Incursion Vector

041

[▲] Arnarson Waypoint

"Riptide we're five minutes out from firing the bridge. Start your pre-flight sequence."

"I know what to do, Neon."

"Fine, whatever. Far be it for me to try and keep you from getting splattered like a fly on a windshield."

"What the hell is a windshield?"

"Ah, spacers."

Nim ignored Russell's snipe and pressed her back against her chair. The SIF had more padding in the pilot seat than she liked; it dampened the vibrations from the engine core through the ship's frame. She was pulling the thing out and wiring in one from a Stuka as soon as she had the down time and her hand had finally regrown fingernails.

Glancing around at all her displays she smiled as they had finally been switched to much more appealing orange and blue colors. It was nice to have the morgue green totally gone. It was even nicer to have gotten rid of annoying System Sue's voice. The replacement was odd, since she had never flown a ship where the VTI's critical alarms were voiced by a male profile, but anything was better than the ridiculously polite default that sounded as though it was going to ask if you would like sugar with your tea right after telling you death was about to smack you across the face.

"So, uh... Winston's brain copy," she said out loud, having read that the ESI responded to audio pickups, "how's that jump calculation going?"

There were a few awkward seconds of silence before the thing voiced something over the cockpit's speakers in reply. It had been surprising at first how it sounded exactly like Winston the person did, only nowhere near as distracted. "Efficiently."

"Efficiently, huh."

"I currently have one thousand three hundred and forty-seven possible entry vectors mapped within the target frame," the ESI volunteered. "Will that be sufficient?"

"Oh I don't know," retorted Nim with a sneer at empty space, "how many you think we'll really need?"

"One. More than one cannot be followed at any given moment in time while we remain in normal space."

She dragged her hand down her face shield and sighed. "Of course you're literal."

"I could make a joke about a cat being dead or not dead in a box as to why you cannot fly on more than one while existing in normal space."

"That'd be a bad joke for this situation given I'm the cat in the damn box. And so are you, for that matter. Sure they've got a copy but this version is going down with the ship."

More seconds of silence, followed by a conciliatory, "That is true. I understand your point."

Nim started ticking off the items on her pre-flight checklist. "Seriously, you've been mapping my brain for a week and you still can't pick up on sarcasm? Winston needs to fix that." She paused in between switching between port and starboard maneuvering thrusters. "Uh, you want me to call you anything in particular? 'Winston's brain copy' is gonna get screwy pretty damn quick when I'm getting shot at."

"Everyone refers to me by the acronym ESI. Because of my classified existence I do not have an official designation. It has made it simpler to placate the anti-artificial intelligence factions which are informed on the Baskerville Project."

"Just because something doesn't have an 'official designation' doesn't mean it doesn't exist," she replied with a shrug. "We don't have an 'official designation' for the aliens but they're still out there trying to kill us."