Serengeti (2 page)

He stared into the camera’s lens a second or two and then flicked his eyes back to the front windows, looking out at the stars.

Serengeti
looked with him, studying the emptiness outside with one fraction of her consciousness while the bulk of her processing power sifted through the wealth of data her systems collected.

Definitely metal out there. Metal and composite both. But whether it was the remains of a ship or not…

Hard to tell. Finlay’s right in that.

Serengeti
amped up the sensors, reaching farther out with her scans, stretching to the very edge of her systems’ range to suck in more data.

Information poured in, but it didn’t really offer anything more than what Finlay had already reported. There wasn’t much out there—that’s just about all the scan data said.

But those pings…

Distant as they were,
scattered
as they were, those pings merited further investigation.

“Launching probes,”
Serengeti
said, voice soft and serene, infinitely confident.

Flares erupted along her port and starboard sides, rounded metallic shapes shooting off into space, ion drives glowing cobalt blue in the darkness.

“Finlay. Bring the probes’ cameras up on the main screen,” Henricksen ordered.

Finlay stared at the console a moment, lips pressed tight, looking like she’d eaten a lemon.

“Finlay!”

“Aye, sir.” Finlay threw an irritated look at the closest camera as she set her hands on the panels in front of her. She was mad—that was clear—and her fingers fairly flew across the Scan station as she called up the feeds from the twelve probes
Serengeti
had sent out. A few seconds of processing and she shunted the video to the front windows—thick panes stretching from the floor to ceiling, curving with the outside wall of the bridge—so the rest of the command crew could see.

Odd, those windows, and that state of the art vessels like
Serengeti,
still came equipped with them. Once upon a time, those reinforced panes were necessary, back in the days when ships’ scans were limited and line of sight still mattered. But now…modern ships’
systems provided far more information than human eyes could ever discern.

And yet human designers clung to the idea of windows anyway, inserting them into every new ship that rolled off the line.
Serengeti
asked Henricksen about that once, wondering why humans insisted on keeping such a silly, useless thing. Henricksen just shrugged and said they liked them. That they liked to look
through
them at the stars…

An error message appeared, flashing until
Serengeti
gave it her attention. She
spotted the problem right away and started to fix it.

Finlay belatedly noticed and jumped in to help. “Number Ten’s malfunctioning.” She frowned at the blank window where the data from the Number Ten feed should have been. Number Ten had always been buggy—a manufacturing defect, or maybe just a quirk of its programming. The probes were AI, after all, and designed by humans. “Running diagnostics.”

Faster if
Serengeti
ran the diagnostics herself, but she left Finlay to it to appease her, and cast her eyes about the bridge while she waited for the results.

Five stations on the bridge—plus the captain’s chair—with a single crewman manning each. The Captain’s Command Post sat dead center in the middle with the other stations—Scan, Communications, Navigation, Engineering, Artillery—arranged in a ring around it.

Circular stations, circular bridge, circular camera eyes watching over it all. The ship designers certainly do like circles
,
Serengeti
thought idly.

She checked in on Finlay, working away at her circular station, found her still working furiously away.

This was taking too long. Ten was a puzzle
Serengeti
figured out long ago, no sense having Finlay try to recover that ground. She
reached for the probe herself, bypassing Finlay entirely to dip directly into Number Ten’s systems.

“Repairs complete,”
Serengeti
said, making a last few adjustments before bringing the probe’s feed online.

“I had it,” Finlay muttered, stabbing angrily at the console in front of her.

“Stow it, Finlay,” Henricksen barked.

Finlay flushed brightly. “Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” She raised her eyes to the camera in front of her, looking angry and contrite at the same time. She nodded stiffly to the camera and then bowed her head, focusing all of her attention on the Scan station in front of her.

Finlay was a hard charger and didn’t like being shown up. By anyone. Not even a Valkyrie class starship.
Serengeti
filed that away, adding it to the library of information she’d collected from her human crews over the years. She was AI, her mind a thousand times more powerful than a human’s organic brain, but she forgot sometimes how important it was for humans to feel needed.

