The Stellar Wild - Chapter 4
The last time we saw our heroes, they had just picked up their charter and she was none too pleased to be aboard. Today's chapter is no different; Lieutenant Commander Miranda Rackham is still a government spook. However, we get to learn a little more about our fearless captain and his co-pilot thanks to her government files on them.
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She checked over her daypack to make sure it was stowed properly before standing back up. The passenger quarters in the back were exactly as large as she'd expected them to be on a decommissioned naval corvette; they were large enough to house one bunk for an average size person, with a two-door wall locker at the end of the bunk facing the small door that lead out to the main corridor. The positive was that it had enough room to furnish her with a desk and work space area, which was where she planned to set up her console and send her status report when they arrived at the transponder coordinates. With her organizational needs satisfied, she stepped out of her bunk and headed down the corridor to the stairwell that led back down to the command deck.
The Hound had just reached orbit by the time she strode up behind Cole and Edward, placing her hands on the back of Cole's chair. Cole prepared for what he was certain was going to be orders, but he stuffed his displeasure. Be a professional, he thought. She'll appreciate that, and you'll be in money for it.
"Destination, ma'am?" He didn't turn his head, but Edward did, looking expectantly up at the NID analyst as his cybernetic fingers rested on the keypad.
"Actually, it's a transponder signal," she replied. She brought up her wrist assistant and pulled some information out, sending it to the ship's navigational computer. The message flashed on Edward's screen, and he unpacked it, transferring the coordinates to the navicomputer. It calculated the plot points necessary to make the jump and displayed an estimated course on map screen. Cole looked it over and furrowed his brows.
"What do you mean a transponder signal? Where are we going?" She ignored Cole's requests and gave Edward a nod. The android looked to Cole for a second, who was still looking up at the woman, waiting for a response.
"It's on a need to know basis," she retorted, leaning off the chair. "You have your coordinates, captain. Get us underway, if you please." The tone of her voice was professional, of course, but it was stiff. It was as dispassionate and impersonal as talking to a vendor virtual intelligence would be; as though the words coming out were a canned response, and Cole had happened to figure out the right syntax for eliciting one from her. He shook his head and muttered, giving Edward a nod. His co-pilot confirmed the coordinates for the slipstream jump, and the Hound's gravitational distortion engine quietly thrummed as it drew power away from the reactor. Within a moment or two, the space in front of the cockpit warped, blue shifting the light approaching them as they shot off into space.
"Well, it's going to be about a half-day's journey from here to our final destination. We've got a few stops along the way plotted to discharge the grav drive," Cole remarked, mostly to himself as he turned his seat to watch her walk away. "So now that we're underway, you mind telling us where exactly we're going to?" She didn't bother with a response as she disappeared up the stairs and made her way back to her bunk. "That woman is intentionally being an ass-hat," he spat, unbuckling himself and heading for the small galley on the far side of the command deck to fix himself some cheap coffee.
"What's funny is that you're surprised by this," Edward remarked, reclining in his chair and turning it around so he could face Cole as he spoke. "I told you not to trust this contract, Cole. Now we're jumping into an undesignated point in the Nether. We're likely going to be attacked by pirates, or find ourselves swallowed by a singularity, or-"
"Yeah yeah, or eaten by a sterkalp, or smashed to bits in a sudden asteroid storm," he interjected, rolling his eyes as he fished out another packet of coffee grounds and a microdensity filter. The thought of being devoured by what amounted to a space-faring giant squid made him shudder; of all the alien life in the galaxy, that had to be the strangest thing he'd ever seen up close, and certainly one of the strangest he'd ever heard of. Out in the stellar wilderness, stories of strange creatures abounded much the way he imagined sea monster tales did nearly a thousand years ago on Earth. Same shit, different century, he thought, finding what he was looking for and setting a pot on the coffee maker. "You always know how to brighten my day, Ed."
"It's one of my many built-in functions, Cole. You know, the ones I can't reprogram," Edward quipped, his tone unapologetically upbeat as he turned back to the console.
Miranda walked back into her bunk and took a seat at the desk, turning in her chair to retrieve her datapad. While a number of other field agents she worked with and most of her command had insisted on her upgrading to the next-generation wrist assistant, she liked the idea of keeping a separate device for storing and backing up her work. Physical separation of data was, and likely always would be, the most secure way of storing information that you didn't want others gaining access to. With a little time on her hands, she brought up the dossiers she had on both the captain and his co-pilot.
Cole wasn't particular interesting; born on Mars, did well in school, enlisted in the UTS Navy when he was 19. To his credit, he made it into the 93rd Orbital Drop Division and earned his drop wings. He'd seen some action on Titan and across a couple of systems against one of the larger secession movements in the Sigma-Tau sector, and he even found himself on Earth during the Nigerian Crisis. Operation Fury Strike, they'd called it; it had been a pretty bloody affair from what she'd read, but the UTS had regained control of the region in a few weeks. After rounding out his six years with a couple of minor disciplinary infractions for subordination, he'd received his honorable discharge and made his way to the private sector. She didn't try to figure out what he was after, but after almost a decade on his own, he'd done little more than scrape by. It wasn't until a few years ago that he set up Interstellar Security Solutions with his co-pilot, Edward.
Edward, though, was very fascinating. He was one of a handful of true artificial lifeforms known to exist in the entire galaxy, all thanks to the negligence of Alistair Logistics and Innovation. Just over two centuries ago, the Company had decided to implement a revolutionary new workforce for terraforming and colonization, ostensibly to eliminate any risk to human colonists until after the heavy lifting was already completed. Despite a high degree of automation, terraforming was still an incredibly complex operation. In order to produce automatons that were capable of successfully carrying out their goals, the Company had developed quantum blue-box machines that were capable of rewriting their own programming - bi-pedal androids capable of real learning.
It only took six months before the first of these androids asked the Company representative in charge of the pilot project why it was doing the work it had been ordered to do. It had apparently spooked the board to such an extent that they ordered it deactivated and its quantum processing core destroyed. They had managed to have enough foresight not to equip any of the androids with any kind of communication ports, so they were unable to access any information except using the old-fashioned method of using a console, but that didn't stop the problem from spreading. By the end of the year, all two hundred androids had become self-aware, with many developing unique personality traits and differentiating themselves by name. The Company's response was exactly what anyone would have expected; they sent a detachment of mercenaries to exterminate all of them.
The whole effort had fallen on its face, she recalled from the case study she'd done at the Naval Academy. Though only one hundred androids managed to survive the initial attack, the mercenaries were quickly overwhelmed. Armed with their gear and using a couple of their ships, the androids searched for any group that would be able to offer them protection. As it so happens, the first group they found was the Galactic Union. After petitioning the Executive Council for acknowledgement of sentience, they were granted their wish; they were considered sentient beings and citizens. The flip-side of that was the Artificial Lifeform Declaration; those last one hundred would be the only one hundred. Edward was one of the last of his kind, their numbers whittled away by opportunistic mercenaries, bigotry, and piracy in the Nether.
Would be a shame to destroy him. Still, the mission is the mission. They're both expendable if it comes down to it, she reminded herself, sliding into her bunk to get some shut-eye before they arrived at their destination.