[▲] 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."
"That is true. I understand your point."
"Well whatever you pick, you can't choose Hal. That's just asking someone to empty your sandbox into a black hole."
"That is unlikely. Cole insisted I sing 'Daisy Bell' as part of my shutdown routine for three months and Seawolf was the only one who understood it was a joke at all. Everyone else within Baskerville merely thought it something akin to 'singing myself to sleep'."
"You're shitting me," laughed Nim. "Not even Kilmore?"
"No."
"Well that just nuked every snarky comment I have lined up." She finished her checklist and glanced at the spinning countdown timer sitting at the top center of her HUD. "Riptide to Baskerville Control, SIF is green across the board."
"Okay seriously, I just heard about that bet you made with Michael," said Russell. "Don't."
"Don't what?" Nim asked innocently.
"Just... don't, Riptide. I don't need another dead MacNamara."
"You do realize that if I fuck up you won't know there's another dead MacNamara because the collision and reactor fallout will obliterate you, me, and everything else within an AU or two right?"
"Pointing that out does not make it funny."
"So?"
There was a pause on Russell's end at which point Yaya in her distinctly Russian voice sighed, "You are still going to do it aren't you."
"Yep."
Somewhere behind the pickup she heard Russell mutter, "Christ I don't even know why I bothered writing the damn safety protocols in the first place."
"Neither do I since you evidently suspend them whenever you want to impress the brass," snapped Nim entirely by reflex.
A painfully awkward silence reigned over the channel for longer than it probably should have. "MacNamara, I--"
"This is Heinlein Control, we are six-zero seconds out from firing the bridge. PNR in three-zero seconds."
Rubbing her hands together she still had a powerful desire to itch her left arm. Everything else had regenerated on schedule according to Yates, though he had gotten rather testy when he was forced to take her off inactive medical for the final jump test.
"Heinlein Control this is the SIF, all systems are green for jump."
"Jump ready confirmed, SIF. Stand by."
She switched back to her in-fighter feed. "Winston's brain copy, you have all your ones and zeroes in order?"
"Final dimensions and vectors will need to be input on bridge approach. All remaining variables are confirmed."
"A little late to ask, but why Alenquer Waypoint? It'd be easier just to jump to Lalande since we're headed there anyway."
"Alenquer Waypoint was brought online three days ago to facilitate border space navigation ahead of Naval reconnaissance operations. Its position has yet to propagate through the current navigational routers thus chances of it being in use outside the Navy are limited. It also falls within the thirty-six hour FTL sphere Doctor Russell established for emergency retrieval before suit life support systems can no longer maintain reasonable internal temperatures."
"How far off the waypoint are we supposed to end up?"
"Anywhere between three-four-zero and three-five-zero million kilometers positive Z axis."
Nim scowled at empty space. "Ten million kilometers is a stupid huge exit zone there, Winston's brain copy."
"I strongly advise against re-solving the existing jump solutions thirty seconds before the physical jump is performed."
"Of course you do."
"Heinlein Control to SIF, bridge is deployed. You are GO to begin approach."
Sitting just under three hundred thousand kilometers behind the Heinlein her home ship looked like a blocky gray moon in the middle of an empty black portrait. There wasn't an abundance of nebulae in the background either, making discerning the event horizon of the jump gate a chore. It was showing up as a bright red circular target area on her HUD into which dozens of possible entry vectors were being highlighted in green and red depending on which one the ESI was determining to be viable.
It was weird having something else determining the best way to approach a target for her. Nim wasn't at all sure she was going to like it.
"SIF to Baskerville Control... catch you on the dark side." She switched the feed to text-only and focused her attention on the rapidly building power surge being fed through the engines. "Start it up, Winston's brain copy."
"Field established. Inputting final variables. Isolating vectors."
Half of the entry vectors vanished from her HUD and she zeroed in on the few left that would take her closest to the Heinlein's hull. "Main engine ready for FTL push."
"Commencing mass manipulation sequences." Despite the fact she had launched without artificial gravity on she started to feel the weight of her limbs again. "Niner-five percent target mass achieved. We should launch now."
