Archaea 3: Red

Red

By Dain White

Other books by Dain White

Archaea

Janis

Red

© 2013 by Dain White. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Preface

Well, here we are again, my friends.

I see you are also standing on the precipice, a scant page away from the next adventure. We’re both ready to make the leap, to dive deep into a story… but first…

I have to thank the wonderful friends, loving and caring family… all of the patient people
throwing support in my direction, in an unending flood. There are so many of you, I couldn’t possibly name you all.

Specifically, and by name, I’d like to thank
Gordon Archer, Paul McNiven, James Hynes, Les Scott, Rod Fisher and Gail White, as each has lent valuable assistance to the development of this story.

This story wouldn’t have a Marine
, without SSgt. Shawn LameBull riding the bus with me, arguing Dostoyevsky or quantum physics, skipping his Masters to work on his Ph.D., graciously allowing me to farm his soul.

As much as
I could thank you all, none of this would even be remotely as entertaining without my dearest friend and most ardent supporter, the most beautiful and wonderful person I know, lovely Angie. It wouldn’t be nearly as engrossing without my wonderfully intelligent and funny children, Zahn and Ava, each of which absolutely define nearly everything in these books.

All those people aside, the person I most want to thank, is the person reading these words. Your support is most appreciated, and quite frankly, without it - - none of this would be possible, or indeed necessary.

Chapter 1

Sol was unbelievably bright.

Even with filters down, Yak, Shorty and I were nearly blinded as the blazing light reflected off th
e glittering dust of the mare.

The wheels reverberated through the cabin of the grounder as we
rumbled along the dusty washboards of the hardpan basalt. We were somewhere between the blast pans and Tranquility Habitat, riding the slow bus in to the lock.

Earth
caught my eye as it hung in the sky, shining through the endless black night. It might look nice from a distance, but the not-so-subtle orange tint of the upper atmosphere was proof enough that the cradle of humanity has suffered the crushing pressure of our race far too long.

Earth was the last place I wanted to be.

It wasn’t all bad down there, I suppose. If you get far enough away from the cities, you can still find nice places. In the service, I took classes in the Idaho Labs, and you could go out in the high deserts and see countryside that probably hasn't changed since the last ice age… but even far out in the seemingly endless sagebrush of southeast Idaho, the orange glow from the sprawling Snake River Metropolitan Area would just about hide the stars at night.

This is part of what motivates us, the search for breathing room and open places. We also look for fame and fortune, but mostly we hunt for freedom on an endless frontier. The galaxy is vast, and while we’ve seen some of it, there remain untold expanses, even complete arms that we've never explored.

As I meandered around the universe in my thoughts, I was jolted out of my reverie, grimacing from the burning light of Sol as it heliographed off a long line of solar panels marching out across the cratered moonscape.

I didn’t want to be on
Luna either, but as much as I wished we were in deep space, burning for the endless – we weren’t ready. We needed to upgrade, and for that, we needed to do a little bit of shopping.

And so here we were, bouncing around in our seats while glowing clouds of fine dust wafted into the sky behind us up like a long feathery tail.

It was a damn fine day for a drive.

My name is Gene Mitchell, and I am the Chief Engineer aboard the Archaea, an independent frigate owned and operated by my very best friend, Captain Dak Smith.

Dak is many things, but what he truly is, through and through, is my Captain. He’s astoundingly good at it. He’s also, without a doubt, the very best starship pilot in the Galaxy.  Even though he is the kind of captain they write books about – he is also one of the most obnoxiously impossible people to scowl at. He is absolutely impervious to any sort of negativity.

It wouldn’t matter if we had reds flashing throughout the entire ship. He’d probably take a slow, casual sip of coffee, and smile. Not even a ten-million-ton capital ship closing on us from astern would be enough. Nothing rattles him. He would probably just smirk, and ask someone for a refill.

I have never seen anything affect him in the slightest. It could be the worst day, on the worst planet, in the worst sector of the Galaxy… literally in the very last moments of your life before you perish in nuclear fire – and he would crack a joke and then raise an impossibly enormous eyebrow to make sure you heard it.

