Post by nrt on Jun 29, 2010 13:39:41 GMT -8
This is a story that I have been writing for a couple of months - I sort of have the whole thing planned out but I don't have much time to get to sit and write it, and when I do it grows a mind of its own...
So here are the first two chapters of 'Liveware' - (working title) please let me know what you think
Chapter 1 – Run!
The cruiser clawed its way up out of orbit, banking towards its jump point and readying for deep space. The geo-stats were docking in their bays, as the last ground crews arrived back on-board. Unseemly haste, not reflected in the stately progress of the ship, was evident in a clattering mêlée of activity across most decks. Just minutes later the captain barked at each station to report their readiness to jump.
Defensive weapons were powered-up and on-line, Offensive weapons were moving to orange alert; able to automatically engage any hostile target their array of sensors could identify, while not actually presenting a hostile profile. Engineering was ready, all propulsion systems were at optimum, life support was go, all liveware was accounted for and standing by. Only the coms desk failed to give a ‘good to go’ response. One of their geo-stats had failed to respond when instructed to return to the ship earlier that day and all subsequent attempts to get it to come out of orbit, or self destruct, had been ignored.
The jump point was now only 78 seconds away and the captain had no intention of going around again. “Just leave it!”
“Yes sir. We ha…” replied the chief coms officer, never quite at ease with the captain in this mood. He was attempting to add that they had enough spares for the likely remainder of the voyage and that he would dispatch a killer sat to seek and destroy the errant unit; far too much information for the captain just at that moment.
“Switch to auto at j-minus 20 and set for silent running” the captain shouted over the officer whom she would cheerfully swap for a geo-stat any day. Then, snuffing out these unhelpful thoughts she refocused on her duty to the rest of the crew and jabbed the ship-wide coms icon on her C&C screen. “Now hear this” went out around the ship and then, after a beat, the captain appended, “all crew; we will go into run-up sleep in 40seconds, get strapped in and masked up. I will give you a fuller explanation when we are in the tube, but right now I am imposing a total coms black-out.”
Resisting the urge to add something hopeful and reassuring in close, she reached for her own mask and orientated her seat so that it would compensate, as much as possible, for the massive load that the jump would inflict on her body. Strapping on her mask she looked around the bridge, everyone was still and quiet, watching the master time signal count down through 25… At 20 full auto mode kicked in, two seconds later the gas entered the masks of the 6 personnel on the bridge and the other 78 crew members across the vessel. Just as their comprehension dissolved, at around j minus 15, the only movement on the bridge was the finger of the coms officer, as he pressed the release icon and launched a killer droid to take out their missing geo stationary coms satellite.
As they slept the sub light ‘engines’, in the nose of the vessel, released enough energy to power a planet the size of Pittsburgh and channelled it into a focussed ribbon in front of the ship. The resulting disruption converted dark matter to anti-matter, which instantaneously collapsed, generating a gravity wave that bent that portion of the universe into a gravity well, sucking the ship forwards a few hundred yards in just a few seconds. Here they fired again, then again and again and again, until the ship was travelling at over a hundred thousand miles per second, some 12 weeks later.
At intervals through the acceleration phase, the designated officer on watch would be awakened to perform a manual check on the ship’s progress and the status of the system’s main functions. These were tortuous minutes of violent agony; distorted by the G force, battered by the massive vibrations inflicted on the structure of the ship and increasingly, as the weeks went on, aware of the pain of hunger. Their task was to read the meters and stamp the time clock.
Finally, close to light speed, but barely out of the solar system that they had been surveying, the run-up was complete; the main engine would then kick in, enabling them to make the jump.
* * *
That much is known. All these actions were recorded, or easily inferred, by the wash-up team which found the black-boxes, a few ion traces and tiny scattered fragments of DSC1729, some years later. The Deep Space Cruiser may have actually made it into Hyperspace, but its cruise trajectory, in the tube, was never attained. Something was waiting, despite the haste of their attempted escape, something that the automatic systems could not deal with, even if they could detect it, and, that same something, took them out.
Chapter 2 – Another M-type another probe.
Weeks earlier DCS1729 had completed the long deceleration, having jumped from the neighbouring outpost system, 8.4 light years any. The crew took their usual couple of days R&R; drinking and screwing, but mostly eating, to compensate for the three months of -5G that was required to get them back in sync with their surroundings. While liquids were provided during the long run-up and run-down, and the gas slowed down their metabolism, they were all mightily hungry, aching and in need of firm ground beneath their feet.
Their course had led them to a 12 planet system that had only recently been designated as fit for colonisation. Two possible candidate planets had been identified as targets for atmosphere acceleration and/or bio-seeding. But, all too often, these projections proved to be wildly optimistic, being based upon information sent back by deep space probes or ‘robot recon’, as the crew called it.