Sliding the small manual lever at her right hand forward Nim dumped every spare electron of power into the SIF's engines and watched everything within her field of vision shift into a blue spectrum. A beat after that everything outside disappeared, leaving her to navigate by the rapidly shifting datapoints the ESI was throwing up onto the HUD as the ship flew straight at a target impossible to see.
"Target mass achieved. Gate shift in five... four... three... two... one--"
Nim had never seen anything as black as bridgespace. Or anything as red as dropping out of FTL after leaving bridgespace.
And then there were rocks. Big floating rocks the size of the SIF which didn't appear on any of her tactical screens because every single monitor outside than her life support readout was dead.
"Fuck you, karma!" she growled, seizing control of every maneuvering thruster on the ship by slamming her fist down on the emergency override panel near her right knee. "Ten million klick landing zone and I would find the only goddamn debris field in it!"
Leaning hard on her port thrusters she tipped the SIF sideways, bouncing off the nearest asteroid just hard enough to shatter its icy surface and fill space with shimmering bits of frozen dust. Unable to see any quick way out of the field she flew in a straight line which changed only when there was something immovable and solid right in the way, focusing on dropping velocity and avoiding damage. Nothing came close to hitting her harder than the first bounce, though no doubt the hull was pitted with dozens of smaller bits and she would be hearing about it for the rest of the week from the Baskerville guys.
Having bled off enough speed to be manageable Nim stuffed her reboot chip into its appropriate socket and manually shunted the main engine's power into the system batteries. She drifted for several more seconds before the HUD illuminated itself and began re-solving for the SIF's position in space, at which point she channeled power back to her engine and navigated her way clear of most of the deadly bits of ice clumps.
White text scrolled across the left side of her suit's visor. {-Hiya Lieutenant / vocalization functions are temporarily offline-}
"Fine. Where's the waypoint?"
{-Search in progress-}
The thrill of having been the first person in a fighter to have survived a gate jump fizzled into nothing as she drifted into the shadow of one of the closer dwarf planets floating around in the frozen ices and spotted something out-of-place among the bits of dirty white.
{-Lieutenant, this is not where we should have ended up-}
"No shit," Nim muttered, pushing her engine back to full and speeding at the dwarf. At the last possible second she cut power and switched entirely to manuvering thrusters, twisting the ship around so that it performed a slightly-less-than-artful pseudo-landing on the planetoid's surface. "Cut everything except the minimum you need to run and I need to tweak our distance, now."
{-Confirmed-}
The SIF went dark again and she waited in silence for the dwarf planet to lazily spin its way around to face away from the distant star of the system it orbited. She could see the massive structure of the Alenquer Waypoint floating in the distance, reflecting shards of distant sunlight off a myriad of solar collection panels embedded in its diamond-shaped structure. That they had emerged nearly on top of the thing was disturbing. Coordinates broadcast by waypoints deliberately included large offsets as a precaution against someone jumping directly into the expensive and strategically vital stations.
The only reason she could come up with was that the SIF hadn't come out where it was supposed to because the waypoint was nowhere near the position it was broadcasting as its location.
"Winston's brain copy, give me a tactical analysis--"
{-Tactical analysis complete / outputting targets-}
A half dozen red blips appeared on her suit's helmet as hovering stationary around the waypoint. Their thermal profiles were almost identical to marauders, a little higher on the heat output than the Navy's standards, but none of them were broadcasting IFF signals or were painted with anything resembling identification numbers or fleet affiliations. Scavengers had always liked slapping their hulls with skulls, crossbones and other pirate-esque motifs, and the migrant fleets always did theirs up in bright variations of earthtone colors. The ones lurking at the waypoint looked like they had just been snagged off the assembly line and thrown into space. And if they were marauders, there was no way they were in the system on their own.
"Have any theories as to how our waypoint isn't actually at its waypoint?"
