The Six-Eyed Beast

Basil was the only one able to leave the ship at this point, passing a long line of crew members gathering in the main corridor to the exit, waiting for the scanners to be decided on and set up. He was relieved to realize he would not be there to listen to the discussion between Nasz and the crew concerning safety versus privacy. As he walked down the long gangway leading out of the small hole in the ship in-between a damaged and a functioning launcher ‒ the gunports open for repairs ‒ he turned around to look at his ship.

The Rubicon now bore her first of many battle scars, Basil thinking she had grown up, before realizing all the impacts on the hull looked like pimples, and then laughing at his teenage ship. It was good to do some walking, proudly returning from two tough but victorious missions. He decided not to take the small pods at the end of hangar 14, but to take the freight elevator all the way up, past resources and reclamation to the command deck just a few decks above the end of the freight elevator. As he strode towards the still unrepaired barn door, he wondered if greybeard would reappear, as he had gotten used to being talked to by weird apparitions, which strangely always seemed to stick to the same spots. Then again, he had only met Mikka Howe once, the same with greybeard, but weirdly, he had gotten the impression that they were a larger group, reliably showing up to talk strange words to him.

The elevator again banged around in the shaft and finally, the barn door opened, revealing some boxes and some engineers and workers sitting on them. They nodded to Basil but didn’t understand why the captain looked disappointed. Basil smiled when he saw the panel counting down numbers now, as this panel had once meant the world to him, before things got a little crazier than he had anticipated. Much had changed since then, as back then ‒ barely over a month before ‒ he had thought to have lucked upon a cozy position as a captain of a shiny prototype, ready to go out into the stars and do the fleet proud. Instead, he had had to make use of all his skills and willpower to get the deathtrap moving, but in some ways, it had worked out very well. At hangar 9, the engineers grunted and got up from their boxes, to slowly push them out into a deserted hallway on their magnetic hovercarts. Clearly, Kappa 3 wasn’t too busy of a station, but that made it an even better homebase for the Rubicon, as the ship and its peculiarities were still hopefully unknown to their opponents and the wider public. Finally, the number 1 appeared on the panel and the barndoor opened, only to get stuck. Basil had to roll under it, which he did, but right under it he realized it was the perfect opportunity to kill him off in a believable way, as any video feed would show him repeatedly disregard the wait for repairs dogma and get into the squashing area. Luckily, his opponents hadn’t spotted this perfect opportunity, likely having expected him to use a pod. He would find out when a pod exploded, he thought, then sent Nocks a message to scan all pods, too.

Far below him, Nocks hated this paranoid message, as they were in the middle of setting up the final scanners on the exit, only to have to tell the murmuring crew to wait longer for the scan arches to be set up for each pod. Doctor Boddins was especially eager to leave, for on his back ‒ hidden in his backpack ‒ were some Visser eels slowly running out of oxygen in the transport tank, ruining the snack he had planned on taking on the romantic observation deck on the top of the station. After some back and forth with an indignant Nocks, he was quickly shut down by Nasz showing up, happy to establish her iron rule over the crew. Mellir watched this and decided to make Nasz his new paragon, as she needed way fewer words to get points across than Basil. Then, the five engineers destined to leave the ship altogether banded together and said they had had enough and that technically, they were no longer crew members and therefore no longer subject to the security on the ship. Nasz was again delighted at this opportunity.

- So, you’re the five engineers leaving this ship after just a few weeks?

One of the engineers, a human woman called Sila Peterson stepped forward, standing upright but still looking up to Nasz.

- Yes, we’re done here, that’s what we are trying to tell you.

Nasz again surprised everyone by being able to narrow her eyes not only vertically, but also change her pupils to a thin upright line, combining this with raising her fins.

- See, ensign. Your captain never gave you a performance score. I guess that’s on me. And all I ever saw from you was your attempt to run off the ship quickly against standing orders. So, I suggest you stay here and wait with everyone else or you’ll never work on anything more interesting than a freight barge again.

Another engineer from the group made a disagreeing face.

