CHAPTER 16 - WAR

"Why did you call me up, First Officer Kuw, when an order by radio would have sufficed?" Patch intoned, having been summoned to the CIC. Its many branches waved in confusion.

"Because it feels more personal. Listeeeen!" she then explained the situation.

"It appears we are very unlucky."

"Thanks, Engineer Obvious," Rachel remarked from her seat.

"Patch, can ya try and steer the ship out of the fleet's path and then dodge the drives and the shots?"

"It can't," Rachel interrupted, "First of all we're in the middle of this clusterfuck. Second of all, it's not the shots that are the issue. Just the drives. The shots are tiny in comparison. Second of all, remember that grazing hit on our central pillar? We can't dodge for crap now."

"So is it just a chance for us to just get sliced in half?" Kuw said worriedly.

"Kind of. We should be able to kind of dodge."

"Then I will do that," Patch beeped and scampered to their console, "However note that currently, we are not near the path of any battleships' likely firing solutions."

Outside, the loyalist ships began firing back. A rain of missiles erupted from their many launcher tubes, their exhausts glowing like hundreds of meteors in a planet's night sky. There was more mass in one volley of these missiles than there was in the Pheidippides, many times over. The volleys could be seen spreading out in patterns resembling bouquets of flowers, covering a very wide area of space.

"Really now?" Rachel said, "How hard would it have been to have the missiles swerve around us instead of putting us at Lady Luck's mercy?"

"It loooooks like they don't care about us at all," Kuw said, "one single deviation from the projected path, oooone hundred meters to the side, and it's too much time lost. They'd rather have the swarm plow through us."

Rachel sighed. "I guess I can't blame them too hard considering the situation. Patch, what even caused the glubb-enn civil war?"

The robot began a fairly long-winded explanation. "The central government of the Glubb-enn Domain is the Confluence: a sort of direct democracy where there is a massive parliament which is tasked with executing the people's will. It is vaguely similar to the relmai Grand Council, with its thousands of seats–"

"Tens of thousands!" Kuw said, "The hall of ours is so large that if you look up inside it, you can see clouds! The clouds get lit up with lasers."

"Thank you for your correction. Back to our topic… in 2229, the Ggggggnn-mnuggh faction of the Confluence was disappointed by the dominant Uuuuu-mmmmnnnlk faction's actions towards the Abyssal Empire: the tithe of adult glubb-enn being was voluntarily raised, in an attempt to increase the Abyssals' opinion of the Domain. Protests and maneuvering did nothing, thus unrest grew to a civil war, which now flows as fast as the aqueous bodies of the glubb-enn themselves. As you most likely know, however, the rebels brokered a deal with Abyssals: more young glubb-enn than before will be donated, raising the total amount of biomass donated by a tenth. Thus, the deep-fleets stay back and watch now."

"I… can't really sympathize with them after that. Sorry. I know about different values and all, but when you're doing… that… I don't care about your cause," Rachel said.

Kuw nodded. "Yeeeaaaa…"

Outside, the hail of missiles only intensified and intensified.

***

Radd pulled one of the chairs behind the curtain and sat down to listen to Mo's explanation.

"First of all, I'll say again this is not the only thing they do. I think to truly unlock the secrets of the diamond spheres, a whole lab would be needed, and years of work. But there's one semi-obvious usage for them."

"Which is?" Radd said with anticipation.

"These things modulate and manipulate the Ugolnikov Field when stimulated with photons of certain wavelengths. In layman's terms, irradiating them with a narrow band of ultraviolet, or X-ray, or oddly enough orange visible-light wavelengths causes the field to become stronger or weaker, or change direction."

"Then why did it affect people even when the balls were just sitting there like?"

"It appears that there is a passive effect that distorts the field in ways resembling a rock in a shallow stream distorting the flow of water. This, naturally, causes discomfort. Anyways, during irradiation, they can severely reduce these effects, or even make the field much more efficient at essentially zero additional cost. However, I don't think these spheres are possible to replicate at this point in time, even with the Federation's knowledge and resources," Mo explained.

"Will we be able to use them now, to improve our drive?" Radd said.

"The answer is a resounding yes. I could rig something up with someone's help. Your help for example, or Temo's help. But I must consult Jamaad and Patch first."

"Patch is busy."

"Then I'll–" Mo began standing up from his chair.

A black-skinned hand pulled the curtain open. "What are you doing here?" the captain said.

Radd digested the complicated explanation in simple terms. Jamaad was not an engineer or anything adjacent to one, so he appreciated it.

"What are you waiting for, Ensign Grant?" he said, "You and Mo should go down to the engi deck and get some helpers, then go perform the necessary– wait, Mo, did you do the calculations for what's needed to make the crystals work in our drive?"

"Yes sir," the materials engineer said and showed the screen of his datapad to the captain, then sent him the blueprint– which was an edit of the current blueprint, "the pseudosap AI verified it but I'd like Patch and Radd and Temo and maybe others to double check it. Speaking of, I'll have Patch join you after it finished setting up the maneuvers. It said it was going to have the autopilot maneuver us through this mess and I trust its judgment. It knows the strengths of organics and synthetics well."

