CHAPTER 1 - A MISSION

10 Apr 2231

The Terran StarNavy base was orbiting a pitch-black planet on the outskirts of the system. Somewhere close to Flamerider was one of the most distant human colonies, New Arizona, but from here the star was a fairly dim light.

The base itself had only a small ring, unlike civilian starports. Instead, it was roughly cigar-shaped, with a great many ships docked to its cylindrical surface. The ships had a much different design from civilian ones: much like their 'home', their habitation ring was smaller, their engines were even wider and thus their radiators were larger, and most importantly they had many weapons bristling on their hulls, from fixed missile tubes to the thick, swiveling barrels of particle beam cannons. Some ships were instead built around gigantic spinal-mounted lasers or beams. To someone from two centuries ago, they would just look like tubes with more tubes sticking out of them, but to a 23rd-century Terran, these were fearsome instruments of destruction.

Somewhere near the central pillar of the starbase, there was a conference room. It was roughly cube-shaped, and owing to its microgravity nature, chairs of perforated aluminum were placed on all surfaces. Floating in the center, tethered to the walls, was a small booth for the speaker to sit in. It could seat more than two hundred people, but this time, it was almost empty. Six chairs floated beside the booth, tiny propeller fans regulating their position.

In the first chair sat Jamaad Warren, a dark-skinned human in his mid-thirties, with short curly black hair, who wore a dark blue jumpsuit with golden lines and curved embroidery. He had a fairly solid build, and his clean-shaven face looked perpetually stern.

In the second chair was a pale-skinned near-human genemod. Her head was graced by a pair of cat ears, as brown as her hair, which seemed to replace baseline ones, while her eyes were green and slit-pupiled. She was slim, and of rather average height, slightly shorter than Jamaad. A tail swished behind her. The little name tag on her cyan jumpsuit read 'Rachel Beka'.

The third seat was occupied by Artur Greenpaw, a very muscular, more than seven-foot-tall wolf-genemod. His dark gray fur was mostly covered by a black uniform with green and red hexagonal highlights, and those same highlights appeared in bleached form on Artur's body. A mop of hair the same color as his fur, that barely reached past his ears, graced his head. As was usual for residents of the Black Fang Republic, he had many cybernetic enhancements, though in his case there was no full limb replacement, only plates and wires visible here and there, a veneer of flesh concealing internal bionics.

Slouched in the fourth chair was a light magenta relmai, almost pink. She was humanoid, as far as aliens went, but her limbs were notably longer than those of humans, and she was extremely thin. Her face was dominated by a triangular snout with a dog-like nose and framed by pointy, splayed-out, tufted ears. Her pupils and nostrils were both doubled, and her eyes were very reflective, like that of Rachel. Though the relmai's rather sparse fur covered her whole body, there was a large hair-like tuft on her head that reached down onto her face, and her long tail was extremely fluffy. According to the tag on her uniform, which had a pattern resembling the upholstery of a bus seat, except oversaturated, her name was Kuwkuobue Liukwelbea-bu.

In the fifth chair was yet another genemod, different from the two other ones: Elektra Jacinth. She was visibly non-human, moreso than Rachel and less so than Artur. Her smooth, slightly slimy skin was blue and striped with black. Two large, green-irised eyes looked from above a small, rounded snout, while in place of her ears were several narrow red-veined fins, making her face just inhuman enough to avoid the uncanny valley effect. She was quite short and stocky compared to the others, and wore a white jumpsuit.

And in the sixth chair was a robot. And not just any robot, a fractal robot. Its main body was narrow and cylindrical, with both ends of the cylinder branching into three more cylinders, which each branched into three more, which each branched into three more. Each connection was jointed, and at the tips of the smallest segments were either magnetic sucker-like plates, gripping manipulators, or beady eye-like cameras. It was shiny and without paint or other decorations, except for the stenciled letters 'PATCH'. The whole robot was about 1.5 meters in diameter.

Speaking from the booth to this motley crew was another relmai, with darker fur, but overall reminiscent of Kuw's appearance, except for her uniform: an even more garish suit and a 'service cap' that more resembled an inverted cake with far too much frosting.

The briefing was clearly going on for a while, and everyone looked a bit drained. The higher-ranking relmai adjusted her dark, reflective sunglasses and squinted at a screen in the booth before simply shaking her head and looking back up, "...and you are NOT classified to know the specifics of Project Broadsword, so once you arrive at Ilsh-Vusbaw, just pop that sucker into the transmitter and give them the info. If you lose the chip, somehow…" The relmai slid her finger across her throat with a 'kscchhh' sound.

