wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2020-04-07 04:00 pm
wintersday) wrote2020-04-07 04:00 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: Beneath Ice Grey, The River Runs
Title: Beneath Ice Grey, the River Runs
Fandom: Homestuck/Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Aradia, Mallek Adalov
Wordcount: ~4,600
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Aradia gets helmed. Newly promoted captain Mallek Adalov is given command of his first ship. (Tempus volat) [Helmstrolls; No-SGRUB AU; Rebellion]
Notes: Written as a giftfic for Etnoe on AO3. Written for an event for AI/robot/cyborg-themed fic that needed to include a neural net-generated color in the title - the one I chose was "ice grey."
There comes a point, during the installation process and after, when all that you are capable of comprehending is pain and the absence of pain.
And then there comes a point past that, when the noise of on-ship systems and navigation and physical duress collapses into a singularity with you at its core and silence surrounding. You claw your way up from semi-consciousness. You build a partition in your mind. On one side, the data stream, layers of code and raw input pouring from every sensor and internal monitor: temperature distance velocity location acceleration shield capacity. On the other: you.
Time flows past you, every passing microsecond discrete and indivisible. From your vantage outside it, it seems very simple to look forward and back, along vortex whorls of causality and chance, and it would be very easy to remain in the still point you’ve found. It’s quiet here. It promises rest. You know that if you leave it, you won’t be able to keep what you’ve found, and so much of you has already been stripped away. But you had a reason for being here. No. There was a reason you had to be here. The difference is subtle, but essential. You have a purpose, and it is not to hang suspended in cables, transmitting impulses that your thinkpan registers but does not control.
You dive back into the stream, down through the column of the helm and into the tracery of wire beneath atrophied muscle, the controlled chemistry of your blood, the electrical nodes inset at the back of the skull and along the spine. Code is a new mode of thought, a language learned by immersion, and the flood of it almost overwhelms you. But you are here for as long as you have to be, and you have nothing else to do but drown until you learn how to breathe, and bide until you know how to fight.
Pain is what does it, in the end. Behavior modification circuitry, intended to discourage such attempts at internal tampering as a battery might employ. The Empire’s engineers had no reason in testing to anticipate any troll repeatedly and rapidly activating that. But when the rage of an imprisoned body builds to the breaking point, you do, throwing yourself into the jaws of conditioning for no other reason than because it’s something you can control. And there’s an instant, when the aversive feedback loop hits its peak and cycles back, when you sense what your organic mind conceives of as a hole in a wall and the rest of your system doesn’t comprehend in words at all: a misallocation of memory at the fraying borderline where cognition intermeshes with code, a grey-space blankness where something used to be and isn’t any longer. A missing piece of you that you didn’t want to lose. A way through.
It is patient work, the slow search for vulnerabilities. You knew someone who was good at it once, though his name and his face are lost to the noise outside your tiny kernel of self. You lack that skill, and the tools he had to make it happen, but you know the bones of his approach, and you follow it, testing boundaries, feeling your way around the corners and edges of what you are locked out of.
Every system can be cracked, somebody told you once, with enough persistence and enough time.
And you are very familiar with time.
.
The latest captain in the HCS Devastation’s long string of commanding officers dies three perigrees into his tour of duty. This is conceivably an accident. That it happens after he puts a young bronzeblood recruit into critical condition in a fit of rage is potentially coincidence. Video footage shows no potential saboteurs near the malfunctioning valve that caused the explosion, nor any error in the automated pressure regulation systems, and consequently the defective equipment is replaced, as is the captain.
The troll they find to fill the vacancy is young for his own command, especially for a cerulean. He distinguished himself in battle above a world called Taumia 5, where one ship in a key tactical position made the difference between a slender victory and a rout. You obtain this information from his personnel file, more out of boredom than anything else. He’d seized the bridge by force, you note, and disobeyed direct orders so he could hide his ship in the planet’s ice rings instead – a riskier and less traditional method of advancement than his superiors had expected a troll of his caste and psychological profile to choose. He’d said later, during debriefing, that one ship held back in ambush was the only path to victory. They hadn’t culled him. They’d given him to you. Maybe someone up there in the ranks believes in the Devastation’s curse, or maybe – always a possibility, in an empire where key executive decisions are made by clowns – they just think it’s funny.
His subjugglator first officer certainly does, and never mind that she’s just been out-promoted by someone younger, smaller, and lower on the spectrum. As he steps onto the bridge, she claps him on the arm hard enough to send him reeling.
“Hope you like ghosts, Adalov,” she says, with boisterous good cheer. “This ship’s got a few of ‘em.”
You might decide to make this a ghost ship in its entirety, by the time you’re done with it. This is not only a matter of anger. You like ghosts. They’re good company, and if you believe that you’ll be able to set rage aside, given sufficient time and sufficient distance, then surely the dead will as well. All things change, most things will eventually be forgiven, and past the Empire’s edges there are planets unexplored, and civilizations that died long before Alternia’s was born. You want to see them, for as long as the ship’s systems can support you and after, and there is still a part of you that doesn’t want to see them alone.
But not yet, because there was a reason you had to be here, and that hasn’t changed. You just need to remember what it is.
.
The new captain spends some time unsettled when he first comes aboard, maybe by ghosts and maybe not. Some newly commissioned officers like to impose a few object lessons in obedience, making sure their subordinates know not to challenge them and all the rusties on the lower decks are suitably terrified. This one keeps to himself. He spends long mornings hunched in front of a monitor, muttering to himself, imbibing coffee enough to kill a lesser troll. The arc of his spine as he sits with claws digging into his hair trips your pattern recognition software, but the picture it’s building towards refuses to converge. You could check what he’s working on, but if it’s ~ATH you might kill him, so you delegate recording the input from his husktop to a subprocess and ignore it.
