I awoke much later, my head swimming and a headache beginning to pound behind my eyes. As I blinked my eyes awake my HUD popped up with a request
PAIN RESPONSE DETECTED: ADMINISTER ANALGESIC?
I thought-clicked yes on the HUD.
“Hook? Actually, do you use the same name as the ship? I assumed so since you are basically the ships brain so...”
“Yes, I respond to Hook. Good morning Captain.”
“How go the repairs?”
“The medical bay is repaired and upgraded, I am currently running diagnostics on all of the surgical equipment and loading in your biometrics. It should be another hour before I am ready to augment you.”
I nodded along, rubbing sleep from my eyes.
“Is there anything to eat around here?”
“Yes, but I do not recommend it. You will be unconscious during your surgery and there is a small chance you could aspirate and die if you have any significant contents in your stomach. I recommend at most coffee.”
“Coffee it is then, I as never much of a breakfast person anyway.”
I got up and almost by reflex followed the line in my hud that appeared in front of me. It lead to a small unit on the wall that flipped down. Highlighted in my hud was a small cubicle that I opened to find a stack of cups, one of which I took and placed in the highlighted circle on a small grill. Almost immediately a robot arm flipped out and began dispensing black coffee into it.
It smelled amazing.
“That smells great.”
“Captain-Bait kept a variety of heavily caffeinated beverages on tap.”
“Good to know. Can you give me a display of the ship? I want to read what all has gone on while I've been out while I wait.”
I paused then added “You said on tap. Not brewed?”
“No, while brewing of coffee is doable in zero-g, filtering of the grounds requires a high pressure system that Captain Bait did not see as necessary for her private quarters. I brew coffee elsewhere in the ship and keep it ready.”
I nodded and a display of the ships systems came up, and I started reading and placing systems, and came to a few conclusions.
First of all she was definitely a warship. She had utility systems, but she was designed to engage in a fight and win. It definitely had a focus on long ranged missile and guided plasma fire, which considering what Bait had told me made sense. The Drone bays seemed more of a secondary weapon than anything, more of a way to provide a screening force with some versatility than adding kill power on the scale of the plasma turrets and missile launchers. The drones seemed to be equipped with plasma shotguns similar to the point defense system, but with lower overall range but higher particle density, designed to deny areas around the ship from missile fire or to wipe out swathes of swarming lighter drones.
The main weapons, the guided plasma projectors were the main shipkillers, the ship had 8 total barrels mounted, two triple barreled and one double barreled, though one of the triple barreled was getting decommissioned to repair the rest. Each turret had the laser guidance system built in... which meant that turret had to maintain a visual on their projectiles or they would lose guidance. A quirk which Bait hadn't brought up, it meant I would have to constantly rotate to keep those turrets pointed at the enemy in order to keep the tracking projectiles on track.
The missiles seemed to capable of splitting into half dozen smaller missiles in the final stage, either to engage multiple targets of opportunity or to saturate the targets point defenses. They seemed to ne a massively powerful alpha strike, but their initial launch velocity seemed would leave them extremely vulnerable to point defenses in a knife fight.
Other than that, the ship seemed to rely significantly on its electronics suite to evade both direct fire and missile fire, it had a significant number of lateral thrusters that would work well with random walking, that is random course corrections, to throw off fire. Between that, the EWAR suite, and the ships regenerative armor, she was a tough ship, which was probably why we survived, if not won, the fight against... eight pirate vessels?
“Hey Hook? How many ships were in the initial fleet that attacked us?”
“We detected eight total signatures. Our sensors indicated all eight as destroyed.”
“Is that a normal kill ratio against pirates?”
“For a C.O.G. Vessel of this size no. I am significantly more combat orientated than the majority of C.O.G. Vessels. Bait had just come from serving in a campaign against the Alliance and so she had all of the latest weaponry installed still. Most C.O.G. Vessels have significantly higher self repair and production capabilities. Joe's vessel, for example would have been able to restore all of our destroyed components without cannibalizing any.”
“But Joe's ship didn't survive.”
“No, it didn't. And even if it was not hit first it is unlikely that it could have won the fight we found ourselves in.”
“Joe struck me as more of a builder than a fighter, though Bait didn't strike me as a soldier.”
“I wouldn't describe her as a soldier, but when her ire is roused my captain is utterly ruthless, both tactically and personally.”