***

The three engineers donned their plate-armor-like hardsuits. Mo had a special, modular one, which included an attachable tail and an adjustable helmet. These 'neo-hardsuits' were somewhat more expensive than the ones for baseline humans, but with the right parts could be adjusted for almost any roughly human-sized species with any limbs and features. A worthwhile investment in a society where over a quarter of the population had a tail or extra limbs.

They went down the central girder pillar like one would go down a sheer cliff: with rappels and special grips, carefully swinging downwards like alpinists. The ship's acceleration could not be stopped, after all the missiles were flying outside in the distance, visible as dots and sometimes comet-like trails. On occasion, one impacted its target, resulting in a brief flash of light. A fiery funeral for perhaps thousands of glubb-enn.

The drive core was actually not directly connected to the engineering deck, which was half of the reason the hardsuits were necessary. Mo, Radd, and Temo all carried massive toolboxes full of heavy tools while pulling a welder behind themselves– alongside four of the spheres in a special padded case.

In the middle of the central pillar was the warp drive itself. It was essentially a slight rectangular bulge in the pillar where the lacy network of the girders was replaced by a solid metal box. It was surrounded by a small metal ring, the Ugolnikov field projector. Slightly below the box, that is, closer to the engines, was the gash torn by one of the kjee railgun shells. Radd winced as he saw how close it had gotten to damaging or destroying the warp drive. On the schematic display of the ship in the engineering department, it wasn't quite so obvious.

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"Christ on a cracker, what if they hit like two meters upwards?" he said.

"If we were a civvie ship we'd be adrift," Temo said, "but as it is it'd probably destroy a few components and just put the drive out of commission for a while. We have spares. These things are rugged."

The inside of the box was accessible through a broad, non-airtight door. Radd unlatched and swung it open, revealing a dark, square-shaped access corridor with many small, colored lights, buttons, and screens lining its walls. This was the most complicated part of the ship, as it doubled as a maintenance panel for the drive. At the end of it, after a 90-degree bend, was the entrance into the drive chamber: a large hatch that resembled a stereotypical bank vault door, as seen in antique human media. Several steps had to be taken to open it: a datapad ID-swipe, a PIN that updated every few seconds, and finally a facial scan. The door then finally swung open, revealing that it was, in fact, an airlock. Fortunately, the inner door opened without a hassle.

The drive chamber looked truly alien. The fact that its design has not majorly changed since the original one from nearly two hundred years ago was a testament to Viktor Ugolnikov's genius. The room was brightly lit by blue-tinted lights evenly spaced in the walls. Between the lights were evenly spaced holes, resembling those of a showerhead but covering the entire surface of the room. It was shaped like a cone, with only one straight wall and the walls and floor being one surface that pointed in the direction the ship would warp. Suspended on four rigid rods in an X shape was the transparent Ugolnikov-Thompson crystal, smooth and clear like a cabochon diamond, except with an oddly waxy sheen. It was shaped just like the room was, with spikes corresponding to holes, but it had many almost-imperceptible lines that curved and split across its surface. It scintillated like an opal would, with glimmers of every color of the rainbow. Of course, it was inert right now, but when the ship was in warp, it would project the bubble that allowed the ship to move superluminally… and gradually consume the pure-hydrogen atmosphere that filled the drive room.

"Radd, stop gawking at the UTC and get to work!" Temo said, his voice audible twice, once over the radio and once through the thick hydrogen soup.

"Right," Grant hastily opened his toolbox and retrieved his construction equipment. "Now we wait for Patch. I'm glad that the hardsuits are so well-designed or my feet would hurt like a bitch standing on this incline."

As soon as the robot came in, work started. Mo firmly attached the spheres to carefully-calculated spots on the crystal support rods, with orange-colored lasers pointed straight into their centers. Naturally, this arrangement was not the best possible: according to Mo's calculations, an X-ray laser, pulsed just over a hundred times a second, would have produced an increase over thirty percent in the drive's speed and efficiency. This setup would only result in a ten percent increase, which was still a lot.

"How do you even come up with this stuff, Mo?" Radd said as he finished welding one of the spheres into its makeshift yet sturdy mounting, then plugged in the laser to let Patch calibrate it.

"I know more than a bit about the relevant physics. Probably more than everyone here except Patch itself. I studied hyperphysics in university, and when I told my friends they looked at me like a madman," the genemod said.

"Huh. Speaking of madmen… is it true that it made Ugolnikov himself lose his marbles? I remember watching an old interview from the last year of his life. In Krasnoyarsk I think, 2062." Radd said, "He just kept chatting 'bout random wack-ass things and threw a glass of water at the reporter when pushed. Honestly unnerving."

"Nobody knows. Perhaps the minds of 21st-century Terrans were simply not ready. These were these same people who seriously debated if certain citizens should have rights or not, just because of their identity. I wonder if they were genuinely intellectually inferior at times," Mo mused as he cleaned some dust off a sphere before verifying its laser's placement.

