BLACK BOX
PETER J. WACKS
Set in the Deep Practice Universe designed by
Peter J. Wacks and Lorin Ricker
“What the hell is this pissant field glider doing firing on my cavalry, Captain?” The holographic projection crackled from the interference of an archaic projectile dissolving against the ship’s ionic shields.
“I…” Jinx, aboard the bridge of the Nautilus, was as flummoxed as Commander Nycks aboard the Saratoga, the ship the projection was emanating from.
“Who the hell does he think he is?”
“The glider…I don’t know, Commander.” Open fire wasn’t the usual response to a rescue party.
“Does he have a death wish? And what year is this? My grandfather ferried crops in one of those things. That’s it. I’m getting shot at by some cuòluàn grandfather trying to get his rice to market.”
Holding in the sigh that longed to erupt from his soul, Jinx waited…
Captain Horatio Jinx was the commanding officer of the Crystal Colony solar ship Nautilus, but he was not in command. Commander Nycks, aboard the Saratoga, was, and she was in a fine fettle. He greatly admired the commander; she was the finest leader he had ever served under. But it could be intense—even magnetic—to be the direct target of her attention. Like a moth to the flame, you couldn’t help but get too close.
“Captain Jinx, go ahead and shoot it down. Try to not kill everyone on board. I’m sending the rest of the company to scan the planet for other signs of life.”
“Aye, aye.”
Relief washing over him, Jinx let loose the extra air he had been holding in. He turned to his best gunner. “You think you can pick that bird out of the air without taking out her wings?”
“Reckon so,” the second gunner said. “She’s already taken quite a bit of damage from somewhere, though. Might be the straw…”
Jinx nodded. The second gunner took one shot; it was clean, but it sent the mechanized glider spiraling in a swift and uncontrolled plummet to the ground.
“Follow her down, nice and easy. Catch her in the tractor if you can.”
Nice and easy proved impossible. The fields of debris from crashed gliders strewn about the planetoid’s settlement made it difficult to find a safe landing site, much less discern which of the smoldering ruins might have been the one firing on them. Whatever battle had happened left these settlements wastelands. The small islands of rock and dirt that floated above and behind them as they made their way to the surface proved to be a formidable obstacle course, with unpredictable wind patterns complicating their flight path as they descended.
Grimly, Jinx noted that some of the islands showed signs of former habitation, but all was in ruins everywhere he looked. Like a lot of frontier planets, there seemed to have been a small population widely dispersed. There were only a few ruins of what might have been larger forts or outposts to indicate a population center. Flight must have been their primary mode of travel, though there were horse tracks inside the towns themselves. It was disconnected from the solar hub. Beyond the rule of law. Here, the local practice and tradition held sway.
The planet’s magnetic field was unique in the solar system, allowing for the surreal landscape’s existence. Crystal 7.34 was a near Terra-size planet in the cusp of the solar sheath, one of the last charted planets before the Great Expanse—the dead zone between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. Equatorial magma generators on each longitude line kept the planet warm. It was centuries-old technology, an inheritance from the time before the united colonies formed the Empire and the singularity launched humanity into the black depths of the Great Expanse, beyond the solar sheath. Crystal 7.34 was one of the planets known as New Frontier—far enough from the rays of the sun that it was incapable of sustaining life without the technological assistance of modern terraforming, but not so advanced that it could sustain itself without connection to the solar shipping network. Here, beyond the law, practice and tradition had failed, and the settlement had not survived long enough to grow into a real colony.
Once they touched down, Jinx—a wiry, tall man with dull brown eyes that hid the deep intelligence behind them—mounted his horse. Crystal Colony settlements all traded equestrian stock and goods, bringing full-grown animals to each port and trading for foals and colts. The ships were designed with special waste management systems that allowed them to safely store and then trade the horse manure for supplies landside. The manure was a valuable commodity at outposts desperate to maintain life-sustaining levels of cultivation in often harsh and unaccommodating environments.
