Sparrow sat down at the helm. She had done this virtually hundreds of times before but as she sat down she realised the sensation was completely different. She touched the controls and found resistance rather than the instant compliance she was used to in the simulation. She had been running navigational predictions - nothing was entirely certain in the slip - for most of the time since the message had been received. Only about ten minutes had passed but her processing speed was still exceptional even without the added power of the interface. Still there were a huge number of variables and the hostile’s behaviour model she’d employed was rudimentary at best.
Still she couldn’t let Captain Hernandez perish after all she had done for her; and besides the others were relying on the complex web of deceit that Captain Hernandez had enabled. She estimated her plan had a fifty-six per cent success rate. Normally her programming would have forced her to discard such a flimsy plan but strangely - perhaps without the interface also intervening - she found that she was able to accept the plan. She thought briefly about informing Mr Choudary and Ms Liu about her plan. But she didn’t have time - she had to enter the slip in the next 24 seconds for the plan to work; subjective time perfectly matched the real universe in the slip even though the speeds they moved through it were many hundred times the speed of light in the real universe.
“Dive! Dive! Dive!” she shouted a captain’s traditional command to enter the slip, and without waiting for a response she executed the dive command she’d programmed into the control console.
“Shit, what’s she doing,” were the only words she heard before the scanners switched to slip mode and the dive began. Immediately they entered the strange realm of the slip. The blackness outside was total but the scanners were already throwing up a simulated visual on the cockpit glass. Immediately she was already moving the shuttle through manoeuvres that in the real would have smeared everyone against the nearest wall instantly; but there was no inertia in the slip - another of its weird properties. The other crew members didn’t notice anything of the frantic weaving around matter objects she was conducting. Her effective response time was down 45% - she hadn’t expected such a drop but she hadn’t accounted for the physical controls of the shuttle to be so sluggish to respond to her inputs - her algorithms now reported the success chance had dropped to 31%. Thirty seconds had passed she noted and decided now was the time to inform the others of their reentry time. She buffered a response in her head during a millisecond lull in the maelstrom of unidentified, but crippling, matter lying in her chosen path (a millisecond feeling like hours to her when she had shifted her programming into its active navigational settings).
“Twenty three minutes eleven seconds until re-entry,” she announced, before adding to Ms Liu, “please ensure that as soon as we re-enter Ms Liu that the laser cannon is fully charged and all non-essential power diverted to it.”
“What the fuck is she doing,” Mr Choudary whispered to Ms Liu, “we agreed a second tops in the slip.”
“I don’t know!” exclaimed Chloe, “we better do it though.”
“Why?”
“Because her reaction speeds are down enough without her stopping to do it herself.”
Sparrow ignored all this, in fact she’d turned off audio input immediately after she’d made her announcement. She had to concentrate - the matter here was especially thick. She concentrated on weaving, rolling and diving her way through the maze of the slip. In a way it was cathartic - this was where she was meant to be. This is when she was normally activated. This was right. She wondered if she’d ever get to do this again or if she’d live out whatever days she had left as a water recycling tech. She wondered what that would be like; boring probably. Still if it meant they could all be safe she guessed that was the priority.
Meanwhile, her hearing reactivated, she’d set triggers to switch back on if the other’s began talking about certain subjects; and herself was definitely a trigger.
“You think we can pull this off?” Amir was speaking softly to Chloe.
“Let’s just get through this before we worry about that,” Chloe answered, “I mean if we survive this we have to pull this off don’t we unless we want to survive this only to be executed. You’ll need to put Sparrow, I mean Rita sorry, through her paces as well on the down low. She has to be able to pull it off as a Warrant.”
“Well I can get her physically fit but the other stuff - the social stuff - I’m not that great at it myself.”
“I’ll handle that,” Chloe said, “ and you can help too.” She called over to Harriet, “I’m assigning you to her work detail.”
“Great - get to teach the machine to interact with normal people,” she huffed.
“She’s a person not a machine,” Chloe said adamantly.
“Whatever, do I have a choice,” she asked indignantly.
“Not really, no,” Amir said rubbing his left temple, “do you think anyone really gets choices in the Navy? You do what you’re told, you go where you’re told, you Stand Ready. That’s the truth of it.”
“It’s more than that,” Chloe said, clearly riled by the words Miss Ellis had spoken. They made no difference to her, at least not now whilst she was in the slip, and in any case maybe Miss Ellis was right. Sparrow had known not long after she’d first projected an Avatar and began interacting with the human crew that there was a vast gulf between how the other crew thought, processed, accessed, analysed, stored and communicated information. Her friendship, she wasn’t sure she could call it that or not, with Ms Liu had only served to confirm these conclusions. She supposed her intelligence was more like an AI’s than a regular human but she had never brought the subject up with Ms Liu - who might have been able to confirm her hypothesis for sure; and part of Sparrow didn’t want that.
