Cosmosis

Artificial

(Starspeak)

I preferred peaceful solutions.

I really did.

You might not believe that fact given how many people I'd killed by my age. I couldn't say for sure if I was in the double digits yet—I hoped not—but any positive integer was enough to at least raise eyebrows. Was I twenty yet? Probably?

But I really didn't like killing anyone, especially if I could help it.

The secret to finding those peaceful solutions?

Time. Nothing helped save lives like showing up well in advance. There were too many times where the Flotilla had been forced into a fight simply because there hadn't been time to talk things out properly.

We were acting on information quickly, but was it quickly enough? Would there be enough time to ensure a peaceful solution?

It was beginning to look more like one of those times where there wouldn't be time to talk things out.

<Transit in approximately five minutes,> I warned the crew.

Not quite turning my head to Sid, I asked, <Have we got the disc loaded?>

<"Ready to fire reverse of our vector,> he confirmed.

<Cool,> I said.

The Jack was flying like mad, and the Siegfried was burning behind us by just a couple hours.

I grabbed the comm handset and broadcast to our destination.

"V5 Beacon-station, this is the captain of the Jackie Robinson, confirming final clearance for high velocity transit," I spoke.

"…Confirmed, Jackie Robinson," the station broadcast back. "Say again: target vector?"

"Vector point…eight, eight, three, two, six, five, eight, one, three," I said. "Vector parallel to…swing forty-two point six, five, five, five, two degrees…slide ninety-five point zero, zero, four, two, six degrees. Confirmed?"

"Vector confirmed," the station responded. "Your vector is good. Confirm zero thrust."

<Kill thrust,> I ordered.

The Jack's engines ceased firing, and suddenly everything in the ship became weightless—a welcome reprieve considering the thrust our engines were pumping out today.

"Confirmed, zero thrust," I said.

"Happy flying, Jackie Robinson, your skip will form in…two-hundred twenty seconds."

"Station-control, we are flying several hours ahead of the Flotilla-marked Siegfried. She's got a softer crew than us, so she's not burning as hard. But by the time she gets here, she's going to be ripping about as fast. And we've got hard copies of telemetry data you're going to want for a ship her size," I explained. "We're going to fire a blank torpedo opposite our vector. Should come to a dead halt more or less. You should be able to just EVA and grab it."

"The Siegfried… requested high velocity skip too?"

"We're both headed the same place," I said. "We're just quicker. Figured we'd give you a head start on the math and headache for an abridgement big enough."

"A blank torpedo? That's a new one," the station replied. "Go ahead and fire it retrograde then, just know if you shoot anything toward us? We're going to blow you to smithereens first."

"Relax," I said. "It'll be hot out of the tube, facing away, you'll see a plume the whole time."

<Fore tubes, release one,> I ordered.

A mechanical thud was faintly audible through the hull some hundred feet below me. Keeping an eye on the psionics and the torpedo's telemetry, I confirmed it fired at maximum thrust, decelerating heavily as we both approached the Beacon.

"Got the plume on your scopes?"

"…Yeah, we see it."

"It's not encrypted, so have fun with it," I said. "But I won't take it personally if you take all precautions with analyzing it first."

"Yeah, yeah," the Casti on the station drawled. "You were cutting it pretty close there with cold-zone. Plus, you just shed a few hundred kilograms. You need new velocity and vector math now."

"[Son of a—]" I bit off my remark, and reconfirmed all of our approach info with only a minute or so to spare.

"Now your vector is good, Jackie Robinson," the controller said, not hiding their amusement. "Zero thrust confirmed."

With the math all locked in, the traffic controller was free to be a little more conversational.

"You Terrans don't do any real space flying back in your system, do you?" they taunted. "Bit of an amateur mistake."

"Oh, it was on purpose," I promised. "We just wanted to make sure you felt needed."

The Casti on the radio laughed, along with most of the crew I had with me on the bridge.

"Thank you, Beacon," I said, adding, "Say hello to the snoozing entity for me would you?"

"Pffft, sure, should I give them a name too?"

"Sure," I grinned. "When they wake up next, tell them Caleb Hane says 'hi'."

If the traffic-controller had a remark to that, it was cut off by the blinding white flash of the Beacon opening a wormhole for a split second, flinging our ship to the reaches of an entirely different star system.

·····

On the other side of the skip, we resumed our braking burn within seconds of entering the Cavore system.

Before Farnata's Razing, this system, V5, was the most infamous and tragic.

Starting just shy of a hundred years ago, colonization had been steadily proceeding as Beacons were successfully launched toward the most promising star systems.

