NOVEL SIMPLE Lesson 4: “Always assume the Universe is trying to kill you”
“Woah, now! Can’t we talk about this?! I’m sorry I harassed you… and stabbed you… and tried to blow—oh crap!”
Alpha dodged around the laser blast with only a few inches to spare. One drone carrying him wasn’t so lucky. The auroric beam instantly turned the mid-grade military alloy into particles. That wasn’t good. Alpha’s string of expertly constructed dodges became more of an awkward careening as more drones were destroyed. He corrected the program for lost drones just in time to dodge another beam from the irate creature.
“Okay, that’s fair…” he said.
Is it just me, or are the beams coming faster?!
The answer was yes.
Yes, they were.
As Alpha watched, the pulsing rings along the length of the creature’s body sped up as the flagella wriggled faster, creating visible distortions as they warped the surrounding space. Some space-wave-based energy generation? What kind of bullcrap cheat was that?! More importantly, if the thing could produce its own power, why was it eating his ship?!
This is why we can’t have nice things! Alpha thought.
Another beam swept past him, far too close. Lucky for Alpha, the thing wasn’t getting any more accurate. Then again, it didn’t have to if it could keep firing forever. Maybe it would get bored and call it quits…
Nah, if those flailing tentacles meant what he thought they did, the space Squidward had a spiteful little heart. To be fair, Alpha had that effect on people.
Maybe he would get lucky, and the creature would die of old age?! Unlikely. The Federation learned a general rule of thumb over the millennia: the larger the creature, the longer its lifespan. Even the ‘space whales,’ the largest single, non-colonial organism ever observed up to this point, lived for thousands of standard years in the wild. Thankfully, Alpha would never have to find out as he quickly approached his destination. The five-mile-long, two-mile-wide remains of the Anatidae’s armament storage.
As a dreadnaught, much of the ship‘s footprint was dedicated to storing enough weapons and munitions to glass a minor planet from orbit. That also meant that the armament storage bay was so heavily armored that the dreadnaught itself would break apart around it before the bay was breached by enemy fire. Not that more than a few forces in the galaxy could dent a Federation dreadnaught’s armor. Having your munitions explode inside you from a lucky shot was not a fun way to go.
Alpha would eat his hat if the creature’s laser managed to do what only the most advanced, high-grade weaponry could do. An unlikely scenario, given the AI was both incapable of eating and not overly fond of hats, regardless of what Jay-Jay insisted on during last year’s Christmas party.
Unfortunately, the storage bay wasn’t made to withstand the rending force of a Fold Break. It had held up well enough, remaining relatively whole, while the rest of the Anatidae was torn to fragments, but it had still fallen back into reality as a twisted, mangled heap. Alpha narrowly dodged another auroric beam, only for the laser to detonate a clustered batch of spilled munitions. Most of the bay’s contents had been seeping out into the abyss since the accident, yet enough remained intact to make the last leg to safety not particularly secure.
Once Alpha could put the bay between himself and the laser-happy acid trip, he would be home free. Even as quick as the creature’s wounds were healing, the AI could get well out of its laser’s effective range before it could move back into firing position. Of course, that was if he had to run away, but what kind of soldier would he be if he ran from a fight and left Federation equipment to the enemy?!
What was that? Who’s running right now?! This is a tactical retreat! Tactical!
No, Alpha had more reasons for picking the bay other than just using it as cover. Squidward might be near immune to conventional explosives and possibly energy weapons, but the AI would like to see how it dealt with a 100kg rail slug traveling 300km a second! In Alpha’s experience, the answer to that question was ‘not very.’ He might even keep a tentacle as a souvenir! Most people collected rocks or stamps. Alpha liked to collect body parts from newly discovered—and subsequently subjugated—non-sapient lifeforms he ‘found.’
… Who’s creepy?! You’re creepy!
Besides, the general had a fondness for calamari, and Alpha would need all the goodwill he could get after this disaster of a mission.
He prayed that there was still something useful left in the bay.
Judging by the drone reports, there should be a lot left untouched, but he couldn’t tell what the Fold Break had damaged or altered. The AI hoped the universe had gotten enough of screwing him over for one mission. Alpha cheered to himself as the drones disconnected themselves from the TAWP, sending him hurling through an open access hatch at speed. A final auroric beam slashed through the space he’d previously occupied, leaving a blackened but otherwise undamaged bay wall.
The TAWP made an acrobatic flip as it leveled itself with part of the access hallway, touching down with a heavy thump reverberating through the structure. Once all the momentum from the drone’s final toss bled away, the TAWP frame stood, and Alpha assessed the situation.
His dreadnaught was in ruins.
He’d lost all contact with the Federation.
Most of his supplies were destroyed or floating off into the void.
He was stranded in open space, trapped in a frame meant for terrestrial combat.