Three such probes were already in orbit around each of the two planets that they had come to look over.
The captain was enjoying a weightless shower with her favourite companion, when the alert sounded in her ear. She motioned to Theah to stop what she was doing, pulled her up to kiss her and selected the dry cycle.
“They’re gone sir…”, came the voice in her ear when she was dry enough to respond.
“Who are gone?”
“The probes, the recon probes, they aren’t there!”
The officer’s voice was full of timid whining that set the captain’s teeth on edge. “They can’t be gone we were tracking their coms all the way through the tube; and through the run-down…”
“But…it, they…” simpered the coms officer.
“I’ll be on the bridge in a minute, wait there.”
Realising she had just told the officer to do the one thing he was duty bound to do above any other, grated on the captain still further, as, still damp and far from satisfied, she pulled on her clothes. She signalled a hasty good-bye to Theah, leavig her in her cabin, fully expecting to join her again in just a few minutes.
But, as she entered the bridge, she could tell that something was very wrong.
Following standard procedure, the crew had been awakened from their run-down sleep, then the duty watch had set up their run-in trajectory, using the local system’s solar wind to ferry them the last short leg before they needed to burn actual fuel and get into orbit.
All that took around 36 hours – with little to do but eat, drink and screw – as a popular mess song would have it.
“Nobody checked?” the captain asked, knowing full well that no one, not even she, would have thought to. Why would they check that unmanned, totally self-sufficient and super intelligent droids were still working, in a lifeless system, eight light years from the nearest life form? Yet, not only were they not working, they weren’t even there!
“So, who or what sent that data we were monitoring?” the captain asked to no one in particular; no one replied.
A second or so later, the recon screens leapt into life, detecting fully sync’d and accurately coded data streams from first a couple, then all six droids. The captain yanked the coms officer aside and stared at the console. “Get me a fix”, she yelled.
“What?”
“A fix! A fucking fix!” the officer’s face looked stunned, then the captain clarified, “I want to know where that data is coming from.”
But, as she turned back, still red and shaking, the signals started to drop out, and seconds later the console was dark again.
“shit!!!... Is it set to record? Can I see that again?”
“Yes sir, of course sir”, the officer acknowledged, turning to the ship’s main computer and scrolling through menus to the archive – all the in-bound, out-bound and intra-ship coms, from every source, were in there, somewhere.
Unseen by the captain, the navigation officer moved away from the huddle in coms, and was now plotting some basic coordinates.
The coms officer routed the most recent droid stream to the coms desk and the captain jabbed pause, freezing the display just a second or so after it first appeared.
“Do you see?” she exclaimed “look, the signal strength, it’s really marginal, barely 8%.”
She pushed pause again and let the stream play on, until all six data feeds were sync’d up. Pushing pause again revealed that the signal strength was now at 20% for the first two, about 15% for others, while the most recent to lock up were down at 8% or less.”
“Sir”, called the navigation officer, “I think you should see this…”
“We are on their doorstep, how can these signals be so weak?”
“They were beamed straight at us sir.”
“What?” The captain turned to face the navigation officer across the bridge.
“Those signals… When we picked them up; we were in direct line with our course here, from Seattle931.”
“Are you sure?”
But the captain didn’t need to hear the assurance, it was obvious, there was a concentrated beam of data coming from somewhere that was designed to make them think that the droids were still in orbit. They would pick it up all the way in, up to the point where they came off their main heading to go into orbit, at which point, anyone on the bridge would have too many other things on their mind to monitor droid tweets.
“We’ve been set up”, exclaimed the captain, unintentionally loud enough for those around her to hear, “Ready a coms shuttle.”
There was no way to get a signal from where they were to any one who could do anything, or make a decision, in anything under a week, even if the coms shuttle survived its massively accelerated run-up and jump.
These immensely powerful droids were able to make the run-up and jump in just a few days. A long time in a crisis, but a little better than the 8.4years it would take a radio signal to get back to their relief crew, before it could be decoded, acted upon and an answer beamed back in another 8.4years…
The crew knew what that meant. The value of the coms droid equalled their bonus. It also meant that the captain thought that their mission was in peril. Without any prompting, every crew member on watch fed a coded message into their nearest data port; their letter, video, or voice message, to someone, or something, back at home. The off-duty crew were woken to do the same. The captain, her message logged into the liveware of every system on the ship, concentrated on collecting the payload. She pulled together the journey log, all voice coms, and the full stream of all the droid tweets that they had received en-route, and then sent these as an encoded packet into the deep liveware of the coms shuttle that was being readied for flight.
Finally she dictated a brief message attempting to explain what she thought had happened, dropping in a strange phrase towards the end, that the people around her could not quite make out.
