Cosmosis

Freefall

( Starspeak )

My fist was itching to just sock Nora right in the face.

There was complicated storm of emotions whirling in my brain about that. There was the basic principle of nonviolence to consider: don't hit people unprovoked. But there was also an entire childhood and adolescence of maybe-chauvinistic principles that said it was especially wrong to hit a woman.

And yet, I could feel my entire body on the verge of shaking from anger. Just the sight of her had dredged all the resentment I'd stuffed down.

All things considered?

I thought I was handling it better than expected.

"[What are you doing here?]" I said, forcing my voice to stay even. Professional.

Nora liked being straight and to the point.

"[SPARK is trying to knock this space station out of the sky.]"

Damn it.

"[Soon?]"

"[We don't have an itinerary, but…]" she gestured vaguely, "[yeah.]"

I grimaced.

Lives were at stake then.

I could shelve my resentment with her for a while longer. God knows I didn't have to worry about it going anywhere…

"We do have something of a timetable," I said, switching back to Starspeak and beaming her some of our stolen documents. "But we took these from CENSOR, not SPARK."

"We're pretty confident it's SPARK, but whichever AI is doing this is secondary to what's actually being done," she said. "The station's main computer network is having a meltdown. We were on the bridge trying to figure out the diagnostics when you guys tripped the station's proximity alarms."

"Someone…gave them the idea that humans were good with computers," Dustin remarked dryly.

He eyed me accusingly.

He was the person in Nora's crew that I knew best, but it occurred to me there that he was also definitely loyal to her. Like Tassser, he'd noticed exactly how much I was containing my anger with Nora.

If I went for her, he wouldn't even think before intervening. With force.

Dragging my attention back to what Nora had actually said…

"We brought talent there," I said. "Ben, Shinshay."

<Get to the bridge,> I ordered them. <Comms are first priority. Then diagnostics. We need to know which threats are real.>

"Lead the way," Ben said.

"Clayde," I said, "are you in command?"

"XO," the Vorak replied.

I beamed them the same package of documents.

"Disseminate that. It's incomplete, but that's what brought us here. Someone has it out for this place."

That gave them enough to focus on while we began walking through the station's guts. Nora and Dustin both didn't talk. As we walked, I flexed my knees carefully with each step, trying to get a sense for how to move in the local gravity.

Ships could make for long term residences because of their engines. Thrust provided enough facsimile to gravity that you could stave off the worst effects of long-term exposure to low gravity. Ships could spend most of their time in transit, under thrust, with only brief periods of truly zero-G scattered throughout.

Unless a space station wanted to contend with the long term consequences of weightlessness, they all needed some kind of artificial gravity.

It didn't take much to seriously reduce the toll. Living at merely 'low' G instead of 'zero' would still cause muscle atrophy and loss in bone density, but the decline was far slower. What would take six months to lose in zero-G would take more than two years to lose at just .2G.

Those numbers only improved as the gravity you lived under closer and closer matched your homeworld's environment.

So long term space platforms needed some form of gravity. Different stations were usually classified by different configurations of gravity.

First were the classics: rings.

They were the oldest and technically the lowest tech.

Build a ring large enough and spin it, and people could walk and live on the inside edge. The downsides were long-term material strain and Coriolis effect. Occupants of rings frequently grew dizzy and suffered vertigo, especially if the radius was small enough.

Second were the earliest stabs at truly artificial gravity: spheres or cores.

Normal rock, ice, and metal needed to be hundreds of kilometers in diameter before gravity would naturally round them to spheres. And even then, their gravitational pull would still be feeble.

Adeptry made it relatively easy to manufacture exotic materials that exerted a more intense gravitational pull than normal matter, at least within certain distances. The Vorak had pioneered a design where much smaller asteroids, just a few miles wide, could be rounded and held together by much more intense gravity, effectively turning them into microscopic habitable moons. Korbanok, where I'd first met Nai and Tasser, was one such 'core' station.

The Yigown station was the third type: a cylinder.

Cylinder stations were made in response to advances in artificial gravity tech. Early artificial gravity could only mimic how gravity occurred in nature: spherically, omnidirectionally. But with Adept-based technology way above my pay-grade, it was discovered that the gravity didn't necessarily need to propagate in all directions.

It just needed to be symmetrical. Cylindrical stations technically could be any prism, circular was just the easiest to maintain. In one half of the cylinder, the gravity would draw down, while opposed by the other half of the cylinder drawing 'up', meeting in the middle.

In this case, the station was split between freight and everything else. Ships docked on the freight exterior and the automated lifts took us 'down' toward the middle of the station before flipping and continuing up toward the bridge.

The inside of the elevator there were sleek digital displays showing our position in the structure, and it gave a rough idea of exactly how big the station was.