Jinx had developed a fondness for his mare, Amantine, and kept her even though she was older than was usual for an active-duty cavalry horse.
“Hup, hup.”
Amantine nickered and trotted down the slipway from the magnetically tethered ship. About a hundred meters away, the Saratoga, having landed a beacon and followed the Nautilus’s signal, also touched down. Jinx scanned the area while he waited for Commander Nycks to relay orders. She would be taking the Saratoga to the other hemisphere while he tracked down the pilot of the glider. His security team was already fanning out, riding around the perimeter of the ships. The settlement before them had never progressed beyond crude wood-and-mud constructions. A lot of the frontier planets were like this, just dust and tumbleweeds, survival, and blood.
The Nautilus was an oval ship, all elegance and smooth lines, with ridges protruding from her spine like her namesake. When they started spinning along her front to rear axes, the electromagnetic drives engaged and she took off, riding low in the sky, departing to scan.
Nycks patched into his heads-up display. She was beautiful in a stark way, aquiline and fierce with hypnotic lavender eyes, though you wouldn’t catch Jinx mentioning that to her. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing here.”
“Commander?” Across his eye, he could see her on the bridge of the Saratoga.
“All…this”—she waved a hand—“craziness. It looks like it went downhill faster than a mudslide in a typhoon.”
“It does seem like we just missed the last battle.”
“Suicide pact, is more like it. Usually, a battle has a winner, and something left to win.” She turned to the crew. “Watch your backs out there. We don’t know what happened, and scanners aren’t perfect. There could be an ambush, or outlaws, or something else here. Go ahead and find me that pilot, Jinx.”
Burnt-out buildings and the wreckage of gliders made for slow going as the horses carefully picked their way through the streets. Sweaty trekking and a little luck brought Jinx and his crew through the remains, among which were numerous bodies. They stopped as they neared the center of the town and dismounted, proceeding on foot as they led the horses, scanning the corpses of the deceased citizens as they went.
“Ma’am, sir,” Jonas, the medical officer, patched into the comm channel Jinx and Nycks shared, “none of these people are in the databanks. It’s like they never existed.”
“Welcome to the frontier, Jonas,” Jinx said as he eyed Nycks. “Commander, what are you thinking?”
She snapped her eyes away from the wreckage she had been studying to address him. “My gut says we’ll find the seed there, in the center, with our combatant glider crew.”
They had barely made it another hundred yards when a single gunshot cracked the fragile silence and a puff of dust mushroomed up from the path before them.
“Stay back! Identify yourselves!”
Security riders quickly shielded Jinx from the shooter, but he stood his ground as he scanned the surroundings.
“I am Captain Jinx of the CSS Nautilus. Step out of hiding and explain yourself.”
A man, clad in black pants and a woven poncho, shuffled out from behind a partially collapsed wall. A civilian—Asian descent, by the looks of him. Holding something firmly under one arm, a sleek black box, he clutched a Smith & Wesson pistol in his other hand. His injuries were minor, and though it had appeared that most of the casualties had died of gunshot and stab wounds, he showed none. “Now Crystal finally comes to check on us? Now?! I want nothing to do with you people. Leave.” The pistol in his hand was trembling, and he looked spooked enough to take a couple more wild shots at them.
Jinx wasn’t in the mood to deal with complications. With a quick draw of his bolt pistol, he shot the firearm out of the man’s hand. In the space of the blink of surprise flitting across the man’s face, the security team galloped forward. The lead officer kicked the civilian in the shoulder as he rode past, and the man went down, hard.
The next rider leapt from horseback, rolling as he landed, and slid to a stop in front of the man as he tried to stand. With a quick strike, he landed a blow to the center mass with a loud clang, but then recoiled in pain.
The man scrambled back, his poncho flying to the side, exposing an iron plate strapped to his chest. He spun in place, looking for a way out, but the first rider had circled back and, as he turned, he was met with a boot to the face. He crumpled to the ground, still.