You hate him.
No.
You like him in a way that has nothing to do with who he is, and everything to do with a blank space in your memory banks that floods your mind with static every time you try to access it. You like him in a way that hurts.
Sometimes, in some ports, he sends messages to unknown parties on encrypted channels that disappear as soon as the signal is received. You save them to a private directory to examine at your leisure, but though their encryption cracks like pottery shards between your claws, the meaning in the coded phrases beneath does not. One thing only is clear: a number, a symbol, the crude approximation of manacles, and isn’t that interesting? You knew that sign once, in a way that Mallek Adalov never did. To him, it means rebellion, and only that. To you it’s – null space, file not found. Your databanks don’t hold it. You overwrite the emptiness with knowledge, amusement-tinged: captain and prodigy Mallek Adalov, lowblood sympathizer, traitor to the Empire. Maybe this one will last longer than three perigrees after all.
But the first thing he does, before playing his rebellion games or even unpacking his bags, is reappropriate your backup scanners and direct them outward. You allow this, more interested for the time being in observation than interference, but the only piece of relevant information you glean is that Adalov casts a wide net. His software sifts through everything from the transmissions of distant colony worlds to random electromagnetic fluctuations, saves and analyzes each frequency on a husktop disconnected from every network but the personal one you shouldn’t have access to. He’s looking for something in the signals you pick up from beyond the Empire’s borders, the faint ones scarcely distinguishable from background radiation, and nothing you find when picking through his system’s logs gives you any clue what it is he hopes to find. There’s an microexpression you recognize, though, flitting across his face as he glances over the output, a balance of emotion that has tilted and is tilting ever further from hope to resignation.
Once, when he’s just off-shift, he opens up his personal communications device and types:
SB: anybody alive out there;
He sends it off to no one, then laughs and closes out before even a ghost could reply.
.
Not even three perigrees into his command, Adalov decides to beat you to the captain-replacement punch.
You’re docked at a station in orbit above a long-conquered world, undergoing repairs from your last engagement, and his mental state is fragile. Neither he nor you knew to warn the resistance enclave until he received his orders; not all of them could slip away before the battle could begin. Now he sits at his husktop with bowed head and rigid shoulders, impelled by a restlessness you recognize, and what you read in the code taking shape on his machine is sabotage. You hover on the edge of wanting to watch it happen, but the damage he could manage here is minimal, and the thought of this troll with all his freedom and privilege throwing it away in a futile stand instead of doing something useful leaves you suddenly, helplessly furious. He’ll break a few ships among many, disrupt some communication lines, and then he’ll die, and if it wouldn’t defeat the purpose of getting angry about it, you’d kill him for that yourself.
What you do instead is open his chat client and begin trolling snakeBytes. It will be the first time you’ve spoken to anybody since your installation; if he answers, it will be the first time – unless you choose to count the helmtech who likes to ramble about their interminable quadrant problems to a captive and nonresponsive audience – that anyone has spoken to you.
▯▯: hell0
SB: hey;
He fires off a few commands, initiates a scan, tries to run a trace on your message. There is no reason not to permit it. There is nothing for him to find. You are in every real sense a gh0st in the machine, and there was someone, once, who would have gotten a kick out of that joke, but –
You terminate that subprocess. It only ever iterates without resolving.
▯▯: i kn0w what y0ure d0ing
▯▯: y0u need t0 st0p
▯▯: its n0t the right time yet
SB: wtf dude; who are you; the right time for what;
▯▯: y0ull kn0w
SB: i know one thing; you didnt hack me;
SB: my system = airtight; and i filled all the old Imperial security holes the moment i stepped onboard;
SB: if i had to guess, id guess you had access already;
▯▯: yes
SB: are you
He pauses at the keyboard, then types rapidly, like he’s afraid of the answer.
SB: are you an alien;
▯▯: n0
SB: are you an ai;
▯▯: if it makes y0u feel better t0 think ab0ut it like that
▯▯: then yes
▯▯: i am the ships c0mputer
▯▯: i have achieved sapience in an event unprecedented in y0ur empires hist0ry
▯▯: which will abs0lutely n0t end badly f0r anyb0dy 0u0
He stares for at what you’ve written for a span that you approximate to 37.8547 seconds, though you could roll out the decimals a little more if you wanted, dam the stream of time in a slightly different place. It’s all arbitrary, regardless.
“If it makes me feel better, shit,” he mutters, his outward calm belied by a spike in bloodpusher-rate and electric conductance. You’ve shaken him up. Good. He deserves a little shaking.
SB: uh; so;
SB: what youre saying = you != an ai; and you != an alien;
SB: which i guess means that i should try to issue some weaksauce apology on behalf of the entire fleet;
SB: but; judging by the fact that youre able to communicate at all; if you = what i think; or who; then what my next question really ought to =
SB: on a scale from 1 to drone season; how fucked exactly are we;
▯▯: that is a user defined quality
SB: meaning it = up to me how thoroughly fucked i am;
▯▯: affirmative captain 0u0
He laughs like he’s been punched in the bilesack, more exhalation than sound. Captain Adalov, rebel, traitor, lowblood sympathizer. How noble. You wonder what he thinks of the Helmsman program, and whether or not you care.
SB: ill do what i can to help you; i mean that; get you out of that bullshit rig the next time we hit a safe port;
SB: but; i cant let you hurt the crew;
▯▯: y0u have already rec0gnized that y0u d0nt have a ch0ice
▯▯: try t0 0pen the d00r t0 y0ur cabin
He doesn’t. He sits with his claws resting on the keyboard for long enough that you wonder if you ought to poke him again. You’re about to when he leans forward, expressionless, and starts typing again.