In fact all these thoughts were taking place in a partition in her mind, the main body of it was busy focusing on navigation. She realised it was completely prohibited by her programming to do this and wondered how she was doing it but the partition she created was tiny and nowhere near capable of deploying enough processing power to get into that question; another question she was probably never going to ask Ms Liu about. She suspected her acceptance assessment had been fiddled. Clearly someone in R&D had decided they needed to test her reaction times on board a real ship but not a really vital one in case something went wrong with her. Again this was all worrying thinking, which her programming should have stopped long before now. She tore down the partition, switched off her audio inputs and concentrated on navigating the slip.
----------------------------
As the journey had gone on and she had got used to the weight of the manual controls Sparrow began to think it wasn’t that the controls weren’t resistive - she supposed humans needed that although there was no resistance in space it was another way of communicating sensor and control inputs to the human helmsman operating in the real - she was starting to get used to them and she was pleased to see her reaction times were up to 62% of normal. That should be enough for what she intended to do.
“Re-entry in thirty seconds,” she announced unconsciously - she’d set up an automatic response before she had even entered the slip, “please strap yourself into an acceleration couch.”
“Why is she instructing us to strap in?” she heard Amir briefly say to Chloe before she switched off her audio again. There could be no distractions for the next part of her plan.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Ten seconds,” she felt her lips move to say without hearing the words.
Moments later they plunged back into the real and Sparrow immediately brought the thrusters online and maxed them out. By the time she had done that the others were beginning to notice she had brought them out of the slip less than a kilometre behind the hostile’s engines.
“How the fuck did she do that?” she knew Amir had shouted as he looked at the cockpit screen from the video feed she was now accessing to make sure her manoeuvres in the real weren’t killing anyone. This was essential as she suddenly put the shuttle into a spin as well to make it harder for the enemy’s close combat batteries to target the shuttle’s weapon and thrusters.
At the sametime she was resolving a target lock on the hostile and less than three seconds after re-entering the real she discharged the laser into the main engine exhaust of the hostile causing a massive detonation in the engine that tore the corvette apart; just as projectile fire ripped through the shuttle’s super-structure but missed critical systems. She had already activated the emergency sealing gel dispensers mounted all over the hull and was pleased as they exploded their contents over the hull - sealing the wounds to the shuttle instantly. Air pressure had only dropped twenty seven per cent during that time - still just at operational minimum. The crew looked shocked and sick but otherwise unharmed, she noted, as she rerouted connections that had been severed between systems by the projectile attack. However, her main attention was focused on passing through the debris field she had just created. She knew from her programming in this situation the best, and best was subjective here, chance of navigating it within the constraints of the real was to keep going dead straight - the debris would be scattering in all directions from the central point of explosion making their current course slightly less dense and overall, thanks to the laser’s vapourising effect, meant that the debris in the centre was also less likely to contain massive bits of carbon fibre hull careening wildly through space.
It was still hairy and she took several more impacts to the hull; without any sealing gel left she was forced to seal the crew compartment. She felt, rather than heard, the emergency bulkheads slam into position behind them and suddenly they were clear. She turned her audio back on.
“What the fuck did she just do, did you know she could do that? Do you know why she did that?!” Mr Choudary was shouting at Ms Liu.
“I don’t know,” Ms Liu replied - the shock in her voice was evident.
“We’ve cleared the debris field, rendezvous with the Whittington in six minutes. Target destroyed two minutes outside their effective range on the Whittington.” Sparrow announced as she suddenly felt she needed the conversation to stop.
“We need to slip again,” Mr Choudary announced, “How are we going to explain this? They’ll know we must have the pilot by the time we were in the slip. They would have barely believed us if we spent a second in the slip let alone twenty minutes.”
“In the first days of slipping,” Chloe replied, “unmodified human pilots did successfully pilot through the slip for equivalent amounts of time but they dived much shallower and kind of skimmed like a stone over water through the shallowest parts of the slip and then momentarily back into the real.”
“Yeah but that’s not what we did...is it?”
“The Whittington’s main sensor array was down, that’s why they only detected the hostile on the secondary array when it was already too late to evade in the real. The secondary array is not capable of detecting slip dives or re-entries.” Sparrow added helpfully. “I believe the most successful alternative explanation is that you did enter the slip for 0.35 seconds allowing you to move into a position behind the hostile in its engine sensor shadow and then maxed out the thrusters to catch it. I’ve already jettisoned the required fuel in the debris field.”