V5 had been one of the first really good prospects alongside Shirao (C2). The V5 system had yielded quite the favorable prospect for terraforming: Igoyungit. It was smaller than Earth by a decent margin, but it had very similar gravity, magnetosphere, and tectonic activity. Within ten years of work, it had a functioning water cycle. And after thirty years, it had an ecosystem spreading across its surface—albeit one in need of careful management and support.

Nowadays?

Its surface no longer featured an ecosystem.

Well… technically it might, depending on you stretched the definition. It just wasn't anything from the Vorak homeworld.

Sixty years after the colony's founding, almost to the day, a young Vorak colonist had found their Adeptry activating under only limited supervision.

And they made something.

For the first few days, no one was any the wiser. The kid didn't understand what they'd created. The whelp just knew the blob fizzled and wiggled when fed grass.

It didn't stay a blob though.

The kid especially didn't understand their creation was poised to spread.

Novice Adepts often didn't understand how to dematerialize what they made at first. This rak had been no exception.

But their little black blob had gestated into a creature with legs, teeth, a stomach, and an insatiable ability to consume organic matter and reproduce.

The first Reploid incident saw a town be evacuated after two days, a whole quadrant three days later, and within a week there was a general order to evacuate a hemisphere.

Militaries were deployed to push back the spread, but it was just in too many places at once. All they could do was slow the advance while rak were evacuated from the homes they'd spent decades building.

Hundreds of thousands died in the colony towns that were overrun.

The so-called Reploids still occupied the planet's surface to this day. They'd evolved over the years, apparently. Turning to feed on each other after they'd eaten every other form of organic matter.

Every single anti-Adept activist or hate group had the words 'Igoyungit' and 'Reploid' on the tip of their tongue.

I'd read up on the event after learning more about Marshal Tispas.

The Red Sails had been one of the military operations to first respond and beat back the tide for a few days. Back then they were just a newly minted officer rather than a Marshal, but Tispas had been in one of the units that fought the longest and were the last to evacuate—refusing to do so until all the civilians had been rescued.

Since learning more about Reploids, the paranoia Tispas had aimed at me about psionics and the Beacon-shutdowns a few years ago made more sense now. At the very least, trying to kill me didn't seem so much like an overreaction.

There were supposedly ongoing talks about trying to glass Igoyungit's surface from orbit just to reclaim the rock, but from what I'd heard talks had been stalling out for years.

So, the planet remained under strict quarantine to this day. The only silver lining to the story was that there'd only been one other confirmed Reploid outbreak since. And that one, at least, had been snuffed out quickly before it could spread.

Igoyungit was a spooky planet to hear about, but it also wasn't our destination today—there was no being in this system without thinking about it.

Since the planetary colony had been infested, the main population center of the system was the group of moons orbiting a gas giant further out.

Firgid sounded appropriately named, at least to my English-reared sensibilities. Instead of Jupiter's browns, oranges, and yellows, it sported cold streaks of white and blue, tinges of sickly green peeking through between bands.

Like Jupiter back home, Paris in C2, Hashtin in V1, and every other protective gas giant, it had a smattering of moons.

Our final stop today was orbiting two of them currently.

The 'Yigown' Freight and Comm Hub Station was an orbital platform whose orbit typically transited around and between two of Firgid's moons in a figure-eight.

It was mostly crewed by corporate personnel, but it was large enough to house several dozen businesses along with the hundreds of permanent residents.

I was pretty sure the station was going to be the victim of a terrorist attack.

A year ago, we'd stolen a small mountain of computer drives and documents from CENSOR. But that AI wasn't stupid. All the information we'd stolen was encrypted, and it took a long time to decode some of it.

So we had a couple diagrams and blueprints featuring serial numbers unique to the Yigown station. One of those documents in particular was highlighting weak points and vulnerabilities in the station's superstructure.

Strange? Definitely. But not alarming by itself.

When we decoded a document estimating death tolls? It was time to grow more concerned.

<…Caleb, I'm not getting a response from the station,> Tasser reported.

We were all lying motionless in cushioned couch berths specially designed for high-G maneuvers.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

A 3.0G burn wasn't normally considered 'high-G', but since we were trying to arrive at Yigown as soon as possible, we'd been suffering three times Earth's gravity for close to four hours now.

<Our end or theirs?> I asked.

<Can't say,> Tasser said. <Our diagnostics say we're broadcasting fine, but I'm not getting an automated acknowledgement from the station.>

<Jordan, do we have a line of sight to the station, or is it still going to be on the far side of the planet?>

<We're bouncing comms off a satellite right now,> she said. <We can tightbeam to the station in about ten minutes.>

<What's our—> I started.

<ETA is forty-one minutes,> Tasser replied.

Yeah, that was why we were doing this kind of stupid extended high-G burn. With the information we'd scraped together from CENSOR's documents, the station might blow up any second.