- Freight barges are pretty interesting, to be honest.

Peterson shot him a meaningful glance, eyes wide, shutting him up as she didn’t think freight barges were the ultimate goal of her career.

- Dismissed, ensigns. To the back of the line.

As the five former crew members stepped to the back of the line, they hoped to see Perlas, as he was sure to lift their spirits or stand up for them, although they had been amongst those being most disgusted by him in the initial days and weeks of the ship’s journey. Instead, they ran into Mender, still pale and with Lin’s hand around her shoulder.

- Pathetic. Why don’t you take the next away mission? Better people than you have lost their life.

None of the five responded, shuffling past the rest of the crew. Perlas was nowhere in sight, since he was working on setting up a distortion field against Diral teleportation technology ‒ which was untested and entirely theoretical but deemed worth a shot, as it was thought to simply negate the attempt to teleport completely by blocking the possibility of sending physical objects through the distortion field. It basically consisted of setting up smaller and modified shield generators inside the vessel, just inside the outer hull to make it even more surprising, as most scanners were unable to penetrate the HCC hull ‒ apart from the Diral, but Perlas was hoping CO wasn’t up to their scanning standards as well. Against the Diral, he had simply installed shield generators in several rooms, to activate after someone appeared. They had tried shooting at those shields, but were quickly incapacitated by the floor, which Perlas had connected to the next outlet, like a flytrap.

Unburdened by these duties, Basil was taking great strides towards the command center, quickly passing through more and more lived-in corridors. The command center itself was directly below the observation deck, with a beautiful 360-degree view onto the oncoming and leaving ships through real windows. Basil had to enter through a transparent gateway scanning him for weapons, which immediately alerted security to him, as he was still wearing his sidearm. After some conversations and another illegal use of his CO ID, he was allowed to enter, albeit disarmed. The command center managed to make two impressions at the same time: very busy and underwhelming. For once, at least 30 officers and lower ranks were zipping about between workstations, making sure Kappa 3 operated smoothly ‒ they even had signs hanging over their areas explaining what they were doing, such as CUSTOMS, DOCKING, OPERATIONS, or even SENTIENT RESOURCES. In the very center of the rotunda was a sign showing the sigil of the League and the familiar stars of an admiral around them, but one fewer than Hays’ door had shown, as Admiral Iffi Petumbio wasn’t a fleet admiral, just a regular admiral. Next to the sigil was a sign and an arrow pointing up some stairs. Petumbio’s office was simply dead-center and above his command center, allowing him a beautiful 360-degree view onto his underlings. As Basil headed up the stairs, he locked eyes with Lieutenant Marcía Zhang, whom he had spoken to a few weeks before when he was trying to get a freight barge to pick up his precious D-9 core. She was sitting at a desk right next to the stairs, also having a nice view out of some transparent safety glass.

- Greetings Lieutenant Zhang, how are you?

- Captain Basil. Good, how are you?

For a moment, Basil wondered what would happen if he answered the question honestly and told her he was frequently visited by angels and demons having strange conversations with him but he thought it might be down to his substance abuse and that he avoided sleeping due to his damn ship following him into dreams, destroying inhabited planets too often.

- All green, thank you. Is the admiral in?

- Yes, they are waiting for you.

- They?

- You’ll see.

Zhang turned back to her display, leaving Basil to wonder why she didn’t want to elaborate further. He shrugged and went into Petumbio’s lair. As the double door opened, he thought opposites indeed attracted, as Petumbio’s office was the polar opposite to the one his friend Hays had had. It was brightly lit, full of plants and sported arguably the smallest table of the whole admiralty. Petumbio and his guest were lounging on a bench, watching the ships go past, it almost looked romantic. The door’s noise alerted them to Basil’s presence and they stood up, obviously having waited for quite some time, since both grunted a bit when getting off the low bench.

- Ahh, Captain Basil. Good to finally see you back on Kappa!

- I must say you have it nice up here, Admiral.

- Ah, you should have seen us a few months back, we were bustling. But I don’t disagree with some peace and quiet for now, tougher times will come again.

