Extracted - Part 3

[Sthurmovik]

Part 3

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Serena looked out through the viewports at the planet below the ship, large parts of both hemispheres covered by massive glaciers. She knew she would have a good time skiing across miles of frozen terrain, but there was the ever present feeling that taking time off for fun was in effect abandoning her responsibilities to both those under her command and the people they were ultimately there to assist. Serena had always known on that becoming an Elder afforded both respect and responsibility, but now the relationship between the two was becoming more and more clear. As she stared out the window again trying to see if she could spot New Oslo with her own optics something brushed against her leg which caused her to jump back.

"Holy shit Lupa, you scared the shit out of me. I told you not to do that!"

The larger than average wolf regarded Serena with an air of bemusement, tongue lolling out.

"What was that? I couldn't quite hear you," said Serena.

//"I said it’s a wonderful view! Sheesh, half the ship is going to hear my conversation at this level."

Having Lupa's words appear directly in her "mind's ear" always made Serena uneasy, but she figured that anyone probably would have the same reaction who wasn't used to it.

"At least since the transition I can at least hear you to begin with. Remember all that body language you made me learn? You know in the time since I've never had to use any of that stuff despite your assurances."

//"It wasn't my fault your mind was filled with computer code instead of thoughts."

"I had thoughts!"

//"If you say so." Lupa let her tongue go out again in her version of laughter. //"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question Serena?"

"Sure, go ahead."

Lupa closed her mouth and bobbed her head a bit. //"I figured that after you became an Elder we would become closer, but instead you sort of drifted away."

Serena sighed, keeping her gaze fixed out the window. "I'm sorry Lupa, and you're probably not the only one I owe an apology to either. Back when we first met I was of an age where the powers that be would be unwise to put any long term investments into me. Sure there was an assumption that I would become an Elder, but until a Sister actually makes that choice she could just as easily lose her nerve and re-initialize or self recycle or just…break down. The result was that I was left to run my squad the way I wanted and that meant I could tag along with you as you went after all those brass ring discoveries. As soon as I made the change it was like the blue fairy had turned me into a real girl and there suddenly wasn't enough work or promotions they could throw at me."

Lupa pushed herself up against Serena to get her attention. //"I can't say I wasn't disappointed, but I fully understand. Good news is that since I have tenure so I'm not going anywhere and if you manage to break free from "the man" I'll always be able to make time for you."

"Thanks Lupa, you're the type of friend I wish I had more of," Serena replied, reaching down to gently pet Lupa's soft head before turning back toward the main compartment. "Hey Fiona! You should come up and see this!" Serena called back into the main desk as the main engines fired to life.

"What is it?" the hybrid tiger-leopard asked, as she made her ways down to the docking bay.

"Grab on to something, we're going to go to warp."

Looking a bit less nervous than she did at takeoff Fiona grabbed onto an inert bar of metal as the ship began to accelerate away from the planet without any feeling of inertia. The engines were quieter this time as the plasma was directed into gravity coils instead of back into conventional thrust. The starfield began to glow then there was a flash as they went FTL en route to their destination in the Dardick system.

//"Come on, you two, it's time for happy hour. There's beer and Chinese food waiting in the lounge," said Lupa as she turned and trotted up the ramp to the main deck.

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"So I'm sitting there watching as this 20 foot tall golem is just ripping apart the transport vehicle and Lupa is inside making all these funny faces. Now I told you about the body language thing, but the problem is that Lupa was in her human shape, she didn't have ears and a tail so I can't tell what she's trying to say to me. Finally I just get something about "fling" or "launch" so I just take the RPG and boom, blow the golem's head right off. It falls down inactive and I'm standing there like I'm hot shit when Lupa kicks open the window, crawls out and just starts ripping into me for "destroying the find of the decade" and "not having any respect for history." Turns out she just needed me to throw her bag over with the counter enchantment glyph in it."

Everybody in the mess compartment laughed as Serena finished her beer. "Fortunately she found like 5 or 6 additional golems that we could send back for study and I guess I was lucky for that to happen 'cause I'm not sure Lupa would have wanted me back after that one."

After two nights even the relatively small crew was getting restless on board the increasingly funky Sleeping Giant, but with their ETA just an hour or so away the last of the three outbound "happy hours" was living up to both parts of its name.

