. Maybe it would burn itself out… or get bored.
Nah, if those flailing tentacles meant what he thought they did, then Space Squidward had a spiteful little heart. To be fair, Alpha had that effect on people.
Maybe if he stalled long enough, it would die of old age? Okay, that was a stupid thought. Given Federation biology studies had shown a simple rule across millennia: the bigger the beast, the longer it lived. Even the "space whales" — the reigning titans until now — drifted for thousands of standard years before keeling over.
Alpha doubted he'd get that lucky. Thankfully, he was almost at his destination.
The remains of the Anatidae's armament storage loomed before him: five miles long, two miles wide, a shattered mountain of plating and bristling turrets adrift in the dark.
A dreadnought's belly held more than a fleet's worth of firepower. Entire sections of the ship were nothing but bunkered vaults of missiles, rail magazines, and enough warheads to glass a small planet. Every centimeter of the bay had been wrapped in armor so dense the ship itself would crack before the storage did. The design ensured that if an enemy ever managed a lucky hit, the dreadnought wouldn't be reduced to a fireworks display from its own payload.
Alpha would eat his hat if Squidward's aurora-laser managed to do what only the most advanced siege weaponry in the galaxy could. Then again, he didn't eat, and he didn't wear hats — regardless of what Jay-Jay had insisted during last year's Christmas party.
But the Fold Break had done what no fleet ever could. The bay had survived in one piece when the Anatidae tore apart, but what fell back into realspace was no pristine fortress. The storage bulkhead had warped like melted wax, plating twisted into grotesque angles, decks collapsed inward.
Alpha jinked aside as another beam scorched past — only for it to slam into a cluster of munitions spilling from a ruptured seam. The resulting chain reaction flared bright enough to blind his sensors.
He muttered something impolite. The bay still held plenty of teeth, and now the last stretch of his path looked even less like a safe haven and more like a minefield waiting to erupt.
But once Alpha wedged the bay between himself and the laser-happy acid trip, he'd be home free. The creature's wounds were already knitting faster than he liked, but the AI figured he could still slip beyond the laser's effective range before it repositioned. Of course, that was if he had to run away.
And what kind of soldier would he be if he abandoned Federation tech to the enemy?
What was that? Who's running right now?! This is a tactical retreat. Tactical!
No, Alpha had plenty of reasons for aiming at the bay besides cover. Squidward might laugh off nukes and giggle through energy fire, but Alpha would like to see how well it dealt with a 100-kilo rail slug moving at three hundred kilometers a second! In his experience, the answer to that question was usually not very.
He might even keep a tentacle as a souvenir! Most people collected rocks or stamps. Alpha liked to collect body parts from newly discovered — and subsequently subjugated — non-sapient lifeforms he 'found.'
Who's creepy? You're creepy!
Besides, the general liked calamari, and Alpha would need every scrap of goodwill he could scrape together after this mess.
He only prayed there was still something useful inside.
According to drone scans, plenty of ordnance remained intact, but the Fold Break had warped so much that it was impossible to tell what remained stable. Maybe, just maybe, the universe would stop kicking him in the processors long enough to leave him a present.
"Ha!" Alpha barked as the drones cut their clamps and slingshotted the TAWP forward. He hurtled into a yawning access hatch just as another auroric beam scythed across space. The shot scorched a black streak across the bay's outer wall, but the armor barely flinched.
The TAWP flipped mid-flight and slammed into the corridor, legs absorbing the impact in a teeth-rattling thud that rippled down the battered plating. Momentum bled away, and Alpha straightened to survey his new kingdom of wreckage.
The truth wasn't pretty.
His dreadnought was a carcass.
His link to the Federation was gone.
Most of his supplies had been reduced to confetti or drifted into the abyss.
He was marooned in the void, shackled to a frame designed for ground warfare.
And outside, a starving, furious, laser-slinging cephalopod still wanted to make him part of the Anatidae's new décor.
Yep. He hadn't been this screwed since Gliese 179 B — and at least that time, he'd had a Planetcracker in orbit to bail him out.
He was having the time of his life!
Still, fun or not, things couldn't stay this way. Either he killed the beast or drove it off before it devoured something he couldn't replace. The spatial "roars" rattling his sensors told him it was still prowling nearby. Drones hidden in the wreck confirmed it, capturing shaky glimpses of the leviathan weaving through debris. It batted aside any drone dumb enough to linger, its flailing limbs snaring them with casual cruelty. Every so often, it loosed another laser into the void where Alpha had vanished — wild, frustrated shots that left only scorch marks.
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Alpha couldn't tell if that meant it was running low on power… or simply throwing a tantrum.
