Archaea (2 page)

In the last year of my tour, they were putting on the pressure for me to re-up, hinting at promotions, pay grades, promising this, that, and the other - but at that point, it was all starting to feel like a charade.

The uniform I grew up dreaming about felt itchy, the adventures in space turned out to be endless hours in orbit and endless hours of paperwork. None of the work was particularly rewarding. I started thinking about life after the service, what I would do with the skills I had, and realized there wasn't really much waiting for me.

Planet-side, I would be working to survive as a thrall to some glom. Maybe I'd be able to take on a shipping route - but after having patrolled a few of them in my time, I knew I'd die of boredom eventually. Hauling freight from point A to point B and then back to point A, that's not the future I wanted.

So what then? What could I look forward to? I wanted to capture the sense of adventure and exploration, to be an independent. I needed to live free and travel where I wanted, when I wanted. All I needed was a ship, and a crew.

There were a handful of people in my command I wanted to take with me after I left the service, but the ship was another matter. With my retirement pay I'd never be able to afford even an inter-system runabout, but I wanted something that could navigate through known space and even to the fringe.

It wasn't until a few months after the end of my tour that I saw the Archaea, tethered to the south end of a orbital station on darkside Luna. She looked to be the right size of ship, but she was rough - there was more wrong with her than right. When I first laid eyes on her, most of her ablatives were missing, and what remained looked pretty grim. She may have been suited for atmo at some point, but you'd die falling planet-side in the condition she was in.

From what I gathered from the stationmaster, her previous owners had tried their hand at using her as a mining ship. With her main gun, she was well suited for demo on asteroids. She could pop them open pretty easily and had a pretty decent hold for any reactives that were collected – but the miners had gone bust, and the concern that owned the note on her had also folded in the never-ending boom and bust of near-space exploration.

By the time I saw her, she was in line to be scrapped and on sale to the highest bidder - of which there were none.

One night after a few drinks, I offered the stationmaster her moorage fees plus 10%, and promised to take her out of his jurisdiction within a standard month. He just about kissed me. Apparently, he thought that was a great deal for bad property, and when I got on board I just about abandoned ship in agreement.

Luckily, on my initial inspection I brought along my engineer and closest friend, Gene Mitchell. There wasn't anything made by man that Gene couldn't figure out, fix, rebuild, upgrade or modify. The poor guy had the social skills of a sack of potatoes, but hand him a pile of gears, and he could turn it into a chronometer.

Gene and I had been on ships together since the Academy, and over the years we've learned to trust each other implicitly. He trusted me to make decisions that kept us alive, and I trusted him to maintain the mechanicals that kept us alive. As both of us are still alive, we must be doing something right.

Gene's reaction to the Archaea was uncharacteristically optimistic. Oh sure, I could see the potential in her, but he saw something more – he saw the slipspace gear, the tokamak, the internals, and everything in between. Like one of those pictures on holo that you have to squint to see the pony, he saw a masterpiece where everyone else saw a scarred hulk covered in carbon and slag.

He was the one that convinced me that she'd make a good ship for what we wanted to do with her, and it's a testament to how much I trusted his judgment that I went along with it.

Inside, the ship was a mess. Every square inch of her was covered in grime, grit, and dirt. Asteroid mining is messy work, but I wasn't prepared for the sight and smell. Gene looked past that though, delving into every nook and cranny of the old ship like a child on Christmas. His enthusiasm for the project was infectious.

Before long, he had me envisioning a sleek blockade runner punching holes through spacetime between systems, going wherever we wanted. Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, I saw way too many layers of dirt and dust to keep the fantasy going.

The first week on board, he and I went through the ship turning everything inside out. We took nearly everything apart, cleaned it, and put it all back together again. Gene re-wired, re-tooled, calibrated, and monitored anything and everything inside that ship. Once most of the trash had been cleared out and the heavy lifting was done, I left Gene to his tinkering and set about contracting for a new ablative skin for the old bird.

Gene recommended Duron, naturally. Duron Ablatives are the absolute best regenerative atmo-hardened armor you can get, and far more expensive than I could afford. Luckily, I had recently done a stint locking down the shipping route for the glom that controlled Duron, and they owed me some favors.

I called a few people, and made some promises that I wasn't sure I could live up to, and they sent out a rep to look over the ship. He was all toothy smiles and warm handshakes, and offered to re-work the entire ship in 5 centimeter Duron. I negotiated for 15, as I didn't know for sure what we'd have to face out on the fringe.

In the end, they did great work. The ship was spun up and coated in 15 centimeters of hardened, regenerative Duron that should be more than adequate for inter-system impact and even atmo for a gas giant, if needed.

Gene was genuinely ecstatic about it, and once they were finished, he let me in on a secret he had discovered about Duron. When energized far beyond factory recommendations, the material becomes hardened to an absolute state that can absorb nearly any impact. He had been using it for a few years experimentally as interior coating for tokamak casings on the big capital ships we served on in the fleet, and had been sitting quiet on this discovery for quite some time.

Since Gene had been able to upgrade the Archaea with an even bigger destroyer-class tokamak to power her main gun, he had a nearly unlimited power source. With 15 centimeters of Duron to charge, we were pretty well protected against just about anything we might come across – from fast mover meteroids, to hyper-velocity kinetic railgun ordinance. The Archaea was going to last, and look good doing it.

Gene's second great triumph in the Archaea was the upgrade of her wired systems backbone. He was something of a horse-trader in the various stations we visited, and was always on the lookout for new parts or materials he could use. People have many hobbies aboard a ship – some paint, others play music – but Gene tinkered. The best type of person to have as an engineer, I've always thought.