Need. Such a strange concept. So difficult for an AI to understand. Truth be told,
Serengeti
didn’t really
need
her human crew. It was slower—infinitely slower—to let them run basic ship’s operations. She could manage everything on her own and
still
have enough processing power to monitor the hundreds of cameras and relays, circuits and networks and every other thing wired into her body.

But I like having them about,
Serengeti
thought to herself.

Crew was…comforting. For herself
and
the humans who’d made her. Truth be told, humans still didn’t quite trust AIs. Funny, considering human engineers designed every last one of them, making them stronger, more capable with each generation. Humans built AIs and wrapped them inside armored shells they launched into the stars, but they still wanted human crews on board those space-faring ships. Human minds and human judgment as a counter—or perhaps a foil—to ship’s intelligence. Because most AI couldn’t
feel
in the way humans did.

Maybe there’s something to that, Serengeti
mused.
We’ve learned emotion—some of us anyway—but it’s not organic. Not innate.

She cast her eyes across the bridge, looking from Henricksen to the stations behind him, circling around to Finlay at Scan. Need was important—
Serengeti
learned that over the years. Next time she’d let Finlay run the scans and argue with Number Ten.

Good luck with
that
one, sister.

“What’s the displacement variation for this one?” Henricksen glanced at the camera, nodded to the dark and stars showing outside the bridge’s windows. “Jump’s not exactly a precise operation. Could be
Barlow
and the others are here somewhere, just out of range of our scans.”

“Possible,”
Serengeti
agreed.
Though not likely.

She kept that last part to herself.

Jump coordinates approximated an area covering nearly a thousand square kilometers of space. They’d sent themselves to the same coordinates as the advance scouts and found nothing. But it was possible those three ships had jumped through to one extreme of the jump displacement and
Serengeti
and her crew to the other.

A slim hope, but better than no hope at all. Hope was a different kind of need. Humans died when they ran out of hope.

Serengeti
ran the calculations, factoring in distance and the time that had elapsed since the three scouts left the fleet. “Forty-eight hundred.”

Henricksen chewed at his lip, thinking that over. He leaned over, tapping at one of a half dozen consoles bolted to his chair—one panel for each of the bridge’s stations and a mash-up screen that showed everything at once—making the Captain’s Command Post look like some kind of mutated octopus. He worked at the Scan screen a minute, switched to the console for Nav, then transferred the data from both to the mashup-screen in front of him.

“Damn,” he said softly. “Debris falls within the displacement zone.”

Grim look on Henricksen’s face. Angry, weary tone in his voice.

The bridge crew went silent, staring at their captain before quickly looking away.

“It could be them. But it could just as easily be one of the DSR ships,”
Serengeti
told him. “Or nothing at all. Just ancient space junk transiting through the area.”

“Maybe.” But from the way he shook his head, the way his hands gripped the edge of his console, knuckles showing white against the skin, Henricksen didn’t believe it. “Damn,” he growled, angry, frustrated. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Believe it or not, she knew how he felt.
Serengeti’s
designers would be appalled if they knew the depths of the anger that seethed inside her. AIs were never
meant
to feel—not anything, just the concept of emotions—but AIs never stopped learning, and war…war taught
Serengeti
many things. Damn right she understood anger. She’d learned what
true
anger meant in her fifty-three years of service to the Meridian Alliance, fighting the DSA on the front lines. Fifty-three years, three
lost crews, and two complete refits,
Serengeti’s
crystal-matrix mind transferred from one twisted, shredded metal shell to another, exchanging her battered form for a sparkling new Valkyrie skin, complete with an arsenal of the latest weapons, and a shiny new crew. Fifty-three years of brothers and sisters dying, their AI containment pods cracked, brilliant minds destroyed with the metal composite hull around them. Fifty-three years, and each loss still hurt. Each one added to the load of anger churning deep within her crystal-matrix mind.
Serengeti
was tenth generation AI, her body armed and armored, a carapace built for war, but the losses were hard to handle. Even for her.

Too much dying. Too much loss, human and AI both.

Stop being so melancholy, Serengeti.

