“What just happened?”
“You are at 100% synchronization, which means for all intents and purposes your body is the ship. When you reached up you accidentally activated multiple ships systems... including maneuvering drives and the weapons array.”
“Uh... shit... Wait the mines!”
I focused my attention on the mines I had marked from before, and to my dismay, they appeared to be playing beams of light over the ship.”
“Those beams of light... those are active sensors aren't they.”
“Yes. We have moments before they spot us and engage.”
“Moments... in real time? What about here?”
“A few dozen moments, but still moments.”
“All right, spin up the main drives, we're getting out of here now.”
“Aye aye Captain Cofey!” Hook said, for once not a hint of sarcasm in its voice.
I stretched my legs, and I could FEEL the main drives come online. In my minds eye I saw plumes of fusion fire belch out of the rear mounted drives, and even despite the frame-jacking we began to move.
I slowly lessened the frame-jack as I brought the main cannons to bear, targeting them on the closest two mines out of the... nine total I now detected.
Lowering the frame-jack to 10x speed, I let loose a swarm of guided plasma from each of the turrets, they came out like little glowing ovals of light, like purple comets that swept into their targets.
Curiously, I inspected the turrets, trying to see how they kept themselves on target. What I came across was a mass of computations that I realized had been running partially in my own head, the plasma projectiles following subconsciously what I wanted to do, or at least the turret was, which was guiding them.
I kept my focus on the first two mines until they were blown apart, the swarm(six projectiles form the medium turret, nine from the large) then re targeted immediately on the next nearest mines, I thought I would have trouble keeping both mines in my minds eye as it were at once but I could split my focus so easily now. I used to be able to multi-task far better than anyone I worked with, but everyone I had talked to said the human brain was not capable of true multi-tasking.
Well now it felt like I truly was. I had... not quite two parallel thought streams operating the two turrets, but one sortof slaved to my main thought stream. I wondered how many more I could split off.
Regardless, the next set of two mines blew apart, and then something curious happened to the plasma projectiles. I focused in my awareness, and I could see each projectile was less than half the size it had been when it had been launched from my vessel. A second later from my perspective, and the projectiles evaporated in puffs of plasma.
They did use their own plasma as fuel to redirect themselves, I suppose it made sense that they would dissipate like that.
With a thought I brought the Ewar suite online, and began tasking the jammers, again, separately from the me controlling the turrets, AND the me controlling the drives. It was all me, but I was doing it all at once, or else I was switching so rapidly between them as made no difference.
Within seconds(realtime, subjectively to me it felt like a minute at least) four of the mines were destroyed, but the last seven were coming at speed and they were accelerating faster than I was.
“There are more mines than I thought there were.”
“Passive sensors can only do so much Captain.”
With a thought I activated my remaining drones, launching them and tasking them with destroying the mines.
These were different than the systems built into the ship. The ship systems I was directly controlling, I felt like I could reflexively activate them, spin off a thought-stream and work all the systems simultaneously, as part of my own body. The drones however, felt like giving commands to a pair of dogs At first I tried to command them to disable one of the mines for inspection, but I almost immediately felt their confusion, and redirected them to just destroying the mines before they hit the ship.
The drones zipped off, and I moved my mind back to inspect the turrets.
It had been ten seconds since I lit my drives, and six since the guns had fired, but they still had good twenty four ACTUAL seconds before they were ready to fire. The wait was agonizing.
A flick of my mind went to activate the point defenses, only to find them already spinning up. Much like the drones they felt like less a part of me and more like... cats, this time. I felt like I could force them to do something, but they were made to be so very autonomous that they resisted anything but me diving in and taking direct control, especially the plasma shotguns.
I was actually starting to see Hook's point on them. I tried to prioritize targets for them, and while the guided plasma point defenses took that and sent an acknowledgment, instantly re-targeting. the plasma shotgun's fired back a negative filled with multiple... feelings?
When I focused on the feelings I realized it was a packet of data that didn't really contain words on it's own, but a lot of meta-data, things like(insufficient range)(Engagement suboptimal)(prioritizing targets with self and other PDT units) at which point it sent back to ME a new set of prioritized targets... which I realized it wanted me to distribute to the guided plasma turrets.
I cranked my frame-jacking back up.
“Uh... Hook, do the point defense turrets have AI? And the drones?”
“Not on my level but essentially yes. Other C.O.G. Pilots refer to them as 'Dog-Brains'. Not intelligent enough to hold a conversation, but intelligent enough to make reasonable choices when presented with problems within their area of expertise.”
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“Some of the point-defense turrets seem... willful.”
“It's the plasma-shotguns isn't it?”
“...Yes...”