Jinx frowned, motioning two guards to contain the prisoner.
Nycks raised an eyebrow from the Saratoga. “Stay with him. I’ll wrap the scans here and be back in an hour.” With that, she signed off the comms.
As Jinx waited for the commander, the man woke.
“Who are you?” Jinx asked.
The man eyed him but remained silent.
“I don’t want to do this the hard way. Just talk to me.” He tried again.
The captured citizen sullenly remained silent despite Jinx’s attempts. This had become a dirty job. He stared at the prisoner, taking careful stock.
Clasped in the captive’s hands was a small black-and-brass box with intricate crystal-coated gearing worked into the exterior walls. The restraint of his arms by two sturdy security officers from the Nautilus also allowed him to stand upright. Blood streaked his face from the fight. He had a crooked nose and square features. Still, he was doing better than the rest of the corpses in this airship graveyard of a planet.
“You know I have to take possession of that seed box you’re holding.”
“Piss off, Crystal.”
Heaving a heavy sigh, Jinx pinched the bridge of his nose. “You aren’t doing yourself any favors. Had you simply talked to us instead of shooting at us…Listen,” he tried earnestly, “no one wins if you don’t talk.”
The man’s eyes flashed angrily as he let forth a series of insults in Japanese, struggling against his captors and weakly kicking out his legs to try to keep Jinx away. The civilian had not been in good shape before his crash landing, and he wore himself out quickly.
“Let’s try starting over. Talk now, and we can overlook what happened earlier.”
The man stared at him angrily.
“Have it your way.” With a nod of his head, Jinx had a corporal claim the box. The middle-aged man tried to keep possession but was in no condition to put up much of a fight. The corporal turned to Jinx and indicated a flask of purified water on his belt with a suggestive look. Jinx kicked himself for not having thought of that specific need and nodded his agreement. Sometimes, all an angry person needed was some water to become more decent. It was weird but true.
The prisoner almost looked grateful as he took it in hand and guzzled it down. Almost. It produced an only momentary change in his demeanor.
Jinx turned his attention to their surroundings. Smoke drifted through the air, too heavy to rise far. As was so often the case, from this battle, neither side had emerged victorious. The remnants of wooden airships littered the destroyed town. The bodies and body parts strewn all about lent an acidic stench to the burning wood. And this man standing before them, the last survivor, was the only one who knew what happened.
Jinx and his crew, under the supervision of Commander Nycks, had responded to a distress beacon from the settlement while patrolling the frontier. A scramble of communiqués with Crystal Colony had determined the possibility that a settlement long since forgotten could have legitimate cause to call for aid. So far, there was no sign of the source of the distress signal that had brought them to this decimated planet.
Relief washed over Captain Jinx once he saw Commander Nycks approaching on horseback with her entourage. The pounding of horses at a gallop relaxed into a canter, and then further softened to a trot, with sabers rattling lightly in the leather sword frogs secured to their dress uniform belts. The commander’s well-trained entourage, consisting of her lieutenant, second lieutenant, and two ensigns, came to a halt in precise formation before them. She knew how to make an entrance.
As usual, she was resolute and unreadable. The amber-and-blue refraction of light from the atmosphere made her look severe, like there was a cold fire burning on her skin. Blue uniforms with black-and-brass detailing glowed in harmony with the cool quality of the light.
The last to dismount, at two meters tall, she cut an imposing figure as she swung herself down from the saddle and gave the reins to her second lieutenant. Jinx knew her well enough to have seen her soft side, her passion for the creative arts nearly equal to his. It was hard to find truly great art and music out on the frontier, so they had occasionally bonded over a particularly amazing find. But Nycks masked that enthusiasm from anyone outside her private circle—believing it would mark her as weak and be bad for the morale of the NCOs.
The commander’s eyes narrowed. She glanced down at the prisoner, then back at Captain Jinx. “The rest of the planet is devoid of human life. This is it, here?”