And then, in the most heroic moment, in the most heroic way, he would somehow save us all, and act as if it was nothing.

Despite the fact that he suffers from an almost chronically over-developed sense of humor, I don’t want you to think he’s some joker. While he does run a pretty fun ship, I've spent countless hours over a good part of my career serving under his command, from corvette-class cruisers to million-ton destroyers, and he has never let me down. He’s truly a legendary captain, the best there is.

We’re lucky to have him, but we’re all lucky that he found our ship. When he first
described the Archaea to me, I imagined the machine we have now, fast, powerful, and incredibly well-armed.

When I first saw our ship-to-be,
she didn’t live up to his description, and in fact, didn’t look to be worth the time it would take to scrap her.

At one point, about a hundred years ago, she had been a long-haul Panther-class frigate. By the time we found her, she had become a grimy mass of corrosion and dust with various nasty-smelling leaky bits. She was barely holding on to the lowest rent moorage on Luna Darkside, lurking in the dark scaffolding at the end of the industrial arm.

It didn’t take me long to get excited about her, nonetheless. She was a beautiful ship, well-built and solid. While she was seriously grimed up, a real sailor knows how to clean a ship, and parts were parts.

Despite my age,
I am no stranger to hard work – and it took all the hard work we could give and then some to get her where she was today, mechanically close to perfect and almost ready to go. We just needed a few upgrades to key systems before we could launch for our dream: to blaze our own trail through the endless depths of space, independent and free to set our own course.

As much as we might dream of freedom, the reality of our collective nightmare is that the gloms control nearly everything. Pick your poison; the gloms mine it, refine it, distribute it, sell it and ultimately profit from it.

The sad truth was our galaxy was almost totally controlled by conglomerations larger than planetary governments, larger than entire systems. Their influence was felt throughout known space, but as you get farther from the regulations and trade agreements of the inner systems, they became unrestricted. Nothing seemed to be out of their reach.

Except for us
... we chart our own course. I smiled across the aisle at Shorty and Yak, backlit by the furious glare burning through the hull ports on the bus. We make our own adventures.

With the good, comes the bad, unfortunately. We have definitely worked for what we have. We’ve had more adventure than any of us wanted, or expected. Along the way we've made some new friends, but we've also made some enemies.

During our first out-system hop to Vega, we came under attack by the Mantis, a service destroyer that had fallen under the control of a psychopathic mutineer named Red Martigan. You might think a million-tonner like the Mantis would have no problems handling a tiny little frigate like the Archaea – that was Red’s mistake, as well. The Mantis was now little more than a radioactive cloud of debris endlessly tumbling amid the dark depths of a remnant system.

As deranged as he was, murdering most of the crew and turning the rest into bloodthirsty pirates… he was also capable of telling you exactly how ho
rrible it was with crying eyes while pretending he wasn’t the person responsible.

I wish we had managed to keep our hands on him, but it took the service a while to establish his identity, and before
they knew who he was, he managed to get away. He’s still out there, somewhere…but it’s a big Galaxy, and we have a lot of adventure waiting for us.

When we first launched from Darkside Station, we were dirt poor. We literally scraped our last credits together just to buy enough low-grade reactives to make it off the dock.

Now, thanks to a huge load of gold Yak found in the Mantis, we’re perilously close to chronically rich. We no longer need to look for work; now we’re working on ‘denting the bank’, as our captain so eloquently puts it.

He figures having as much money as we have now is a liability more than an asset, and he wants to turn that into commodities; plating and materials, tools, weapons, parts and upgrades, the best we can get, in as much quantity as Janis thinks we need.

Thinking of Janis, a smile cracked through my standard frown. She was really something else, hard to describe. I guess technically, she’s a program, an artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t really describe her. Whatever Janis actually is now, she isn’t really a program any more, at least not in any normal sense.

I am not really qualified to explain what she is; I would leave that to our resident geek, Steven Pauline.
We call him Pauli, and he’s one of those scary-smart types that can do anything with tech, and I mean anything.

I smiled,
remembering Dak’s face when Pauli replied to our Unet post. We were looking for help building a connection interface for our freshly installed tokamak, once it became apparent that what we had was incredibly inefficient and almost certainly life-threatening.