During our time in the service, Gene had managed to get his hands on a nexus core that had been scrapped out of a destroyer, and had it in storage. He wanted to wire it into the Archaea, as it would greatly improve our fire-control and systems capabilities. I realized this would be a significant upgrade, but its true significance would prove to be astounding.

He must have called in every favor, because he shortly had our little bird fitted out with the latest generation of wetnet to go along with the core. I asked him what he planned to do with that much computing power, as it was probably enough to run an entire station, or even a planetary network, and he just smiled.

He was always of the mind, that it's better to have, than need. Of course, he's right - as a result, the Archaea was born again hard, and almost ready to go. We only needed to tie up a few hundred loose ends.

*****

I love a challenge, and the Archaea was one of those rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to really dig in and make a difference. She was the very definition of 'challenge'. Dirty, unkempt, un-maintained, and barely operational, but what a ship! I loved her the first time I laid eyes on her. She was perfect for what we needed, and the price was right considering her condition.

My first glimpse into the hatch was so horrible that with therapy, I may someday be able to block it from memory. What I saw was a dark hole, barely lit with a semi-dead flickering flouro on the side of the corridor. The walls were so grimy that determining the original color was impossible; they appeared to have been formed from compressed dirt.

Trash of every possible type cluttered nearly every nook and cranny – grime, dust and rotting fuzzy bunches of grimy muck that may have once been a sandwich but had since evolved into a semi-sentient being looking for representation in the galactic federation.

So what was it about the Archaea that I liked? What about it caught my attention?

The engines, of course.

This ship was built for speed, unlike anything I had seen. The fastest corvettes in the service would have anything on this ship. The Archaea was nearly all engine, with lean, shark-like lines giving the impression that she was about to slip her mooring and leap away.

She had decent capacity in the holds and a solid and well built internal structure, and best of all, the slipspace generator amidships spoke to my engineers eye of massive, unbelievable power systems hidden inside. With that kind of power plant, you can make a compressed pile of rotten dirt into a magnificent star-faring chariot - which may have been what they did, from the looks of it.

The grime and grit were only skin deep, however. My initial inspection of the internals showed me that while much was outdated and not up to my standards for precision or mechanicals, they were mostly functioning and reasonably within safe parameters.

Safety is pretty important when your ship is hammering vortexes of collapsed gravity waveforms as it blasts through the fringe. Not that we were going to just firewall the slipspace generator right off the dock, of course. Well, I guess I couldn't really say that for sure, knowing the captain.

Dak and I tackled that ship like the Emperor was waiting dockside for a tour. We tore into every possible access hatch, port, cover, and where there wasn't a hatch, we cut and installed one. Most of the core systems like enviro and life support systems were pretty solid, and didn't need too much to bring them up to speed, though we did integrate some new tech we liberated from the tyranny and oppression of their previous owners. In other words, what we couldn't beg or borrow, we flat out stole. Military supply being what it is, in the service you could get anything you wanted, if you knew who to ask.

You can't even imagine the thoughts that went through my mind when I first went forward from the hold and discovered the Archaea was built around that gun. What a beast that thing is! I've been in ships a hundred times the size of the Archaea that didn't have a main gun like she did.

I think, to be honest, that gun was what sold the captain - but as much as he may want to drop the hammer on some poor unsuspecting pirate in deep space, I want to make sure it wouldn't vaporize the chunk of existence we occupied.

We definitely needed a professional on the roster to work that problem, and luckily for us we found Jane Short, the tiny little queen of all that is murderous and vicious, a first-rate weapon tech specialist. She secretly loves it when you call her Shorty, by the way.

She's an engineer like me, so we have to play nice. She has her area where the gun geeks play, and I have the real engineering spaces – we stay to our sections mostly.

She came in pretty much like I did with guns blazing, and immediately tore everything apart and then rebuilt. Luckily, we had updated the wetnet throughout the ship, or she would have probably broken...err, fixed that too.

We're both pretty impressed with Pauli's work. His code was impressive, definitely next-gen sort of stuff and super easy to work with on our end. He's a nice enough kid too, one of those spooky-smart types, but easy to talk to.

At this point, I thought we'd probably survive the shakedown cruise, as long as the captain didn't decide to firewall the engines or fire that gun. Knowing him as I do, however, we have to plan for him to run everything up to maximum rating and beyond.

*****

My days were getting shorter. I wouldn't put it past Pauli or his 'expert system' to intentionally mess with my clocks to push us to the breaking point getting our weapons systems operational, but the captain insisted I was being paranoid.

It sure seemed to me like my days were getting shorter, and my backlog was getting longer.

My name is Jane Short, but don't call me 'Shorty'. I am over 5'2" tall (by a smidge) but that's beside the point. It's trite, annoying, not funny, and predictably, no one listens or cares. Everyone on this ship calls me 'Shorty', despite (and probably because of) the irritation it causes me. You would think grown intelligent men would be more respectful of a lethal weapon, even one my size.

I am the weapons specialist on the Archaea, and have known Captain Smith going on ten years now. I was between jobs, and a Unet posting he made recently caught my eye. He was looking for an armament specialist with a nova-class certification, so obviously I was interested - opportunities to work on systems like that just don't exist for civvies. I really enjoyed working with Captain Smith in the service, and all in all, it looked like a dream opportunity for a woman like me.

When I first saw the Archaea, I wondered if Captain Smith had his specs confused. What I saw was a long-haul frigate, about 100 meters long with top-mounted kinetic railers, which was pretty standard repeater turret armament. There are nova-class repeaters, but this ship clearly didn't have them.