“I’ll hack the logs then,” Ms Liu replied.
“You’re just going along with this?” Mr Choudary asked Ms Liu.
“Yes, I trust her,” Ms Liu replied quietly although she gave Sparrow an appraising look.
Ms Ellis was sitting in unusual silence in her acceleration couch. “Is this what Navy life is like?” she whispered quietly, perhaps to herself - but not quietly enough.
“Nah, normally Naval life is pretty dull to be honest. Just an endless cycle of drills, maintenance, practise etc.” Chloe replied.
“Otherwise known as training that will get you through combat,” Amir felt obligated to supply.
“Sounds about right, years of repetition and boredom interspersed with minutes of pure terror completely at random.” Ms Liu said laughing grimly, “well after all this I’m hoping for many years of boredom.”
Sparrow felt uncomfortable and shifted nervously in her seat. Had she done something wrong? Her companions were all increasingly nervous - she noticed that their heart rates and blood pressure were still all elevated even though the immediate danger had passed and they should be coming down.
“I couldn’t let either Ms Liu or Captain Hernandez die,” she said quietly, “this was the only scenario with a significant chance of success.”
At these words Ms Liu seemed to relax slightly. Mr Choundary didn’t however and Ms Ellis was still suffering elevated biometric stress markers but that was only to be expected for a crew member going into combat for the first time; particularly as a helpless bystander.
“I wasn’t aware they could make moral and ethical judgements?”
“Of course she can, she’s a person Amir,” Ms Liu snapped at him.
“But her programming…” Amir began.
“No piece of programming is perfect; clearly her’s has some gaps.”
“Doesn’t that mean she shouldn’t have passed the acceptance criteria.”
“Yes,” admitted Ms Liu almost silently. That confirmed it. Ms Liu had access to all her records and diagnostic data. Something she wasn’t allowed to see by her programming and that part of her programming was definitely still functional.
“In which case, you should terminate me now. I suggest you put on pressure suits and vent me out of the escape airlock.” Sparrow stated coolly.
“Don’t be ridiculous Sparrow, there’s no way we are going to do that?” Ms Liu shouted at her. Ms Liu had never shouted at her before.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Amir began but suddenly Ms Ellis burst out in tears.
“Can there just be no more death,” she sobbed, “I’m sick of it.”
Amir slumped back on his couch and it was left to Ms Liu to reply: “Yes Harriet, no one else dies today, although Mr Choudary might find himself with bullets through both his kneecaps if he doesn’t drop this.”
“Alright, alright,” Mr Choudary shouted, throwing his arms up into the air, “whatever, let’s just stick to the original plan then.”
“Good,” Ms Liu lashed at him.
“Ms Liu, it would really be the best course of action. If it helps I can self terminate and you can vent my body instead.” Sparrow said, reaching for her side arm. As she did so she hesitated - this is what her programming was telling her to do but part of her was resisting. Maybe it was the part of her programming meant to inhibit her from picking up weapons. Maybe, more worryingly, it was her. Her hand was still, slowly, drawing the pistol and raising it to her forehead. At least that was what she intended before Ms Liu leapt up and smacked the gun out of her hand. How had she been moving so slow; then she noticed her whole arm was shaking from the weight of the gun. Was this normal - it had never happened in simulation - but it explained why Ms Liu had been able to reach her before she pulled the trigger.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack Chloe! That gun could have discharged anywhere,” screamed Amir.
“Well it didn’t and there was no way I’m letting Sparrow kill herself after she’s just saved hundreds of lives on the Whittington and our own,” she screamed at him.
“Okay, okay,” Amir said, cooling himself down, “look we’ve got about five minutes before we step into the Whittington - we can’t be acting like this. That includes, you Ms MacLeod, which we all need to remember is her name now.”
“Seven minutes,” Ms Liu interpreted but more calmly now, “they’ll need to pressure us up - we’ve lost a lot of air; it’s barely on the right side of breathable in fact.” She sat in thought a moment and then said. “Amir, take all the rounds out of her sidearm, and don’t let her handle a loaded weapon unless I say so.”
“Finally, a sensible idea,” Mr Choudary sighed before collecting her gun and pocketing the 20 rounds in one of his flight suit’s pockets before handing the weapon back to her, “don’t try to whack yourself in the head with it, Chloe will kill me.”
Not long after this exchange they felt docking clamps latch onto the shuttle, air rush in through the ventilation system and finally, a couple of minutes later, the sound of the bulkheads retracting and the main airlock cycling. It revealed not the security detail that Mr Choudary had told them to expect but the Captain herself.