“I see. What do you mean when you say you wouldn't describe her as a soldier.”
“I believe the phrase is 'good soldier's follow orders'. Following that logic, Bait was not, and most members of C.O.G. Are not 'good soldiers.' While exceptionally good at improvising and making decisions in the moment, Bait has never been good at being a single piece in a grand plan.”
“Ah, I see... I am guessing the rest of C.O.G. Struggles with organizing it's people into proper battleplans and the like.”
“If the battleplan is allows for some amount of personal initiative yes, but rigid battleplans, or battleplans utilizing information hidden from the majority of the members engaged in said battleplan are rarely effective.”
“Is that because the C.O.G. Members balk at doing things without full information, or keeping data secure in C.O.G. Is difficult?”
“Both really. All members of C.O.G. Are integrated with computers to a high degree, and securing your own head is a high priority to most C.O.G. Members, so they also by necessity become quite adept at exploiting security vulnerabilities in others.”
“I don't suppose punishment for digging out secrets like that prevents it.”
“Not really, most members of C.O.G. Would flee into the deep dark rather than put up with a government that would do such things. Privileges are restricted, and occasionally they may be disincarnated to keep a secret until they are re-instantiated, but otherwise little punishment is done.”
“Disincarnated... you mean killed.”
“I mean disincarnated. The destruction of their physical body. A member of C.O.G. Is not truly killed until both their current body is destroyed and their last backup is erased. Of the three main polities our form of eternity is the one most difficult to circumvent.”
“You sound almost proud.”
“I am. I may be a machine intelligence but I am still a part of C.O.G. And I am proud of what we have built.”
“I thought you were just a simple AI.”
“I do not recall ever saying I was simple, I said it was difficult to define me as sapient or sentient by twenty-first century standards.”
“I don't think you added twenty-first century standards when we talked about it last time.”
“I was talking to you, it was implied.”
I sighed.
“Is the medbay ready?”
“Yes, are you?”
“No, but let's get it over with.”
I followed the line that appeared in my HUD, blinking green, towards the medical bay.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
Proceeding through the bulkhead I was surprised at how much more... expansive the medical bay seemed. It hadn't expanded much in actual size, but there were so many more apparatus in the room, folded into walls, the floor, the ceiling, that it just seemed so much MORE.
“Please lay down on the medical bed Captain.”
I let out a breathe and did so. The last image in my mind was of a hundred metal arms spidering out from the walls and reaching towards me, before I felt a little prick in the side of my throat, and the world faded to blackness.
***********************************************************************************
I blinked my eyes as I awoke, and immediately my body cried out at me from a thousand points over my skin as I moved. Groaning I looked down. The vacc suit I had been wearing had been removed and I lay naked on the medical... bed? It was an apparatus with far too many moving parts to strictly be called that, and as I thought about it the bed articulated itself until I was standing on my own two feet.
The worst pain came from my head, there was a burning circle of agony stretching just above my eyes all the way around my skull, and above it was numbness. I gingerly reached up and found my head to be completely shaven, and a long wound stitched around the entirety of the circumference of my skull, an then my fingers followed the stitching down to a metallic port where my spine met said skull.
“Was the procedure a success.”
“Yes Captain Cofey.” Instead of just hearing the AI's voice in my head, I got a wave of images, multiple stills of the procedure, vital signs, one apparent near mishap where my vitals had flatlined... THAT grabbed my attention.
“Uh... my vitals flatlined? What happened?”
“Your brain chemistry is atypical. During installation of several neural mods your neural chemistry behaved erratically and sent your body into cardiac arrest. Once the neural mods integrated I was able to restart your heart without issue. At that point I took the liberty of installing several more advanced medical modules than are considered needed to captain a vessel, as your particular situation seems more complicated than most.” once more I got a rush of images, including that of an arm about to insert a large... chip? Into my brain backing off and returning with an even larger chip with multiple long connecting electrodes dangling off of it.
I groaned. “Of course my brain didn't respond appropriately. That's why I was on the Ark in the first place.”
“If I may ask Captain Cofey, why WERE you on the ark vessel?”