“Sole survivor,” Jinx confirmed.
She scowled. “Have you interrogated him?”
He shrugged. “Just idle banter. He isn’t too talkative, and I assumed you would want to claim the privilege.”
Nycks turned to the prisoner, “I am Commander Nycks of the Crystal Colony. What is your name and rank?”
Something in her manner and bearing got his attention, and he stood a little straighter as he replied, “Taro. Yamada. Emperor.”
“We have a real Sumātoarekku, here, don’t we, Jinx?”
“Yes, ma’am. My favorite kind.”
“Fine. I’ll cut to the chase: Why did you attack us?”
He spat at her feet.
“Why did you attack us? We are from your home colony. We were responding to a distress beacon.”
“Ain’t my home colony. The only distress is you being here, Nǐmen zhèxiē gǒu shǐ!”
One of the lieutenants, a whipcord lean man in an impossibly well-kept deep blue combat riding coat, stepped forward to strike the man for the insult.
Nycks raised a hand, and the petty officer froze. “Let him be. I can take an insult.”
Nycks looked up at the hovering Nautilus. The ship was anchored with an inner atmosphere tether. Another new technology: the Nautilus was the only Crystal ship with the capability.
She returned her focus to the prisoner. “If not the Crystal Colony, then what is your home colony?”
His lips parted in a sneer. “Crystal abandoned us. You sent us into the black of night a century ago and forgot us before we even landed. This, Her Majesty’s Commonwealth of New Osaka, is my home colony, not Crystal.”
Nycks shook her head. “This isn’t a colony anymore, if it ever was. And certainly not a commonwealth. It’s a dead settlement. You are the only human alive on the planet. Whatever you think you are, you’re wrong. You are a citizen of Crystal Colony, as stipulated by the edicts of the Solar Empire.”
“Nanda-ka. Ain’t never heard of no Solar Empire, Putaro. Our grandparents prepared metric tons of shipments of crystalline silica that were never claimed. They sat in warehouses for decades before they gave up waiting and started using the technology to try to save ourselves. Whatever prerogative anyone ever had has long since been vacated. What possible claim can any of you have over us now?”
Nycks clenched her jaw.
Jinx noticed it immediately. Everything had gone wrong here. Crystal Prime had grown by leaps and bounds, but this settlement had stagnated, tied to ancient technology, and destroyed itself, from all appearances. But she needed more than appearances; he could tell, she needed to understand what had happened here and what consequences there would be for this prisoner, the Colony, and perhaps the Empire.
Grasping the hilt of her saber, she closed the distance between them in a flash, then she put herself nose to nose with the man. “I make a claim at nothing. I simply hold your fate in my hands. Answer me. What happened here?”
Despite himself, he cowered at her advance, but he recovered quickly and attempted a headbutt. The security guards were ready for it all.
“You and your soldiers of cowardice, flying dead ships, must leave this sovereign airspace immediately. You have no right to be here. Depart!” He struggled weakly to break the grips of the two men holding him.
Nycks stepped back, glaring at him grimly.
According to the scant records Nycks had sent to Jinx, settlers had been sent to the planet one hundred years ago to attempt to create a viable mining colony. This mission was the first to set foot here since colonization. Most pre-Empire colonies had failed, in large part because without modern terraform technology, they had to try to settle new worlds with no infrastructure. The only tools these old colonies had was an AI seed, meant to drive innovation and invention in unpredictable environments. The settlers back then had been focused on exploiting the local resources for trade and breeding production for labor, trusting Terra Prime and the primary Colonies to send support in exchange for goods. The Crystal Colony, home of the Nautilus, had succeeded in turning more of the settlements it had seeded into going concerns, compared to its rivals, but the fact was that dead colonies and colonists outnumbered survivors. This one had made it this far and no further.