She pushed those thoughts away and focused on the mission at hand. “We need to clear the area before we send word back to the armada. I don’t want them coming through until I’m sure it’s safe.”

Henricksen nodded and looked to the camera, waiting for her orders. For
her
orders, because
Serengeti
was ship, and ultimately in charge.

“Probes are sitting idle,” she said, offering that much, let him work out the rest for himself.

“Run ‘em in a grid pattern?” he suggested.

“Makes sense.”

“Right. Finlay. Get Ten and Six in there to investigate those debris clouds and find out what they are.”

“Aye, sir.” Finlay set to work.

Henricksen watched her for a moment and then turned his eyes to the front windows, brow creasing in a frown of worry.

“Henricksen.”
Serengeti
waited until Henricksen looked up at the camera. “
Osage
and
Veil of Tears
came here.
Barlow
was right behind them. They’re not here now and I want to know why. I want to know where they went. I want to know what happened to them.”

She dropped the calm, serene tones and let the anger show through in her voice. Henricksen cocked his head to one side, giving the camera a considering look. And then he nodded—just once—and looked away, barking orders at Comms.

“Kusikov!”

“Aye, sir!” Kusikov’s muffled response came from somewhere beneath the Comms station. He extracted himself and climbed to his feet, slipping a multi-tool surreptitiously into his pocket. He’d obviously been fiddling with something—he always was in his spare time, insisting
Serengeti’s
comms package and language routines needed improvement.

Serengeti
didn’t like people messing with her systems, and Henricksen knew it. “For the luvva god, Kusikov, stop messing with the equipment!”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Automatic response accompanied by a mischievous, most-definitely-not-sorry smile.

“Cut the shit, Kusikov.”

Kusikov’s smile withered, sobering up quickly under Henricksen’s withering gaze. “Sorry, sir,” he said, doing his best to sound sincere.

“You are that, Kusikov. Now if you’re done screwin’ with
Serengeti’s
systems,
maybe
you could actually do your fucking job.”

Henricksen didn’t swear often—well, he used ‘damn’ a lot but that really didn’t count—so when he did it got the crew’s attention. Fast.

“Aye, sir.” Kusikov saluted smartly, all business now. He reached for the cables dangling from his station, jacking relays into the ports in his wrists and neck, grabbing the comms visor from the panel where he’d set it and slipping it over his eyes.

He was…interesting, this one. Arrogant. Cocky as hell. And yet, one of the brightest human minds
Serengeti
had come across in her travels. She wasn’t quite sure if she
liked
Kusikov, but she respected
him. She just hoped he never figured it out. If he did, she’d never heard the end of it.

“Send a comms buoy back to the fleet,” Henricksen ordered. “Tell them the scouts aren’t here. Advise them to hold back while we figure out what’s going on.”

“Aye, sir.” Kusikov went still for a few seconds, fingers splayed out on the console in front of him, eyes flicking rapid-fire from one piece of data to another, drinking in the information the visor displayed. A twitch of his fingers sent instructions back out, delivering the orders as fast as his human brain could process them. “Buoy away, sir.”

“Right.”

Henricksen turned to one side, staring out the windows, waiting for the buoy to appear. It took a few seconds—the buoys were simple things and not equipped with the probes’ ion drives—but once it appeared, the buoy quickly moved away. Henricksen watched it, tracking the little buoy with his eyes until it flashed and jumped away, returning to the fleet of ships waiting light years away.

“How we doing, Finlay?” he asked, staring at the back of Finlay’s red head.

Finlay was having a tough time of it—the look on her face made that clear. Probes One through Five were in place and patiently working their way through the grid pattern she’d laid out, Six had reached the edge of the huge cloud of drifting debris and started sending data back, but she’d just barely gotten the others into place when good old Number Ten started to act up again.

Serengeti
had seen it coming, knew the warning signs that meant Ten was up to his old shenanigans but—true to her word—she’d left it for Finlay to figure out this time. In retrospect, that might not have been such a good idea.

“Probes are working their way through, Captain, but Ten’s being a bit balky again. I can’t—it won’t—” Finlay huffed in frustration, hands curling into fists on the console in front of her. “I’m sorry, sir. I know
Serengeti—”

“Finlay.”