It was huge. I was having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that there were bigger ones. End to end, it was more than three-thousand feet tall, and more than three-hundred feet wide.

The elevator finally stopped at a level marked 'operations' and security XO Clayde directed us to follow Dustin and Nora while they rode the elevator back down.

The doors emblazoned 'bridge' opened to reveal a beleaguered looking Vorak who immediately barked, "Clarke!"

"They're friendly," Nora said. "Trust me, we want their help."

"Caleb Hane," I said stiffly. "Who's your system architect?"

The station governor must have been seriously concerned to not haggle over authority or posturing. They just pointed to a small huddle of rak hunched over screens and consoles to one side of the bridge.

<Ben, Shinshay, make friends,> I ordered. <Remember triage.>

They both got to work, introducing themselves to the tech-support rak, before quickly engrossing themselves in the computer talk.

I turned to Nora.

"SPARK?"

<A surveillance operative of his jumped ship,> Nora explained. <There was a Vorak civilian attached to the occupation on Archo, and SPARK made them an asset to monitor the Archo Mission. But something made SPARK clean house; blew up their apartment with them, their spouse, and child inside.>

"[Jesus…]" I swore.

<Their Adeptry activated in the explosion. They survived. They wish they hadn't, but…> she grimaced behind her air mask. <We were first responders on scene. Brought them in. Reported them dead. We've been pumping them for information in the meantime.>

<They knew SPARK was planning to down this station?>

<Technically, they only knew this station was going to be dropped out of orbit somehow,> she said. <We assumed SPARK because of their affiliation.>

<How did you know they were affiliated with SPARK?>

<Pattern,> Nora said. <CENSOR doesn't blow up her operatives. They die quiet. Plus, we know what surveillance CENSOR has on Archo.>

<That's all?>

<No, but do we really have time for receipts?> she asked.

"First impressions?" I asked, turning to tech support.

"Bad," Ben replied.

"It's not just software," Shinshay added. "They already tried a [factory restart]. No good."

"Hardware has been added?" I asked.

"Ya," Ben said. "Someone gave this station a second brain. A big one. Don't know where yet. Probably multiple points. Maybe distributed processing. Maybe something modular. Could take a while to locate it all."

I turned back to the station governor.

"When was the last time there was major work done on the station?"

"Define 'major work'," they said. "We have ongoing projects."

"We're not talking about opening up some walls, or replacing conduiting," I said. "Major maintenance. Structural. Anything that would require temporarily blacking out the entire station or switching to backup generators, even temporarily."

"You're thinking nodes were inserted during a power-down?" Ben asked.

"Just my first guess," I said. "The new brain had to get added at some point."

"…The station underwent a major addition about nine months ago," the governor said. "Nine decks were added, and the reactor redundancies were replaced. We replaced major systems."

"You can't take critical systems offline," Nora followed, "so you'd have to install the new stuff before taking the old stuff offline?"

I saw what she was getting at.

"Maybe the new brain wasn't added at all," Nora said. "Maybe an old one just got kept."

"Was the bridge one of the things that got replaced?" I asked.

"No!" one of the rak working with Ben and Shinshay called. "All the nodes with override priority are here."

"Then the problem isn't one brain we're competing against," I said. "It's going to be little brains, grafted onto specific systems."

"…Yeah," Ben said, looking over the screens of diagnostic data. "We got there too. Couple seconds behind you."

"So which all systems aren't behaving?" I asked.

"Docking operations and comms are the big ones," the governor said. "We can't release ships, and we can't broadcast."

"Or receive," I pointed out. "We really were broadcasting regularly on our way in."

"We're still receiving regular transmissions from around Firgid."

"…Are you sure?" I asked.

"What?"

"<Nerin, come in?>" I asked.

<Standing by,> she reported.

<Take helm on the Jack,> I ordered. <The station is going to patch you a copy of their comms, both receiving and transmitting. I want you to compare their feeds to the Jack's.>

<Acknowledged,> she said. <…How are they patching to me if they can't broadcast?>

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I glanced at the station governor.

"<We'll try a low tech manual broadcast first. If that doesn't work, we'll…run a cable or something. I'm handing you off to…someone who can make that happen.>"

<Got it,> she said.

The governor ordered one of their people to do so, but Nora beat them to it.

She materialized a machine box from a template, and worked with the station's bridge crew to interface the box with the station comms.

Nora handed me a psionic shard with the transmission information, and I relayed it to Nerin.

Yigown station's crew didn't have the fancy optical-hologram-psionics that my and Nora's crews did, so we had to comb the audio manually, one channel at a time. But the difference between the feeds became obvious quickly.

