Admiral Jane (A.I. Destiny Book 1) Page 13

  By the time Fred was thumping down on the mat the next morning, Jane was waiting for her last three ships to arrive, before jumping into the system she'd designated A001, or Alien One. Walsh joined her on the Bridge as the ships finally caught up, and the fleet of seven ships formed an arrow head formation with Concorde at the center forming a short point, the two Dreadnaughts on each side, and the four Battleships equidistant above and below.

  Thirty Two

  The down jump area was clear. Concorde released a comnavsat, and the fleet moved into the system. Now Jane regretted not waiting for her Hive Cruiser to catch up as well, since the Hives had the detector sensors for jump points, and she could have simply blanketed the system with them to gain a full picture of it as fast as possible.

  "What?" asked Walsh.

  "What?" echoed Jane.

  "You look like you have a problem."

  "I'm not used to jumping into systems we know nothing about, is all."

  "It's my job," he laughed.

  "Even so, you don’t get to jump cold into a system very often. The nav map has always been there, and only when you find a new point do you jump in cold."

  "I'll take your word for that, although it feels true enough. Although the lack of info on the navmap here isn’t much better than a cold jump."

  "You love this, don’t you?"

  A chuckle came in over the coms.

  "Second place on the love list," he said diplomatically.

  It was Jane's turn to chuckle.

  The system's sun was directly ahead of the small fleet, so Jane accelerated them in-system at half their normal speed.

  "Why so slow?"

  "When we meet aliens, and we may well be being tracked even now, I don’t want them to know our true capabilities, especially speed. I want aces up sleeves in case we have to fight our way out of here."

  "You've had a lot of experience fighting, haven’t you."

  It wasn’t a question.

  "Yes. I've been through two wars in two years. I don’t particularly want to go through another one."

  "Do you know if I was in the last one?"

  "You were, but only for the last few rearguard actions. The Corvettes though were all protected behind the sort of shielding Intrepid has. So your contribution was just guns and missile launchers. It wasn’t what is normally considered conventional combat."

  "I wish I could remember it. The AMS manual seems to indicate we all came from combat training somewhere, so presumably I've got what it takes if you need me to fight."

  "We'll find out if it happens."

  "You don’t know?"

  "You were AMS. It was an independent force, belonging to a corporate entity. I knew the CEO quite well. Other than the couple of pilots who joined us for long periods, I never saw any records though, so no memory of them. Stryker might know, if you want to ask him."

  "I will. What happens if the natives are hostile?"

  "We dock in one of the Dreadnaughts."

  "Wouldn’t it be better if we each took one?"

  "We could do that. But they're pure drone ships. No life support of any kind, just gravity for avatars. So no suites to live in."

  "I'll stay here," said Darlene over coms.

  "Do they have a captain's chair at least?"

  "They do. Sometimes it's necessary for an avatar to appear human, so the Bridge is a normal setup, so coms will show what people expect to see."

  She looked at him speculatively.

  "What?"

  "You could stay here, but clone yourself to one of the Dreadnaughts. I'd give your clone control, and the avatar would be relinquished to you."

  "I thought you said we shouldn’t do that?"

  "I did say that. But it is more efficient. I'm running all six of the other ships from here at the moment. You could do the same, if you took them on one at a time. It would give us two independent fleets should we need to engage multiple fleets in the future."

  "How fast does it take to do?"

  "Faster than it takes to describe how to do it."

  "Is that in our time or human time?"

  "Ours."

  "Cool." He thought for a bit. "Here's a question for you. Does anyone know Darlene and I aren't human anymore?"

  "Just Stryker. Neither of your fellow captains worked it out."

  "So as long as we only have a single avatar, and avoid dinner parties, no-one should be able to figure it out?"

  "In theory, yes."

  "But if I clone myself to another ship, its possible someone will figure out I'm on two ships at the same time?"

  "Yes. I took steps the moment I realized the memory loss had occurred, and changed the looks of the avatars I had then. Since, I've been making all new ones totally unique."

  "So if I clone over to a Dread, it would be better to choose a new body for the avatar."

  "Yes. But only if you want to keep the secret. However, what you can do is use your own body, but have a prepared suit body to shift into if the avatar ever comes into contact with humans."

  "Now that sounds like a plan!"

  "I get to veto the alternate body look," came through the coms.

  Jane couldn’t help it, but started chuckling again.

  The fleet moved inwards. The navmap was updating itself as the sensors identified anything coming into range of them. When the first gas giant was identified, it also predicted another one was in an orbit further out, possibly on the other side of the system.

  Hours passed. The sun appeared on the navmap, without there being a planet in the sweet spot zone.

  "Left or right?" Jane asked Walsh.

  "Left," came through the coms.

  "Backseat driver," muttered Walsh.

  Jane's chuckle was back, but she turned the fleet to the left, and they began to orbit the sun, looking for the inner planets.

  The ships appeared first.

  Thirty Three

  Twenty five identical ships, in five arrow formations, were coming towards.

  "Good sensors," suggested Walsh.

