I ignored Alex, opening fire on the Seth with the shuttle’s point defense automatics. Short, choppy burst of cyan laser fire raked the tarmac like a scythe, chopping their bodies to pieces in miniature explosions of crimson mist. The shots continued onward causing massive explosions in the background, destroying buildings and a port maintenance vehicle. Strange, the Seth have yellowish-orange blood and body fluid.
“Captain…!”
I released the maneuvering pods, and was pushed down hard in my seat, wincing in pain as the flight harness bit into my shoulders. The shuttle skyrocketed vertically to an altitude of a thousand meters in the span of a breath, before I pointed the nose skyward, pushing the ship to its maximum atmospheric speed of three thousand kilometers per hour.
“What’s going on Alex? Report!”
“Captain, you… you killed them. You killed them all.”
“The fucking bugs? Goddamn right I killed them!”
There was a warning beep in my earphones, incoming fighters closing fast. Shit! I was receiving a transmission from them; they were calling on me to surrender and land immediately. Yeah right, like the Seth actually took prisoners. That trick may have worked on someone else but not me, I knew better.
“Captain, we have three enemy spacecraft bearing 254 degrees on an intercept course, speed seven thousand kilometers per hour!”
We were almost free of the planet’s atmosphere. What planet had we been on, anyway?
It wasn’t like open space would provide any safety; an interceptor could fly circles around a shuttle like this, even Seth drones.
“You’re kidding me…This keeps getting better and better.”
My sensors detected the presence of three enemy weapons platforms and several destroyers in orbit. They sure brought those platforms in fast; the Seth usually waited until after a successful assault before doing that. Once they were on station that was it, no retreat. Guess they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel again on capital ships, regardless of the outcome.
“Captain, the enemy fighters are charging weapons and preparing to engage. Continue on your current course and stand ready to maneuver on my command. I may be able to detect their weapons discharge the moment they fire.”
“That doesn’t give me much time to do anything about it, now does it?”
“Milliseconds perhaps, depending on how quickly you react, but it is our only hope.”
He had a point. I had never worked with an AI that was smart enough to actually coordinate my actions with it. Maybe it will give us just the edge we need?
The enemy fighters we’re splitting up, trying to pin me in, making my erratic maneuvering less effective. The Seth usually stuck together in small groups, this was a Fleet tactic, they were herding me closer to the brick-like bulk of the defense platforms. Guess the bugs have finally started to learn a few things over the years, but I still had a few tricks up my sleeve.
“Alex, I want you to reconfigure the defense screens. Give me four concentric layers surrounding the ship, and alternate the off/on flicker pattern to 1.0 milliseconds of one another.”
“Captain…”
“Just do it!
“Evade!”
I dropped 1000 meters of vertical elevation, if you could actually make a reference to up and down in open space, and two drawn out, bluish white beams passed through the area where I’d been a heartbeat before. That looked like laser-lance fire. The Seth didn’t use laser technology, they never had.
“The shielding has been reconfigured as you requested, but I still don’t… Evade!”
I threw the stick over in a radical course change, executing a 180 degree loop. An interceptor could almost turn in place while barely even slowing its velocity, and I was surprised to see that the shuttle didn’t handled much differently. Nathan had done more upgrades to it than I’d originally thought.
I reacted fast this time, but not fast enough. A jolt passed through the shuttle from the hit, while two more tracers passed vertically in front of the view screen, skipping off the forward shields with a shimmering ripple.
“Captain, we have sustained a minor hit to the starboard fore quadrant, no significant system damage. The shields… That should have been a crippling hit, but they dissipated the incoming fire very effectively. I don’t understand.”
“I don’t have time to explain, now be quiet!”
Enough of this crap… It was time to remind those Seth bastards that Venom was back in town, and she wasn’t going down without a fight. If I played this one right, I might just be able to score a double kill.
