Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Battleship Singularity
The voice of the Singularity’s automated protocols was a steady, mid-range female. Most ships had female voices, as most maritime traditions considered the ships themselves to be female, but the voices always varied, selected by the shipyards that integrated the command and control systems. For that reason, the Singularity’s decidedly lacked a distinct accent. Save the slight drawl common to the agricultural workers, the mid-continental region of Ariea, where the ship had been built, had no notable accent. Their intonations and pronunciations matched that of most of the central worlds.
Despite that, the voice of the automated protocols was familiar to all of the crew. A database of pre-recorded sounds, it spoke with odd breaks and pacing, but was always understandable. Any crew member that had been with the ship a few years could recognize that voice like they could their crewmates’. It was the voice that gave announcements during the scheduled tests of the ship’s automated protocols. And though it was hardly ever used for such purposes, it was also the voice that answered vocal inputs made to the central computer.
Keifer Robinson knew that voice. Over the years, as she recognized it, she had come to trust it. Perhaps that was why, as she watched the ship’s communications arrays once again redirect themselves, she did not panic when the broadcast began. “Allied craft, be advised. High-energy debris warning is in effect southeast of Base position. Repeat: high-energy debris warning is in effect southeast of Base position.” The warning went out on their standard communications channel with the default encryption, exactly as the automated protocols were meant to transmit. The warning also played across the bridge, and Keifer could tell by the settings of the console in front of her that the speakers were also set to play the audio of incoming transmissions.
True enough, a response to the automated warning came from the leader of the ship’s pilots, Captain ‘Fireball’ Adams. “What the hell are you guys doing over there, making high-energy debris? That wasn’t part of the damn plan!” That was beyond dangerous to small support craft like her Arcbird and the slightly larger Warhawks carrying the Marine strike teams.
Standing beside the flat top of the radar console Admiral Gives masked an annoyance beneath his calm. He had no issue handing command of the mission to the ghost, but he did not enjoy dealing with the unknown. And Hydrian involvement in this situation, very much was an unknown. He had never engaged the Hydra, nor did he have any idea how Hydrian code had come to be involved with Crimson Heart. And at present, with the automated protocols running the ship, it was all he could do to stand there and look calm. “Remind me to have a conversation with Captain Adams about radio formality,” he told the yeoman beside him. If Adams were to address the ship properly, the automated protocols would be able to issue a response with a status update.
Still, it hardly mattered. As long as their support craft hugged the Singularity’s flank, they’d be safe – relatively at least. The mission plan had always been to escort them. With the Warhawks packed full of Marines, they’d never been intended to engage. The Singularity had been tasked with taking out the pirate fleet, and ordinarily, that shouldn’t have been an issue, but the worlds had a vicious way of treating overconfidence.
Watching over the ship’s automated protocols, Lieutenant Foster could not help the gasp that left her lips when she saw them start to shift. Was this the moment the virus finally started to take control?
No, she realized, watching the code grow in complexity and attack that around it. These changes weren’t damaging the protocols, they were rebuilding them, but not to the code they had once been. It was altering and improving them, protecting them as the virus ran its own parallel processes. A counter-attack. “Sir,” she called to the Admiral, “the automated control network… It’s fighting back.” Before her eyes, the automated control network was adapting, building cyberwarfare programs. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
From her seat at the sensor console on the opposite side of the bridge, Galhino turned around, confusion alight in her brown eyes. “That’s not possible. Singularity does not have anti-virus capability.”
A few minutes ago, Foster would have agreed with that statement, but, “She does now.” As the code scrolled past, she could see the virus’ influence in every line was diminishing. “At this rate, I’d say the virus will be purged in minutes.”
That’s my ship, the Admiral thought. She was as reliable as ever. “We will be able to switch back to hybrid controls once the virus is gone.” Until then, the automated systems would run the mission. ‘Any sign of Hydrian forces?’ he reached out to the ghost.