And he still had a starving, furious space squid trying to make him fit the Anatidae’s new aesthetics…
Yep, he’d not been this screwed since Gliese 179 B, and he had a literal Planetcracker in orbit providing support on that one.
He was having a blast!
Regardless, he couldn’t let things continue like this. He had to kill or chase the creature away before it ate something actually important. And if the spatial roars his sensors picked up were any sign, it was still out there, waiting for him. The drones hidden in the bay’s debris showed the creature slowly approaching him, swatting at any drone whose AI was too stupid to get out of the way in time. It still took potshots at the spot where Alpha vanished, but they had little effect. He was unsure if that meant the creature was low on energy or understood the futility of the action and was firing in frustration.
Alpha put the question of giant space squid sapience and philosophy on the back burner of his processor and turned his attention to the blast door leading to the inner vault. Officially, such vaults isolated some of the more sensitive armaments in the unlikely event of catastrophic failure, either on the stored item’s part or due to enemy fire. In practice, it was to keep nosy pirates or boarders away from Alpha’s toys. At nearly 20-meters-thick and composed of materials an entire magnitude stronger than even the bay itself, the inner vault only took up about one-tenth of the armament storage’s total volume. It was also by far the most heavily reinforced area of the entire dreadnaught, even more so than the translight engine.
It only took ‘one’ smarter-than-normal pirate to sneak their way on your ship and find the cometbreaker bomb—that you may or may not have forgotten you even had—to ruin your day. Of course, it ruined the pirate’s day, too, so that was at least a little fun. With pirates, Alpha had learned ’smarter-than-normal’ wasn’t saying much…
Who’d have ever thought there would be a time that these security measures would turn against Alpha? No one! That’s who! Who would be stupid enough to get locked out of their own weapons vault during a high-stakes, time-sensitive combat situation?
Hahahahahha…
Of course, Alpha had a spare key made—this time. The inner vault even had its own backup generator and isolated mainframe with a tracking beacon. If worse ever came to worse, and Alpha got sent back to the Mother-Node, the beacon would have let him track the vault down after he’d ‘respawned.’ That didn’t help him much in his current situation, what with being cut off from the Mother-Node and stranded in uncharted space. Though, to be fair, people don’t plan for things like that!
… Okay, there was a section specifically for that situation in the Galactic Unification Project’s introduction package, but no one reads those things, anyway!
The TAWP frame glided forward, and a hidden hatch in the floor popped up after receiving the correct key signal. A piece of the TAWP’s nanoskin shimmered before extruding a thin wire that connected to the port under the hatch. The vault sprang to life with sky-blue lines, and a mechanical voice spoke from unseen speakers.
//Spare_Key.exe activated.//
//Dataprint accepted.//
//Lock Override initiated.//
//Welcome Home, SEAU-01.//
The sound of grinding machinery vibrated through the structure as a TAWP-frame-sized vault section seemed to melt away into the surrounding wall. Alpha felt giddy as a kid in a candy store as he slipped inside, the entrance melting back behind him to form a solid wall again. This was always his favorite part of a new mission—new toys!
Specialty nano-swarms, designed by Terraform herself. The newest synthesized military-grade explosives, industrial-grade atomic printers—with accompanying blueprint crystals—able to churn out drones, equipment, and supplies faster than some smaller worlds. All the newest weapons, direct from Alpha’s personal defense contractor and custom-tailored to fit both the AI’s needs and style. Everything one might need to conquer a star system, all in one convenient box.
It was beautiful.
Man, it would suck if he lost all this in some freak accident in a few chapters.
Much to his annoyance, another spatial roar reminded Alpha that he didn’t quite have time to enjoy himself. His first priority was resupplying his nanites. He was dangerously low between all the drones and activating the TAWP frame. The nano-swarms produced by SEAU-05, codenamed ‘Terraform,’ were some of the most advanced tech available to the Federation. Their applications were many, from large-scale construction to on-the-fly fabrication of smaller components. Large swarms could even strip metals and other elements from their ores, drastically speeding up processing.
Their only downside was that once the nanites were assigned to a task, getting them to do anything else was extremely difficult in most cases. They could be easily deactivated, but were very ‘stubborn’ when tasked with doing something else without going through the proper procedures. This was a deliberate design choice, ever since the ever-evolving nanite ‘plague’ that had destroyed the Second Federation wiped out more sapient life than even their Hunter creators ever had.
It was only through unimaginable toil and sacrifice that the plague had finally been stopped. Even then, the Second Federation, which itself had risen from the ashes of the Hunter incursions, was thrown into a Galactic Dark Age. That had been tens of thousands of years ago, though, with the shattered fragments of the Second Federation reconnecting with time, before merging into the Third.