"And one last thing. You were five minutes late, Artur Greenpaw!" She shouted, "Forgot your time with the Berserkers, did you?"

"I apologize, Admiral Wouwbiikza, I was–" The Canid man said, lowering his head.

"Forget your apologies! One more such incident, and you're demoted. Understood?"

"Understood."

She then handed a tiny data card with thin golden streaks, perhaps the size of a pinky fingernail, to Jamaad. "Now go. You know what to do."

***

The six made their way to the stardock. There were many airlocks on each side of the hallway, each with a screen above it that displayed the name of a ship. Jamaad floated to the door marked 'TFSMV Pheidippides' and prepared to open it… only to see the rest of his crew lagging behind, except for Patch.

Friends and families. Near-humans, Canids, relmai, and empath-genemods dressed in a mix of civilian and military attire, but mostly military, embraced their acquaintances of the same species. Rachel and Elektra cried as they embraced their civilian best friends from New Arizona, while Kuw gave tight but brief hugs to her relmai coworkers, as well as a single child. Artur, meanwhile, stoically shook his father's hand.

"If only mine cared…" Jamaad thought. "Ever since I rose up the ranks, my family grew so distant. And after Hkaal'Unthan I no longer have many friends..."

The captain sighed and reached into his satchel, putting on a blue service cap.

A tinny, robotic voice came from Patch's body as they watched the scene with their dozens of cameras. "Why are the meatbags so solemn?"

"Because they think we won't return. All I can say is, 'not with that attitude'."

He didn't question the presence of the civilians on the station– it was policy to allow close friends and families of crew about to depart on lengthy missions to visit the crew before they leave, provided there was no criminal record or suspicion of espionage, and they did not get past the dock. Perhaps it wasn't optimal, but the Federation was quite a sentimental nation. In practice, usually only those from the same system came.

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Artur then received some kind of package from his father and pushed himself towards the airlock. The others soon followed.

Kuw looked distraught and kept glancing back at the relmai child in the hall.

"Did something happen?" Artur said, stowing away the palm-sized package into one of his uniform's deep pockets.

"Buonoukiu did not handle the last warp well…! The Jwuikbou field had too much flux. The tones did not play niiiice with his mind!" She made a few strange gestures while speaking.

The Canid furrowed his bushy eyebrows. "...tones?"

"Ya know, the odd tones that ya hear when–"

"You mean the voices?"

"Noooope, I mean the tones… Oh, is it different for aliens?"

Artur felt it was a little unusual to be called an alien, but he supposed it went both ways. "Yeah we hominids just get voices that talk nonsense."

Jamaad, who was floating there and listening, checked the time on his pad. "Time matters, everyone go in!"

The group went through a short tube and towards another airlock leading to the ship itself, which was visible on viewscreens in the tunnel. It was rather small and clearly optimized for acceleration and fuel efficiency. A narrow crew module comprised, from front to back, several decks: the first deck contained the crew rooms, the medbay, and an emergency supply room; the mess hall was its own deck; the command deck contained stations for comms, sensors, astrogation, comprising the CIC; while the 'bottommost' one was the rather bulky engineering deck. This relatively compact habitable part was at one end of a thin pole of Whipple-wrapped girders, surrounded by four thin propellant tanks. Even engineering was very far from the engines proper, and a single glance at the immensity of the four fusion-torch drives at the back of the vehicle, winged with four equally gigantic radiators, would show exactly why. The Pheidippides, being a hastily-refit scout, had only two small-diameter particle beam cannons mounted in the middle of the pole. The narrow ring of a military-optimized Ugolnikov drive was the only ring visible. Unlike on civilian ships, the habitat did not rotate. Everything had a silvery coating, but there were various colorful emblems on the surfaces of the propellant tanks.

"Not exactly a warship to rival our Attila, eh?" Artur said, glancing at the meager weaponry.

"Well yeah, I hope even those don't see any use… I don't want us to kill people," Elektra said, her voice altered with a slight reverb.

Rachel stopped for a moment and scratched her chin with an extending claw. "Well, it doesn't seem like we will, if all goes okay."

"Then what are the guns for?"

"Pirates," Jamaad said. "Not just in our frontier– there was a bust on Akshaya's gang last year, though the mofo still hides somewhere– but honestly half the nations we will be going through haven't got their shit together."

Artur rolled his eyes. "Are you really a spaceman if you're not in this to reduce some fuckers to space dust?" He chuckled.

"Officer Beka said 'if all goes okay'. Things rarely go completely okay. The admiralty wanted the ship to have just the one gun and I had to beg them to let us have two."