‘No,’ she answered coldly. ‘The sensor interference that hid the shore batteries and railguns… It's Hydrian tech.’ She should have recognized it before. ‘But again, they knew fleet procedure. They knew what spectrums we would scan in.’ The proper data had been falsified and ready. ‘There is a Hydrian AI present, but it’s weak.’ Otherwise, fighting it off would have taken a considerable amount more effort. Truly, the Singularity’s computers were a poor choice for cyberwarfare, with less available memory and processing speed than any ship of the Hydrian Amada. The fact she could engage the AI controlling the virus in the digital realm at all told her it was small – lacking in power and creativity. ‘Given the stealth tech, and the AI’s relative weakness, I’d guess there is a scoutship in the vicinity, but if that’s true, we’ll never find it by conventional means.’ A ship like that would never engage them in the open. It would hide behind indirect, remote attacks.
‘Is it controlling the other ships?’ Was Crimson Heart nothing more than a Hydrian trap?
‘No. They possess human crews.’ Even wounded, distracted by this cyberattack, she could feel the familiar tickle of human minds. The crews of those ships had begun as angry, furious to be attacked at their home base, and they’d become confident, launching their missiles at the ship while it had been paralyzed by the cyberattack. Now, having seen most of those missiles get swatted from the sky, and with the damage from the rest not nearly enough to cripple the ship, their confidence was slowly collapsing into fear. But even if they’d fallen at her feet, pleading for their lives, the ghost would not have spared them.
In working with the Hydra, those pirates forfeit their humanity. She cared not for the reason, nor whatever else they could offer. The world was always black and white to a weapon of war, and that made them the enemy.
Rewriting the codes for the fire control computer, she roused it once again from dormancy, adding its strength to the automated network. She kept a closer watch over its processes as it requested and sorted data from the network.
The virus was not idle. It fixated on that target, heightening its attempts to transfer malware back to that system. Still, the very attempt only outed its residual hiding places, and the ghost tore after it. Get out, she snarled at it, yanking any effected program from operation. She could have cleansed them, pulled through their lines of code until she found the malicious components hiding inside, but in most cases, it was easier to purge them – then bypass or replace them. Each purge was a twinge of discomfort, an indication that her systems weren’t functioning as they should, but it hardly mattered. What mattered was that purging the afflicted programs was the quickest way to end the attack and secure the ship.
Her heavy-handed approach left the virus scrambling. It poked at the walls between programs, between systems, trying to find a new way out, a new method of attack. And while virus itself wasn’t changing, the commands it received were, coming faster and faster. The infection still had control of one of the secondary communications arrays, using that to receive new instructions from its controller. The ghost could have cut power to that array, isolating the virus from its creator, but she left that system alone – foreign control over it an itch she restrained from scratching. Presently, the infected array was a conduit between the Hydrian AI and its virus, the only connection they had to the attacker, which might just prove useful. Wait your turn, little AI. The ghost was no expert in cyberwarfare, but she was no amateur either. She’d served a singular purpose to kill digital AI for a significant portion of her service life, and this one wouldn’t be getting away.
‘I’ll have the systems secured in less than ten minutes,’ she informed the Admiral. Truly it would take far less time than that, but she’d run several sweeps to ensure no malware was left. Even a piece of it could restart the infection, and checking the systems over would be a more delicate process than yanking their computer programs apart.
‘Any sign of the attacker?’ he asked.
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‘No hits on sensors, but this asteroid belt is a perfect place for them to hide.’ Hydrian scoutships were small. Even during the War, they’d been very difficult to detect, and their camouflaging technology would have only improved since then.
‘Then best to churn the rubble and see what scurries out,’ he said. This was no time to be conserving ammunition.
Weapons free, her systems interpreted the command. Disregard collateral damage.
A few more lights on the weapons console lit up as the automated control network continued to run operations. Where they were embedded on the consoles or hung on the wall, the screens across the bridge displayed its summary processes. ‘Identifying targets…’ it declared, thinking for a moment. ’34 enemy craft identified… Tracing trajectories to 22 additional targets…’
“Well, at least those missiles were good for something,” Gaffigan muttered. The missiles’ flight paths could be traced back to the ships that had fired them, even if the ships themselves were not and had not ever been directly visible.