To them it sounded like, “we may have found Bin Laden.”
So here are the first two chapters of 'Liveware' - (working title) please let me know what you think
Chapter 1 – Run!
The cruiser clawed its way up out of orbit, banking towards its jump point and readying for deep space. The geo-stats were docking in their bays, as the last ground crews arrived back on-board. Unseemly haste, not reflected in the stately progress of the ship, was evident in a clattering mêlée of activity across most decks. Just minutes later the captain barked at each station to report their readiness to jump.
Defensive weapons were powered-up and on-line, Offensive weapons were moving to orange alert; able to automatically engage any hostile target their array of sensors could identify, while not actually presenting a hostile profile. Engineering was ready, all propulsion systems were at optimum, life support was go, all liveware was accounted for and standing by. Only the coms desk failed to give a ‘good to go’ response. One of their geo-stats had failed to respond when instructed to return to the ship earlier that day and all subsequent attempts to get it to come out of orbit, or self destruct, had been ignored.
The jump point was now only 78 seconds away and the captain had no intention of going around again. “Just leave it!”
“Yes sir. We ha…” replied the chief coms officer, never quite at ease with the captain in this mood. He was attempting to add that they had enough spares for the likely remainder of the voyage and that he would dispatch a killer sat to seek and destroy the errant unit; far too much information for the captain just at that moment.
“Switch to auto at j-minus 20 and set for silent running” the captain shouted over the officer whom she would cheerfully swap for a geo-stat any day. Then, snuffing out these unhelpful thoughts she refocused on her duty to the rest of the crew and jabbed the ship-wide coms icon on her C&C screen. “Now hear this” went out around the ship and then, after a beat, the captain appended, “all crew; we will go into run-up sleep in 40seconds, get strapped in and masked up. I will give you a fuller explanation when we are in the tube, but right now I am imposing a total coms black-out.”
Resisting the urge to add something hopeful and reassuring in close, she reached for her own mask and orientated her seat so that it would compensate, as much as possible, for the massive load that the jump would inflict on her body. Strapping on her mask she looked around the bridge, everyone was still and quiet, watching the master time signal count down through 25… At 20 full auto mode kicked in, two seconds later the gas entered the masks of the 6 personnel on the bridge and the other 78 crew members across the vessel. Just as their comprehension dissolved, at around j minus 15, the only movement on the bridge was the finger of the coms officer, as he pressed the release icon and launched a killer droid to take out their missing geo stationary coms satellite.
As they slept the sub light ‘engines’, in the nose of the vessel, released enough energy to power a planet the size of Pittsburgh and channelled it into a focussed ribbon in front of the ship. The resulting disruption converted dark matter to anti-matter, which instantaneously collapsed, generating a gravity wave that bent that portion of the universe into a gravity well, sucking the ship forwards a few hundred yards in just a few seconds. Here they fired again, then again and again and again, until the ship was travelling at over a hundred thousand miles per second, some 12 weeks later.
At intervals through the acceleration phase, the designated officer on watch would be awakened to perform a manual check on the ship’s progress and the status of the system’s main functions. These were tortuous minutes of violent agony; distorted by the G force, battered by the massive vibrations inflicted on the structure of the ship and increasingly, as the weeks went on, aware of the pain of hunger. Their task was to read the meters and stamp the time clock.
Finally, close to light speed, but barely out of the solar system that they had been surveying, the run-up was complete; the main engine would then kick in, enabling them to make the jump.
* * *
That much is known. All these actions were recorded, or easily inferred, by the wash-up team which found the black-boxes, a few ion traces and tiny scattered fragments of DSC1729, some years later. The Deep Space Cruiser may have actually made it into Hyperspace, but its cruise trajectory, in the tube, was never attained. Something was waiting, despite the haste of their attempted escape, something that the automatic systems could not deal with, even if they could detect it, and, that same something, took them out.
Chapter 2 – Another M-type another probe.
Weeks earlier DCS1729 had completed the long deceleration, having jumped from the neighbouring outpost system, 8.4 light years any. The crew took their usual couple of days R&R; drinking and screwing, but mostly eating, to compensate for the three months of -5G that was required to get them back in sync with their surroundings. While liquids were provided during the long run-up and run-down, and the gas slowed down their metabolism, they were all mightily hungry, aching and in need of firm ground beneath their feet.
Their course had led them to a 12 planet system that had only recently been designated as fit for colonisation. Two possible candidate planets had been identified as targets for atmosphere acceleration and/or bio-seeding. But, all too often, these projections proved to be wildly optimistic, being based upon information sent back by deep space probes or ‘robot recon’, as the crew called it.
Three such probes were already in orbit around each of the two planets that they had come to look over.