Finlay stiffened and then bowed her head.

Serengeti
watched her, flipping from one camera to another, cycling through the many views of the bridge her electronics eyes offered. Movement from Henricksen—a slight shake of his head, eyes locked onto the front camera as he stepped away from his Command Post and walked over to the Scan station.

“Don’t take it personally.” Henricksen leaned close to Finlay, pitching his voice low so the other bridge crew wouldn’t hear.

Serengeti
zoomed in, studying the two of them together, enjoying the moment—this rare glimpse at was scarred, grizzled, oh-so-very-military Henricksen’s softer side. Dark and imposing—that was Henricksen. Tough as old leather and about as cuddly as a brick, everything planes and angles and muscles stretched taut across tendon and bone. In military fashion, he kept his dark hair clipped short and buzzed tight against his head, uniform crisp and clean, snugged close and fitted perfectly to his rangy frame. Henricksen loomed over tiny, red-haired Finlay, a dark shadow wrapped in a jet black uniform, the silver stars of Command flashing brightly at his throat while Finlay sat her station, looking tiny and girlish, her own dark uniform somehow making her look tinier still.

Black and silver—those were
Serengeti’s
colors.
All
the uniforms were black here, the crew themselves thin shadows half-hidden in the sparse light of the ship’s
bridge.

“Can’t compete with an AI, Finlay. No one can. No
person
,” Henricksen amended, lips quirking in a rueful smile. His eyes lifted, looking directly into the camera in front of him.

Henricksen knew she was watching.
Serengeti’s
eyes were everywhere, her mind split into a hundred sub-minds keeping tabs on everything and everyone in the ship, but unlike her other captains, Henricksen didn’t seem to mind. That was another reason
Serengeti
liked him. Trust, respect—not all humans felt them toward AI.

A wink at the camera and Henricksen focused back on Finlay, hand settling on her shoulder, squeezing gently. “A mind like
Serengeti’s
…hell, even the other AIs feel inferior compared to a Valkyrie like her. Crystal matrix, Finlay. Hundred times the processing power of that piece-a grey matter you got in your head,” he said, giving her a playful tap on the temple. “Makes the likes of you and me look like idiots.” Another smile, this one for Finlay.

She turned her head and looked up at her captain, face surprised, hopeful, infinitely grateful. “Yes, sir.” Finlay dipped her head. “Thank you, sir.”

Henricksen straightened, returning to gruff Captain mode. “Alright. Eyes up front now, Finlay. Let’s see what those probes have to show us.”

“Yes, sir.” Finlay faced around, sucked in a breath and then started tapping away at her console, adding a scrolling readout of data to each of the video feeds.

Ten’s feed was garbled—
Serengeti
slipped in and fixed it when Finlay wasn’t looking—and the other feeds from most of the other probes were empty, just twinkles and black and line after line of data that basically said the universe was stardust and moonbeams and could
Serengeti
please keep it down a bit because she was ever so noisy.

Cheeky,
she sent.

The probes sent protests and AI laughter back.

Serengeti
flipped to the probes’ cameras, tapping into them directly so she could gaze upon the stars through their electronic eyes. She
loved the stars—not really surprising since she’d been born to the darkness and the distant, twinkling lights—and the freedom that came with floating in that endless black, jumping through hyperspace from one star cluster to another, witnessing the miracles the universe had to offer.

Humans craved planets, fought endless wars over rock and dirt and vegetation, but
Serengeti
cared nothing for those balls of water and soil. All she’d ever
wanted was the stars. All she wanted was to explore the universe and drink in the endless black.

“Probes have reached the debris cloud.” Finlay nodded to the feeds from Ten and Six showing on the front windows, adjusted the probes’ cameras from her station and zoomed in.

Ten and Six entered the collection of junk from opposite directions, working their way through the cloud, dodging this bit and that, sensor arrays reaching out, scanning everything in their path and sending it back to
Serengeti.
Their feeds—now that they were both working properly—were
quite
interesting.