Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins Read online

  I eventually took a non-advancement position in the Freeground Fleet. My rank of Lieutenant Commander guaranteed me a reasonable pay grade even though I was deactivated, and I chose communications. There weren't many positions available, so I thought it would be a good post. I was wrong.

  Being a part of port administration wasn't as empowering as I thought it might be. We were forced to adhere to strict policy and had very little deciding power. Speaking to travellers from across the stars wasn't a good place to learn about the galaxy. We were inundated with unreasonable requests, strange pleas and lonely, chatty captains who just wanted someone to talk to and would keep the comm open no matter what it took.

  It was irritating but as I finished directing my first ship of the day, a hauler called the Queen Virgo, I found myself glad I wasn't assigned to a Freeground Fleet vessel in the middle of nowhere. The only thing more boring than port control was a maintenance post on a military non-combat vessel. I was perfectly qualified to keep a vessel like that together, but I couldn't help but appreciate sitting behind a desk in a comfortable seat. It was better than a cramped maintenance crawlway.

  I hoped I wouldn't be in for serious trouble from accessing the restricted simulations. Minh's heart was in the right place, but there was a chance his good intentions would land me in a military punishment post. Forced enlistment wasn't uncommon and my civilian friends would be in for equivalent punishment. Professional demotions, imprisonment, even hefty fines. If we were discovered and Fleet Command wanted to make an example of us, things could get bad.

  I would have never guessed the true-to-life sensory simulations would lead to so much trouble, but as the civilian encounters became over practised and mundane we couldn't help but delve into the secure military scenarios. The challenge was thrilling, but what kept me going back day after day, month after month were the people. Ayan, Oz and Minh were the closest friends I had and I had never met two of them in person, seen their real faces or heard their real voices.

  The people at work were kind, but most of them were much older. Semi-retired military officers and career communications personnel, I was the odd man out. Someone who had seen military service, been in the highly regarded Fleet Engineer Corps and walked away.

  Being an engineer was my father's dream. He was a deep thinker, always had a simple solution that had everyone in the room saying, “why didn't I think of that?”

  When I was very young I headed straight to the academy with the intention of getting as far away from Freeground as possible. I got just enough training to qualify for the engineering staff of a ship and found out that I was dead wrong about that choice too. I excelled at the academic challenges but I didn't enjoy the work once I was in the service.

  My heart jumped into my throat when the staff sergeant, a tall fellow with a narrow face and greying hair, tapped me on the shoulder. “You're relieved Lieutenant Commander. Admiral Rice wants you in her office in twenty-two minutes.”

  I nodded, collected my coffee mug and stood up. My sergeant cracked a smile and shook my hand. “Don't take this the wrong way sir, but I hope the next time I see you back in this room you're the one giving me orders.”

  “Don't call me sir yet Carl, my rank is still deactivated as far as I know.”

  “Not as of five minutes ago sir, you're active now, and that's all I know. The Admiral will tell you more I'm sure.”

  I smiled back at him, though I don't know how convincing I was. “Just enough time to refill my mug before meeting her.”

  I put my coat on and made for the cafeteria, where I tossed my mug into the recycler instead of getting more coffee. The last thing I needed was more caffeine. I stepped into the transport tube and tapped the activation point on my wrist to turn on the screen built into the arm of my uniform. Alice, my personal digital assistant came on. “Hello Jonas, I hear you have an appointment with Admiral Rice.” She cheerily chirped. I could practically see the curiosity of the other five or so passengers in the tube car pique. The doors closed and the express car began to speed around the station to drop off everyone who had already stated their destination.

  “Why am I the last to know?”

  “Only the Admiral, her assistant and your former sergeant know about it, actually.”

  “So I'm fired, great.”

  “In a manner of speaking, but I'm sure that if you present yourself as an incompetent baboon the Admiral will be happy to put you back where she found you. I'd advise against it.”

  “I'm going to have to look into where I went wrong with your sense of humour sometime Alice.”

  “You would regret the results, simplifying my programming would make me a very dull girl.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Where am I supposed to meet her?”

  “In the Officer's Forward Observation Room.”

  “Forward that to the tube system.”

  “Done. We'll be on our way after we drop everyone else off. You're the only one in this car with clearance to visit that section.”

  “I'm sure everyone appreciates you mentioning that Alice,” I whispered in response.

  “When the Admiral makes your promotion official, will I have to start calling you sir?”

  I should have expected that kind of behaviour from her, I had kept the same personal assistant program since I was a teenager and she had grown to love embarrassing me when she found the opportunity. I suppose it's the price I paid for having the most sophisticated AI allowed as a personal assistant program. I saved up for two years so I could afford her software package. “No, but would you mind looking up what my current rank is and whispering it to me?” I asked quietly.

  A moment later I heard Alice's response in my left ear. “That information is currently restricted, I can't find my way to it presently. It only tells me that your former rank was reactivated and has been changed since. I can keep digging.”

  “Okay, you can stop trying.”

