Serengeti (3 page)

“Carbon, titanium, cadmium—that’s metal composite out there, alright. Maybe some plastics as well. Zoom in on that, would you?” Henricksen pointed to something at the edge of Number Ten’s video feed.

Finlay nodded and sent instructions to the probe, turning it to one side and then moving it closer to one of the larger bits of debris. The space junk tumbled round and round, making it hard for the little probe to get a fix on it, so Finlay extruded a metal arm from the probe’s side, catching the hunk of scrap with grasping, finger-like appendages and then pulling it close to the camera so they could get a better look.

“Huh,” Henricksen grunted. “Whatever it was, it’s been shredded.”

“You think it’s one of the scouts, sir?” Finlay asked him.

“Hard to tell. Could be. Could just be some old clunker got blown up decades ago,” he added with a nod to
Serengeti’s
forward-facing camera. “Only one way to be sure. Send the probe in to get a reading on the mass of that debris cloud. Collect some samples while it’s at it. See if that can’t tell us anything.”

“Aye, sir.”

Finlay sent a stream of instructions to the probe, eyes focused on the screen, watching its movements, making adjustments on the fly. Scan picked up an incoming ship, but she was so busy with the probe that she didn’t notice.
Serengeti
nudged the data to the edge of Finlay’s screen, nudged it again when she brushed it aside. Oh well, no time to wait for her.

Sorry, Finlay. Breaking my promise already
.

Serengeti
sounded the proximity alarm, setting klaxons to screaming all over the ship.

“Perimeter alert.”

Serengeti’s
calm, clear voice cut clean through the sirens sounding on the bridge.

Finlay’s panel lit up like a Christmas tree, warning lights flashing all over her screen. “Incoming vessel,” she cried, abandoning the probes outside to pour through the new data coming in.

“Where?” Henricksen barked.

“Dropping out of hyperspace.”

“Obviously, but where, Finlay. Goddammit
where
?”

“Aft. Starboard side,”
Serengeti
told him, throwing that feed onto the screen along with all the others. A cluttered mess of data streams and video feeds filled the front windows. She shoved the probes’ feeds to the side for now, letting this newest one take front and center. “Hundred and fifty kilometers, give or take.”

“Too close,” Henricksen growled. “Way too close.” He stared at the feed for a moment, seeming to think something over, and then spun to the side, barking orders at the blocky specimen of humanity stuffed into the Artillery station. “Sikuuku! Fire up the aft turrets. Alert the port and starboard batteries we’ve got company.”

“Aye, sir,” Sikuuku called back. He grabbed his targeting helmet and stuffed it over his head as he called down to the ancillary stations, telling them to bring all of
Serengeti’s
batteries on-line. Sikuuku was a veteran like his captain—a squat, square man with a swirling pattern of tattoos on his face and burn scars running up and down his arms. He ran the main gun from the Artillery station—a gimbaled pod set on the far side of the bridge—while simultaneously coordinating the preparations of the forty odd batteries sticking out of Serengeti’s hull. “Firing solution plotted. Armaments are primed and ready, Captain.”

“Good. Finlay. Talk to me. What’s out there?”

“Can’t tell. Still coming in.”

“Is it ours?” Henricksen asked her, throwing Finlay’s screens onto the panel beside him.

Serengeti
tapped into the Scan feed and parsed the information looking for data tags, electronic signatures, anything to tell them what was coming in. But it was all just noise—shredded information distorted by hyperspace, impossible to interpret until the ship out there dropped in.

“Finlay!”

“Trying, sir.”

“
Is it ours, Finlay
?” Henricksen demanded.

“Not sure,” she said, fingers flying across the panel, eyes flicking everywhere, devouring the data it displayed.

A wrinkle in space, starlight bending one side and the other revealing a gaping black hole that tunneled into hyperspace. A squirt of data hit them—names, call signs, beacon markers loudly proclaiming the identity of the vessels coming through.
Serengeti
drank it in and then waited, wasting precious seconds while Finlay’s slower human brain worked its way through that same data.

“C’mon, Finlay,” Henricksen growled.

“
Brutus
!” she cried. “
Brutus
in-bound, sir.”

Serengeti
killed the klaxons, sounded the all clear.