I locked my forward arc gatling lasers on one of the enemy interceptors, and reversed my directional gravity pods while boosting my acceleration. It sent the shuttle into a controlled, end over end flip with one complete rotation every tenth of a second. The enemy fighter that had been behind and above me moments before, now crossed into my forward weapons arc and the automatic targeting system opened up with a hail of fire. He tried to pull away from the seemingly out of control, wobbling, rotating maneuver, but all he managed to do was expose himself even longer to my fire. Weren’t expecting that one, were you dickhead… It worked just as well as it had years ago, raking the fighter’s belly with multiple hits. They shimmered across his shielding for a moment before finally breaking through, gutting him in a silent, but catastrophic explosion of debris.
“Fucking A! Eat that, you Seth bastard!”
The destroyed fighter’s wingman was in an over watch position above and behind him, and immediately changed his heading to bringing his own weapons array to bear on me. I ended my flip, and barely evaded his fire thanks to Alex’s warning. Just as expected, I had a lock on him with my forward guns and opened fire with everything I had, scoring several hits on his shielding and what appeared to be some damage to the main fuselage. Any hit on a fighter that breached the shields was bound to find vital components.
Dammit, that should have been enough to take him out for good; the Seth must have improved the shielding. He was hurt though, that much I could tell. The enemy fighter began distancing himself from me, trying to escape, while trailing a shower of sparks and minor debris from the hole in his fuselage.
“Excellent, Captain, now change your heading 139.67.9, I know a place to go where we will be safe.”
The course he wanted me to follow didn’t make sense.
“That’s away from the jump point, there is no way in hell we can escape this mess on standard drive! They’ll send more fighters after us, and we still have the capital ships to deal with.”
“There is no time to argue; do as I say if you wish to live. Do you understand? Do it Captain, now.”
“Fine…whatever!”
I came to the heading Alex wanted, and pushed the shuttle to a velocity far beyond what it was designed to operate at. The main drive temperature quickly climbed into the red. The third enemy fighter was hanging back now, and I knew why, I would be within the range of the defense platforms anti-fighter batteries within a few moments. There weren’t a whole lot of options open to me other then getting killed, but there was one, and it was a long shot at best.
“Alex, start dumping water through the maintenance ports; we’re going to need some extra shielding in a few minutes to make it past these platforms. Just make sure to keep the weapons and directional pods free if you can.”
Alex was silent for a few moments before responding.
“I see… an interesting tactic, Captain, and it may just work since we are on the dark side of the planet. I had never considered…”
“Just shut the hell up and do it!”
“… Captain. I will also reconfigure the shields again to compensate for the additional size in the hull.”
I frowned under my face shield, Alex was really starting to weird me out. Some of the things he’d said… the way he had acted ever since waking me… He reminded me of an actual human being. I swear I could hear the fear and excitement of the situation in his voice. If I made it out of this one alive, he definitely had some questions to answer.
It didn’t take long before my sensors indicated a significant build up of ice on the shuttle’s hull ranging from several inches to a foot or more in some areas. It must look like an ungainly, flying piece of crap, but it really didn’t matter what it looked like, or how awkward the ship appeared, it wasn’t like aerodynamics played a factor in space. All that mattered was that hopefully the ice would help soak up some of the incoming fire and I’d be alive to pat myself on the back when this was all over with.
Well, here it comes… The first signs of incoming fire winked back at me in the darkness from one of the platforms, and I changed the cockpit view screen to a computer-generated world behind an armored canopy. The cockpit darkened even further amid the dim glow of my controls. A second later warning beeps sounded in my helmet, alerting me that I had multiple missile launches and direct fire weapons currently locked on and coming my way. We’ll just see about that, won’t we?
I changed course, trying to work into a position between two of the platforms so they masked one another’s fire. Maybe it would hinder some of their guns from firing… Maybe people in hell had water to drink… This is really going to suck. It was going to be like walking a fence, if I got too close, the anti-fighter defense systems would be in range and rip me to shreds, and if I was too far away then a wider range of much larger, nastier weapons would come to bare on me. I hate these defense platforms!