  “Are you sure? There are a couple things I could try for you, they might not be entirely legal but-”

  “I'm sure, let's not get into trouble.”

  “All right, good luck, sir.”

  Sometimes I thought witnessing all my experiences and learning from every decision I had made since I turned seventeen had made Alice a little smarter than the programmers intended, and other times I thought it just made her more eccentric. I was never quite sure.

  The tube car arrived at my destination two minutes early. Admiral Rice's assistant, a short, dark haired man who sat manipulating a holographic representation of crew schedules beside the door leading into the Officer's Observation Lounge looked up at me for half a second before going back to his work. “For future reference, the Admiral prefers all her officers to be fifteen minutes early. She's inside, don't keep her waiting.”

  “Thank you,” I replied stiffly before walking towards the doors. There was a two second delay while the computer scanned me and I heard the locking mechanisms decouple. The security systems were old, but near indestructible and reliable.

  I didn't know what to expect as I stepped inside and I definitely wasn't prepared for what I saw. The room was arranged like a clover leaf, with a main platform featuring seating and tables near the entrance. Three sets of stairs lead down into the separate multi-level sections. There were command and control consoles in each area, holographic representations of ship deployments and advanced record keeping interfaces surrounding some officers, while others wore visors that provided advanced visual interfaces privately. Catwalks above and around the command centres provided space for many more operational and intelligence officers.

  White noise generators kept the specific images and sounds on the command sections hidden but it was obvious to me what I was seeing was a large part of Fleet Command. My best guess was that there were at least twenty high ranking officers in each of the three sections and room for a lot more.

  The section I stood in, nearest to the entrance, was a contrast to the command sections. The ligh
ts were dim, more like a classy dining club, and a few Captains, Majors, Generals and Admirals sat quietly and sparsely at the thirty or more tables. A woman in her middle years with short red hair and sharp features smiled at me and stood. “Mister Valent I presume?” She asked with a British accent.

  “Yes Ma'am.” I said with a salute, noticing the nine platinum slashes on the neck of her uniform, marking her as an Admiral.

  “I'm Admiral Rice,” she said, shaking my hand firmly. “Impressive, isn't it?”

  "Just a bit, when I was told to meet you in the Officer's Observation Deck I expected something else.”

  “That's the point as I'm sure you realize. We value our privacy and misdirection is an important tool for protecting the senior staff.”

  “This is almost as large as the official Fleet Command Deck. I didn't know fleet was this active,” I muttered.

  “Well, let's get started. Follow me please,” she led me across the section closest to the entrance, down the right-hand steps, then into a side office. The door closed and the din of sound, muffled and clear alike, was gone. One wall of the office was transparent and looked over the military dry dock. Few civilians had ever seen the inside of it, a massive open space that was set stationary and without a gravitational generator so there was no measurable force exerted on the ships inside. It was over twenty kilometres at the far, narrow end, and to hazard a guess it had to be at least fifty kilometres wide below where I stood, which was roughly in the centre. I could see dozens of ships in for repair. Many had taken extensive damage and one, a massive three kilometre long Abolisher Class Carrier, was missing most of its middle. Ragged beams and a scrap of hull was all that held it together. The edges of the damage looked melted.

  The Admiral had obviously followed my gaze to it. “The Lockheed, sister ship to my old command when I last captained a ship. She was hit by a high-rad dirty nuke in the field. From what the logs say the enemy left her adrift, and a few members of the crew managed to get her drives online before dying of radiation poisoning. By the time it got here it was a ghost ship. I knew her captain; he was a friend of mine for over twenty years.”

  “I'm sorry Admiral, I know what it's like to lose someone.”

  “Your family, I know. We're looking to prevent that kind of loss from ever happening again, even though the likelihood of it increases by the day. We need to change our manner of thinking and fast. The Lockheed is a morality tale. Her Captain directed his battle group around to the dark side of the fourth moon orbiting the planet Rindega in a Colthis Corporation system and was ambushed by an AI fleet. They had dug into the moon and were protecting something, we're not sure what exactly. When the Lockheed's battle group came into range they sent out dozens of drone fighters, each armed with one dirty nuke.

  Captain McKay's battle group nearly destroyed all of them before they were within range but a few got through. The fact that Corporations like Colthis Intergalactic are using illegal AI fleets, breaking nuclear conventions that have stood for four hundred years and throwing away millions of credits on defences like this tells us two things. Firstly, they are doing something -- or have something -- that is worth protecting at any cost and secondly, we have to look beyond conventional thinking. All of Captain McKay's precautions and countermeasures were by the book, but even with an experienced crew it didn't mean a thing. He was overpowered by a more reckless, forward thinking enemy with no moral restraint.

  “We're big enough to draw a lot of attention but not powerful enough to make claims on areas with the resources we need to grow, so we have to think outside the normal realm of conventional methods.”