Before Grant could respond, Sabauri sighed deeply. "Cease that specist nonsense. Yes they did not have the durabilis treatment. They were still sapiens sapiens. But durabilis doesn't change anything about the brain. They're the same people. We're just more enlightened and whatnot."

Mo just mumbled something as he kept working.

***

"Swarm of missiles coming right through us!" Rachel announced to Kuw.

"Weeell, Patch said it set the autopilot with the necessary manuevers to dodge their specific firing patterns. It'll be fiiiine."

Meanwhile, down in the drive chamber…

Radd yelped in surprise as he was nearly tossed to his side by the ship's sudden swerve, but fortunately the location of the drive chamber, near the vessel's center of mass, dulled the whiplash of the rotation.

He regained balance, but then another swerve, in the opposite direction, finally sent him off his feet…

A rapid string of expletives, some not exactly from English, spilled from his mouth as he slid down the drive chamber's slope, like an ice skater on a tilted rink…

Into one of the crystal's support rods.

CLANG!

The rod bent enough to visibly skew the crystal to the side as the hardsuit's back impacted it. A soft hiss became audible as an alarm started to blink and beep on Radd's HUD.

"My seals ruptured! Hydrogen getting in! Help!" Radd shouted. His suit was not meant to withstand such impacts.

Temo Sabauri paced back and forth on the slope. Thinking quickly, he reached into his toolbox, pulled out a roll of space tape, tore off several long strips, and slapped them one by one onto the gaps in the plate-armor-like metal of the suit, until the hissing stopped. To truly verify it, he put his helmet's side to Radd's back. It indeed seemed airtight.

"Are you okay?" Temo said as he helped Radd get onto his feet.

"I think? Is the drive though?"

The other engineer made a motion that would result in scratching his head, if not for the hardsuit. "Well, the crystal seems fine, I guess it's an hour more work to straighten out the rod… Sir Patch, why did you do this? Why set the autopilot to dodge at these angles without considering where we are? If you were at the helm, you could have put in a gentler curve…"

Though the robot did not tell them the exact details, all three had an idea about the autopilot plan.

"I was only following standard operating procedure," Patch intoned, "For maintenance operations on the warp drive, the chief engineer must be present. However, I could not let the ship fly without any planned maneuvers in this tense situation."

"Why didn't you warn us, at least? You have a connection to the ship's alerts…" Radd said.

"According to the standard operating procedure, you must inform yourself about imminent minor changes of course and similar g-force-inducing movements. These jolts counted as minor changes of course."

"The 'standard operating procedure' nearly landed me with a trip to the medbay, or worse, and nearly left us without a warp drive. In an active warzone."

The robot went quiet. Outwardly, it ignored the complaint. But inside, it doubted. It doubted its actions. It doubted its ways. It doubted its ideals. Indeed, what if Radd got killed? Or the crystal got damaged?

It kept silently working, as everyone did. The incident seriously dampened everyone's mood except for Mo, who did not seem like he even noticed the jolts, which were as a whole not too intense, aside from picking up a fallen screwdriver.

***

Elektra barged into the command room. "Ensign Grant's sensors show a mild oxygen depletion! What did– oh where'd Patch go?"

"In the drive room. Why?" Kuw said.

"I want to talk once it's available."

Realizing what happened, the relmai leaned back in her seat. "I gueeess they should have, you know, waited for the ship to exit the system before starting work on the drive upgrades."

"A ship formation's gonna pass very close! They suddenly changed course and they're now in the way! We'll go right through their plumes in thirty minutes!" Rachel shouted. "Turning around would not only put a lot of stress on our structure but also likely have our exhaust destroy one of them, and I'm not so sure of the autopilot's capacity to swerve through them. And we're in this situation because of it not considering a possible enemy trajectory change like a sapient being would. Kuw, call Patch in!"

The relmai, after making the request, her voice deadened from stress, clutched her muzzle in both of her hands and whimpered. Rachel stood up from her seat and hugged her tightly. "It'll all be okay… please don't worry. Please. We'll dodge them."

A few minutes later, the robot hurriedly scampered into the room. As soon as Elektra breathed in, about to give it a mouthful, it began speaking.

"I admit: I made a mistake. Three miscalculations. I miscalculated the capabilities of the autopilot, I miscalculated the attentiveness of meat– correction: organics, I miscalculated the intensity of the situation. I request forgiveness. Forgiveness for putting the mission into jeopardy," it stated. The voice was monotone, but the wording and context betrayed a heavily battered ego.

Stifled yet still hearty laughter revealed that Artur was watching them the whole time through the ajar door. "Yeah and I thought I was the only one who got burned during this mission, eh?"

"I… forgive ya. Just please saaave us now."

"I suppose we will all learn something," Rachel spun around in her chair and smiled, trying to put her mind off the challenge ahead, "and we will grow as people."

Meanwhile, on the sensor screen, the task force's deadly trails approached. The forest of pillars of plasma resembled three-dimensional hurdles.