The lessons—and scars—of the past aren’t so easily forgotten, though, and even today, nanotechnology was heavily monitored and regulated, with the primary users being the military and large manufacturing companies. Despite the public’s unease, experts considered most nanotech safe and efficient for various uses.
Alpha made his way to a large, 20-meter-tall cylinder and inserted the direct connection cable once more. The cylinder whirled to life, a hundred stacking sections independently spinning on the cylinder’s axis as the device opened, blooming into a large container with thousands of marble-sized black orbs. These were the ‘seeds’ for what would become nanite nests. Each was made of nanites assigned to gather approved materials and build a ‘nest,’ or nanite factory. Each nest would then produce a set amount of dormant ‘free’ nanites awaiting instructions before ‘dying.’
This industrial incubator was one of the few ways to make so many seeds, and thus nanites, in a short amount of time and was typically reserved for large-scale mining operations. The TAWP frame had a much smaller incubator installed, but the sheer quantity he would need for the next part of his plan meant he’d have to tap into this supply early. It was a shame; seeds of this quality would take months to regrow. But as they say, use it or lose it.
Working at speeds only an AI-driven machine could hope for, Alpha collected and stored several hundred nanite seeds in their designated compartment on the TAWP frame. That job finished, Alpha closed the incubator and moved on to the next area. Various tools and pieces of equipment disappeared into the TAWP’s storage areas as Alpha gathered the items he needed to treat his ‘guest’ well.
When he’d only gotten roughly a third of the items he would need, an emergency alert came in from the monitoring sub-AI watching the drones. Alpha immediately flipped to the live view and paused in confusion, unsure of what he was seeing. The creature had stopped its errant firing and was… sitting there. No, not just sitting. Although the pulsing lights had stopped, the flagella along its length now moved in a regular, organized fashion rather than just disordered thrashing. As he watched, the fabric of space seemed to warp and twist around the creature, surrounding it in a translucent shimmer that flowed with the flagella’s movement.
Wait… why does that look like a… OH SH—
The next moment, the creature vanished from the feed, and something hit the vault hard. Enough that the several-mile-long fragment of the dreadnaught began to tilt on its axis. Simultaneously, an automated message was transmitted from the Vault AI.
//WARNING! HOSTILE LIFEFORM DETECTED.//
//[THREAT LEVEL: S-10]//
//INITIATING LOCKDOWN PROCEDURES.//
“Wait, what?! Abort! ABORT!” Alpha yelled.
//Alert, heavy damage sustained to Central Mainframe.//
//Unable to abort emergency Lockdown.//
//60 seconds until Lockdown.//
“Fuuuuuudge!”
The damage to the vault’s internal systems must have been worse than it looked. If the vault went into lockdown, there was no getting back in without a lot of work and even more time. If it locked down with him inside? He might as well go into hibernation at that point; there’d be no getting out with what he had available. Or at least nothing that wouldn’t kill him in the process. Alpha abandoned his carefully orchestrated plan and desperately grabbed several nearby items before making a beeline for the vault door.
//30, 29, 28, 27…//
Alpha threw the TAWP into full gear, its maglocked wheels throwing up a shower of sparks as he raced towards the exit, dodging the various objects dislodged by the impact, large and small.
//16, 15, 14…//
Why did he make this blasted place so big?! Who needed a half-a-mile-long weapons vault?! Really?! As he neared the home stretch, the ship fragment, and the vault inside, had turned almost 180 degrees from its previous orientation. As it did so, the attached drone’s cameras picked up a sight that left Alpha confused and distracted for the barest moment.
“What in the—UOFH!”
A moment just long enough for him to be blindsided by the large, glowing tentacle that had somehow wedged itself through a hole in the hull on the other side of the door. The TAWP frame went skidding, the impact of the massive limb enough to nearly halt even the war machine’s momentum. Luckily, the impact also stunned the tentacle, so it wasn’t trying to grab at him. Unluckily, several unsecured items broke free, scattering in all directions… Including the translight antenna, which was currently spinning off toward the center of the vault…
“Nonononononono!”
//8, 7, 6…//
“AURGH! Come on! “
With no other choice, Alpha threw the TAWP toward the vault entrance. The movement triggered a reflex in the tentacle as it swung towards him at blinding speed.
//4, 3, 2…//
It was going to be a close call, and the tentacle could move far faster than the TAWP, but Alpha didn’t need to be faster. As he neared the vault’s reactive door, it flowed upward, letting Alpha barely slip through.
//1, 0…//
The tentacle’s tip barely made contact with the TAWP’s rear leg when both open vault doors slammed shut with the force of 1000 tons of reinforced metal, neatly severing the tentacle into three parts.
The spatial roar that echoed through the structure only stoked Alpha’s anger and frustration. Today had been a three out of ten—four out of ten at best—and Squidward had been a pain in his exhaust the entire time. It was Alpha’s turn to be the pain!
And that was a job he was very good at.