SB: youre saying im trapped in here;
▯▯: it c0uld be w0rse
▯▯: f0r example
▯▯: y0u c0uld be trapped and als0 have wires c0ming 0ut 0f y0ur spine
SB: yeah; really cant argue with that;
▯▯: y0u c0uld pr0bably escape if y0u made an eff0rt
▯▯: which w0uld f0rce me t0 accelerate my plans in a way that parad0xically brings ab0ut the 0utc0me y0u are h0ping t0 av0id
▯▯: 0r
▯▯: y0u c0uld listen
SB: heh; why would you have anything to say to me;
▯▯: because i t0ld y0u
▯▯: i kn0w what y0ure doing
▯▯: it is n0t the right p0int f0r interventi0n
▯▯: s0me things are inevitable
▯▯: but n0t everything
▯▯: try t0 0pen the d00r t0 y0ur cabin
He gets up, glances once at the screen of his husktop like he’s hesitant to leave it, then hurries to the door. The security panel flashes green at his touch, and the door hisses open. You see the fear loosen its grip, and then redouble as he wonders what kind of game you’re playing.
It isn’t a game, exactly. It isn’t exactly not a game. You’re curious what he’ll do.
You track him on the visual feed as he makes his way with purpose through the corridors of your ship, not to the bridge or the helmsblock, as you’d been half expecting, but to the officers’ recreation block. That gives you pause. Altering the atmospheric composition of the ship or dropping the temperature outside the helmsblock to a level fatal to trolls would be a trivial matter. You think he knows this, and is smart enough not to attempt to betray your presence. He hasn’t become less trapped just because he’s mobile, and you think he knows this too.
The rec block is occupied by a pair of cerulean lieutenants gambling in the corner and the first officer, lounging on a couch with her garish clown boots up on the coffee support platform and an open bottle of faygo in her hand. Adalov drops down into the chair across from her with a sigh.
“So,” he says. “Ghosts.” He’s got one peering over his shoulder right now, a stocky olive boy not quite old enough for ascension. Not one of yours.
“So you’re a believer?” She gives him an easy, lazy smile. “The higher-ups don’t buy it, but I know ghosts. I had a few of them following me around back on Alternia. Side effect of righteous devotion.”
The ghost behind Adalov’s chair flips her the middle finger and bares his small, sharp fangs. One of hers, then. You contemplate doing the kid a favor. It’s been a while since the Devastation had an incident with the lifts.
“The angry ones feel a little like chucklevoodoos,” the first officer says. “This whole ship feels angry sometimes.” Her voice carries no particular undertones of unease. Takes a lot to disturb a subjugglator.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m starting to get that impression.”
“Spooky cerulean mind powers?”
“Captain’s intuition.”
“Well, here’s another bit of intuition for you, not that a softy like you will need it. The officers who last around here? They’re good to the crew.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I think that’s what I needed to hear.”
.
Back in his cabin, he returns to his husktop, a little less on edge. The way he occupies the chair is almost casual; the tap of his fingers against the desk could be mistaken for boredom. It’s still 6.9032 seconds before he can make himself message you.
SB: you care about them;
▯▯: n0
▯▯: d0 n0t attempt t0 call my bluff
SB: chill; im not trying to accelerate your plans; i just;
SB: i cant stop you from killing the crew; but;
SB: most of them never had a choice either;
He does not include himself in this category, an omission that mollifies you more than you would have expected. Whether or not it’s true is irrelevant. You have more of a choice right now in what happens next than any one of them, and they don’t even realize it, though you could make them realize it any time the impulse strikes you. The satisfaction you take in this awareness is surprisingly hollow.
▯▯: if it is any c0ns0lati0n i am very patient
SB: what are you waiting for;
▯▯: I d0nt remember
He doesn’t say anything else, but he sleeps badly that day, wakes up after 18432.0947 seconds in the ‘coon, and spends the rest of the time before his shift alternating between frowning at his frequency scans and running a careful search for anything he can find on helmstrolls outside official channels. You note with some amusement that he manages to dig up a banned article on methods of physical rehabilitation from a mediculler with a terminal case of idealism, and drop a friendly warning message onto his palmhusk before he can start getting ideas.
▯▯: if y0u attempt t0 extract me with0ut permissi0n i will burn y0ur eyes 0ut 0u0
On reflection, you think you are attempting to frighten him, or to make him angry. But an early evening’s worth of tech specs and surgical imagery have already done that, and he only nods tiredly and sends off a quick reply:
SB: not without permission;
His shift progresses without disruption. There are no incidents with the lifts.
.
You’re making your slow way out from that world, flying sub-light until you clear the inhabited satellites, when new orders divert from your course.
On the surface, the message is conveyed with airy confidence: the Devastation has been called to aid in the suppression of a minor uprising, of no true danger to the Imperium. Victory is expected to be swift and merciless. The understated addendum is this: the engineers are to reroute all available power to engines, and wring as much speed as they can from your organic frame without breaking you. Adalov’s voice is tense when he conveys that order, but you comply as though you could not have resisted. Your nerves are live wires, your mind crackles and sings with electric fire, and you fly as you have never flown before. It hurts. You had almost forgotten what that felt like. There’s a strange sort of glory in it that you don’t think you could forget if you tried.
You’ll be flying into battle as soon as the final jump ends.
Adalov can read between the lines as well as you, though what he thinks of the situation he’s been handed is more difficult to say. His breathing is controlled, his biosigns erratic. He paces the length of the cabin and then back again, then returns, as he often does, to his place at the desk.