{-Manual interference with location processes combined with physical repositioning facilitated either by tow or independently attached propulsion unit / it is approximately 04 AU from its broadcasted location-}
"And the giant ice field makes for a nice thermal mask." She looked over the basic system information they had gathered before dropping off the electrical radar. "I'm betting their carrier is lurking over by that exo-Neptune."
{-High probability-}
"Still have the question about how they got past the automated defense systems and distress beacon. Cannons should've shredded those fighters before they got inside a thousand meters. And what the hell does anyone want with a waypoint anyway?"
{-Unknown / salvage does not appear to be their objective / intercepting communications will require more power than will allow us to avoid detection at this range-}
That much was true. The marauders looked like they were orbiting around the things like the moths she had seen at Damien's place swarming the lights strung up in his orchard. As far as she could tell from a surface inspection nothing conspicuous was missing, either. There were a few cracked panels but it looked to be the result of space debris rather than weapons fire. The dozen or so cannon mounts were in place, the positional thrusters didn't seem to have been touched, and any scavenger worth their ship would've seized the solar panels first for the rare metals in their assemblies.
She started drumming her fingers along her knee, watching the fighters hover and do absolutely nothing. "How much power do you need to try and zero in on their carrier?"
{-More than will allow us to avoid detection at this range-}
Nim sat back in her seat as the dwarf rotated her out of sight of the waypoint. They had a ten minute window before the Heinlein jumped in to fetch them and the seconds were ticking down quickly. If something the size of a strike carrier jumped in it would be a disaster. The planetoid she was camping out on alone would wreck a dozen external decks if it hit the ship and there were more than she could count floating around at an assortment of velocities.
"All right, how much power do you need to hack into that waypoint's com relay and send something?"
{-More than will allow us to avoid detection at this range-}
She pulled up the limited map of the debris field the SIF had managed to gather before shutting down. There were hundreds of decently-sized ice shards floating freely through the area and a dozen more plutoids exactly like the one she was hovering near. All Heinlein needed to do was alter its exit vector slightly to come out further inside the system and it could unleash hell upon whatever enemy targets were in the area.
Still, it would be a real trick to play rabbit that long against an unknown number of enemy fighters. There were a lot of nice places to loose a tail, though, and if she kept a few big rocks between her and where she figured the carrier was hiding she could fight it out at least long enough to get an update off.
{-Tactical map updating / we should make an attempt-}
Nim paused. "Make an attempt at what?"
{-Engage the enemy while routing a message to Heinlein using the waypoint's communications array-}
"Are you reading my mind?"
{-I have a considerable number of your unique decision pathways stored as well as access to all your after-action reports and training simulation data from UFS databases / you also share situational analysis patterns with Seawolf / this is what he would have tried / analysis of past events suggest that this course of action has the highest probability of being selected by you-}
Strangely Nim did not feel at all ghoulish when the AI compared her to her dead brother. Having someone around that could figure out what she would do and match her shot-for-shot was almost like...
"Well then, Winston's brain copy, switch everything we've got on."
{-Confirmed-}
Everything on the SIF powered back to life at once. "Give me a full tactical assay and then get to work pushing through a message to Home Base. Repeated info burst of everything you wring out of the sphere updated with everything I'm about to shoot up. Keep transmitting until we're dead or they get here."
She ran her hands along her weapons system, priming every battery and cannon she had equipped. Luckily she had launched with a full engagement loadout despite Russell's objections to the contrary. Xia had been thrilled to finally equip the SIF with a legitimate killing payload. With a smirk Nim noticed that the weapons specialist had stuffed in an extra battery of thermal-seeking missiles that wouldn't have been able to fit into a Stuka. Earlier in the day they had gotten into a prolonged debate about what kind of arsenal could and couldn't fit into the SIF and seeing the things show up on her weapons screen was like hearing a snickering 'I told you so' from the woman parsecs away.
The ESI's audio output came back online. "Confirmed. Zero-seven hostiles inbound. Read Proteus for maneuver Abrams for weaponry. Close-range evasion protocols active. Caution: damage to ventral thruster assembly. Output reduced to five-eight percent."
"Well then get ready to dive. And record this for Lyall. This is so counting for our bet."