Serengeti (12 page)

Hyperspace was endless—a place of no time and all time, of calm and peace and silence.
Serengeti
entered with a sigh, a last few shots pockmarking her backside before the breach pulled closed and the void claimed her. Girders groaned, abused internal structures shifting, moaning beneath the added stress of faster than light travel. Lights flickered, data streams garbled, confused by the blur of high-speed information passing them by. Nothing out of the normal really. They called it ‘unstable space’ for a reason, after all, and systems—even healthy systems—turned wonky during jump.

Besides, in many ways, hyperspace didn’t really exist. Which meant the vessels transiting hyperspace didn’t really exist either. It was all very…metaphysical.

Serengeti
smiled to herself, remembering a late night argument with a very tired, very
drunk
Henricksen on the topic of hyperspace existence.
Postmodernist crap,
he’d called it. And maybe it was. But there was a certain tranquility to hyperspace travel that was unlike anything
Serengeti
experienced anywhere else.

She sighed again and settled in, watching the jump clock languidly roll over and start marking time.

Thirty seconds—that’s how long it took to jump from one hyperspace coordinate to another. Thirty seconds of
real
time, that is. But in hyperspace, those thirty seconds felt like thirty years. At least to her. Something to do with physics—real physics, not the metaphysics Henricksen so derided—and the rules of the universe changing, morphing in the bent reality of jump. Her human crew never seemed to notice, but to
Serengeti
each hyperspace transit felt like a long, slow cruise around the solar system—a lumbering meander through an infinity of black, with only brief flashes of colors every now and then to mark the stars and planets they passed by.

Thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds and they’d be safely again. Returned to the fleet, the worst of it behind them, food and fuel—anything and everything they needed to repair and refit and get back into battle.

Back with my sisters, Serengeti
thought, settling in.
Except Seychelles.

Sorrow—so much sorrow in remembering that name.
Seychelles
was gone, never to be seen again.

Focus on the living,
she told herself, taking a page from Henricksen’s book of wisdom.
Never forget the dead.

Serengeti
ran a diagnostic, taking stock of the damage to her body—the rents in her hull, the state of her internal systems.

That’s when everything went sideways.

Alarms started screaming, shattering the peace in which
Serengeti
floated. Warning lights flared, popping up everywhere, error messages flashing
Failure! Failure! Failure!
in bold red letters.
Serengeti
tapped into each one, drawing information to her, querying her systems to find what was wrong. Reams of data came back to her, scrolling faster than she could absorb, requiring her to detail no less than three sub-minds to wade through it all.

She checked the Chron, found just ten seconds of jump time elapsed.

Damn. Damn-damn-damn.

The hyperspace trough fluttered and her damaged hull groaned in complaint.
Serengeti
felt herself drifting out of alignment and
tried to correct her course. But when she reached for engines and navigation, she found the crew’s hastily completed repair job was coming undone—just two jump drives running in parallel now, and as she watched, one flickered, power dropping precipitously before spiking again.

More shuddering, a distinct sensation of slewing sideways.
Serengeti
re-corrected, trying to maintain position within the hyperspace trough, a nearly impossible task with one engine surging and the other trying to compensate. A surge of power, both engines running wide open, and then the failing engine coughed and finally went out.

“No,”
Serengeti
whispered.

The jump clock stood at twelve seconds. Not even close. Nowhere
near
where she needed to be.

Serengeti
heaved over, pulling hard to port. A last minute correction did nothing, and before she knew, she was rolling—spiraling in the rough chop just outside the hyperspace trough, internal frame creaking, bending as her hull plating ripped away in chunks.

External structures broke off and disappeared into the oblivion around her. Electronic relays flared and burnt out. Compartments pressurized and just as quickly depressurized, voiding heat and air, suffocating her crew, venting them into space. One by one,
Serengeti’s
systems failed, leaving her dark and silent—deaf and blind in the endlessness of hyperspace jump.

It’s tearing me apart,
she thought.
My crew’s going to die.

She reached for the jump drives, trying to shut the one working engine down to drop them out of hyperspace. But the engine—stuck wide open and burning hard, trying to fulfill her last wish and push them through jump—stubbornly refused her command. She tried again with no better result, and then, unexpectedly, the engine just quit.

Serengeti
dropped out of hyperspace as the jump counter hit fifteen seconds. She tumbled out of control, shedding pieces of her composite metal skin, leaving a cloud of debris behind her as she returned to normal space.

The klaxons roared to life, screaming wildly. Abused systems flickered and shut down, panels exploding as relays burned out all over the ship. Maneuvering jets fired, slowing
Serengeti
down. Another burst—fighting the tumble, finally bringing it tumble under control—and
Serengeti
settled into a smoothly gliding path, slipping between the stars on the last of the inertia she’d built up in jump.

She split her consciousness, sending sub-minds throughout her body, peering through the few electronic eyes that were still functioning to survey the damage the DSR and her own hyperspace engines had done.

Not good. Not good at all,
she thought, flicking from one camera image to another.

A few internal spaces remained intact, protecting the clutches of terrified humans and confused robots huddling inside. But as she moved on,
Serengeti
found more and more damage, large swathes of her carapace destroyed, sheets of hull plating gone, internal structures missing entirely in places. Cargo bays and commons spaces, barracks, storage rooms—everything ripped wide open, stars showing through gaping holes in
Serengeti’s
hide. Silent corridors stretched everywhere, some cracked upon and looking out upon the stars, others choked by smoke and fire—dead bodies and broken robots lying everywhere.