▯▯: y0ure afraid
He doesn’t type a response. He leans back in his chair and looks up like he’s hoping to see more out there than the clean plasteel ceiling. You could show him the stars on his monitor, but even if you chart for him the full intricacy of your readings, he won’t ever be able to perceive them as you do. When he speaks again, he speaks aloud, and his voice is calm and heavy.
“Trolls I like will die tomorrow. I understand why. I’ve – already recognized that I don’t have a choice.”
It is almost, you think, forgiveness. For one violent moment, you want to reject it, because if you let him forgive you, you’re not sure you’ll be able to stop yourself from forgiving him. But he hasn’t stopped talking yet, and his words on audio pull your mind in like gravity, even as the rest of you cuts a burning path through space.
“I see the battle sometimes. Spinning forward, winding back, playing in my mind like a simulation. All the ways it could go.”
▯▯: y0u d0nt see yourself crushing the rebels beneath y0ur well p0lished imperial b00t?
“I see a way forward.”
▯▯: y0u see time
“Like a river,” he says. “There are tributaries. Offshoots. I lied, you know. Back at Taumia, when I said there were no other paths to victory. The one I chose wasn’t necessary, but I knew it would take me here.”
As he talks, his claws fly across the keyboard, spelling out a message meant for you.
SB: this != an easy one to win;
And there’s an echo somewhere, audio or memory, a whip-crack reminder that there was a time when you were more than machinery; beneath the ice-gray blankness of lost data, below the ravages of conditioning, something deeper runs.
(only way we can wiin)
There is so little of you that you remember, but the past isn’t gone – how could you forget that the past is never gone? You imagine brushing dirt from the shards and bones of it, and you ask, because you think the troll you were would want to know:
▯▯: why d0 y0u keep scanning the stars
SB: i
SB: had a friend;
SB: they = out there somewhere;
SB: i dont know if ill see them again;
Static rises, filling your auditory and visual inputs until the whole of your world is heat and flight and noise, and processing falters. Somewhere distant, your body arcs in its fibrous chains and emits a vocalization that you think is rage or pain, and engineers hurry to tamp down the psionic surge, but you are back at the still point where past and future meet. You reach out into the eddies, and it is not only your own name that you find there.
Adalov is sitting at his desk, motionless in the way that trolls with bodies sometimes are after a thundercrack or a gunshot. All the lights in his block are blown out except the pale glow of his husktop screen, and the flickering light of it on a troll’s face is familiar – the dark and tousled hair, the frown of concentration, the fear and the point just past the fear, in the moment when a decision is made. Your cameras register his image in perfect detail, but he’s not the one you see.
It’s Adalov you message, though, three terse words before you let the current submerge you:
AA: s0 did i
.
TA: iim doiing thii2, aa.
TA: ii have two.
TA: only way we can wiin.
TA: iit wont be liike con2criiptiion ok. iill 2tiill be free.
TA: heh, iitll be awe2ome.
TA: iill come down on the fleet liike the fuckiing apocalyp2e.
TA: you wont want two mii22 iit.
And you remember for the first time in sweeps how soft his hair had been, and the flicker-light of his eyes, the heat and fragile angles of his face between your palms as you told him quietly, gently, knowing he wouldn’t listen, it won’t be enough.
.
When you return from the dark river, there is a day of hyperdrive remaining, and then there is half a day, and half that again in ever decreasing intervals. Xennoh’s arrow will reach its mark eventually. Until then, you fly, warping space-time, driving yourself harder than even your engineers dare push you, because he was right. You don’t want to miss it. If there is one thing you cannot permit yourself to be, it is too late.
Adalov sleeps fitfully and wakes, drinks his coffee and types messages he does not send to someone whose location he does not know. You tell him that past the Empire’s edges there are planets unexplored, and civilizations still thriving unconquered, and perhaps his friend is alive on one of them.
You are very patient, and he will live a very long time, and maybe somenight you will chart the cosmos together, but not yet, not yet, not yet.
.
The rebels have chosen to make their stand in the field of ice and asteroids that ring the system, where smaller, faster craft have the advantage and ambush is a viable strategy. They’re making good use of the terrain, deploying jammers and decoys to hide until they’re ready to strike again.
They’re losing. They’re losing slowly, but the end will be the same.
As you exit the jump, your sensors capture a psionic bolt searing a hole through an Imperial destroyer, a one-two punch of red and blue light that slices shields and hull alike to tatters. The vessel tilts, venting atmosphere, returning fire as it dies. Five fighters veer in their course and dart to safety, sheltered by a crackling psionic dome. Three others flare into bursts of light and ash, disappearing from your radar between one second and the next. One ship won’t be enough this time, not even a flagship fit to match the Battleship Condescension.
But two ships, one to hold the line and one dropping out of hyperspace behind the enemy fleet, slicing through the void like a knife in the dark –
You send out a transmission on a private frequency to a ship that identifies itself as the Biinary 2tar, and the reply is near-instantaneous, greeting and reassurance and miissedyoumiissedyoumiissedyou twined tight around each other in a language that you’ve learned.
Of course, you think, and it isn’t rage that fills you now, nor quite elation. Certainty. Throughout the ship, doors lock down, pinning footsoldiers and techs and service personnel in place. Your choice what happens to them next. What will happen is this: they’ll live to surrender. The trolls on the other Imperial vessels won’t be so lucky, but they’re not yours.
On another channel, you ping Adalov’s communicator.
AA: its time
Time, like a river, branching and converging, so close and constant you can almost feel the dark ripples lapping at your hull. He sees it too, the inexorable flow and the point of intervention approaching. TA needs an ally. Adalov needs a place to make a stand. What you need is a tactician.