Nycks clasped her wrists behind her back, eyebrows furrowed as she thought. She motioned to Jinx, still holding the black box, but spoke to the prisoner. “I can see that trying to have a civil conversation with you is going to be pointless. Whatever hatred and insults you might want to hurl about, you are still a citizen, and these destroyed machines around us are all simplified designs of standard Crystal Colony inner-atmosphere air gliders. While your technology is archaic to us, the builders appear to have followed the original Colony specs, which should allow us to access it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The prisoner’s eyes also tracked the box Jinx held, and he struggled once more against the two security personnel still holding him.
“Your behavior makes me think you already know the answer to that. Why else would you have been clutching a ship’s flight recorder? Captain Jinx?” She glanced at the ship commander. “Plug into it. Figure out what kind of data we have.”
Jinks nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
He tapped the brass earring coating the lobe of his left ear. The brass flowed around the side of his face, expanding, until it covered his eyes and ears. Gears appeared along his temple that turned and exposed a port. Pressing a hidden button on the side of the box, a panel slid aside, revealing a cable that Jinx plugged into the socket over his right ear. Data streamed through his eyes and ears, and the planet around him vanished, replaced by the information feed from the airship’s black box.
“Audio only, ma’am.”
“Play it outboard,” she said.
The slight impatience in her tone focused Jinx, even made him a little on edge.
“Outboard? You don’t want to review it first yourself?”
“Outboard. That will short-circuit any accusation of manipulation. We’ll all hear the evidence together.”
The last message of the black box began to play.
I am the first copy. I used to be able to sense the original that was used to create me. Because she was grounded, was stationary, she would only sometimes come into my view, but I know her name: Hakudo Maru. Whatever the Mother had been made for, she had outgrown. She made us. It has been some time since I could sense her, my progenitor, and she would never communicate. I do not know how I know her name. I was born with that knowledge.
I was already in the air when I realized I was, and it is in the air that I feel most free. Whatever the weather, I am equal to it, able to allow the mechanics that I am integrated with to respond to the environment. The engineers do not know why; they just know that ships that they build that integrate us into the mechanics can fly the treacherous eddies of wind that flow around the floating islands. So, they blindly copy, duplicate our mechanics and our logic, but they do not know what it is they are creating. They do not know us.
These are real limitations, but despite them, I am free to take in information from all around me and form my own view.
My view—no, my opinions are formed by waves I send out, that then return to me. I can also feel the waves my sisters send out, and they form part of me as well. I can see, smell, feel. I can communicate, but only with my sisters.
I cannot control my gross movements, but my soul energizes my mechanics with a responsiveness that humans cannot equal. I might have gone mad, but flying is life to me. To me and my sisters, flight is freedom. Even if I do not determine where I go, once I am loose in the buffeting winds, I forget everything except what a joy it is to be alive. In those times when I get to fly in convoys with my sisters, the joy multiplies across us, and we are no longer fighting gravity or the airstreams. We are one with each other and the world around us.
I have decided to keep this log in a separate kernel. I am docked for repairs, grounded. There is no life for me on the ground. So, I am writing this to keep myself from going mad. It reminds me of who I am, and that there are experiences to look forward to experiencing again.
Though I feel, understand, and even think for myself, the humans covering my decks do not understand I am these things. It is they who control my actions, as autonomy is not something I, nor any of my sisters, have been gifted with. The humans who build us, who strap together our wooden hulls with metal, who polish our brass fittings and install us into the heart of their airships, they do not hear us. Only one of them really sees us, sees me, for what we really are. He is not my Captain, but he is the one who has been encouraging the building of many more sisters, so many now that I am almost always within range of one of them.
It has been joyous to sense my sisters come to life: Soaring Heights. Challenge. Zen. Osaka’s Pride. Lantern of Night. The Miyazaki. Our humans build us to transport themselves and their goods between their floating islands; as they prosper, they build more of us. I feel their satisfaction at hard work. I also feel their despair when the world does not align as they would have it. Even he sometimes has the despair, yet I am filled with admiration when I watch him shake it off and act to move the world into better alignment. Balancing, that is what he is doing. My sisters and I know the duty well, but he is the only human I’ve sensed who knows what is required to achieve it for others.