Opening the Jack's sensors to the full spectrum and using the station's decryption, we were listening in on emergency broadcasts that weren't typically intelligible to ordinary transceivers. It was the special direct lines a station or moon might use to communicate with other objects orbiting the same gas giant.

More than a half dozen of Yigown's neighbors had detected a change in ordinary broadcasting behavior, and they were sending regular transmissions toward the station trying to query the problem.

Three ships were even en route, not even counting the Siegfried and the slew of other Flotilla ships.

"I don't understand," the governor frowned. "How's this possible?"

"These are tightbeams, right?" I asked.

A comm tech nodded.

"How tight?"

"Err…tolerances are still dozens of kilometers wide," they said.

"So it's not some dish being misaligned?"

"No," the tech agreed.

"Then there's some compromised element between the comm station here and the station's main comm array," I concluded.

"Governor, it's even more important to consider evacuating," Nora said.

"They can't," I pointed out. "Not as long as the station's docking clamps are inoperable. Ships can't detach themselves."

"What about escape—"

Nora started to ask, but she was cut off by a rumble going through the station. Every single person on the bridge fell to their knees, and a wave of unified emotion surged all throughout the station.

Fear.

Someone shouted for everyone to brace, but it was a mostly pointless gesture. There was only so much you could hold on without any warning.

The rumble only lasted a few seconds, but the bridge erupted into chaos with everyone screaming all at once. Everyone on the bridge were barking into radios trying to talk to the other parts of the station, demanding answers or reporting about what just happened.

Nora motioned to tap my arm, but she hesitated a few inches short.

I eyed her suspiciously.

"There's no alarms," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"Listen."

She pointed vaguely upward.

"No alarms."

That was strange.

"<Ben, Shinshay, how long would it take to test the station's emergency systems? Alarms, emergency venting, seals, anything.>"

<A while? Err…I don't know. There's no alarms going off—oh, I get it,> Ben said.

He and Shinshay weren't even bothering to speak, all of their focus was on feeling out the boundaries of the station's computer problems.

I took one step and an itch went down my spine. Something felt off. I flexed my knees a couple times.

When you've visited as many different moons as I have, when you've lived on space ships under thrust for years, you develop a sense of gravity.

You get a sense for how much things are supposed to weigh. I had no way of measuring precisely, but just judging based on how my weight settled on my joints…gravity was slightly lighter than before.

"Governor, this end of the station, the moon is 'down' compared to us, right?"

"What?" they shrieked, aghast at my interruption.

"Which direction is the moon, compared to the bridge, up or down?"

"DOWN!" they thundered.

I ignored the anger. It wasn't productive right now, and if I was right, every second mattered.

<Nai, Nerin, decouple the Jack from the station immediately, we need eyes on the outside,> I ordered.

"<Shinshay, Ben, forget solving the computer for a minute, show me any exterior cameras this station has. Now.>"

The tone of my voice made it clear where I wanted our priorities. Exterior cameras were concentrated on the lower half of the station, primarily there for monitoring docked ships. But there were still a number of cameras mounted to the outside of the residential top half.

At least, there should be…

<Where are the topside feeds?> Ben asked one of the rak.

They frowned, and the concern growing amongst them caught the attention of the governor.

"<Nerin, how's the Jack?>" I asked.

<Decoupled,> she replied.

"<Maneuvering thrust,>" I ordered, "<get us eyes on the top half of the—>"

<Unholy fate—what is that?>

It was agonizing seconds before any reply came, but using the same feed we'd routed for the comms, the Jack sent us a live feed of the ship's own external cameras.

The Yigown station loomed taking up almost the entire feed, but looking parallel to the body of the station, toward the top, a massive glow was visible.

The clamor on the bridge ceased as all eyes fell on the screen showing the Jack's feed.

"W-w-what is-s-s th-th-that-t-t? a dozen voices all asked the same question in stereo, unsynchronized.

<It…it looks like a rocket of some kind,> Nerin reported.

"<Scan it,>" I ordered. Every second mattered here. "<If it's a drive, it's got a reactor. Find the heat bloom and put a hole in it. [ASAP].>"

There was some alarm from the station leadership as they heard me order my ship to fire on what was ostensibly part of the station, but no one actually voiced any objection.

<Acknowledged,> Nerin said. <Lorel's on guns. Passing maneuvering.>

"Wait," Nora said. "You need to make sure no one's up there."

I ignored her, and kept watching.

<We've got the heat bloom,> Lorel reported. <Stabilizing ourselves for a shot…>

"What if it's rigged to explode?" she asked.

"It's not," I said.

"You don't know that!"

"No, I can't know that," I said, letting my patience slip. "I've been in more crises than you. I know what I'm doing."

She opened her mouth to object, but before she could, Lorel's voice crackled on our open psionic channel.