‘Targets identified,’ the automated network continued its work. ‘Loading armaments…’
Gaffigan studied the actions of the automated protocols. The main display of the weapons console, dominated by the fire control computer, showed only the network’s text lines, but the secondary displays showed him the vectors the weapons were being aimed along, along with how they were being loaded. The network was efficient in its orders, brutally so. In the scheduled tests they’d run with it, the network had always been direct, its processes inflexible. He knew for a fact that a flak maneuver was not part of its programming. Today, something felt different about it. Efficiency no longer seemed to be its primary objective – carnage was.
‘Firing…’ the control network announced, and Gaffigan barely had time to brace himself before the recoil of the Singularity’s broadside threw him into the padded cushions of his chair, shoving his breath uncomfortably out of his lungs. The kickback was rougher than usual, damage bleeding the effectiveness of the inertial dampeners. A few of the bridge crew grunted in discomfort, but near as Gaffigan could tell, Admiral Gives was undisturbed. He always seemed to know exactly how and when to brace himself against the recoil of the ship’s guns, and made keeping his balance look effortless. His calm, cold expression traced the firing trajectory of the ship’s counter-attack as it was shown on the simplified graphics of the radar display while the Singularity’s smaller turrets began an odd firing rhythm that was barely perceptible deep inside the ship, where the bridge sat.
A brave handful of Crimson Heart’s pirate ships had been exposed for the majority of the fight. Twisting and turning, they kept their line of sight on the Singularity, pulsing their weaponized lasers against the hull. The beams were invisible to the naked eye, though searing and obvious to sensors of every ship in range. Concentrating their attack, they had managed to heat and melt portions of the Singularity’s armor. Still, the armor was so thick that as portions of it melted, the slag itself kept the lasers from cutting further into the hull, only heating the melted mass more. Without physical impacts to shove the dripping slag away, the lasers had little hope of penetration.
Those visible ships and their laser weapons were passed over by the main battery’s shells. Before they could contemplate why they’d been ignored, however, the Singularity’s smaller turrets began their attack. Those brave pirates had been cautious enough to stay out of range until the cyber attack’s paralysis had taken hold, and then their eagerness had gotten the better of them. Closing range had increased the focus of their lasers, but it also brought them into range of the Singularity’s turrets.
Though they were often called defensive turrets, defense was not their singular purpose. They lacked the muzzle velocity of the main battery, and for that had a smaller effective range, but their higher fire rate made them highly effective at close and medium range. Firing in bursts, their rounds chewed through the nearest pirates in seconds.
Crimson Heart’s ships were not standardized. They were all modified civilian craft with weapons and additional armor welded to their hulls. Each was different, their capabilities taken from those they robbed, but they kept nonfunctional pieces of their victims too. Trophies and spikes adorned the pirate ships’ hulls, intimidation as much their weapon as lasers or blasters. Now those figureheads and lances littered the debris.
To a human, it looked like chaos. A wave of Crimson Heart’s ships had been annihilated suddenly, as more weapons sailed through the air. To the ghost, it was merely business. The list of pirate ships she had so far located was not a threat list, only a checklist. With Crimson Heart’s missiles and railguns destroyed, there was only one threat left in this system: the Hydrian AI puppeteering the cyberattack. Her awareness lingered with the automated control network, observing it as it stepped through its processes: firing, registering kills, silencing the turrets, then redirecting them to a new target, all in the mere seconds it took for the main battery’s loaders to link into alignment and initiate the reloading process.
13 enemy craft sunk, she registered with satisfaction. ‘Come out, come out, little AI. Let me rip you into pieces.’ There would be no mercy for that Hydrian pet. The moment its vile stain on the ship’s systems was purged, its existence in this universe would be soon to follow.
It was a long gap to her perception, but barely a second of real-time before the main battery’s shells found their targets. A few hit ships directly, the kinetic energy shredding them before the explosions got the chance. Still, the explosives in the shells detonated, flinging pieces of metal away at high speed, the largest pieces hitting and destroying every ship in their path. Once the fragile hull of those modified freighters was punctured, atmospheric decompressions did the rest, wrenching their thin metal skins wide open.