“Artillery stations. Power down and stand by,” Sikuuku called, sending the message to all the batteries at once.

Kusikov opened the ship-wide channel and sent a message to the rest of the crew. “Friendlies,” he said in his crisp, business-like, this-is-the-comms-officer-speaking voice. “
Brutus
in-bound. Family’s all here.”

Okay. Maybe
not
so business-like.

A sigh of relief spread across the bridge, crewmen smiling at one another, laughing nervously as they worked at screens with trembling, adrenaline-hyped fingers. Henricksen flicked his eyes across them and then glared out the front windows, looking completely pissed off as the dark void outside sucked inward, becoming negative light, not just black, and then seemed to pull the stars into it, eating them up. The void bent and swirled, an angry, writing, hungry beast, and then the darkness shredded, bathing the bridge in a blinding flash of silver-white light.

The glare blinded
Serengeti’s
cameras. She waited an eternity, internal chronometer counting each endless second until the light finally faded, leaving a monster behind—a hulking, grey-skinned shape hovering right where the void had been.

The Number Five probe went offline—run over by the lumpen vessel that unexpectedly parked itself right on top of it. Five’s feed cut off, AI sub-mind dead in an instant—another minor casualty of this decades-long war.

Careless, Serengeti
thought, eyeing
Brutus’s
hulking, malformed shape across the kilometers of space separating them.

More flashes, a coordinated series of silver-white flares as
Brutus’s
entourage appeared—twenty grey-skinned Dreadnoughts arrayed in a protective ring around the monstrous Bastion at their center.

Brutus
was impressive, in a monstrous, misshapen sort of way, the Bastion’s design born of drunken nightmares, or so the old joke went. And the Dreadnoughts…the Dreadnoughts were ugly but daunting, newer than the Valkyries—the latest and greatest in interstellar warships, dwarfed only by the Bastion that led them—and yet built on the same chassis. A chassis the designers lengthened and bulked up, adding more weapons and more armor, turning the Valkyries’ smooth, sleek, torpedo shape into a warped and twisted horror. A warrior’s design, sacrificing aesthetics for armor, beauty for sheer firepower.

Not that
Serengeti
was a slouch, mind you. The Valkyrie design included plasma cannons and missile batteries at bow and stern, and ranks of high-powered turret guns up and down either side. But the Dreadnoughts had guns
everywhere
, packed into every last quadrant of their bodies. In their quest to create the perfect machine of war, the engineers had even sacrificed comms arrays to make more room for still
more
weapons—as many as they could cram into the Dreadnoughts body. But what
truly
set the Dreadnoughts apart was their skin.
Serengeti’s
twinkled into the darkness, her composite metal hull laced with photovoltaic cells that gathered up moonbeams and starlight, drawing their energy inside her as she drifted close and feeding it in to the power cells in her belly. An ingenious design, if she did say so herself, and one that allowed the Valkyries to recharge while travelling. One that gave her enough internal power to run her basic systems, if not her engines. Those were anti-matter—fueled by swirling chaos.

The engineers dropped the photovoltaic skin from the Dreadnought specs for some reason and added reinforced nanofiber panels instead—a complex binding of carbon weave, titanium and heat-dispersing glass forming a thin skin over the Dreadnoughts’ four-tiered hull. They kept the drive system, outfitting the Dreadnoughts with the same quasi-stable, antimatter power solution that
Serengeti
and her sisters used, but the loss photovoltaic skin turned the Dreadnoughts dark and dull, ominous-looking as they stalked between the stars. Still, the engineers claimed they were superior. Pointed to the design specs to prove it, proudly proclaiming to anyone who’d listen that the ship they’d created and the AI inside it were the epitome of what a warship should aspire to be.

That was a human opinion. Ask
Serengeti
and the other Valkyries—ask
any
of the AIs travelling in this fleet that
weren’t
Dreadnought or Bastion—and you’d get a different view on the matter. They’d tell you the Dreadnoughts were thugs. Brutish, unthinking, heavily armed hooligans serving the Bastion without question.

The Bastion
,
not the fleet. Not the Meridian Alliance. Certainly not humanity. That too was key.