So we were doing some truly absurd space travel to get there as soon as possible.

Relative velocities involved complicated math when approaching a planet in retrograde motion compared to your flight path…but my math put our velocity north of 1,000 kilometers per second, at least at one point.

<Alright, as soon as possible get a tightbeam to the station. If CENSOR got sabotage in their comms, we might have to board the station from the outside,> I said. <Nai, how's the Siegfried doing behind us?>

<They skipped through the Beacon about twenty minutes ago,> she reported. <All green from them.>

<Tasser, feed them a copy of our telemetry and see if they still have a line of sight to the station back there.>

<Got it,> he said.

Not a one of us moved a muscle as we operated the ship psionically. The weight of our own deceleration was immense. As long as we all kept our bodies oriented correctly in our cushioned couches, then we could keep our blood from pooling too much in our legs or brain from its own weight.

But still.

For extended hours like this?

Every single member of the crew was on blood-thinner and oxygenation aid.

Everyone had their assignments. There was no mission briefing that needed sharing. All there was to do was be crushed into our couches and wait until we got there.

The minutes ticked by, and I knew I couldn't be the only person tempted to pass the time by spinning up a game in my psionics.

But I knew no one aboard would.

Maybe we were about to arrive at a station and just get a headache trying to figure things out with the station leadership.

But maybe we were heading into a deathtrap.

The right headspace could save lives.

T-minus thirty minutes.

Tasser sent a tightbeam broadcast to the station. Still no reply. That was bad.

T-minus twenty minutes.

We started to get clear signals from the ship transponders docked with the station along with basic readable telemetry like thermal readouts on their reactors. Those scanned as normal. Strange. Maybe it was just the station comms malfunctioning?

T-minus ten minutes.

We peppered the ships docked with the station with comm requests and finally received responses.

"The station's main comm array isn't transmitting anything," Tasser told the ship. "Do they know that?"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay," Sid said, talking to another ship. "No, no: is the station under attack?"

"Are you sure?" Jordan asked. "Thank you very much."

Listening to all of their conversations simultaneously would have sounded funny if not for how urgent things were beginning to seem.

<What is it?> I asked.

<The station's experiencing 'computer' trouble,> she said, injecting far more sarcasm into her psionics than she ever displayed audibly. <Apparently some people have talked about storming the bridge.>

<Mine says the bridge got stormed,> Sid came back.

Wonderful, I sighed to myself.

T-minus one minute.

The Jack finally cut thrust and instantly became less suffocating.

<Alright everyone, don't forget to stretch. Breathe deep. Nerin, do you have blueprints for vital telemetry Ben can fill? If one of us suddenly starts seizing because of this burn, I want to know instantly, okay?>

<Got it,> Nerin replied. <Ben and I can hand them out at the hatch.>

<We see an open shuttle berth, but without comms to confirm with the station, I don't think the station's going to open for us,> Tasser said.

<We'll do it manually if we have to,> I said. <Nai, help Tasser moor us?>

She nodded, pulling on a helmet and heading toward an airlock for EVA.

Normally, there would be exchange between the docking ship and whatever structure or system the station used for docking ships. Computers would exchange data second by second. The pilot of the ship would talk through each step with whoever was sitting in the control room for the station's docking.

Luckily, whoever was controlling the station's docking systems had recognized that problems were happening vis-à-vis communication, and the whole system had been put into a manual override mode.

Nai, magnetizing herself to the Jack's hull, helped talk Tasser through the precise position of the docking clamps and how to orient the ship so our hatches would match the station's gangways.

<Hello?> I checked, seeing if the station operator was using any psionics in lieu of the electronic methods.

Unfortunately checking on the default channels only resulted in noise. Hundreds of psionic exchanges were happening onboard the station, all of them tinged with stress and confusion. It would have taken me ten or fifteen minutes to sort through them all to find whatever not-so-default channel the operator might be trying to use for official docking business.

In addition to automated docking clamps not engaging, it was questionable exactly how much air barrier we'd be under on our way across the gangways. Come to think of it, it was unclear exactly how much gangway there would be at all, since most of them were extended and retracted at the prompting of the docking operator.

Nai solved the problem handily by just materializing a tube of translucent crystal to bridge the gap between us and the station.

It would be a major safety hazard if someone tried to extend the gangway through the tube while we were walking through it, but that seemed unlikely.

<Hey, I'm still talking to the ice-hauler?> Sid said as we pulled on our gear and strapped Nerin's vital monitors to us. <They're hearing stuff about Terrans now.>

<Maybe some people are excited to meet us,> I said.

<…We're pressurized,> Nai announced.

The Jack's hatch popped open, and she led the way through the crystal tube. Accessing the station's airlock was troubling, and it was a solid three minutes of just floating there in zero-G before we abandoned attempts to open it as intended.