<Firing in four, three, two—>

The 'one' was replaced by a heavy thud sounding through the Jack's comms and what looked like a splash in the metal sticking out the top of the station.

On the camera feed, hell's bright glow suddenly stopped emitting from the top of the station, and another shudder went through the superstructure.

I flexed my knees, confirming gravity was back to what it had been moments ago.

Good. The only gravity acting on us was the station's symmetrical artificial setup—we were at least no longer under thrust.

"That vectored the whole station down," I said.

"Get Mustaro again," the governor ordered one of their subordinates. "Get the power grid braced for the biggest thrust-correction burst we've ever done."

Nora was still chewing her brain through the process of 'shooting the rocket' CENSOR or SPARK had strapped to this space station.

"How did you know that wouldn't blow up and kill us all?" Nora asked angrily.

"Because if it they wanted it to blow up, then they never would have needed a rocket," I said. "Rigging it to blow doesn't get them what they want, which is apparently dropping this space station down on…"

"Rava," Nai prompted me.

"Thank you," I said. "The station comms are still [screwed] so we need to be talking to the moon below." <Whoever's on the Jack, get on comms and start talking to people on the ground. If we can't get the station back in a stable orbit, we need to make sure they're ready down there."

"Caleb…" Nora said, dropping her voice. <If the station drops, there aren't going to be any survivors on board. We're going to hit the ground like a megaton bomb.>

<I know,> I said pointedly. <I meant they need to be prepared to evacuate anywhere that looks it might be where this thing lands.>

I glared at her, wanting so, so badly to bite her head off and just spill all the venom I'd been saving for years now.

But I didn't. Because I could be a professional while lives were on the line.

"How'd you know there wasn't anyone up there that could get hit?"

"I didn't," I snapped. "I did consider the possibility, but then I weighed that possibility against how many people would die if we left that thruster firing long enough for us to go check and make sure no one would get hurt shooting it."

The part that bothered me wasn't actually that her questions were unreasonable. They were. She was second guessing tactical decisions not seconds later when decisiveness and follow-up mattered.

No, what bothered me was they weren't that unreasonable.

My brain, for whatever reason, saw fit to remind me that she wasn't prepared for tactical thinking. It hadn't been what gear her brain had been in minutes ago, and not everyone was trained to switch gears like I was. Even among people who were trained, not everyone was as good at it as I was.

Stop it, I chided my brain. Stop apologizing for her.

"How much did the station's vector change?" Nora asked—finally a good question.

"0.12 G off acceleration downward, roughly two-minutes…" Nai spoke, plugging math into psionics in her head. "…I can tell you how fast we're going toward the moon, but I don't know how far up we're in orbit."

<Nerin, sorry to put more on your plate, but we need a clock. How far from the planet are we? How fast are we falling?>

<Gotcha,> she said. <We'll get it to you in a bit…err…check with the station engineers. I'm not seeing any thrusters firing to correct the orbit.>

I glanced toward the governor. They were frowning with worry, doing their best to stay out of the way while the engineers tackled the problem.

<They haven't fired yet,> I reported. <They're going in three…two… one…?>

The number came and went, but no rumble went through the station.

<Nothing outside,> Nerin reported.

Vorak eyes looked from the governor, to me, and then Ben and Shinshay.

"The software reports the thrusters are firing," one engineer said, voice full of doubt.

"But it's clearly not. We should be feeling something," another voiced.

"Okay…compromising elements are definitely in the comm systems and the emergency thruster controls," I said. "For starters."

<We've got your clock, Caleb,> Nerin reported. <Three hours, Fifty-one minutes, and ten, nine, eight seconds, here's the file.>

"That's until we hit the moon," I said. "But the point of no return is going to come a lot sooner than that. How low can we get and still have a viable chance to correct the orbit? How long until that?"

The governor and their rak took over that problem, and they quickly came back with a figure.

"One hour. Slightly less, really."

"Nai, thrusters? Get cascading, but: free reign. You know what you're looking for," I said. "Jordan—"

"I need Jordan!" Shinshay interrupted.

"We do," Ben added. "We need the Siegfried."

"—help them," I ordered. "I'm heading outside to check the comm array. I'll work my way through back tracking toward the bridge. Whatever is compromising the comms has to be somewhere between here and there."

Sid moved to follow me without a word. I thought about Tasser joining us, but my Adeptry was already going to be stretched pretty thin making suits for Sid and myself.

"I'll loop with security—Clayde, right?" Tasser said. "They can use all the help they can get."

Dustin nodded. "Me too."

"What about me?" Nora asked.

"I'm in charge of my people," I said without missing a beat.

Sid and I jogged out the bridge and toward the elevator, not caring to see if Nora was following or not.