Prologue 0.03 - Cold, Stale Air

Continued from Prologue 0.02 -- A Symbiotic Relationship

"Yoo hoo. Hey. Are you there? Hello?" Tachie's interior voice sounded clearer than over the radio, but it was still over-modulated because of too much power being put through the processor and speakers.

Uencial opened his eyes to complete darkness. The cushions had deflated and he was no longer cocooned in place, but judging by the stiffness he was feeling, it had been several more hours since he woke up the first time and even longer since he'd moved. "Lights?" he asked into the darkness.

"Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot." The cabin lights began to slowly illuminate; first a dark, bio-luminescent green glow, which allowed his eyes to acclimate, then the glow grew in intensity and warmth to full spectrum. "Hey uh, listen. I'm sorry about that, I know we agreed not to engage the hyperdrive unless you say so."

"Yeah? So what happened?" yawned Uencial as he picked himself up and began stretching.

"A Consortium fleet showed up unexpectedly. They wanted to SNIP."

"Don't tell me, you panicked?" sighed Uencial.

"They took me by surprise." she responded sardonically.

"You know... that's really not possible," he sighed with exasperation. "I need go back over that SNIP subroutine..." Uencial trailed off to finish the sentence under his breath to himself, "...there's got to be a better way of automating SNIPs."

"Uh huh. Come to the bridge, I have something to show you." The sounds of the last words echos went silent as the buzzing in the speakers stopped when they weren't being used.

Now the only buzzing was inside Uencial's own ears. He rubbed his eyes. "Juckin' Gnusmasian ale.... juckin' hyperspace. Ugh." The headache wasn't as bad as he was afraid it would be, but the overall feeling like he was the gum that got stepped on by a shoe was starting to manifest itself the longer he stood upright.

Cold corridors and stale air were between him and the bridge, which wouldn't help his mood by the time he got to there. He decided to take a circuitous route past the pantry where he could eat and the sonic shower where he'd clean up. Everything was quiet as he made his way around.

The cargo bays were empty and airy, it had been several weeks since they actually hauled any cargo anywhere, so it was about time to go pick up some contracts, complete a circuit or two, and get paid. With no other crew on board, all the shares he accumulated were his alone, in theory. In practice, he usually spent most of his profits on settling debts or losses caused by the Tachina herself. It would have been easier, with a crew, to decide when to and what kind of work to contract; but it was just Uencial who did the looking for work and ultimately it was the Tachina herself who decided when to actually do it. The Deuterium Tachina's attitude and personality wasn't always as obstinate as she'd been lately, but Uencial had reached a point of work-ability with it and like several other systems on board, 'good enough' was working for the time being.

As he approached the bulk-head outside of the bridge, he could hear the ship's over-modulated voice from inside through the door. It was so loud in fact, the door itself was vibrating inside the frame from sympathetic resonance with certain tones the voice would hit. Uencial pushed a few buttons on a pad, and then put his hand on the door's handle. Pushing buttons was a purely symbolic action, there was no code to unlock the doors, he just knew that pushing buttons would get the Tachina's attention. Her voice trailed off and the metal stopped vibrating and a long pause passed before the panel beeped and the bulkhead door opened.

"I didn't notice you leave, what did you miss?" she asked him as he sat down in the chair.

"I just got here, Tachie, and turn the volume down. What's going on with you? Are you interfacing with the sensors at all? Is that why that Consortium ship took you by surprise?"

Tachina was annoyed, "Hey...I am aware of everything, it's a constant flood of images and noise and blah, blah, blah with all the SNIPs between all those stupid ships. Since the last mod with the new receiver dish array, I've been sorting through a lot of new sensor data. It's what I've been telling you."

Uencial brought up the logs the computer had gathered. The new array had gathered thousands of files full of communiques, SNIPs, and status reports for every ship within four sectors. "You have been busy."

"Yeah, yeah...let me show you the important stuff." The screen Uencial was reading flickered to black as the main holoscreen began filling with overlapping images of ships, maps, and text the Tachina had been compiling. Every modification to the Tachina had the potential to change the behavior and would inevitably bring side-effects, so it was becoming clear that the new sensor array they'd salvaged had given the Tachina access to a lot more data than she could process while still maintaining operations; however, since her intelligence was more complex than any other known AI computer, she'd managed to pull together all those data into a surveillance report that would be the envy of every Consortium intelligence contractor. "Six days ago, the Consortium Cruiser Barb reported that Eitypsenumentla, some backwater planet's fleets all scrambled outward so fast, some of them actually ran into each other. I haven't finished unencrypting the rest of the message yet, but then there was sudden explosion of unencrypted radio communication between every Consortium ship in the area who all changed their courses for the same backwater planet way out on the end of the second galaxy."