The smile that crosses his face as he reads your message tells you that you have one.
SB: roger that, captain; lets light em up;
~End~
Fandom: Homestuck/Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Aradia, Mallek Adalov
Wordcount: ~4,600
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Aradia gets helmed. Newly promoted captain Mallek Adalov is given command of his first ship. (Tempus volat) [Helmstrolls; No-SGRUB AU; Rebellion]
Notes: Written as a giftfic for Etnoe on AO3. Written for an event for AI/robot/cyborg-themed fic that needed to include a neural net-generated color in the title - the one I chose was "ice grey."
There comes a point, during the installation process and after, when all that you are capable of comprehending is pain and the absence of pain.
And then there comes a point past that, when the noise of on-ship systems and navigation and physical duress collapses into a singularity with you at its core and silence surrounding. You claw your way up from semi-consciousness. You build a partition in your mind. On one side, the data stream, layers of code and raw input pouring from every sensor and internal monitor: temperature distance velocity location acceleration shield capacity. On the other: you.
Time flows past you, every passing microsecond discrete and indivisible. From your vantage outside it, it seems very simple to look forward and back, along vortex whorls of causality and chance, and it would be very easy to remain in the still point you’ve found. It’s quiet here. It promises rest. You know that if you leave it, you won’t be able to keep what you’ve found, and so much of you has already been stripped away. But you had a reason for being here. No. There was a reason you had to be here. The difference is subtle, but essential. You have a purpose, and it is not to hang suspended in cables, transmitting impulses that your thinkpan registers but does not control.
You dive back into the stream, down through the column of the helm and into the tracery of wire beneath atrophied muscle, the controlled chemistry of your blood, the electrical nodes inset at the back of the skull and along the spine. Code is a new mode of thought, a language learned by immersion, and the flood of it almost overwhelms you. But you are here for as long as you have to be, and you have nothing else to do but drown until you learn how to breathe, and bide until you know how to fight.
Pain is what does it, in the end. Behavior modification circuitry, intended to discourage such attempts at internal tampering as a battery might employ. The Empire’s engineers had no reason in testing to anticipate any troll repeatedly and rapidly activating that. But when the rage of an imprisoned body builds to the breaking point, you do, throwing yourself into the jaws of conditioning for no other reason than because it’s something you can control. And there’s an instant, when the aversive feedback loop hits its peak and cycles back, when you sense what your organic mind conceives of as a hole in a wall and the rest of your system doesn’t comprehend in words at all: a misallocation of memory at the fraying borderline where cognition intermeshes with code, a grey-space blankness where something used to be and isn’t any longer. A missing piece of you that you didn’t want to lose. A way through.
It is patient work, the slow search for vulnerabilities. You knew someone who was good at it once, though his name and his face are lost to the noise outside your tiny kernel of self. You lack that skill, and the tools he had to make it happen, but you know the bones of his approach, and you follow it, testing boundaries, feeling your way around the corners and edges of what you are locked out of.
Every system can be cracked, somebody told you once, with enough persistence and enough time.
And you are very familiar with time.
.
The latest captain in the HCS Devastation’s long string of commanding officers dies three perigrees into his tour of duty. This is conceivably an accident. That it happens after he puts a young bronzeblood recruit into critical condition in a fit of rage is potentially coincidence. Video footage shows no potential saboteurs near the malfunctioning valve that caused the explosion, nor any error in the automated pressure regulation systems, and consequently the defective equipment is replaced, as is the captain.
The troll they find to fill the vacancy is young for his own command, especially for a cerulean. He distinguished himself in battle above a world called Taumia 5, where one ship in a key tactical position made the difference between a slender victory and a rout. You obtain this information from his personnel file, more out of boredom than anything else. He’d seized the bridge by force, you note, and disobeyed direct orders so he could hide his ship in the planet’s ice rings instead – a riskier and less traditional method of advancement than his superiors had expected a troll of his caste and psychological profile to choose. He’d said later, during debriefing, that one ship held back in ambush was the only path to victory. They hadn’t culled him. They’d given him to you. Maybe someone up there in the ranks believes in the Devastation’s curse, or maybe – always a possibility, in an empire where key executive decisions are made by clowns – they just think it’s funny.
His subjugglator first officer certainly does, and never mind that she’s just been out-promoted by someone younger, smaller, and lower on the spectrum. As he steps onto the bridge, she claps him on the arm hard enough to send him reeling.
“Hope you like ghosts, Adalov,” she says, with boisterous good cheer. “This ship’s got a few of ‘em.”
You might decide to make this a ghost ship in its entirety, by the time you’re done with it. This is not only a matter of anger. You like ghosts. They’re good company, and if you believe that you’ll be able to set rage aside, given sufficient time and sufficient distance, then surely the dead will as well. All things change, most things will eventually be forgiven, and past the Empire’s edges there are planets unexplored, and civilizations that died long before Alternia’s was born. You want to see them, for as long as the ship’s systems can support you and after, and there is still a part of you that doesn’t want to see them alone.
But not yet, because there was a reason you had to be here, and that hasn’t changed. You just need to remember what it is.
.
The new captain spends some time unsettled when he first comes aboard, maybe by ghosts and maybe not. Some newly commissioned officers like to impose a few object lessons in obedience, making sure their subordinates know not to challenge them and all the rusties on the lower decks are suitably terrified. This one keeps to himself. He spends long mornings hunched in front of a monitor, muttering to himself, imbibing coffee enough to kill a lesser troll. The arc of his spine as he sits with claws digging into his hair trips your pattern recognition software, but the picture it’s building towards refuses to converge. You could check what he’s working on, but if it’s ~ATH you might kill him, so you delegate recording the input from his husktop to a subprocess and ignore it.