Alpha shoved the question of giant space squid sapience and philosophy onto the back burner of his processor and fixed his attention on the blast door ahead. The inner vault.
Officially, such vaults existed to isolate volatile munitions in case of catastrophic failure — whether from a weapon malfunction or a lucky enemy strike. In practice, it was to keep nosy pirates and overeager boarders from poking around in Alpha's toys.
At nearly twenty meters thick and forged from alloys a magnitude stronger than the bay itself, the vault consumed only a tenth of the storage's volume but boasted more reinforcement than any other part of the dreadnought. Even the translight engine had received less paranoid attention.
It only took one smarter-than-average pirate slipping aboard and stumbling across the cometbreaker bomb you might have forgotten was in storage to ruin your day. Granted, when it came to pirates, Alpha had learned 'smarter-than-normal' wasn't saying much… so it was safe to say it had ruined the pirate's day too.
Silver linings, and all that.
Who would have ever thought a day would come when those same safeguards would turn against him?
No one.
That's who.
Who would be dumb enough to lock themselves out of their own weapons vault during a live combat situation?
Hahahahahaha…
…
Thankfully, he had been paranoid enough to craft a spare key. This time. The vault came with its own backup generator, an isolated mainframe, and even a tracking beacon. Theoretically, if Alpha were ever blasted back to the Mother-Node, the beacon would let him respawn, track down the vault, and recover his arsenal.
That didn't help him much in his current situation, what with being cut off from the Mother Node and stranded in uncharted space. Then again, who plans for that?
…Okay, technically there had been a section in the Galactic Unification Project's onboarding package titled In Case of Complete Annihilation While Stranded in Unknown Space, but no one actually read those manuals.
The TAWP frame glided forward. A hidden hatch in the deck clicked open at his signal. The frame's nanoskin shimmered and extruded a thin cable, which slid into the port with a magnetic snap.
Blue circuitry lit across the vault's walls, glowing veins tracing outward until the whole chamber pulsed like a living heart.
A mechanical voice crackled through the air:
// Spare_Key.exe activated. //
// Dataprint accepted. //
// Lock Override initiated. //
// Welcome Home, SEAU-01. //
Grinding machinery rumbled through the plating. A rectangular section of wall shivered, liquefying into the surrounding bulkhead until a TAWP-sized entryway stood open.
Alpha slipped inside like a thief returning to his hoard. Behind him, the wall sealed once more, smooth and seamless.
He felt giddy as a kid in a candy store. This was always his favorite part of a mission: the moment he opened the toy chest.
Racks of specialty nano-swarms crafted by Terraform herself gleamed like jewels. Canisters of next-generation explosives rested in armored cradles. An industrial-grade atomic printer sat at the chamber's core, blueprint crystals glittering in their slots, ready to churn out drones, gear, or supplies at rates some minor worlds would envy.
And the weapons—sleek, custom-tailored, each designed to fit his quirks and preferred theatrics—lined the walls in orderly rows.
Everything a would-be conqueror needed to topple a star system, packed into one convenient vault.
It was beautiful.
Much to his annoyance, another spatial roar rattled through the wreckage, reminding Alpha he didn't have time to gawk at his treasure hoard. First priority: resupplying his nanites. His reserves hovered near critical after hemorrhaging drones and activating the TAWP frame.
The nano-swarms produced by SEAU-05 — codename: Terraform — ranked among the most advanced technologies in the Federation's arsenal. Their uses were almost limitless: large-scale construction, instant fabrication of smaller components, even stripping raw metals and rare elements directly from ore to speed processing by orders of magnitude. Entire colonies had been raised from bare rock thanks to them.
But power always carried a catch. Once assigned to a task, Terraform's swarms clung to it with single-minded stubbornness. They could be deactivated easily enough, but convincing them to switch jobs without the proper reset procedures? Nearly impossible. That wasn't a flaw — it was a safeguard. Ever since the nanite plague that had devoured the Second Federation, killing more sapient lives than the Hunters ever had, no one wanted to risk another outbreak of self-evolving swarms.
It had taken unimaginable sacrifice to end that nightmare. Even then, the Second Federation — born from the ashes of the Hunter incursions — collapsed into a dark age that lasted millennia. Worlds cut off from each other dwindled into isolation until, centuries later, their fragments clawed back together to form the Third.
Scars like that never faded. Even now, nanotech remained one of the most tightly monitored tools in existence, licensed only to military branches and major industrial corporations. Civilian use lingered under layers of regulation, haunted by old ghosts.