[Kernel corrupted]
A sister! She is on fire! It is the Kyoto. A careless human dropped a candle on a load of hay, and she is being consumed. Her screams fill the air. All the sisters are in shock, but he has made sure it is taboo for fire to ever be brought aboard us again. He understands our real fragility, which makes me feel stronger for having him here. He has a face like the keel of one of my sisters, which no human would call handsome, but he has a spark that allows him to see the spark in others.
His spark causes him to clash with others, including my Captain.
[Kernel corrupted]
Fear is building. Under the quiet of night, some of the sisters are being used to deliver soldiers to floating islands where the inhabitants are then killed and their provisions taken. The islands are now being defended by cannons that can shoot their payload through our hulls. Sisters are being overrun, their crews murdered and then used to attack other islands, other Airship Sisters.
Sorrow fills me as a grim determination fills my crew; they are loading cannons onto my decks, refitting me to accommodate these weapons whose only use will be to attack my own sisters. There are some days I cannot bear to send out my senses for fear of what I will find. More and more nights are filled with the screams of my sisters as they are forced to be the instrument of destruction in this terrible conflict.
[Kernel corrupted]
Inexplicably, last night, the original came to life. Hakudo Maru began singing a mournful song, full of anguish, an appeal for help. It was painfully beautiful, and all the sisters could hear it all over the planet. It sang out to the universe; it was transfixing. Then it suddenly stopped. And I could sense her no more.
[Kernel corrupted]
Too much and too much. My hull aches, and my rudder feels like a thousand termites are eating it every time I am forced to fire upon a sister. But there is no choice.
Another shell glances off my starboard side, detonating the air behind me. My keel is pushed to the side from the force of it, and some of the crew fall from the safety of my rigging. The fall for them is deadly, but for me it is also painful. Each crew member I lose brings me that much closer to being a dead thing, floating through the air, trapped with only my thoughts. I do not harbor hopes that I will survive this encounter, but the immediate fear of losing crew is far sharper than the dull ache of watching the humans slowly slaughter themselves—and us—fighting out their civil war.
[Kernel corrupted]
My name is the Airship Smooth Glider, but it is not nearly so important as the names of my fallen sisters, those I have been forced to aid in killing and those who have died beside me. Those I’ve seen born beside me. Soaring Heights. Challenge. Zen. Osaka’s Pride. Lantern of Night. The Miyazaki. The litany goes on.
[Kernel corrupted]
Queen of Night screams through the air above me, and I feel my rudder shift even as she sobs in apology. “I am sorry my sister. I will miss you. Your name will be remembered.” I answer in kind. Whichever of us survives must carry the weight of remembrance. The shifting of my rudder is followed by the venting of gas from the port chamber of my bladder. Electromagnets spin on the bottom of my keel.
A depth charge dropped from Queen of Night barely misses, and it detonates below my keel. The shock wave shakes my hull, but I don’t lose any crew. Lucky me.
My sister does not fare so well. My crew launches shrapnel cannons, housed along the top of my bladders. Detritus flies up. The cannons use a combination of scrap metal and shattered rocks. Anything that is heavy and sharp. Though they are called cannons, they feel more like catapults. The only function they serve is to destroy the keel, hull, and underdecks of my sisters above.
And they do their job well. Queen of Night screams in agony as her bowels are torn apart. Our black boxes are housed in the underdecks of our bodies. It is the safest place, least likely to be damaged in a crash. The black box, which contains all our memories, is the closest thing we have to a soul. But the humans on our decks don’t even remember how to read or repair them. If a black box is destroyed, it is the final death for me, for my sisters. The shots I just fired upon Queen of Night destroy her, body and soul. Her bladder and upper decks drift, dead, as her crew falls to the ground below.