The captain was enjoying a weightless shower with her favourite companion, when the alert sounded in her ear. She motioned to Theah to stop what she was doing, pulled her up to kiss her and selected the dry cycle.
“They’re gone sir…”, came the voice in her ear when she was dry enough to respond.
“Who are gone?”
“The probes, the recon probes, they aren’t there!”
The officer’s voice was full of timid whining that set the captain’s teeth on edge. “They can’t be gone we were tracking their coms all the way through the tube; and through the run-down…”
“But…it, they…” simpered the coms officer.
“I’ll be on the bridge in a minute, wait there.”
Realising she had just told the officer to do the one thing he was duty bound to do above any other, grated on the captain still further, as, still damp and far from satisfied, she pulled on her clothes. She signalled a hasty good-bye to Theah, leavig her in her cabin, fully expecting to join her again in just a few minutes.
But, as she entered the bridge, she could tell that something was very wrong.
* * *
Following standard procedure, the crew had been awakened from their run-down sleep, then the duty watch had set up their run-in trajectory, using the local system’s solar wind to ferry them the last short leg before they needed to burn actual fuel and get into orbit.
All that took around 36 hours – with little to do but eat, drink and screw – as a popular mess song would have it.
“Nobody checked?” the captain asked, knowing full well that no one, not even she, would have thought to. Why would they check that unmanned, totally self-sufficient and super intelligent droids were still working, in a lifeless system, eight light years from the nearest life form? Yet, not only were they not working, they weren’t even there!
“So, who or what sent that data we were monitoring?” the captain asked to no one in particular; no one replied.
A second or so later, the recon screens leapt into life, detecting fully sync’d and accurately coded data streams from first a couple, then all six droids. The captain yanked the coms officer aside and stared at the console. “Get me a fix”, she yelled.
“What?”
“A fix! A fucking fix!” the officer’s face looked stunned, then the captain clarified, “I want to know where that data is coming from.”
But, as she turned back, still red and shaking, the signals started to drop out, and seconds later the console was dark again.
“shit!!!... Is it set to record? Can I see that again?”
“Yes sir, of course sir”, the officer acknowledged, turning to the ship’s main computer and scrolling through menus to the archive – all the in-bound, out-bound and intra-ship coms, from every source, were in there, somewhere.
Unseen by the captain, the navigation officer moved away from the huddle in coms, and was now plotting some basic coordinates.
The coms officer routed the most recent droid stream to the coms desk and the captain jabbed pause, freezing the display just a second or so after it first appeared.
“Do you see?” she exclaimed “look, the signal strength, it’s really marginal, barely 8%.”
She pushed pause again and let the stream play on, until all six data feeds were sync’d up. Pushing pause again revealed that the signal strength was now at 20% for the first two, about 15% for others, while the most recent to lock up were down at 8% or less.”
“Sir”, called the navigation officer, “I think you should see this…”
“We are on their doorstep, how can these signals be so weak?”
“They were beamed straight at us sir.”
“What?” The captain turned to face the navigation officer across the bridge.
“Those signals… When we picked them up; we were in direct line with our course here, from Seattle931.”
“Are you sure?”
But the captain didn’t need to hear the assurance, it was obvious, there was a concentrated beam of data coming from somewhere that was designed to make them think that the droids were still in orbit. They would pick it up all the way in, up to the point where they came off their main heading to go into orbit, at which point, anyone on the bridge would have too many other things on their mind to monitor droid tweets.
“We’ve been set up”, exclaimed the captain, unintentionally loud enough for those around her to hear, “Ready a coms shuttle.”
There was no way to get a signal from where they were to any one who could do anything, or make a decision, in anything under a week, even if the coms shuttle survived its massively accelerated run-up and jump.
These immensely powerful droids were able to make the run-up and jump in just a few days. A long time in a crisis, but a little better than the 8.4years it would take a radio signal to get back to their relief crew, before it could be decoded, acted upon and an answer beamed back in another 8.4years…
The crew knew what that meant. The value of the coms droid equalled their bonus. It also meant that the captain thought that their mission was in peril. Without any prompting, every crew member on watch fed a coded message into their nearest data port; their letter, video, or voice message, to someone, or something, back at home. The off-duty crew were woken to do the same. The captain, her message logged into the liveware of every system on the ship, concentrated on collecting the payload. She pulled together the journey log, all voice coms, and the full stream of all the droid tweets that they had received en-route, and then sent these as an encoded packet into the deep liveware of the coms shuttle that was being readied for flight.
Finally she dictated a brief message attempting to explain what she thought had happened, dropping in a strange phrase towards the end, that the people around her could not quite make out.
To them it sounded like, “we may have found Bin Laden.”