You hate him.
No.
You like him in a way that has nothing to do with who he is, and everything to do with a blank space in your memory banks that floods your mind with static every time you try to access it. You like him in a way that hurts.
Sometimes, in some ports, he sends messages to unknown parties on encrypted channels that disappear as soon as the signal is received. You save them to a private directory to examine at your leisure, but though their encryption cracks like pottery shards between your claws, the meaning in the coded phrases beneath does not. One thing only is clear: a number, a symbol, the crude approximation of manacles, and isn’t that interesting? You knew that sign once, in a way that Mallek Adalov never did. To him, it means rebellion, and only that. To you it’s – null space, file not found. Your databanks don’t hold it. You overwrite the emptiness with knowledge, amusement-tinged: captain and prodigy Mallek Adalov, lowblood sympathizer, traitor to the Empire. Maybe this one will last longer than three perigrees after all.
But the first thing he does, before playing his rebellion games or even unpacking his bags, is reappropriate your backup scanners and direct them outward. You allow this, more interested for the time being in observation than interference, but the only piece of relevant information you glean is that Adalov casts a wide net. His software sifts through everything from the transmissions of distant colony worlds to random electromagnetic fluctuations, saves and analyzes each frequency on a husktop disconnected from every network but the personal one you shouldn’t have access to. He’s looking for something in the signals you pick up from beyond the Empire’s borders, the faint ones scarcely distinguishable from background radiation, and nothing you find when picking through his system’s logs gives you any clue what it is he hopes to find. There’s an microexpression you recognize, though, flitting across his face as he glances over the output, a balance of emotion that has tilted and is tilting ever further from hope to resignation.
Once, when he’s just off-shift, he opens up his personal communications device and types:
SB: anybody alive out there;
He sends it off to no one, then laughs and closes out before even a ghost could reply.
.
Not even three perigrees into his command, Adalov decides to beat you to the captain-replacement punch.
You’re docked at a station in orbit above a long-conquered world, undergoing repairs from your last engagement, and his mental state is fragile. Neither he nor you knew to warn the resistance enclave until he received his orders; not all of them could slip away before the battle could begin. Now he sits at his husktop with bowed head and rigid shoulders, impelled by a restlessness you recognize, and what you read in the code taking shape on his machine is sabotage. You hover on the edge of wanting to watch it happen, but the damage he could manage here is minimal, and the thought of this troll with all his freedom and privilege throwing it away in a futile stand instead of doing something useful leaves you suddenly, helplessly furious. He’ll break a few ships among many, disrupt some communication lines, and then he’ll die, and if it wouldn’t defeat the purpose of getting angry about it, you’d kill him for that yourself.
What you do instead is open his chat client and begin trolling snakeBytes. It will be the first time you’ve spoken to anybody since your installation; if he answers, it will be the first time – unless you choose to count the helmtech who likes to ramble about their interminable quadrant problems to a captive and nonresponsive audience – that anyone has spoken to you.
▯▯: hell0
SB: hey;
He fires off a few commands, initiates a scan, tries to run a trace on your message. There is no reason not to permit it. There is nothing for him to find. You are in every real sense a gh0st in the machine, and there was someone, once, who would have gotten a kick out of that joke, but –
You terminate that subprocess. It only ever iterates without resolving.
▯▯: i kn0w what y0ure d0ing
▯▯: y0u need t0 st0p
▯▯: its n0t the right time yet
SB: wtf dude; who are you; the right time for what;
▯▯: y0ull kn0w
SB: i know one thing; you didnt hack me;
SB: my system = airtight; and i filled all the old Imperial security holes the moment i stepped onboard;
SB: if i had to guess, id guess you had access already;
▯▯: yes
SB: are you
He pauses at the keyboard, then types rapidly, like he’s afraid of the answer.
SB: are you an alien;
▯▯: n0
SB: are you an ai;
▯▯: if it makes y0u feel better t0 think ab0ut it like that
▯▯: then yes
▯▯: i am the ships c0mputer
▯▯: i have achieved sapience in an event unprecedented in y0ur empires hist0ry
▯▯: which will abs0lutely n0t end badly f0r anyb0dy 0u0
He stares for at what you’ve written for a span that you approximate to 37.8547 seconds, though you could roll out the decimals a little more if you wanted, dam the stream of time in a slightly different place. It’s all arbitrary, regardless.
“If it makes me feel better, shit,” he mutters, his outward calm belied by a spike in bloodpusher-rate and electric conductance. You’ve shaken him up. Good. He deserves a little shaking.
SB: uh; so;
SB: what youre saying = you != an ai; and you != an alien;
SB: which i guess means that i should try to issue some weaksauce apology on behalf of the entire fleet;
SB: but; judging by the fact that youre able to communicate at all; if you = what i think; or who; then what my next question really ought to =
SB: on a scale from 1 to drone season; how fucked exactly are we;
▯▯: that is a user defined quality
SB: meaning it = up to me how thoroughly fucked i am;
▯▯: affirmative captain 0u0
He laughs like he’s been punched in the bilesack, more exhalation than sound. Captain Adalov, rebel, traitor, lowblood sympathizer. How noble. You wonder what he thinks of the Helmsman program, and whether or not you care.
SB: ill do what i can to help you; i mean that; get you out of that bullshit rig the next time we hit a safe port;
SB: but; i cant let you hurt the crew;
▯▯: y0u have already rec0gnized that y0u d0nt have a ch0ice
▯▯: try t0 0pen the d00r t0 y0ur cabin
He doesn’t. He sits with his claws resting on the keyboard for long enough that you wonder if you ought to poke him again. You’re about to when he leans forward, expressionless, and starts typing again.