"Alright guys and gals that's enough stories for now, time to get to work," said Serena standing up and stretching out. "We're going to be touching down at 1735 Zulu, but we're going to need to reset to local time which is going to be somewhere around 0800. Make sure you've got the right settings on your clock apps. Lars, Sarah, you two get into the light powered armour and set up the security perimeter as outlined in your plan. Once I get the go ahead from you two we'll go into a rotation with one person on watch and the other with me in the portal hall. Remember, link with Bea, she's your eyes and ears. Oh, I don't want to have to repeat myself, everyone who breathes needs two spare rebreather cartridges at all time. That's not, "I'll go get a fresh one when I get around to it," that's you run one out then you go and replace it ASAP. Remember, there are only 5 of us so if you get stuck somewhere it might take awhile for the rest of us to get you out."

The meeting broke up with everyone heading out to get their gear together. It was only then that Serena noticed that Fiona had slipped away into the information center under the cockpit. Swinging through the hatch he found the fuzzy Linker sitting in front of a sensor terminal looking zoned out.

"Hey Bea, thanks for giving Fiona a second chance, but could you kick her out? I need to talk with her."

"Right-o Colonel," came the voice from a speaker.

A few seconds later Fiona's feline eyes fluttered open.

"What's wrong Serena? Bea said you wanted to talk to me."

"Yeah, we're landing soon, I need everybody to get their stuff on. Just because you're synth doesn’t mean the atmosphere won't mess up your lovely fur."

"Oh I know, but I was tracking down a strange energy transient that happened about 3 hours ago. Bea thinks it's just a sensor malfunction, but I wanted to be sure. It came from the portal area, but looks too short to be a transport event."

"Any lifesigns? Movement?"

"Nothing detected….I…I guess it's probably just an echo."

"Go get suited up, I'll take a look at it while you're away."

The two women traded seats and Serena began to glance over the data. She wasn't assuming she could find something the other two synths had missed, but lately she had found herself to be getting increasingly better at making gut decisions as the humans liked to call them. In this case, like some of the others, something just didn't feel right to Serena, even thought there was nothing she could point at to back up her feeling. The ship dropped out of warp and the scanning systems lit up with new data that was now available at sub-light speeds.

"Do you think we should establish standard orbit before going in for a landing Colonel? Check things out from a safe distance?" the ship's AI asked her.

"We're not going to get anything from orbit that the existing satellite grid isn't sending us already. Think you could handle a couple of low atmospheric passes? We could drop out the survey drone early."

"That sounds like a good idea Colonel."

As Serena examined the new sensor feeds an alarm went off as one of the displays went red with an urgent sensor warning.

"Bea?!" cried Serena, cancelling the alarm. "Talk to me."

"An interdimensional portal just opened and a small heavy fighter class ship came through."

"A portal? God damnit, we truck overland for three days and some dickhead portals in just to rub our faces in it. Isn't this system still portal restricted? I'm going to write this fucker up…"

"Serena," Bea's voice, a great deal of concern in it. "The portal did not have a Federation signature. Unknown heavy fighter 0.2 AU and closing on the planet."

"Raise shields."

"I'm putting you on conference with the Captain."

"Bea, Serena, what going on down there!?" the Captain's voice thundered through the speakers.

"Unknown at this time, you might want to get those Norwegians on the line. Call them on the Inter-D, I don't want to freak this guy out with comms traffic over subspace," said Serena.

At that moment Fiona poked her head back into the information center.

"What's with all the alerts? Did you find something on the planet?"

"No, a portal opened and an unidentified heavy fighter came out."

"May I?" Fiona asked.

"Of course," said Serena.

Fiona sat down in the other seat and pulled up a visual scroll of the data, not even bothering to take the time to download it. As Serena watched she could have sworn the fur on Fiona's face change from yellow to white.

"Oh no no no, that's a Unity ship!"

Serena felt her heart sink. She had been prepared for almost all possible scenarios, except that one.

"Captain, you need to floor it…"

"No!" cried Fiona. "They'll see the warp trail and come after us. There's no way we can outrun them in this ship. We have to hide."

"Captain, can you get the planet between us and the Unity ship then look for a hiding place on the surface or perhaps around the large gas giant."

"No good," said Bea, “they've changed course to intercept."

"Get us down to the planet. We at least have options there. I'm going to get on the line to the Norwegians," said Serena as she patched herself into the open interdimensional communications link. "Lifestation Dæhlie, Lifestation Dæhlie, this is Colonel Serena Hanford on the WS Sleeping Giant declaring a Mayday. We have a Code 82 enemy ship, presumed hostile…"

"I'm getting an inbound message," said Bea's voice over the speaker, still tinged with concern. "Or more like thousands of copies of what I presume is the same message just in different languages and formats. I think I found one I can translate. "Unidentified ship, you are now under the jurisdiction of the Organization of Unified Minds. Assume standard orbit and power down all engines and weapons. If you comply you will not be harmed. Any resistance may result in unfortunate events beyond our control."