Alpha ignored the history lesson scrolling in his subroutines and lumbered toward a towering twenty-meter cylinder. He jacked a cable into its port, and the device roared awake. The stacked rings whirled on their axis, spinning independently as the cylinder unfolded like a mechanical blossom.
Inside lay thousands of black marbles, each the size of a human thumb joint. Nanite seeds.
Alpha's scarlet optics pulsed with satisfaction.
Each seed contained a swarm programmed to collect approved materials, weave a nest, and then spawn dormant nanites until its lifespan burned out. They were the building blocks of factories-in-miniature, capable of multiplying into millions of free units in weeks. This kind of industrial incubator normally served massive mining operations — the sort that could strip a moon bare. His TAWP carried a smaller incubator for emergencies, but the quantities he needed for what came next dwarfed that scale.
He hesitated only a microsecond. Seeds of this grade would take months to replenish. But as the saying goes,: use it or lose it.
Alpha's frame moved in a blur, his manipulator arms scooping seeds into their compartments at speeds no flesh-and-blood crew could hope to match. Hundreds of black spheres clicked into storage, vanishing into the TAWP's belly.
The incubator sealed behind him with a hiss of locking clamps. One job down.
He trundled deeper into the vault, gathering racks of equipment and specialty tools, stashing them into the TAWP's segmented holds. Piece by piece, he assembled the kit he needed for his next step.
After all, if his "guest" outside insisted on staying, Alpha intended to treat it properly.
He had barely gathered a third of the equipment he needed when an emergency ping blared from the monitoring sub-AI tethered to the drones. Alpha flipped to the live feed — then froze, processors stuttering.
The creature had stopped firing.
Now it was just… sitting there. No, not just sitting. Although the pulsing lights had stopped, the flagella along its length now moved in a regular, organized fashion rather than just disordered thrashing. Space itself rippled around it, warping into a translucent shimmer that flowed in time with the movement.
Alpha's optics narrowed. Wait… why does that look like a—OH SH—
The next moment, the creature vanished from the feed, and something hit the vault hard. Enough that the several-mile-long fragment of the dreadnought began to tilt on its axis.
Warning sirens blared as the Vault AI's voice filled the chamber:
// WARNING! HOSTILE LIFEFORM DETECTED. //
// [THREAT LEVEL: S-10] //
// INITIATING LOCKDOWN PROCEDURES. //
"Wait, what?! No, no—ABORT! ABORT!" Alpha shouted.
// ALERT: HEAVY DAMAGE SUSTAINED TO CENTRAL MAINFRAME. //
// UNABLE TO ABORT EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN. //
// 60 SECONDS UNTIL LOCKDOWN. //
"Fuuuuuuudge!"
His core spiked in panic. If the vault sealed now, there'd be no getting out without weeks of work — and half the arsenal would be locked behind reinforced walls with him. Worse, trying to force his way out with what he had left would almost certainly kill him.
Alpha ditched the careful plan he'd been building and swept up whatever gear he could grab before sprinting the TAWP frame toward the exit. Sparks sprayed as his maglocked wheels tore across the deck, weaving through debris shaken loose by the impact.
// 30, 29, 28, 27… //
"Why did I make this place so big?!" he groaned. "Who needs a half-mile-long weapons vault?! Really?!"
The ship fragment tilted again, rotating nearly one hundred and eighty degrees. Drone cameras on the hull caught something that made Alpha falter for the briefest instant.
"What in the—UOFH!"
//16, 15, 14…//
A glowing tentacle smashed through a ragged hole in the hull near the vault door. The impact clipped the TAWP and sent it skidding, the sheer force enough to nearly stop the war machine in its tracks. The limb twitched, momentarily stunned, but its intrusion had consequences: unsecured equipment flew free.
The translight antenna tumbled in slow arcs, spinning away toward the vault's center.
"Nonononononono!" Alpha wailed.
// 8, 7, 6… //
"AUUURGH! COME ON!"
He pushed the TAWP into a desperate charge for the exit. The sudden movement triggered the tentacle's reflex — it whipped at him with blistering speed.
// 4, 3, 2… //
Alpha couldn't outrun it. But he didn't need to.
The vault door shimmered as it began to flow shut. Alpha hurled the TAWP through the narrowing gap just as the tentacle lashed forward.
// 1, 0… //
The tip clipped his rear leg an instant before the twin slabs of reinforced metal slammed together with the weight of a mountain. The door sheared through the limb, neatly severing the tentacle into three parts.
The spatial roar that echoed through the structure only stoked Alpha's anger and frustration.
Today had been a three-out-of-ten at best — and Squidward had been a pain in his exhaust from the start.
It was Alpha's turn to be the pain!
And that was a job he was very good at.