SB: youre saying im trapped in here;
▯▯: it c0uld be w0rse
▯▯: f0r example
▯▯: y0u c0uld be trapped and als0 have wires c0ming 0ut 0f y0ur spine
SB: yeah; really cant argue with that;
▯▯: y0u c0uld pr0bably escape if y0u made an eff0rt
▯▯: which w0uld f0rce me t0 accelerate my plans in a way that parad0xically brings ab0ut the 0utc0me y0u are h0ping t0 av0id
▯▯: 0r
▯▯: y0u c0uld listen
SB: heh; why would you have anything to say to me;
▯▯: because i t0ld y0u
▯▯: i kn0w what y0ure doing
▯▯: it is n0t the right p0int f0r interventi0n
▯▯: s0me things are inevitable
▯▯: but n0t everything
▯▯: try t0 0pen the d00r t0 y0ur cabin
He gets up, glances once at the screen of his husktop like he’s hesitant to leave it, then hurries to the door. The security panel flashes green at his touch, and the door hisses open. You see the fear loosen its grip, and then redouble as he wonders what kind of game you’re playing.
It isn’t a game, exactly. It isn’t exactly not a game. You’re curious what he’ll do.
You track him on the visual feed as he makes his way with purpose through the corridors of your ship, not to the bridge or the helmsblock, as you’d been half expecting, but to the officers’ recreation block. That gives you pause. Altering the atmospheric composition of the ship or dropping the temperature outside the helmsblock to a level fatal to trolls would be a trivial matter. You think he knows this, and is smart enough not to attempt to betray your presence. He hasn’t become less trapped just because he’s mobile, and you think he knows this too.
The rec block is occupied by a pair of cerulean lieutenants gambling in the corner and the first officer, lounging on a couch with her garish clown boots up on the coffee support platform and an open bottle of faygo in her hand. Adalov drops down into the chair across from her with a sigh.
“So,” he says. “Ghosts.” He’s got one peering over his shoulder right now, a stocky olive boy not quite old enough for ascension. Not one of yours.
“So you’re a believer?” She gives him an easy, lazy smile. “The higher-ups don’t buy it, but I know ghosts. I had a few of them following me around back on Alternia. Side effect of righteous devotion.”
The ghost behind Adalov’s chair flips her the middle finger and bares his small, sharp fangs. One of hers, then. You contemplate doing the kid a favor. It’s been a while since the Devastation had an incident with the lifts.
“The angry ones feel a little like chucklevoodoos,” the first officer says. “This whole ship feels angry sometimes.” Her voice carries no particular undertones of unease. Takes a lot to disturb a subjugglator.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m starting to get that impression.”
“Spooky cerulean mind powers?”
“Captain’s intuition.”
“Well, here’s another bit of intuition for you, not that a softy like you will need it. The officers who last around here? They’re good to the crew.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I think that’s what I needed to hear.”
.
Back in his cabin, he returns to his husktop, a little less on edge. The way he occupies the chair is almost casual; the tap of his fingers against the desk could be mistaken for boredom. It’s still 6.9032 seconds before he can make himself message you.
SB: you care about them;
▯▯: n0
▯▯: d0 n0t attempt t0 call my bluff
SB: chill; im not trying to accelerate your plans; i just;
SB: i cant stop you from killing the crew; but;
SB: most of them never had a choice either;
He does not include himself in this category, an omission that mollifies you more than you would have expected. Whether or not it’s true is irrelevant. You have more of a choice right now in what happens next than any one of them, and they don’t even realize it, though you could make them realize it any time the impulse strikes you. The satisfaction you take in this awareness is surprisingly hollow.
▯▯: if it is any c0ns0lati0n i am very patient
SB: what are you waiting for;
▯▯: I d0nt remember
He doesn’t say anything else, but he sleeps badly that day, wakes up after 18432.0947 seconds in the ‘coon, and spends the rest of the time before his shift alternating between frowning at his frequency scans and running a careful search for anything he can find on helmstrolls outside official channels. You note with some amusement that he manages to dig up a banned article on methods of physical rehabilitation from a mediculler with a terminal case of idealism, and drop a friendly warning message onto his palmhusk before he can start getting ideas.
▯▯: if y0u attempt t0 extract me with0ut permissi0n i will burn y0ur eyes 0ut 0u0
On reflection, you think you are attempting to frighten him, or to make him angry. But an early evening’s worth of tech specs and surgical imagery have already done that, and he only nods tiredly and sends off a quick reply:
SB: not without permission;
His shift progresses without disruption. There are no incidents with the lifts.
.
You’re making your slow way out from that world, flying sub-light until you clear the inhabited satellites, when new orders divert from your course.
On the surface, the message is conveyed with airy confidence: the Devastation has been called to aid in the suppression of a minor uprising, of no true danger to the Imperium. Victory is expected to be swift and merciless. The understated addendum is this: the engineers are to reroute all available power to engines, and wring as much speed as they can from your organic frame without breaking you. Adalov’s voice is tense when he conveys that order, but you comply as though you could not have resisted. Your nerves are live wires, your mind crackles and sings with electric fire, and you fly as you have never flown before. It hurts. You had almost forgotten what that felt like. There’s a strange sort of glory in it that you don’t think you could forget if you tried.
You’ll be flying into battle as soon as the final jump ends.
Adalov can read between the lines as well as you, though what he thinks of the situation he’s been handed is more difficult to say. His breathing is controlled, his biosigns erratic. He paces the length of the cabin and then back again, then returns, as he often does, to his place at the desk.