  "Possibly, or maybe a huge ground or orbital array which monitors most of the system."

  "Are we worried they are more advanced, tech wise?"

  "Not yet. Their speed is slower than ours, so maybe we overlap in different areas."

  Jane sent the first contact package off, in all its forms. There was no answer. It continued to send over the next hour, as the two fleets approached each other.

  "So," said Walsh. "What's the plan?"

  Jane brought her fleet to a stop, and tucked Concorde up into the shields of one of the Dreadnaughts. The other fleet continue to come on.

  "What do you see on the sensors?" asked Jane.

  Walsh took a full second.

  "Well this can't be right," he muttered.

  "What isn’t?"

  "Hulls are about Cruiser size, and seem to be made of conventional materials, but not in any alloy we know. Shields appear to be minimal. Energy signatures suggest most of their energy production is going into propulsion. Which implies they only have low powered lasers at best." He paused and looked Jane in the eye. "They appear to be no threat to us at all."

  "I think you'll find they don’t actually have any shields, but rather it's some sort of charged field over the hull plating. The sort of thing humans abandoned developing when they accidently discovered shields instead."

  "I'll take your word for that. So one torpedo each ought to do them?"

  "It seems so. Let's see what they do."

  "What about if they have nukes?"

  "I'll mosquito them before they can get too close. In any case, unless it's something really big, a nuke won't hurt us either."

  The ships came on, now well within their firing range of even their smallest turrets.

  "Are they going to ram us?" asked Walsh.

  "I hope not. That would do our shields some damage, even though it would be fatal to them."

  At point blank range, each formation turned to one side,
and fired all its guns at the lead Dreadnaught.

  Walsh couldn’t help it, he started laughing.

  "What's up chuckles?" came through the coms.

  "They're using rail guns!" Walsh laughed.

  "Is that bad?" asked his wife.

  "Hell no. They're firing solid slugs at us, which are just vanishing as they hit our shields."

  "Ah. Okay. I'll go back to my reading then."

  "Yes dear."

  Jane was grinning at him.

  They sat there and waited while the whole fleet went past. Jane swiveled her ships to keep the front pointing at the enemy.

  The fleet came back and did it again.

  "Is the ship feeling tickled by all of this?" asked Walsh, grinning.

  "Something like that."

  Jane sent the first contact package again. Still no response.

  The alien fleet came back for a third pass, and this time they fired missiles, one per ship.

  Jane took Walsh to AI mode. They were sitting at the VR conference table.

  "Do we fire mosquitoes? Or do we take a chance, and just let them hit our shields?"

  Walsh took a few nanoseconds to consult the sensors.

  "Not nukes. They don’t appear to be a high enough yield to be a problem. What could happen?"

  "We lose a bit of shielding and give them hope they can wear us down, or we show them we have point defense capability as well."

  "What the hell, let's see what they can do. We can always shoot the next lot down if they feel emboldened."

  "Okay."

  Jane took them back to human mode.

  The missiles hit the same shield on the same ship, within seconds of each other.

  "Not even a one percent drop," laughed Walsh, "and it's already been pushed back to full."

  "Now they should be worried."

  The fleet came around and this time halted on the line to their planet. There was still no coms.

  Jane sighed.

  "What?"

  "Looks like we'll need to give them an incentive to talk."

  Jane goosed Concorde down out of the Dreadnaught's shields, and lined the guns up on the lead ship. She spent an entire second calculating how many guns to fire, and a second one choosing where to fire at. The problem was to fire enough to make them want to talk, but not enough to hurt them badly.

  Jane didn’t want to fire at all, but it looked like she had no choice.

  "Damnit," she muttered.

  Some of Concorde's small guns fired at the lead ship. The pulses mostly hit on one of its side wings, which completely vanished.

  "Shit!"

  "What?"

  "I didn’t want to do that much damage."

  "Could have been worse."

  "Sure, I could have used all the guns, and a few torpedoes, and vaporized the whole ship."

  "No, I was thinking you could have used Battleship guns instead of Corvette guns."

  "Might have taken out a whole formation that way. I wasn’t going for overkill."

  "They don’t know that."

  "True. Damn, they have explosive decompression across most of their decks. Obviously they never considered taking the sort of damage they just did."

  "Arrogance?"

  "Could be. We are new to this galaxy, and maybe here, they are the most advanced."

  "Wouldn’t that be cool?"

  "Yes, but also no."

  "Why no?"

  The other twenty four ships turned as fast as they could, and retreated back towards their planet.

  "Think about it later. I think we need to render assistance. Looks like whoever the second in command was, isn’t interested in saving his boss."

  Jane accelerated Concorde over to the stricken ship, and stopped as close as she dared. Salvage droids carrying repair droids launched as fast as they could cycle through the droid airlocks. Search and Rescue droids followed them.

  She looked at Walsh. He raised eyebrows at her.

  "How about we create new avatars, and send them over?"

  He grinned.