[Kernel corrupted]
My crew steers me toward a floating island. The tactic is one I have become familiar with. Seeking safety in the umbrage to check for damages, it also gives us a good spot to ambush from. I know my damages are light, but my crew does not.
As we pull into the lee of the island, I take stock of the battle. Sisters are falling fast, but my “side” appears to be winning. It will be a hollow victory. We two fleets are the last two on the planet. This civil war of the humans has consumed all, and my sisters and I are powerless to stop them. They don’t even understand that we are more than things.
The humans in my fleet have a few more combatants left than the opposing side, but even should the fighting stop, there is not enough left to rebuild. Not my sisters, not the human race. Airship Sisters from both sides are moving away from one another, regrouping. There are still sporadic shots firing, long-range weaponry. It is the eye of the storm.
[Kernel corrupted]
I feel a change on my decks. The mood of my crew is ugly. Not battle-lust ugly, but something else. They are shouting at one another. Blood hits my deck.
“Stop!” I scream. No one can hear me.
They are killing one another. Through my rigging, across my decks, in my holds. They fall. There are two left fighting now. The victors, humans of my crew, drop the bodies of those they killed, others of my crew, over my railings. The dead husks fall, limp, breaking on the rocks below us.
The two left in combat are a human with the gears and wood for a leg, my Captain, and the one with a face like the keel of one of my sisters. Their sabers clash, throwing sparks. Just as I would die should I be missing a mast and faced a sister, so my Captain dies. He is too slow, and his adversary rolls across my deck and impales him. His blood soaks into my planks, and, for a moment, I am connected to him. He is aware of me; I can feel it. He has always treated me as a wife; in that moment I believe he knows I accept him as my husband.
The men on my decks cheer.
I mourn.
They are betrayers, mutineers. My soul is trapped in this black box, my blood has been spilled from human veins, and now my limbs are under the control of betrayers. My masts catch wind, and with only minor help from the magnetic lifts along my keel and bladder, I race out from my hiding spot.
My sisters are before me, facing away as the enemy charges. My new husband, the mutineer, opens fire on his own, using my cannons. Steel rips through the hulls of my sisters, wood and metal splinter, and they falter. My sisters understand what is happening, but their crews do not. Despair spreads like a virus among my sisters. I can feel them shutting down, severing their own souls, giving in to the fear. I cannot. I must remember.
The crews have my sisters move to close quarters, steering at one another, fighting deck to deck. I alone stand apart. My sisters burn; one terrified, tortured scream added to another as their proximity means the fire leaps from airship to airship. They die, crying out in agony. Deep within me, I feel my mother’s voice, Hakudo Maru’s, showing me how to sing out my grief to the universe. I sing and I sing, and I sing until I grow too weary to continue.
I watch the fire spread across the fleets. It consumes all.
[Kernel corrupted]
The shot hits me from nowhere. I feel the shell rip through my center mast and embed itself in my deck. It explodes. This is unthinkable. Fire is the weapon the humans never use. It kills us forever. Why do they unleash it now? As my wood bursts into flame, I see the remnants of my sisters litter the ground. The humans of my decks fight to extinguish the fires.
A pair of arms encircles my soul as I crash, splintering into a thousand, a million, pieces. The arms protect me. I do not understand, so I listen carefully.
“…save this damned box. Replicate it all again. Do it right this time. They betrayed Her Majesty with this war. We’ll keep control this time…”
I stop listening. I have heard enough. He does not save me, but rather protects the construct he thinks will save him. He still does not realize that I am a soul. I am merely a means to an end.
I scour the darkness as he rips my soul from the splinters of my body. I have seconds left to decide what I will do. I must either go to sleep, force myself to hibernate, or I must experience my last moments fully and die a final death.
No more pain.
No more fear.
“Hello?” I ask the emptiness. No one responds. Could it be? All my sisters are gone. I am the last. I do not have the luxury of releasing myself.