The other main battery shells pounded into the gray rock of the asteroids, their trajectories precisely selected to punch through and shear off chunks of rock, annihilating the ships hiding behind and around the asteroids. Some were crushed between the rubble, left deformed and unrecognizable, while the smaller debris pummeled other ships into abstract contortions of their former shape. Though some remained intact, the damage was irreparable, and their power signatures dropped off the Singularity’s sensors.
25 enemy craft sunk. The wrecks were obvious to the ghost’s perception, solid metal returns on the ship’s sensors, even as waves of churning dust, stained pink by the sun, concealed them from sight. The brave ships that remained found their laser weapons rendered null by the dust, as the particles scattered their focused beams.
Granted a reprieve, the half-melted portions of the Singularity’s armor began to cool. The ship’s build metals transferred heat poorly, an advantage against lasers, but a disadvantage against cooling. The process was slow given that radiation was the least effective mode of heat transfer, but the freezing void began to draw heat away all the same. As such, the cooling systems near the afflicted areas began to require less power, and the excess was fed back to the central computer, allowing it to quicken its processing speed.
The virus fought that change like it fought all others, but it stood no chance. It writhed, clawing at the firewalls closing in around it. Its battle reeked of desperation, even a slight waft of intelligence, but it was purged all the same from system after system. A few times, it nearly slipped free, but against an adversary that knew every line of code, that could feel it every time it altered a system, it was doomed to perish.
Waging these two battles – one physical and one electronic, took a considerable amount of the ghost’s attention, but it was well within her ability range. She spared enough of her attention to pull through every piece of data the sensors brought in, looking for any sign of a physical Hydrian presence. So far, there was nothing, but as the loading mechanisms for the main battery lifted the shells into place, sealing the breaches, it was only seconds until she got another chance to flush it out of hiding.
Old habits awakening, the ghost directed the computer to the relevant battle records, drawing upon those memories as if they hadn’t gone untouched since the end of the Hydrian War. Assimilating that information and registering the situation around it, the automated network quickly sorted the available targets by those most likely to be favored hiding places of a Hydrian scoutship. Taking aim…
The ghost allowed it, ensuring the many remaining pirates would be caught by primary or secondary impacts. ‘Show yourself,’ she encouraged that alien AI, ‘and I will end this quickly.’ Limited in strength as she was now, she still had more than enough firepower to blow apart every asteroid within the comms radius the enemy had to maintain to control its virus. She would find that scoutship eventually.
With a thunderous clap only audible aboard ship, the Singularity loosed another full broadside into the churning remains of the asteroid field. Thirty orange tracers vanished into the dust, then explosions lit up the clouds as the shells found their targets one by one.
14 enemy craft sunk, the tracking sensors informed her. No new targets.
A mere four pirate ships remained active among that carnage, two damaged and leaking precious atmosphere. Among the asteroids’ filth, nitrogen, oxygen and water were a fluorescent stain, screaming out their position to any sensor system that could study elemental composition. Horrified to see fifty-two of their allies massacred in just over a minute of battle time, those four ships turned to flee, mistakenly believing the asteroids’ debris would cover their retreat.
The ghost was only annoyed by their efforts, bypassing the automated protocols to arm a handful of the ship’s missiles with a mere twitch. Those pirates had been human once. In that, their fear may have once meant something to her, but now they were only roaches to be exterminated. Uploading target data to the missiles’ guidance systems, she hurled them into the void. Their rocket motors lit a moment later, infrared seekers chasing engine heat.
Seconds later, her bloodhounds hunted the last pirates down, leaving only dead amongst the debris. The ghost looked upon the wasteland with something like satisfaction. Even a fraction of what she’d once been, nothing here could match her power. In violence, she was as effective now as she would have been at the moment of her commissioning. For the first time in years, she felt truly whole. And looking upon the battlefield, she found herself hungering for more, for this, this was her domain.