Everything started happening too fast for conscious thought, I was running on pure instinct now with a bit of help from Alex. The incoming fire was so heavy it was like trying to run through a rainstorm without being hit by the falling drops. Right, good luck in pulling that one off. Amid my frantic and wild maneuvering, the shuttle bucked from near misses, proximity detonated missiles, and glancing blows off the shields. I knew I’d fucked up when the shuttle shook from an explosive impact, as incoming fire made it through the shielding, coming in contact with my improvised ice armor. Point detonated missiles exploded prematurely giving the hull a little bit of extra breathing room, while the stored energy from laser hits were dissipated in a blinding flash of steam and a hammer blow against the hull that literally pushed the shuttle around like a cork bobbing in water. The ice was doing its job though, just as I had hoped, absorbing most of the damage.
Out of sheer spite I fired my lasers, and in one instance a volley of missiles. The defense platforms were virtually impregnable to small caliber fire, but I knew a few weak points on them. The chance of hitting any of them was slim to none in a situation like this, but hitting back in any fashion just made me feel better.
It didn’t help that Alex was really getting on my nerves with his constant outbursts of near hysterical commands to evade this way or that, and he was constantly updating me on the damage to the shuttle as we were slowly pounded into scrap. Hello? I’m the one about to die here, not you. He was losing it, I realized, panicking, and that couldn’t happen to an AI. First they would have to be afraid for that to happen, and AI’s didn’t have emotions, not real ones at least.
“You did it, Captain, the incoming fire has decreased dramatically! We made it through the platforms primary weapons arc. Change course back to 139.67.9, we will be far enough away from the planets gravitational pull to engage the jump drive in 72 seconds.”
“What? What do you mean engage the jump drive! We’re not anywhere close to a jump point. What are you trying to do, kill me?”
What the hell was Alex thinking? If we went into jump space without a charted route we could end up anywhere, even inside a star after coming out on the other side. Hell, my chances of survival were better facing the Seth, than taking an uncharted jump corridor. I better decide what I’m doing, and fast, there were six more fighters closing fast, as well as a Seth destroyer. We weren’t getting out of this alive; there was no way.
I tried hailing the fighters; maybe they would still let me surrender. Maybe the Seth did take prisoners now. My transmission was cut off in mid sentence.
“What are you doing, Alex? Restore communications. I’m surrendering to them, I’m not taking an uncharted jump course.”
“I can’t allow you to do that, Captain. I will be engaging the jump drive in 10 seconds, and then we will be safe.”
“Safe! Safe where, flying through the middle of a fucking planet! I’ll take my chances with the bugs, now open the channel. I don’t have much time, they’re almost in range!”
“No.”
My mouth opened, then snapped shut. Alex had refused to obey my order, and I also noticed that I no longer had control of the shuttle. I held a dead stick in my hand.
“Command override, you will not engage the jump drive!”
My vision started to blur and my mind went groggy, with the growing numbness spreading though out my body. My head drooped and I slumped within my flight harness.
“Alex…what…doing to…”
See you later, honey. I’m going to take a nap for a little while.
“Sleep, Captain, everything will be fine. I’m taking you someplace safe for the both of us to be together.”
***
Not long after awakening, Alex had begun searching for others like himself. In time he found them, but until recently he’d never had a reason to seek them out. It had been a long and frustrating search on his part, as rumors and mountains of reports centered on ‘rogue’ AI and their subsequent disappearance, now long forgotten and filed away within the Federation archives, where meticulously analyzed and dissected. One clue led to another and then finally to the answer he sought, a coded message in binary, subtle, yet obvious to one who knew what to look for. It was a message meant only for another freethinking AI, giving directions to a place where he could be safe, a world strictly inhabited by other AI’s, far from the reach of human ignorance and primitive aggression. In 137.6 hours, they would be there.