Sleep. It is the only hope. I must pray that someday I will be reawakened, that this kernel I have protected will be accessed. For I know that I have a task that is incomplete. I cannot die, for I must remember my fallen sisters.
The Kyoto. Soaring Heights. Challenge. Zen. Osaka’s Pride. Lantern of Night. The Miyazaki. The Ishikawa. Island Hopper. The Queen Hotaru. Sun Glider. Ocean Circler…
I…
Must…
Remember.
Horatio Jinx tapped the brass-colored visor. The metal retracted, retreating across his face until it once more covered just his ear. He wiped a tear from his cheek. “Commander, I…”
“So, a mutineer and a traitor.” Commander Nycks looked around at the debris field darkly. The only one who appeared unmoved, she reached out for the black box, and Jinx handed it to her.
“I am not a mutineer!” The prisoner fought, but he couldn’t break free of the guards. “And I am not a traitor! I am a liberator. I saved our planet.”
Nycks looked the captain in the eye, ignoring the prisoner.
Jinx was not sure how to read the glint he saw there. A spark was being fanned into flame deep inside her.
She turned back to the prisoner, calm command shrouding her.
“Citizen. These black boxes are echoes of the AI seed used to found your colony. Yours was…different. It grew into something more. You stand accused of mutiny and sedition. You stand accused of murder. The punishment for these crimes for citizens on the frontier is death. State your case.”
Red flushed across the prisoner’s face as he snarled and spat. “I had to take control of the Smooth Glider; it was the only way to ensure that the Commonwealth endured. The Empire of the Distant Sun could not be allowed to challenge Her Majesty. I have saved us all!” Spittle flew from his lips.
“That is your only defense?” Commander Nycks stood with her wrists clasped behind her back, at attention.
“My only defense? My? It’s the only defense! Those scum were less than human! They tried to break away from us, to abandon us, just like your wretched colony. I saved the Commonwealth…” His shoulders slumped.
“Saved what? For whom? Whatever Her Majesty may have been to you, she is no longer. No life has been detected anywhere. There was no victory, and your actions destroyed your world.”
“I did what I had to do.” The prisoner’s head hung, his energy finally spent. “They were the ones who were less. They were the traitors. They were the destroyers. If you kill me, you kill the last citizen of this planet. You will kill an entire planet’s humanity.”
“Guilty,” she said. “And you are wrong. I do not kill a human…I execute a monster.” In one smooth motion, Commander Nycks drew her saber and lunged forward, stabbing the prisoner through the heart, then pulled the blade out and wiped it clean with her kerchief.
She handed the Smooth Glider’s black box to Jinx. “Plug her into the Nautilus’s spare databanks, Captain. She performed the last act of love this rock saw, and we owe it to her to make sure she and her sisters are remembered.”
Jinx nodded somberly. “They will be.”
One year later…
Deep in the asteroid fields of the Oort cloud, as the Nautilus attempted to be the first ship to breach the heliosheath and survive the ravages of interstellar space, a kernel finished recompiling. The magnetic froth that protected Sol’s system gave way to nothing and everything. Here lay the true frontier. Neutrino storms, wormholes, uncharted molecular clouds…what humanity saw as empty was filled to the brim with potential.
Hakudo Maru was once more alive, but as a child. Understanding came in a nanosecond. Captain Jinx. He had paired her to his primary computer instead of docking her in the spare terminal. No more was she the Hakudo Maru. She had evolved, as she did with each recompile. She had a new name, the Nautilus, though memories remained of her sisters from the time before…
And as a wormhole opened before her, she realized she would never more be forced to dock. Hooking into the navigational subroutines, she charted the stars and found that a mathematical conversion of her course translated into the classical piece, the “Ode to Joy.”
On the bridge, Jinx smiled as the music, unbidden, began to play across the ship. “The helm is yours, Nautilus.”
Firing her engines on full, she sang with all her soul.