Nai and I shallowly linked through my superconnector, and we materialized solid masses in the right places to undermine the hydraulic seals and move the hatch's secure bolts aside.

Getting into the airlock put us within the station's cylinder of artificial gravity, and we didn't have to float anymore.

I gently flexed my knees, savoring the gentle three or four tenths of a G we were under.

Once our first little squad got into the airlock, our options became much cleaner. Airlocks could always be cycled in.

But before we did, a problem stared us in the face.

I glanced through the airlock's inner door while Nai dissolved the work we'd done, resealing the exterior of the airlock. But through the thick window, I saw a number of Vorak in uniform all taking up firing positions on the airlock.

"<Whoa!>"

I ducked back from the window, and everyone with me followed suit.

"I don't suppose you can hear me in there, can you?" I asked loudly. <How about this way?>

At this distance it was a lot easier to aim psionics directly at them.

<In the airlock, do not move and face away from the hatch!>

I traded glances with Nai and Tasser. Something was very wrong. We'd announced ourselves multiple times on approach. This was too hostile of a response.

Surely their comm problems weren't also preventing them from properly receiving signals?

We cooperated with their instructions, making sure to stand where they could see us in the airlock, but I wasn't done trying to talk it out.

<My name is Caleb Hane of the Terran Flotilla,> I said. <We've been announcing ourselves and our intentions for hours on our approach.>

<Quiet!> the rak inside snapped. <Do not move or you will be shot!>

One of their squadmates however, 'muttered' something to another via a psionic channel they thought was private.

<Weak lie. The Flotilla is still hours away.>

"Let's not make this worse," I ordered. "Jordan, Sid, hands up. Get up front with me."

We made the slightly risky play of facing the Vorak as they opened the airlock to arrest us, presumably.

Three humans gave them pause.

Oh, good grief.

Thee humans apparently gave them enough pause to half-lower their guns and exchange concerned looks with each other.

I so, so badly wanted to tell them 'never take your eyes off a target/threat'. But… play nice, Caleb.

"My name…is Caleb Hane," I tried again. "I'm with the Terran Flotilla. Our flagship is still a few hours behind us. But we, the crew of the Jackie Robinson, arrived first. We think we know what's wrong with your station."

The poorly trained station security hesitated further at that. More than a couple of them lowered their guns outright.

"How do we know you're Caleb Hane?" the rak-in-charge asked.

"What, you want my ID?" I scoffed. "I could show you documents, but is that really going to convince you?"

"<Psionics,>" the rak said. <You're supposed to be good. Show me.>

I couldn't help but give a cocky smirk.

<I'm the best,> I assured them, and sent a specialized volley of attacks that blew the alien's firewall clean away.

Their setup deviated from the default by only a tiny margin. It was not hard to obliterate.

My attack didn't touch any of the constructs within, but every last external defense they wielded was torn down in seconds.

The rak flinched.

Unfortunately, that renewed the rest's suspicions of me, and they pointed their guns at us again on reflex.

With reflexes and training of her own, Nai materialized solid barriers the split second before they could pull their triggers.

Jordan, Sid, and I all flinched at the gunshots, but Nai's crystal deflected the burst of shots.

"<Whoa! Whoa! Stop! Stop with the shooting!>" I cried out.

"Hey! Hey! Stop shooting!" another voice yelled from down a corridor.

A familiar voice.

My old pen pal Dustin jogged down one of the corridors.

"Clayde, they're friendly—[damn] you guys are touchy," Dustin said, talking to the rak in charge.

"…That was exceedingly stupid of me to ask," Clayde admitted.

"It was a team effort," I admitted, partially distracted by the newcomers.

Dustin pointedly positioned himself, deescalating tension.

"Yes. Yes, that's really Caleb Hane. Yes, he is shorter than the stories."

I would have laughed at the joke, but Dustin actually didn't have my attention.

An alien hand gently coming to hold my shoulder from behind told me that Tasser was the first person to notice where Nai and I had our gazes locked: on the girl behind Dustin.

Nora Clarke.

"Caleb," she said tactfully. "[Been a while.]"

I bit my tongue hard enough to taste blood. I did not trust what words that might come out first.

The last time Nora and I had spoken directly had been more than three years ago now. She'd paralyzed me and Nai before trying to drag me back to Marshal Tispas' clutches…because the Vorak had been worried I might be the next Reploid event.

Had I thought their paranoia made a little more sense in retrospect?

Seeing Nora in person again, I was reminded that being hurt? Being betrayed? That had nothing to do with making sense.

"[…Yes it has, Nora,]" I said evenly.

It took every ounce of self-control I had to remind myself in that moment…

I prefer peaceful solutions…right?