Dak knew Pauli from the Academy; they were both rising stars in their particular fields. Though their paths didn’t cross much in the Service, they were both the best
at what they did, and everyone knew who they were.

It didn’t take him long to get us up and running, and with all the other work we had for someone like him, I was really anxious to talk Dak into offering him a position on the crew. I smiled at the thought. We really went crazy fitting out that ship.

In the end, I didn’t even get a chance to try.

Before I could even talk to the captain about it, Pauli came to us and asked if he could join up. All it took was an eye-full of the nexus core we had installed, liberated from the same wrecked-out destroyer that donated our tokamak. Access to that much processing power was all she wrote for that kid. Dak was glad to sign him on as full-share permanent crew, granting his only condition: that he would be allowed time to work on his hobby, an unlicensed AI.

Neither the captain nor I thought that would amount to much, and we were really lucky to have someone like him around on the Archaea. Programming is something I can only really do if there is impending death waiting for me if I don’t, and I certainly couldn’t do it well enough for what we needed. We both knew that Pauli was a legendary geek, exactly the kind of person we needed on the crew.

Little did we know, but Pauli had made a breakthrough with something he called a 'predictive analysis engine' – I sure don't know much about it, but the upshot of it was that he was able to fold requests for data back into the core some extent faster than they were generated.

Neither of us knew what that meant, and when he tried to explain reiterative feedback loops to us, we did what we normally do when talking to Pauli: nod blankly, get back to work, and go on with our day.

When he first joined us, the Archaea was barely degreased and hardly painted. It had only been a few weeks, but the captain and I had been working on upgrades non-stop, almost around-the-clock. Even though we were dirt poor, between us we called in every favor we had for parts to upgrade as many systems as possible.

I don’t mean little stuff like coolant pumps, either. I went pretty far, and replaced nearly everything. Besides the tokamak, wetnet and core, we replaced nearly every system – from simple things like pressure lines and filters, to coolant pumps, recyclers, and everything in between.

The integration challenge we faced for the new systems was immense. The Archaea was a solid platform to build on, but with the upgrades we had done across the board, it was a real balancing act to try and find the fine line between safely operating our systems, or blowing ourselves into screaming bits of incandescent ash.

And yet, as hard as we had all worked to find those limits… when Janis woke up – literally within the first second of her awareness, she reprogrammed everything… every interface, every system, every balance and every limit.

Nothing we had ever experienced prepared us for what had happened. We were caught off guard, like a dream without pants.
It took some doing to come to grips with what she had done, and what she had become.

Artificial or not,
she’s not simply a program. Janis is as much of a person as anyone, and as weird as it may be, I’m proud to say she’s also my friend. That’s not just me being some irascible old coot that might fall in love with his toaster from loneliness, either.

As if to prove my point, a flashing alert on my screen caught my eye.

“
Hey Shorty, it looks like Janis has updated our list – are you looking at this yet?” I asked smugly on comms. I almost never get the opportunity to one-up Shorty.

“
Thanks Gene, taking a look now”, she replied, and I smiled at how quickly she pulled the revised list up on her screens. If there’s one thing our Shorty loves, it’s a freshly updated list. She's big into lists. She doesn't go anywhere without them, and probably starts every list with 'wake up'.

The list
Janis worked up for our shopping trip to Tranquility was exhaustive, that’s for sure. Not that I am complaining…I may be an old valve turner, but I am no different from anyone else. One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday afternoon was spend money, and for the first time in my entire career, there really was no limit to our budget.

Wat
ching Shorty and Yak, I smiled – what a pair.

She's so damn small you might step on her, and he's so tall you get a crick in your neck trying to make eye contact.  I grinned as she fought the bumps and hunched over trying to work on her wrist holo despite the glare. Shorty, or 'Jane Short' as she claims she prefers, is the biggest short person you will ever meet. The ship may be the captain's, but the guns are hers.

At least she would like us to think that.

I suppose it's no different from the way I feel about anything mechanical aboard the Archaea... The engineering deck is as much mine as the clothes on my back.