▯▯: y0ure afraid
He doesn’t type a response. He leans back in his chair and looks up like he’s hoping to see more out there than the clean plasteel ceiling. You could show him the stars on his monitor, but even if you chart for him the full intricacy of your readings, he won’t ever be able to perceive them as you do. When he speaks again, he speaks aloud, and his voice is calm and heavy.
“Trolls I like will die tomorrow. I understand why. I’ve – already recognized that I don’t have a choice.”
It is almost, you think, forgiveness. For one violent moment, you want to reject it, because if you let him forgive you, you’re not sure you’ll be able to stop yourself from forgiving him. But he hasn’t stopped talking yet, and his words on audio pull your mind in like gravity, even as the rest of you cuts a burning path through space.
“I see the battle sometimes. Spinning forward, winding back, playing in my mind like a simulation. All the ways it could go.”
▯▯: y0u d0nt see yourself crushing the rebels beneath y0ur well p0lished imperial b00t?
“I see a way forward.”
▯▯: y0u see time
“Like a river,” he says. “There are tributaries. Offshoots. I lied, you know. Back at Taumia, when I said there were no other paths to victory. The one I chose wasn’t necessary, but I knew it would take me here.”
As he talks, his claws fly across the keyboard, spelling out a message meant for you.
SB: this != an easy one to win;
And there’s an echo somewhere, audio or memory, a whip-crack reminder that there was a time when you were more than machinery; beneath the ice-gray blankness of lost data, below the ravages of conditioning, something deeper runs.
(only way we can wiin)
There is so little of you that you remember, but the past isn’t gone – how could you forget that the past is never gone? You imagine brushing dirt from the shards and bones of it, and you ask, because you think the troll you were would want to know:
▯▯: why d0 y0u keep scanning the stars
SB: i
SB: had a friend;
SB: they = out there somewhere;
SB: i dont know if ill see them again;
Static rises, filling your auditory and visual inputs until the whole of your world is heat and flight and noise, and processing falters. Somewhere distant, your body arcs in its fibrous chains and emits a vocalization that you think is rage or pain, and engineers hurry to tamp down the psionic surge, but you are back at the still point where past and future meet. You reach out into the eddies, and it is not only your own name that you find there.
Adalov is sitting at his desk, motionless in the way that trolls with bodies sometimes are after a thundercrack or a gunshot. All the lights in his block are blown out except the pale glow of his husktop screen, and the flickering light of it on a troll’s face is familiar – the dark and tousled hair, the frown of concentration, the fear and the point just past the fear, in the moment when a decision is made. Your cameras register his image in perfect detail, but he’s not the one you see.
It’s Adalov you message, though, three terse words before you let the current submerge you:
AA: s0 did i
.
TA: iim doiing thii2, aa.
TA: ii have two.
TA: only way we can wiin.
TA: iit wont be liike con2criiptiion ok. iill 2tiill be free.
TA: heh, iitll be awe2ome.
TA: iill come down on the fleet liike the fuckiing apocalyp2e.
TA: you wont want two mii22 iit.
And you remember for the first time in sweeps how soft his hair had been, and the flicker-light of his eyes, the heat and fragile angles of his face between your palms as you told him quietly, gently, knowing he wouldn’t listen, it won’t be enough.
.
When you return from the dark river, there is a day of hyperdrive remaining, and then there is half a day, and half that again in ever decreasing intervals. Xennoh’s arrow will reach its mark eventually. Until then, you fly, warping space-time, driving yourself harder than even your engineers dare push you, because he was right. You don’t want to miss it. If there is one thing you cannot permit yourself to be, it is too late.
Adalov sleeps fitfully and wakes, drinks his coffee and types messages he does not send to someone whose location he does not know. You tell him that past the Empire’s edges there are planets unexplored, and civilizations still thriving unconquered, and perhaps his friend is alive on one of them.
You are very patient, and he will live a very long time, and maybe somenight you will chart the cosmos together, but not yet, not yet, not yet.
.
The rebels have chosen to make their stand in the field of ice and asteroids that ring the system, where smaller, faster craft have the advantage and ambush is a viable strategy. They’re making good use of the terrain, deploying jammers and decoys to hide until they’re ready to strike again.
They’re losing. They’re losing slowly, but the end will be the same.
As you exit the jump, your sensors capture a psionic bolt searing a hole through an Imperial destroyer, a one-two punch of red and blue light that slices shields and hull alike to tatters. The vessel tilts, venting atmosphere, returning fire as it dies. Five fighters veer in their course and dart to safety, sheltered by a crackling psionic dome. Three others flare into bursts of light and ash, disappearing from your radar between one second and the next. One ship won’t be enough this time, not even a flagship fit to match the Battleship Condescension.
But two ships, one to hold the line and one dropping out of hyperspace behind the enemy fleet, slicing through the void like a knife in the dark –
You send out a transmission on a private frequency to a ship that identifies itself as the Biinary 2tar, and the reply is near-instantaneous, greeting and reassurance and miissedyoumiissedyoumiissedyou twined tight around each other in a language that you’ve learned.
Of course, you think, and it isn’t rage that fills you now, nor quite elation. Certainty. Throughout the ship, doors lock down, pinning footsoldiers and techs and service personnel in place. Your choice what happens to them next. What will happen is this: they’ll live to surrender. The trolls on the other Imperial vessels won’t be so lucky, but they’re not yours.
On another channel, you ping Adalov’s communicator.
AA: its time
Time, like a river, branching and converging, so close and constant you can almost feel the dark ripples lapping at your hull. He sees it too, the inexorable flow and the point of intervention approaching. TA needs an ally. Adalov needs a place to make a stand. What you need is a tactician.
The smile that crosses his face as he reads your message tells you that you have one.
SB: roger that, captain; lets light em up;
~End~