  Admiral Rice looked from the Lockheed to me. I felt like I was being inspected from the inside out as her eyes locked with mine. “Being in command has taught me that solutions sometimes come in surprising ways, in strange packages,” she said quietly. “Your friend, mister Minh-Chu, did us all a favour when he showed my colleague your replays. We've been trying to find out who has been raking trainees over the coals the last few months. You and your friends, some of whom are actually ranking members of the Fleet, don't just out shoot our trainees, you have been embarrassing them. At first we thought one of the basic opposing team AI's had gone rogue, learning too much and performing past its normal abilities but then we managed to get into the simulated communications chatter and heard the disguised voices of you and your team. Not simulated chatter at all, and heavily encrypted. Ever since then we've been watching and trying to find out exactly who you and your friends are but the trail never led back to the right place. Your programmer friend, Jason Everin, has done such a good job at hiding your transmission trails that at one point we were led to a door control module in a waste reclamation plant as the source. We were able to determine something interesting from our findings, however. Your entire team uses direct neural interfacing for simulations. The same kind of nodal interface our cadets use, so you people have some kind of need to make the simulations feel as real as possible. I'm surprised some of you aren't suffering from link disorders. The simulations you were running were so real that they're part of the encounter hours debate.”

  The encounter hours debate. I had heard about it all through my academy days and into my early military career. Some instructors argued that the stress and conditions of higher level training simulations were so real that they should be counted as actual combat in personnel records. I didn't take their side. No matter how real the simulations were, and some of them were so real that they left trainees shaking and mildly traumatized by the end, there was a safety feature in the neural link node that subconsciously reminded us that it wasn't real, like we were dreaming awake. She was right. Everyone who I counted as friends craved the experiences. They were so exciting, such a complete escape and every little victory came with a rush that could only have been surpassed by the real thing.

  "If I were to meet this Jason Everin, I would have to congratulate him on his ability to maintain the fidelity of the transmissions while keeping you perfectly hidden. Accomplishing both is difficult. Normally I'd have every opportunity to meet him while he spent three to ten years in prison for violating a secure network.” The Admiral's accent seemed to slip. Her perfect diction failed for a moment to reveal a hint of an aristocratic bend to her words. I had heard it before but I couldn't be sure where.

  My heart was sinking, but I kept a stiff upper lip and tried not to show it. “I've never met him ma'am.”

  “I'm not surprised, but you will.”

  “I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused and take full responsibility for the actions of all my team mates. They followed me in and we initially used my access codes to gain entry into the training simulations.”

  “We realize that now, and it's too late. We've already singled out who we can and are acting accordingly. You, along with three others are being dealt with presently. Just so you know, we were on the verge of finding out exactly who you all were. The last simulation you ran was one of the most difficult we have to offer, as you well know it is among a chosen few that are reserved for optional study among trainees. When we realized that you and your people had started it, our cadets were removed and replaced with a group of seasoned commanders and pilots we had in place to test you. They were beaten. Not impossible, but bloody unlikely.

  “You managed to embarrass a number of the senior staff and they think you've been brought in so I can administer your punishment personally.”

  I wanted to say something, but didn't know what, so I kept my mouth shut and clenched my teeth.

  She shook her head and continued. “Computer, display full career path of Jonas S. Valent.” A holographic tree of everything I had done appeared over her desk, starting at age seventeen. She pointed at the first one. “You purchased a top of the line personal organizer program, called it Alice and started modifying it. By the time you joined the service at the age of twenty Alice had grown into the most sophisticated level of AI we al
lowed by law, her limiters have been in place ever since. There have been three attempts at copying her, which failed since her AI is complex enough to warrant severe usage limitations, and she was moved twice.

  You joined the Fleet, spent two years training as an engineer, four as a cadet, received basic engineering, infantry and combat pilot certifications. You then went on to complete a year of officers training and entered the service proper as an Ensign. During the voyage to All-Con Prime you received field promotions more than once because they saw great underutilized potential and they were short on leaders.

  Your commanding officer noted that you had no difficulty meeting and sometimes exceeding expectations as an Ensign, but as a Second Lieutenant Commander you only did as much as was required and no more as an engineer, but where it came to the staff under you there was no limit to the time and effort you would expend on them. People under your command flourished, the few that didn't meet your standards were routinely written up. The discipline and professionalism with which you conducted yourself while in that position earned you the respect of the senior staff. Final reports entered by those under you generally noted that you were fair, personable and a few even claimed it was a pleasure to have you in charge. Two years later you arrived back here with a stolen fighter group that you helped command safely back home and were promoted to Lieutenant Commander. You requested a non-career position shortly thereafter, joined the reserves, served for a while as pilot on patrol and then had your rank fully deactivated when you left.”

  Admiral Rice sighed and walked to the window, folding her hands behind her back. “Years later you're back on our sensors but as a Command maverick on our simulator network. From what I understand you joined with a group of hobby pilots and infantry who you then led to the top of the leader board using the call sign Horus. Then you got bored and used your clearance to gain access to actual training scenarios where you've gotten everyone into a great deal of trouble by disrupting our curriculum, exposing civilians to high level military training materials, and making a mockery of our standards and war game grading. Do you know what the Officers just outside that door are calling you?”