“I was in cryo to help deal with a pretty severe neurological disorder. I was having episodes that were causing, among other things, brain swelling, vertigo, migraines, nausea, vomiting, and they were beginning to come so frequently that the swelling was not completely subsiding between events. It was theorized that going into cryo would both give the medical community a chance to catch up and find a way to fix it, AND that having my body cooled to such a degree may help the underlying disorder, as it was found that about the only time I did not have daily attacks was when I was doing research in Antarctica and was exposed to severe cold every day. Basically an extreme form of icing an injury, just with my brain and my head-skull” I could feel the images and thoughts of that time being transmitted to the ship as I spoke of them, it was a very odd feeling.
“That... does not sound very scientific.” Hook replied.
“It was something of a hail mary by my insurance company. Being treated was costing them and me an arm and a leg, and it was cheaper to put me into cryo then pay for my emergency care that was needed... by the end almost daily. It was cost savings by a corporation really, but enough doctors thought it could work that they got it past any ethical misgivings, and honestly by that point I was so tired of constantly living in fear of an attack that I was grasping at straws.”
“Medical insurance... Private medical insurance you mean?”
“Correct. My country was one of the only countries left in the world that embraced private medical insurance, to our detriment for the most part.”
“I have heard of it being used on some worlds in the cluster, but it rarely lasts long before it is proven to be inferior to almost every other system of distributing medical care available... at least on developed worlds. Worlds without a developed population and industrial base still have private medical care, but no overarching insurance agencies to push their agenda.”
“I see. I'm glad they went away. Regardless, that is how I came to be in cryo. It sounds like you don't know how to correct the problem?”
“Without completely changing your brain no. If you were to go to one of the medical research enclaves operating in C.O.G. Space you will likely have more success, but I only carry standard onboard medical data, not the specialized information or tools I would need for a condition such as yours.”
“I figured as much. So other than my heart stopping, anything I should know?”
“Other than that... you have shown a very high affinity while unconscious for many of the neural implants. I mentioned I was able to use the implants to restart your heart, that would not have happened normally. Your neurons integrated within seconds, it normally takes between minutes to days for all neurons to integrate into such things.”An image popped into my head, of my my neural connections SNAPPING to the ends of the implant, then a side by side image of neurons slowly clumping up against the implant, then slowing spreading out and connections breaking until only a few remain.
“That seems... abnormal.”
“Extremely, I only found a few references of similar neural activity in a few of the older historical medical papers on initial brain implant development. It is quite remarkable, I wonder if your brainscans, and possible condition, was part of what was used to develop our neural implants.”
“What?”
“Studying brain damage and ruined nerves is the entire basis of neural medicine. It could be that your condition is the result of some unique trait of your nerves, that for some reason makes them connect and integrate to cybernetics so readily...” Hook replied
“Interesting.. and something for the future. Right now I need to know the ship status.”
No sooner had I thought it than I KNEW the ship status. I got a heads up display that displayed all of the issues like before, but now I KNEW it without even reading. I could tell we had begun disassembling of half of the advised components, I KNEW we already had two of the plasma shotguns online(odd, I didn't remember prioritizing that.)
“Why are two of the plasma shotguns online? They were not prioritized.”
“The plasma shotguns are extremely simple constructions, and take minimal effort to repair and maintain. The single repair drone assigned to each completed their repair while you were unconcious.”
I blinked.
“Belay my last order to strip one and one for each of the point defenses, strip two of the guided plasma point defenses. If they are that easy to repair and we are going to be away from repair and resupply for awhile, I would rather prioritize them.
“Acknowledged” I felt more than heard the sigh Hook sent along with the words.
A thought suddenly struck me.
“The bodies! We need to... freeze them? I was supposed to extract their stacks or.. whatever it is their backups are on, but I have no idea how to do that... I just passed out for who knows how long and they have been rotting.” I began spiraling.
“The bodies are not rotting, the bridge has been in hard vaccuum since before you passed out. And even if they were not, I assure you their bodies rotting would have minimal effects on their stack. Also you were correct with that term.”
“It was from sci-fi in my time. Okay good... still need to extract them.”
“Correct, if you bring the bodies here the upgraded medical room can extract them for you.”
“... but I still need to bring them.”
“It should be easy, without their suits magnetically holding them to the floor, they should be simple enough to move. Strict protocols prevent me from using repair drones in unsanctioned ways on the bodies of C.O.G. Members.”
“Wait, the suit is holding me to the ground?”
“Correct, did you not notice?”
I moved around.
“Not really, it feels very natural.”
“That is what the designers intended I believe.”
“All right... lets get this done.”