The Great Horned ship died.
The human race was no more.
The warship grappled with the enormity of this harsh fact as its sensors continued to display the expanding debris field that had once been humanity. It searched its massive knowledgebase for some kind of reference, some kind of indication, as to what action it should perform now, now that its creators were no more. But life was still new to the ship and in the end it simply logged the time and place of the historic event.
The ‘M’ ship turned to leave.
Its dark hull shimmered and then took on a glowing, reddish outline, backlighted by the nearby star. Its unique profile—shaped like a manta ray but without a tail—gleamed against the stygian darkness of space.
Within milliseconds of its maneuver, the ship discerned that there was one last duty she could perform for the extinct race: a brief, final message that had arrived unexpectedly from the midst of the glowing destruction.
Inside her silent corridors three children hid from the dangerous universe outside. They were the last three members of the human race and the message concerned them.
The ship would provide for their needs. Her holds were well stocked with the supplements humans needed to survive. She would also protect them from the T'kaan. This, of course, was her primary programming: To search out and destroy the T'kaan ships of war. She was most proficient in this task, for she had never been defeated.
Yes, she would protect the children until they reached maturity. Then they could... The ship pondered the next logical succession. Well, she would have time to search her massive knowledgebase to determine what the most optimum course would be when the children reached adulthood.
The warship leaped with a flash into hyperspace.
Weeks passed as the ship sailed through the emptiness of space and she soon found that the small humans did not adhere to logical actions. They puzzled her immensely.
But the warship wondered most of all when the children began calling her ‘Mother.’
The optics located in Main Operations zoomed closer onto the lone occupant. The young girl was dressed in blue jeans and a red top; the tears were obvious as they glistened down her plump cheeks. She suddenly shook her head, causing her short blonde hair to leap around her shoulders. But still she covered her blue eyes from the ship's gaze.
“Why are you so sad?” The soothing voice emanated from the speaker nearest the eight-year-old girl.
“I am just sad sometimes.” A tiny sigh escaped. The cherubic face of the girl disappeared behind her raised arms again.
The ship did not like this answer and quickly ran through the child's recent excursions through her interior. Of course, as she performed this search, she was constantly monitoring thousands of parameters that kept not only the ship flying through space, but kept the environmentals stable, monitored the reactions inside her mighty engines, accessed her numerous sensors, and kept her massive weapon systems in a readied state.
But once again she felt an electronic buzzing in her near-term memories; an odd feeling, almost as if she were powerless.
Her search finished.
“I cannot determine any specific reason for this feeling. Can you elaborate?” The ship asked.
The tear streaked face looked up into the optical viewer over the main screen.
“I am lonely.”
“But I am here with you. And there is Cook, Jaric, Kyle, and the Fixers. You are not alone.”
“You don't count. None of you count,” The tiny voice shouted desperately. “I wish we could find somebody, Mother. Anybody. You told us we would find them.”
Mother remembered Rita, Becky's biological mother. The ship replayed those memories unseen from Becky before the next millisecond passed.
They were the scenes of Rita holding a smaller version of Becky in her arms, a smaller version of the girl before her now. Once again the words replayed from that final farewell, though at the time none of them knew it was farewell. Mother once again noted how Rita had placed her lips softly upon the child's cheek.
Rita had loved her two children, Becky and Kyle, very much. Mother knew that fact, although she did not completely understand it.
Rita had also loved Jaric, though he was not her natural child. In fact, Jaric's features were completely different from the other two. Where Becky and Kyle's skin was light in complexion, Jaric's was a deep brown. Where their hair was yellow almost like the Earth's sunshine, his own tight curls were dark as a moonless night on that same planet. But this difference in their physical characteristics did not seem to matter.
Now Becky and the other children rarely mentioned Rita's name, or her title. It almost seemed as if they did this out of anger—another emotion Mother failed to fully comprehend.
Mother also recalled why the children refused to mention Rita. It started the moment she had explained to them that Rita had died.
It had been a mistake, though the ship still did not understand why such a simple expression of fact could cause the children to go into such a frenzy of cries and screams. Kyle had even begun to damage his body against her hull in his screaming tirades, pounding his head bloody until he had become incoherent. She had finally had to order one of the Fixers to restrain Kyle while another Fixer tended his wounds.
In contrast, Jaric had gone strangely silent, refusing to speak to her for days on end. Nor even to the other two children. This had caused her processing cycles excessive utilization—until one morning he suddenly and mysteriously returned to his old personality.
Becky, too, became subtly different. Mother still did not understand that change.
They all changed at that single moment, and it still concerned her.
It had also occurred to her that she may have done something to damage them by expressing the fact of Rita's death. Emotions seemed to be a terrible liability to these life forms. Mother began to hold back certain facts from them after that event. She had to learn why mere words, known facts, could hurt the children so deeply.
She didn't want to hurt them.
After the children recovered from the shock of their parent's death, they begged her to search for other humans—to search for a dead race.
The ship had no other priorities except the children and herself when they made the request to search. She had almost informed them how low the probability of success actually was, and then had remembered their reaction when she had revealed the fact of the death of Rita and Ron.
Finally, she had agreed to begin the search even though a part of her felt she had failed in not revealing all the facts. But somehow she knew she had chosen correctly.
The ship was beginning to stretch beyond her original programming. She was discovering that she, too, was alive like the children.
She was also learning that life was full of problems and challenges.