The Canid looked around. No obvious cameras. "The admiral's a bitch honestly."

The airlock slid open as they entered the first deck of the ship, into a shiny, unpainted corridor with many panels and sometimes exposed wires.

The command deck, where everyone went as they followed the captain, was essentially one large, square room. Large by the ship's standards, at least: it was overall quite cramped, with narrow passages between all the stations. The aft side housed the comms interface, with sensor information displays next to it, both graced with lots of expensive-looking audio equipment; the port side contained a medical display and and life support panel with lots of knobs; the starboard end contained engineering and navigation consoles, more metal than glass; while the fore had a large screen with many levers and buttons, to be used for controlling the weapons. In the center was the captain's seat, a swiveling chair with many screens and buttons mounted on the different surfaces of it. Everything was placed in such a way that every commanding officer could see everyone else's screens by just looking back or swiveling in their chair. The walls were unpainted, the lighting was dim, and the seats had black faux-leather upholstery with magnets. This was what civilians would call a 'bridge' thanks to centuries of media referring to starship control rooms in such a way, but a spaceman would not be caught dead referring to it as anything other than a CIC. Nobody else was here.

"Well, here we are," Jamaad said as he took the central seat, reclining it back and forth and testing out its various features. "Familiarize yourselves with this stuff, we'll be here for a while."

He was about to comment on the apparent lack of tail ergonomics, considering that three out of six of the CIC crew had very prominent ones, but it wasn't long before Rachel pulled a tiny lever on one of the armrests of the sensors seat, and a wide slot on the back swung open. The appendage snugly fit through it. Patch was even more different from the usual humanoid form, but somehow seemed even more fit for using the engineering console, with each 'leaf' on a different button.

Artur glanced over to the tree-like robot. "Must be good at typing, eh?"

"Why type when one can just direct-interface? I would hope you would understand, as a cyborg."

"I may have metal bits in my head but I think all this BCI stuff is for gamers and pilots. Or CCI in your case, I suppose," he paused. "Speaking of you, uhm. Jamaad briefed me about you but I still dunno… what pronouns would you like me to use?"

"I don't care," Patch bluntly responded, "but I prefer 'it'."

"Well doesn't that make you sound like a soulless machine? Like the factory bots. Don't you consider yourself something greater?"

The robot did not hesitate to respond, as if having prepared for this. "I may have sapience, or as you superstitious folk say, a 'soul', but I am just a machine, a servant of QDNE-32. QDNE-32 may have set me free, but it does not change the fact: I am a mere cog that has been thrown loose."

Artur looked down. "Makes sense," the Canid swiveled back to dig through the UI of the weapons control program.

Elektra had just finished checking the crew manifest and corresponding medical records. "You're free, but is QDNE still listening?"

"As a gesture of goodwill, my transponder was removed when I left," Patch intoned.

"Alright. Then I'll say one thing: I think QDNE is a robotic dictator as bad as Gaa-Mul-Hel. It creates sapient quantum AI and forces them to follow its every word, just to solve tasks that require sapience more effectively. You're only free because it decided you will bring more use to it by being free. According to some cold evaluation function running on a server on Mainframe. You don't think that's horrifying?"

"No. QDNE-32 only seeks to ensure its survival in an irrational and unpredictable Oval. Can you oppress those who don't feel emotions?"

Elektra crossed her arms in annoyance and tilted her head slightly.

"Are you upset? I would be as satisfied as I am now if I was never set free."

"You don't understand! It isn't a matter of satisfaction. You–"

Jamaad turned around. "No fighting in the control room!"

The two immediately fell silent.

The catgirl and the relmai, meanwhile, did not really catch any of this exchange. They were testing out the various audio-enabled equipment provided, wearing headphones that more resembled oversized, dark gray earmuffs. Whether it was detecting the bright flares of every torchship in the system and every planetary colony, or sending a few test messages to the other docked ships, the systems worked just fine.

Jamaad reached into one of the armrests and flipped out a microphone. "This is Captain Jamaad Warren speaking! We are departing in five minutes. Please make sure you are not in mid-air and are firmly standing or seated."

"Do we… do we even know our crew?" Elektra said.

Rachel took off her headset. "The cook is nice, talked to him at base. But I had to clarify: no cat food! Literal cat food."

Some chuckling resounded through the room. "I'm serious, I got offered some planetside. Pisses me off! Now, tuna…" She trailed off.

Soon, there was an audible clunk of the docking airlock as the ship detached from its roost, followed by the hum of the fusion drive, running at less than one percent of the full throttle while near the naval base…