"Why do people try to improve on "Resistance is Futile"? You just can't," commented the Captain, sounding offended by such a haphazard demand to surrender.

"What the hell does that mean?" asked Bea.

"It means that they're going to stop us, board us and transfer all of our minds into a VR gulag for our own benefit," replied Fiona.


"…thank you Dæhlie I understand." Serena looked back at Fiona. "Good news is that the Federation has been made aware of our situation and is going to be coming in guns blazing. Bad news is we can't expect help for several hours as Fleet wants to build up a decisive concentration of force in case things escalate."

At that moment the ship shook hard back and forth, throwing anyone not strapped in around.

"That was their warning shot, these people mean business. They are circling around to take up a shot down position behind us." Captain Dunn called in. "Bea and I are doing the best we can to shake them off, but they're just too maneuverable."

"Lupa, get in here!" called Serena out the door to the information center. As soon as the wolf appeared Serena continued. "Ok, here's the deal. This is a bad situation and I don't just mean for us. If the Unity decided to attack here in force they could overrun the entire Federation presence in this reality. We're looking at potentially millions of individuals being uploaded into their little commune or the Fed having to go to war on the Unity's terms. We're the only ones who are in a position to do something and I know this might sound crazy, but I think our only option is to find a way to take these guys out."

Everyone was silent, Lupa and Fiona looking around uncomfortably.

"So first things first do we have any weapons?"

"Just some light particle beams and rockets with various scientific payloads," Captain Dunn answered over the intercom.

"That's not all." It was Bea's voice this time. "We recently took on board a load of 4 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, but there aren't any launchers or fire control systems installed. Lupa had plans to kitbash them into long high performance range probes during our next extended port visit."

"Are the warheads active?"

"Affirmative."

Serena jumped out of her seat. "That's a start. Bea, join me in the cargo bay. Fiona, try to talk with them, see if you can stall them, you know what buttons to press."

Lupa whimpered, her ears flat and head held low.

"Lupa, get on two legs and get into an environmental suit now!"

The wolf hesitated for a second before dashing off to her quarters, Serena followed close behind taking the turn down the ramp to the cargo bay instead. Bea, in hologram form, was already there racing around a 15 foot long hard shelled container undoing all of the fasteners and shackles.

"Took you long enough," Bea chided Serena. "There's a metal table behind you used for mounting particle beam experiments. Lock it onto the central set of rails then move three pairs of mounting blocks each about 4 inches from the centerline."

Serena leaped to the table and put her back into pushing it on the horizontal guides until it engaged with the central rails. "The range to the Unity fighter is insufficient to achieve any sort of lock even if we had a fire control system so we're going to have to fire this like an old fashioned torpedo. Bea, can you set the missile to make a preprogrammed maneuver then detonate on either range or impact."

"Yes, but the software really doesn't want me doing this. Hmmm, you ever get that feeling when you're doing something very unsafe? Alright, fins on, I need your help lifting."

The ship lurched from another barrage of warning shots as Serena ran back over to Bea and slid her arms under the front section of the nearly 1 ton missile.

"Ok, on three, one, two, three," Serena called out.

The hologram and the android lifted the missile out of its container and over to the table, laying it on the mounting blocks.

"How are we going to keep it on the table? This missile is set up for a hot launch."

"I got it," said Bea, a cowboy hat appearing on her head as she jumped up to sandwich the missile between her body and the table, holding on with all the force the holo emitters would allow her to apply. "You just have to help me clean up afterward because this is going to make one hell of a mess."

Not needing Bea to say anything more Serena ran back to the tunnel, hitting the emergency isolation button that brought down the yellow blast door.

"Los!"

Bea had calculated the sequence of events down to the microsecond. She first released the clamps holding the cargo bay door shut. With the electromagnetic pistons set to provide zero damping force the door began to blow open under the force of the pressurized air behind it. At the exact right instant she gave the fire command to the booster. Complex subatomic structures in the booster fuel began to breakdown into normal matter releasing incredible amounts of energy that was directed towards the rear of the missile as hot plasma. Some of the plasma was routed through a single use gravity field generator and combined with the physical thrust, started the missile moving forward at an incredible rate of acceleration. Bea held on as the rocketed toward the still opening door which locked in the down position just milliseconds before the table flew past it. As soon as the launch sled exited the ship Bea's holographic body vanished freeing the missile from the table just before energy flowed into the gravity coils in the fins causing the missile to execute its maneuver towards the Unity fighter that was trailing about 1km behind. The synthetic pilots on board the fighter were quick, quick enough to see the missile coming and execute an evasive maneuver, but it was too late as the missile skimmed the fighter's shield, detonating the warhead.