As she spoke, she projected the images of the various types of ships she'd found into one area of the holoscreen. On the other end of the viewer, she showed projections of the planet's airspace showing trails of the ships' positions and directions as they scrambled. In the center between the two areas, Uencial's eyes saw a projection of something that they were not able to focus on and made him shut them for a moment. "What is that in the middle? My eyes can't focus on it."

"I know, right?" said Tachina. "That's what caught my attention too. What you are looking at are interference patterns caused by sub-atomic particle fields coming from each of those ships. That's why all their communications are unencrypted. See?" She changed the projection to bring one of the ships from the side of the screen into the foreground and created an animation of energetic points of light emanating from it to the distortion field. "They're using sub-space frequencies that nobody else even hears, much less monitors, because they all set their main deflection emitters to generate these fields. Thanks to the new array mod, I've been catching it all."

The distortion field, as Uencial saw it, was a confusing array of rippling colors and glimmering reactions that came in and out of focus. "Hey Tachie, I can only see in three dimensions, can you project something else to visualize what you are talking about?"

"Oh, sure." The image morphed and zoomed out from one, featured ship emitting the animated particles to include representations of about 3000 ships sending animated pulses of particles out in front of each and interacting with one another, illuminating the entire area in the direction back to the system they were all now headed towards. "See that? They are looking for something they think is between Eitypsenumentla and that ring of ships closing in on it."

"Sub-atomic particle fields, what's the point of that? Some massive science experiment?" Uencial knew it was stupid question given the sheer amount of information Tachina was streaming at him. "Do you know what they lost already?"

"I think so. But I need to decrypt the rest of the message from the Barb to be sure. I think the Eitypsenumentlans may have a ship with some kind of a cloaking device, but then they lost it."

"Lost it?" Uencial asked.

"Either it exploded or it's still out there cloaked and they don't even know where to look for it, so they called in the Consortium to help" answered Tachina as the holoscreen's multiple projection melted away and displayed an empty area of space far outside of the search area between the Consortium ships and the Eitypsenumentlan fleets.

"What are you showing me now?"

"I searched back through all the data I'd collected from the new array since you plugged it into me and I found a strange EM disturbance that happened in the first few minutes. It was the tip of a huge amount of noise, so I just wrote it off as a space goat fart. But after all the chaos around Eitypsenumentla, now I think it could have been from a ship we can't actually see from here. This is the area where I extrapolate the ship to be right now."

"How do you suppose it got so far out?" The coordinates were outside of the normal shipping routes to the outer galactic rim, but not too far from an inhabited area Uencial knew about out there.

"Yeah. That's the trick isn't it? It couldn't have gotten that far out on its own that fast. Something flung that thing out there," she speculated. "It doesn't really matter, no one is looking for it out there. I want to go out there and get that device."

Uencial's body was immediately overcome with a sense of dread as Tachina's pronouncement meant she'd already made up her mind. They'd been together for a long time, so he knew she wasn't going to be easy to convince her that it wasn't a good idea if a Consortium fleet that size, along with an entire fleet from the planet was also looking for it. Although, he thought about how it could be done, it is quite a ways out from the search areas, they might be able to get in and out without drawing too much attention. But then it was going to be a completely different story if they found it and salvaged that device and it totally blew all the mods he'd made to keep the Tachina somewhat under control. Flickering on the navigation computer's screen distracted him from imagining the implications of the change, it was the Tachina laying in a course directly to the outer rim. "Hang on a minute, Tachie.

"Before we go, we should pick up a haul to take out there, that would help us if any Consortium ships wonder what we're doing. If we swing past Chalfrourami first, we can fuel up, load up, and check out that new moon they've been terraforming." Uencial had very legitimate reasons for the stop, but he hoped that Tachina wouldn't pick up on how he was trying to detour the trip altogether.

"Ah c'mon," she protested, "a full haul is going to slow me down too much. Let's just go."

"How much fuel do have for the hyperdrive?" There hadn't been that much before she ran from the Consortium Command ship, so now there wasn't even enough to get them to Chalfrourami using hyperspace. "Damn it Tachie....it is going to take a least a day at full impulse power to get to the fuel station. Lay in the course and let's go." Tachina did as Uencial instructed and they started heading towards the Chalfrouramian alliance depot.

Both were annoyed with the other, so neither spoke another word until after they'd arrived.