It was easy to see why the Dorions were so prevalent in the League’s media. Petumbio had a beautiful, low voice, changing intonation rapidly ‒ and likely set up his interpreter unit in a way that transcreated his almost theatre-stage voice faithfully. Petumbio now turned to his guest, a human with the rank of a captain, a blonde, thin-faced official-looking man in his forties or fifties.

- This is Captain Adano from RND.

Basil instantly hated this guy. Not only was he from RND, he also looked exactly like the kind of people who were smart enough to shut up in certain official situations and since Basil had never reached that level of self-control, he disliked the type.

- Greetings, Captain Adani.

- Captain AdanO.

Basil had learned this trick a while back, it simply and quickly set up disrespect and disinterest in the conversational partner.

- Apologies, Captain Adanno.

- No, the emphasis is on the a. AdAno.

- Apologies, Captain. Anyways, what brings you out here? RND is operating out of Epsilon 1 now, correct?

- We are. I’m here because your ship is here.

Admiral Petumbio had been wondering about the strange introduction rituals amongst humans, apparently their names had much deeper meaning than he was aware of, which surprised him, as he had been keeping quite a few humans as “pets” as his Catanian friends once called it. He decided to exit the conversation.

- Captains Basil and AdAno, might I get back to my duties? My staffers have some documents for me to sign.

Captain Basil nodded and shook his hands, Adano hurriedly did the same, then gestured Basil to the window of the office, overlooking one of the docking pylons of Kappa 3.

- Might I show you something, Captain Basil?

Basil hoped he wasn’t misreading the situation.

- Of course.

They approached the window, looking at the hundreds of meters of pylon where several ships were docked. There were 2 liners, a fleet frigate, several smaller and larger freighters and a modern heavy cruiser.

- See that cruiser over there?

- Hard to miss, what about it?

- Sentir class. The SFC Maka. Crew of zero.

- Zero?

- RND’s latest prototype. A fully automated ship, controlled by our best AI.

Basil saw his reflection in the window raising first one and then two eyebrows. Not only was the sudden mention of AI perfectly aligned with what he was researching, he had thought the concept of an AI cruiser had been buried in the files by then. There had been numerous attempts by the League to cut down on crew costs and loss of life in space by replacing crews. Bots were standard in Basil’s time, sent to either hazardous or hard-to reach spaces on ships, easily replaced, but not very useful for thinking outside the box, as a high-powered CPU still needed too much power and space. Basil had been fully updated on the current possibilities by Nocks, who one day had suddenly overshared her progress with the captain one evening, but the captain had already taken his sleeping aid and not much time to take in information, even if Nocks was finally talking fluently. But he did remember the previous attempts in AI cruisers, the SFC Nappia being the first of them, quickly hallucinating an invasion and opening fire on the research ship accompanying it before being put out of its misery by a nearby battlecruiser. Then, there was the SFC Kukulu with a much more powerful CPU needing a lot of power and space, making the ship useless as a cruiser. One day, it refused to work, claiming to have become self-aware and therefore protected by the sentient beings’ act. After some investigation against the will of the ship, it was found that it had simply read up on the laws of the League and found the quickest way to fulfill its mission of self-preservation by pretending to be self-aware, thereby gaining the right to stay safely in dock. It was tested for a while, found to be non-sentient and quickly dismantled. The final attempt had been the SFC Guran, a much more disciplined AI that self-destructed upon connecting to the wider grid, finding a dark philosophy forum and learning that nothing mattered. Now, they had apparently tried again, which was worrying to Basil, as he did trust the crews of the ships in the fleet much more than their leaders.

- You tried again? Didn’t you already create enough ships with psychological issues?

- It works. And you’ll be the one to prove it. Or rather your ship.

- How so?

- I’ve got your Senatorial Orders right here. In 4 days, you are to reach a position in-between Epsilon Indi and 61 Virginis. Bit outside the trade and travel routes, an ideal place for a test.

- And how will we test your ship?

- You’ll fight it.

- Come again?