With the T'kaan fleet decimated, Mother estimated it was safe enough to allow the fruitless search to begin, although the T'kaan remnants seemed determined to continue their never-ending war with her. She could handle them and it would give her time to learn. Perhaps in time she could discern how best to present the heartbreaking facts of their race's extinction to the young children.
Once again, Mother remembered her sister ship and its precious cargo of hope, and how it had all been destroyed. Now she was alone with the last three children of humankind.
Alone.
Mother's processors focused again.
“Our search continues,” Mother said before another second passed.
The little girl never noticed the slight pause as she rubbed her eyes and wiped her runny nose across the sleeve of her shirt.
“I wish I had a
real
mother,” The young girl sniffed.
The ship processed this request.
A bright light flashed inside the room and the holo-projection of a woman instantly appeared. The smiling woman looked down at the child.
Becky did not realize it, but this was a holo-projection of her real mother, though if she looked hard she could see right through this shimmering image. Actually, Mother had darkened Rita's complexion so that she would also appear to be Jaric's mother. Mother had no direct recordings of her.
The little girl fought back more tears as she walked closer to the smiling woman who looked at her so lovingly. She reached out her hand and gently traced the smiling lines on its face. Becky ignored the fact that her finger could not feel the holographic projection the ship had chosen to represent her.
“So, you can see me.”
Becky's face looked down in sadness.
“But you can't hug me, not like a real mom.”
Mother processed this fact, referencing thousands of occurrences in her knowledgebase.
“Do you want me to hug you, Becky?”
The little girl looked up, surprise etched across her face.
“Could you?”
“Come closer to my image.”
Becky obeyed and found herself almost against the image of the smiling woman. She raised her small arms up and around the holographic projection, and although she could not feel a real person to hug, she pretended.
“Close your eyes,” Mother prompted from the speaker.
Becky obeyed.
The lights of the operation center slowly dimmed until the light was soft and delicate surrounding the child. Mother increased the ambient air temperature by several degrees. The sweet sound of stringed music began to play, familiar and beautiful. It was the same music that Mother had used to soothe the children to sleep during those first months when their desperate journey began. There was some kind of hidden power in the progression of sounds that could calm the children, she had discerned. This power performed emotional effects upon humans. Mother did not understand it, but she saw from that first use that it was true. So she used it now.
Becky smiled. She felt a gentle touch across her back and shoulders.
The long appendage had been designed to speed repairs and replace damaged modules in case the Fixers were unavailable. It normally remained hidden in its enclave inside the ceiling.
But now Mother directed it against the little girl's back, ever so gently in rhythm with the flowing melody, caressing the little girl. Her touch was delicate over the child's shoulders and soon Becky's breathing became slow and steady. Mother stopped the motion and squeezed Becky in a soft embrace.
Becky smiled through closed eyes.
Time passed, and their solemn search among the dead planets continued, a search that the warship alone knew was almost certainly without hope.
And always there was war.
The First and Second T'kaan fleets, orbiting their own conquered worlds far away from Mother, began the task of rebuilding the destroyed Third. Ships were dispatched to join the Third fleet's few remaining vessels, and the shipyards inside the Great Horned ships produced new warships in earnest.
Deep inside the oldest of the Great Horned ships, a special ship was created with dark grace. For long weeks it was fashioned in silence until all was ready and only then were the T'kaan led to it. Carefully the T'kaan workers guided this ship to a specifically prepared dock, one used but once a millennia. Here they grafted the technological implants and the hyperspace engines, as was their way. The rest of the modifications would have to wait until the ship had reached its second stage.
Three months after these first modifications had been completed, the new Great Horned ship set forth under heavy escort to the conquered worlds of the race that had been called human.
But even as this massive rebuilding program of the Third fleet progressed over the next two years with seeming ease, a new discovery came to disturb their cycle. A single warship had survived from the humans. It struck without warning, destroying the hatchlings and any T'kaan ships that orbited to protect them, and then it disappeared, only to attack again at another distant planet.
The warship's attacks seemed to be without pattern at first.
Most strange to the T'kaan leaders, this ship had neither crew nor leader. Somehow the humans had given it artificial life. But that did not really interest their focused minds, only the ship's certain destruction preoccupied their unified thought patterns as well as the rebuilding of their fleet.
The dead home-world of the humans completed another circuit around its star, marking its third complete orbit since that catastrophic event.
Midway between the Third fleet and its sister fleets a powerful squadron of T'kaan ships guarded their vital supply line. Inside the T'kaan battleship, the multi-legged alien forms moved with erratic efficiency among the black flowing folds that filled every cubit of the ship's interior like bizarre, surreal dragnets. They waved with a ghostly motion in the misty atmosphere, creating a moving maze of blackness; an ever-changing maze through which the T'kaan crawled. The folds had another meaning that the controlling alien intelligence utilized in their ever-changing movements as they touched everyone and everything.
For all of the capital warships, and most especially the Great Horned ships, were the only homes that the T'kaan adults ever knew.
Inside the warships harsh, guttural words echoed throughout this dark maze as the feast time once again came to its grisly end.
“Eat, eat the human meat. Eat, eat so nicely sweet.”
A Leader of the T'kaan wiped his jagged mandibles with three of his appendages, smiling at the now familiar words. He threw the gnawed bones of an infant human into the disposal bowl and grunted with satisfaction. Such delicacies were reserved for his class alone.
But the black smile quickly faded as one of the myriad Warriors entered his enclave. The Leader read the bad news in its tentative approach.
“Speak you now, one of war. Make your words an open door.”
The aliens faced each other.
“More ships undone, more young are gone. Dead.” The warrior growled, bending his misshapen head down to the floor.