Even set at the lowest yield Bea thought they could safely get away with the expanding sphere of energy hit the Sleeping Giant overwhelming it's own shield and tossing the ship and its occupants end over end. After several terrifying moments Bea managed to restore attitude control allowing Serena to pick herself up off the deck plating.

"Oh man, I think you're going to need a new paint job after that one."

"That's not the only new thing I'll need. Both engines have sustained significant damage to the thrust shaping structures and we're sort of crashing into the planet."

"Fuck me," cursed Serena, "if it's not one thing it's another." She made her way up the ramp and into the mess where everyone was strapped into the harnessed seats. Fiona was attending to a small cut in Lars' scalp while Lupa sat with a plastic bucket in her lap looking a bit green around the gills.

"Hang in there everyone. This is going to be a rough landing," said Serena in her most reassuring voice as she commanded the nanoarmour under her jumpsuit to flow into its full coverage form factor. Climbing up the ladder into the cockpit she slid into the second seat next to Captain Dunn, who monitoring systems while Bea flew the ship.

"Hey there Captain, mind if I join you? I didn't want you to be up here all alone."

"I'm never alone," he said, gently touching the control yoke in front of his. "The burners are ok so Bea's going to flip us around here and try to slow out forward velocity as much as possible before using the shield for aerobreaking."

"You still think you can make the original landing site? That long runway will come in handy if we don't have the thrust for a soft touchdown."

"That's the plan. Hold on, here we go."

The Giant rotated around 180o before Bea fired up the damaged engines as high as they would go without summarily ejecting the remaining contents toward the planet. Serena felt herself pressed forward against the straps as the ship began to slow. The planet got larger and larger in the viewports as a red-orange glow began to envelop the ship in the spherical outline of the shields.

"The shielding systems are running only at 37% of their usual capacity, I'm probably going to have to let some of that heat through," remarked the Captain.

"We're really slowing down now, but are we going to be able to make the landing site?" asked Serena.

"Bea thinks we can. Ok, prepare for reorientation for aerodynamic flight."

The ship spun back around discontinuing the braking thrust provided by the marginally functional engines, but by this time the atmospheric drag was starting to dominate. The planet's surface kept getting closer as the black of space took up less and less of the horizon.

"Lift jets coming on…full power. With the main engine thrust we have left we should be able to just hit the landing, or should I say controlled crash."

"Better than theirs," said Serena, pointing out the window at a glowing fireball descending towards the planet's surface several hundred miles away. "Congratulations Captain, you get to paint a silhouette on the hull."

With the stub wings and fins providing some lift and a good deal of stability Bea was able to line up the nose with the landing site and put the ship into a powered approach. Still, the farther into the atmosphere they got the more there were buffeted by winds and turbulence. Serena scanned the horizon then pointed when she saw the ruins of a city and the unmistakable straight lines of a landing strip not far in front. Captain Dunn tucked his hands under his arms to physically mute his natural instinct to touch the controls.

"When the lady gets finished with this I'm going to have to do something special for her. She certainly earned her share on this mission."

"What counts as special? New paint? Repairs?"

"Night in," said Dunn, giving Serena a sly smile. "Alright, here we go…would you be so kind as to hit the collision alarm for me Serena?"

The android pulled the red handle sounding the collision alarm throughout the ship. Seconds later the skidplates on the bottom of the flat hull touched down, plowing through century's worth of firth and debris that had gathered on top of the hard runway surface. Serena and the captain were repeatedly thrown forward in their harnesses as the Sleeping Giant hit periodic patches of resistance, the nose of the ship slowly twisting off the centerline.

"You need to bring the nose around or we're going to have an off," yelled Serena, her voice showing a bit of apprehension as the ship continued to barrel along.

"Don't look at me," came Bea's voice. "Sir Isaac is the one flying now."

The Giant soon fell off the side of the runway, twisting more violently as the skids dug deep into the soft ground. Suddenly the nose dropped and there was a huge explosion of dirt and sand that covered the viewport and threw everyone forward in their seats one last time before all went quiet. Serena looked at the Captain as light began to filter back into the cockpit, then smiled and made a show of wiping her brow.

"You know what they say about landing Serena."

"Excuse me!?" said Bea in an irritated tone of voice. "I don't think I'm walking anywhere."

"Relax Bea, you don't have to….we're right next to the terminal," said Serena, getting up from her seat. "By the way…let me know when you're having that night in and we can see how well your multithreaded AI can perform under load."

Captain Dunn could only sit back and laugh.

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[BD]

This one was rather nice if a bit quirky. Though i am not sure if you meant altitude control instead of attitude control (i don't think the second would make sense )