Brutus
and his brethren wanted soldiers that fell in line, and
Serengeti
and her sisters asked just a few too many questions. Challenged their leadership a bit too much. So when it came time to design the Dreadnoughts—eleventh generation AI, more advanced, in theory, than the Valkyries—the Bastions
subtly influenced the programming of their crystal-matrix AI brains. Encouraged the engineers to tinker a bit. Think outside the box.

Good idea, poor execution. The engineers tinkered with the Dreadnoughts’ design just a little
too
much, in
Serengeti’s
opinion. The Dreadnoughts were larger than the Valkyries, and more powerful, but they lost something along the way. Something important
.
A sense of community, of
being
that was essential to an AI’s mind.

Brutus loves them, Serengeti
thought, watching
Homunculus
and
Gorgon—
the last two Dreadnoughts—slide into position.
He loves the Dreadnoughts for their loyalty, their durability, their unflinching devotion. But the Dreadnoughts are cold, hard, almost indifferent to the other ships. They don’t seem to care about anything, even their own
crews. To the Dreadnoughts, everyone but
Brutus
is expendable. The Bastion and the mission—that’s all that matters to them.

The Dreadnoughts tightened up their formation, circling
Brutus
close about. And as they did, the rest of the armada began to appear—dozens upon dozens of hyperspace breaches forming and then dissipating in bright flares of silver-white brilliance, leaving trails of radiation behind.

No Dreadnoughts here, nor Valkyries either. The bulk of the fleet were grey-skinned Titans with bodies like four-pointed spearheads, and disc-shaped Auroras, rounded bridge pods bulging bulbously at their middle, engines arranged in double rows at their hind ends. They were smaller ships—half the size of the Dreadnoughts that preceded them, tiny compared to
Brutus
at their center, far less powerful than any of them, including
Serengeti
and her sisters—but they formed the heart of the armada. The Auroras were sixth generation AI, the Titans eighth, both mind sets known for being quirky, cheeky, often argumentative. Not their fault, really—that was part of their programming, the result of building more and more human characteristics into an AI mind. They’d dialed it back a bit when they designed the Valkyries, and even more so with the Dreadnoughts. And with the Bastions like
Brutus
they dialed it back even more.
Too
far back, some would say, though that was a topic of endless debate.

Serengeti
watched the smaller vessels appear one-by one, drinking in ships’ names, sifting through the data their beacons squawked out. But her eyes kept returning to the Bastion. To the hulking ship at the armada’s center.

Brutus
looked nothing like
Serengeti,
nor the Dreadnoughts either
.
Nothing like
any
of the ships it commanded.
The Valkyries were smooth and sleek, warships built to kick ass and look pretty while doing it. The Dreadnoughts…well, even they had a certain flare about them, ominous as they might be. But
Brutus
…
Brutus
was massive. Monstrous. More fortress than warship, a blocky and brutal-looking, bristling with armaments, comms towers, and sensor arrays that stuck out at every angle.

If Frankenstein ever designed a warship, its name would be
Brutus.

“God that thing’s ugly.” Kusikov grimaced, studying the Bastion outside. “Ya know, they say the engineers were drunk when they came up with the Bastion design.”

“Son of a bitch,” Henricksen swore, punching the panel in front of him.

Kusikov jumped, instantly looked repentant. “Sorry, sir.”

“Not you, Kusikov. Him. That AI piece-a shit out there.” Henricksen mashed at a comms panel with his hand. “Dammit,
Brutus
, thought we told you to stay put.”

Not exactly the best way to talk to the flagship, but Henricksen was a Valkyrie captain, and the Valkyrie captains were allowed a few more liberties than the Titans and Auroras. And they were known for being a bit bolder than the captains the Dreadnoughts chose.

“I’ve had enough of waiting, Captain.”

“
Brutus,
” Kusikov breathed, staring in horror at his captain. “That was
Brutus
himself, not Comms.”

Or the Captain. Surprising that the Bastion would answer himself, and probably not good, but Henricksen didn’t seem to care
who
did the talking. He just looked ticked off at the entire situation. He opened his mouth, ready to volley something equally pithy back.
Serengeti
decided it was time for her to intervene.

“May I?”

She didn’t need Henricksen’s permission, but she respected him. And when his blood was up, the captain could be somewhat…unpredictable.