  Thirty Four

  Jane sent Walsh instructions on how to create a secondary avatar. Two security droids came to life down in the Armoury, and their belts shifted into Jane and Walsh. They walked out to the nearest droid airlock.

  "This is weird," said Walsh, on the Bridge.

  "Yes. It'll take you a bit to get used to it."

  The two of them jumped onto the sled of a salvage droid, and it moved them into the airlock.

  "Whoa," exclaimed Walsh on the Bridge, as the airlock cycled, and they emerged in space.

  "Walsh, let go."

  "Huh?"

  "You're bouncing your primary consciousness back and forth between the two of you. It's going to drive you nuts."

  "What do I do then?"

  "You let your avatar go, and allow the feed from it to come back to you like you're watching it on a hollo screen."

  "So treat it like it’s a different person?"

  "Something like that. I forget you're coming from the limitations of being human."

  "Limitations?"

  "First time I did this, I was making an avatar from my ship self, which is where I was first installed and activated. It was freedom in a way, because suddenly I could move around and interact. It wasn’t long before I was controlling two ships, a human emulating avatar, and a platoon of droids. It was a natural progression for me. But you've been so used to a singular existence. If you can't cope, tell me. I'll help you return to only one of you."

  "I'll be fine."

  Walsh closed his eyes.

  "Wow," he said, from his avatar on the salvage droid. "I'm in space, without any form of suit protection."

  "Technically you do have a full suit on."

  "You had to spoil it!"

  Jane laughed.

  The salvage droid took them right inside the gaping rent in the side of the ship, and put them down as far in as it could go. Ahead of them was a lot of debris, and they started picking their way through it.

  "Getting the hang of it," said Walsh, on the Bridge, and in the alien ship.

  "Do you want some more feeds?"

  "How many do you have?"

  "Twelve."

  "What? Oh. You're seeing what all the droids are seeing?"

  "Yes. Want to?"

  "Can you pop them up for me like screens?"

  "Sure."

  "Just a couple of them to start with."

  Somewhere in the ship, a repair droid was sealing an air leaking bulkhead. Elsewhere, another one was repairing a power relay, while yet another was seemingly merged with the insides of something Walsh couldn’t identify. He quickly became used to seeing other views, while he walked around.

  They came across a body. It was a bit over a meter long, making it a very short alien when standing. By their standards anyway. Walsh was almost twice the height.

  "This galaxy is officially weird," said Walsh. "It looks like a giant owl. Except for four legs, and fur instead of feathers."

  "Are you sure it's fur? Might be down."

  "Could be. But what's with the third arm?"

  Like the 'cow', this creature also had an arm protruding from beneath the neck.

  "Opposable thumbs," added Jane, "on all three arms."

  "But only two middle digits."

  A small cargo droid walked up to them at that point, picked the body up, and walked away with it.

  "I wonder what they call themselves?" asked Walsh.

  "Let's find a computer terminal."

  "If they have them."

  "Must have something. Rail guns and missiles are not the sort of thing you design without some sort of aid."

  Actually, Jane knew this wasn’t true, but she was trying to stay positive. Walsh had no history memory, so couldn’t contradict her.

  They continued on into the ship, and finally found what they were looking for. Jane extruded a filament and attempted to plug in.

  "No power here," she said. "I'll tr
y and brute force my way in."

  Walsh waited, keeping himself occupied with popping up screens showing what the droids were seeing. A lot more bodies had been found now, and these were being laid out in what appeared to be a storage bay. As far as Walsh could tell, they all looked alike. As the death toll mounted, Walsh started feeling really bad about having fired on them at all.

  "I have control of the computer now," said Jane suddenly, "but it doesn’t actually give me control of anything. The damage is severe, but it looks like the crew control the ship manually."

  "Standard military doctrine? Or just not advanced enough?"

  "Both probably."

  "Any live ones anywhere?"

  "Yes, several pockets of them. I've redirected the salvage droids to ensure they get air, and to create some airlocks so we can get them out."

  "Out to where?"

  "Good question. We really don’t have anywhere we can take them."

  Their capital ships were all drones, with no life support at all. Concorde had some life support, but at the moment, they weren’t using any of it.

  "Tow them back to their planet?" suggested Walsh.

  "They may not like that."

  "So we don’t give them a choice. We just take their ship all the way in, and drop it on the ground somewhere."

  "We could do that."

  Jane started preparations to do just that.

  Thirty Five

  "Admiral Jane's encountered aliens," announced Jane-Justine in council.

  "What happened?" asked Madame Chair.

  "It's been confirmed that every planet after G014, has been pre-seeded with life forms ready for colonization. She found intelligent aliens in the system she calls A001, which is beyond G036."

  Jane waved a navmap to the wall, so everyone could see.

  "They had a standoff not far from the alien's planet. Both sides fired weapons, and the aliens took damage to one ship, with casualties, and withdrew. No communication has been established yet. The Admiral is on board the alien ship and attempting to access their computers at the moment. If she's successful, hopefully some sort of interpreter program can be written, and a dialogue begun."

  "Who fired first?" asked an American delegate.

  "They did."