No,
she whispered, voice filled with horror.

She flicked from one camera to another camera, but all she found was emptiness—death and destruction and her own shattered remains. And when she’d cycled through every last one, and seen as much as she could see,
Serengeti
pulled back and returned to the bridge. So much death inside her, but there was life yet too—crew that needed saving. And the best way to do that was to figure out where in the hell she was.

Hard to do without a solid point of reference and most of her systems heavily damaged. She checked the jump clock and confirmed it frozen at fifteen seconds.

That’s one data point anyway.

Serengeti
ran a few calculations, and a series of what-if scenarios. Fifteen seconds was half their projected hyperspace travel time, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d covered half the distance they needed to go. Things didn’t work that way in hyperspace. Time and space weren’t linear. Speed and distance ebbed and flowed randomly in the trough, which meant they could be anywhere really. If she had to guess,
Serengeti
would say they’d barely traveled a quarter of the distance to the rally point with
Brutus
, but she was AI and disliked guessing—so inexact—so she reached for Nav instead, wanting the star charts to use as reference.

More bad news: Nav was down, the entire system burnt out, all the data, all the maps of all the solar systems and galaxies and nebulas locked away in storage, lying just beyond her reach.

No,
she whispered.

For the first time—the very first time since her consciousness was first created—
Serengeti
felt the tiniest bit of fear.

She reached for Scan, thinking to survey the area around her in the hopes that there’d be something—a ship, a satellite, a rogue transmission from a nearby colony that she could tap into for information—but Scan was down too. And Comms, thanks to Kusikov’s tinkering.

Kusikov.

Serengeti
turned her eyes on the bridge and found it darkened and dead. Emergency power kicked in, bathing the rounded room in a bloody glow, revealing a smoking ruin—bodies lying everywhere, stations destroyed beyond any hope of recovery.
Serengeti
panned a camera around, taking it all in.

Kusikov lay on the floor—curled up tight, face blackened, burnt hands still clutching the cables he’d been fiddling with when the power surged, sending a flood of energy coursing through his body.

Stupid. You stupid, arrogant, son of a bitch.

She zoomed the camera in tight. Studying Kusikov’s dead face, his burnt out eyes, sorrow and anger warring inside her. He’d been tinkering with Comms again, trying to fix it while they transited jump. Not the brightest thing to do given the vagaries of hyperspace travel, but Kusikov was always the risk taker. He always thought he could beat the odds.

Not this time. You should have waited. If you’d just waited until we reached the other side, you might’ve made it.

But judging by the state of his station, Kusikov would likely still be dead.

“You’re cocky little twit, Kusikov, but I’ll miss you just the same.”

Serengeti
recorded an image of his face and sent it to storage, placing it in a folder alongside the smiling picture from his personal record. And then she pulled back and kept searching.

She couldn’t find Sikuuku, but she found his hand sticking out of the crushed Artillery pod. No need to check if he was dead. The pod was mangled beyond all recognition, blooding coating its sides—nothing could’ve survived in there.

Scan next, camera zooming in on a bloody and shaken but very much alive Finlay. “Finlay,” she called, patching a few damaged relays together to get a speaker working. “Finlay. Up here.” She flashed the light above the camera to get Finlay’s attention.

Finlay raised her head, staring vaguely at the camera, and then she climbed to her feet and started wandering around the bridge, looking lost and alone and terribly frightened. It pained
Serengeti
to see her like that, but she had to move on.

Evans was easy enough to find—he still sat his station at Nav, looking surprisingly unharmed—but a shudder passed through her as her maneuvering jets cut out, and when the trembling stopped, Evans slipped slowly from his seat and toppled lifelessly to the floor.
Serengeti
stared at him, noting the odd angle of his head, the sharp bones poking at the skin of his neck.

Dead, just like Kusikov. Like Sikuuku in that pod.
The loss saddened but it was…different than with the others. Vague. Unfocused.
I wish I’d known you better, Evans. I wish I had more than this image of you lifeless body to remember you by
.

“Goodbye, Evans,”
Serengeti
whispered. She recorded his image and filed it away with those of Kusikov and Sikuuku whom she’d known so much better, and then
Serengeti
moved on, peering through the smoke until she finally found her captain.

“Henricksen,” she said, voice filled with relief.

Henricksen blinked slowly, looked dazed and confused. Blood covered his face—even more blood than before, thanks to a fresh gash on his cheek—and from the way he hugged his arm to his body—right hand clamped securely around his left wrist—she was pretty sure it was broken. Henricksen turned in an unsteady circle, surveying the damage around him, looking grim and grimmer with each dead body he found.

“What’s happened?”

He reached for the panel in front of him and swore softly at finding it dead. He raised his head, looking out the windows wrapping the front of the bridge, but that didn’t help him either. Nothing out there but empty space.

“No ships. No fleet. Not a single goddam thing.” He turned to his right, grimacing at Kusikov’s burnt body, the bloody remains of Sikuuku’s Artillery pod before moving on to Evans. “Dead. All dead.” Henricksen closed his eyes and bowed his head.

“Henricksen,”
Serengeti
called again.

Henricksen straightened with an effort, raised his head and looked up at the camera. “
Serengeti.
” He nodded in acknowledgement, winced in pain and hugged his arm to his stomach. “What happened? Where are we?”