“I had multiple reasons for preferring the guided PDT's. The plasma-shotgun's AI is extremely efficient, but, perhaps due to having several centuries to learn and develop, it is very distrustful of anyone else making decisions in it's particular area of interest, vis-a-vis, keeping the ship in one piece.
“It sent me a data packet with updated firing priorities, couldn't it have just send that to the rest of the PDT network?”
“Ah, THAT. Yes, theoretically it could, but none of the other systems would accept it and thus most if not all AI does not. It's a firewall procedure. YOU are the main component to keep viral attacks from taking over the ship. If we ever run into Berserker's you will be happy for the biological air-gap as it were. Unless you excplicitly indicate to a system that it needs to network with another all of that data will go through you.” We were at maximum frame-jack, and I was beginning to notice during these long winded explanations that Hook was... struggling. Hook's voice cut out and back in like it had a bad connection, and roboted occasionally. I brought up a list of resources and realized that Hook's processors were being pushed to the limit to keep up with me. I made a mental note of that.
“So I basically have to vet the data before sending it to other AI?”
“Yes. Thankfully with your 100% synchronization you should be able to crank up your frame-jacking massively to have enough time. I can help you go through this data. Though... it seems you have been subconsciously doing it this whole time.”
“What? Crap have I passed anything bad?”
“Nothing important, part of the synchronization process uses your subconscious, or rather your autonomic nervous system and other parts of your brain that are not necessarily doing much during synchronization to vet certain processes. Things like feeding targeting data to the turrets, adjusting thruster levels so they don't overdraw the fuel intakes. It's a part of the enhancement suite that allows you to be captain, though, once more, your brain is proving to be unusually adept at it. Most Captain's do take some time before it runs this smoothly...”
“They need training?”
“More experience with high-synch states to allow their brain to learn what to do. Yours did it nigh instantly.
Switching their focus the two of us opened up the data sent from the plasma shotgun PDT.
“It looks pretty standard. What would I be looking for.”
“Something like this.” Hook brought up a similar set of code and I looked it over side by side.
I looked them over, and at first they looked similar, but...
“This targeting data has far too many numbers in it.”
“Buffer overflow attack, yep.”
“And this... it's a data request for... credentials to the main database?”
“Yep, it's trying to find a way in to main memory. Theres one more.”
I looked around, and then my eyes... not my eyes but, my focus sortof glazed out, and I caught sight of the filename.
“Is the filename code itself?”
“Yep, if that file got sent further the name could trigger further issues, like allowing in a viral attack through the comms or sensor buffer.”
“Okay... so cyber atacks are a big deal, got it.”
“Generally not when facing the other empires, they've given up on doing that to us, but we can use it against them, and the Berserker's use it on EVERYONE.”
“So how does my autonomic nervous system parse this?”
“Well, normally it's trained over time, but part of the captain surgery you undertook causes your autonomic nervous system to have a negative response to requests that do not fit within a very specific paradigm. Essentially intrusion attacks that go through your subconscious will spike a small fever, cause a spasm, something small like that. That response from your autonomic nervous system wipes and blocks whatever caused it in concert with your augmentations. It' can't catch sophisticated attacks, but things like the buffer overflow from before are caught fairly simply. You need to watch for the sneaky attacks.”
I focused back on the battle, now running at 1/10,000th time, and sent the updated target prioritizations to the other PDT's, then I cranked the frame-jacking back down.
An explosion filled my vision as the two drones closed and destroyed the mine with gouts of vented plasma.
The drones had flown off and engaged the closest mine to the ship, but it was also attacking at a completely different angle than the others. It was unlikely the drones would be able to move to engage the remaining six before this engagement was concluded.
The PDT's started firing as I poured more power into the engines, feeling a slight hitch in my chest that I knew must be from my physical body as I knew more than saw that we had hit more than 5G's of acceleration.
The guided plasma PDT's launched thin streamers, more like needles, of contained plasma that lanced through two of the remaining mines, bringing them down to four. I requested status on them and they returned that, much like my main guns, they had a long cooldown time. Only about 5 seconds, but in this situation that was an interminably long length.
The plasma shotgun PDT's were waiting and tracking. The mines closed the gap quickly, getting within three kilometers, two, one...
And then the plasma shotguns filled the void the light.
Bright cones of whitehot fire filled my vision as the plasma-shotgun PDT's filled space with high energy plasma, each one emptying it's charged magazine of fusing plasma, making a veritable wall of high energy particles that the mines rammed right into.
Three of the remaining mines detonated in the inferno they found themselves in, but one was knocked off course and veered to the side, out of the hail of plasma fire.
I saw it arcing back and in a panic yelled out 'SHIIIIT!'.
And then one of my drones swept in from the side. No guns firing, no requests for permission, the drone just zipped in and kamikazed the mine in the side, detonating it less than a dozen meters from the hull.