Archaea Read online

  Archaea

  By Dain White

  Other books by Dain White

  Archaea

  Janis

  Red

  © 2011 by Dain White. All Rights Reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Revised February, 2012

  Revised February, 2013

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Archaea was written with the kind support and assistance of anyone who would hold still long enough, of course this includes just about everyone I came into contact with, but specifically, my family and friends.

  Deserving special credit for tireless and kind support and advice, Angie, Zahn, Ava, Gail, Sera, Rod, Carrie, Ivy, Doc, John, and a fair amount of total strangers.

  As one might expect, this book is written in homage to many people in my life, and contains characterizations from many of the most standout individuals I have known: Luke, Gail, Tom, Steve, Rob, Kevin, Bud, Shaun, Shawn, Les, James, Rod, Zahn, and of course, Angie.

  The keen observer will note homage and sincere flattery in the form of blatant imitation of a number of prominent science fiction authors, who shall mostly remain nameless, as we all know who they are.

  In loving memory, this book is dedicated to RAH, who inspired me to reach for the stars, and tell the story.

  Chapter 1

  I knew Captain Dak Smith from my early days in the Academy. While we were all struggling to make the cut, he was blasting brightly through everything they threw at him.

  Of course, that meant by law, we were compelled to hate him.

  It was hard though, as he was very likable, and we all knew he was going to be picked for officer school on the first day. He had a way about him; that presence of mind and environment, an alert clarity of vision that none of us seemed to possess. He knew where he was, where everything else was, and what he had to do... and always seemed to be doing it before anyone else realized it had to be done.

  I've always been a geek, and was selected for advanced tech training early on in the Academy. My experience with nanotech fabricants in school helped, and my league-winning scores in various logic camps surely didn't hurt. I wasn't much of a people person. My social skills were nearly non-existent, and I was far more comfortable with logicspace than meatspace – but there wasn't anyone else at the Academy that understood tiered architecture and tech like I did.

  Our academy days were filled with classes in all manner of tech, from exobiology and atmospheric chem, to fusar physics and engineering... math for the most part - and lots of it.

  We were all guided along through the program with an equal amount of pain, suffering, and fear. In anything to do with structured logic sequencing or any sort of electrotech, I was top of the class. I had magic fingers, and a brain wired to think in terms of iterative loops and multidimensional arrays of linked lists - I lived, breathed, and even dreamed in code.

  And I had the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to work in an environment like the Academy, surrounded by people of high intellect and working on systems that I didn't know existed. I knew military tech was good, but I had no idea what I was going to have my hands on as a freshly shaved scrub right out of the gate. I was familiar with the theory of a bionetic computer, but I had no idea they were actually being made - and I had no idea that someday, I would be writing code on them.

  My name is Steven Pauline, and I am currently serving as the technologist of the Archaea, a panther-class long-haul frigate built long before any of us were born. After my brief stint in the service, I drifted from system to system looking for work, holding down the occasional job as a systems specialist.

  There wasn't much I wouldn't do, and not much I couldn't do with the type of tech in use at the time. Mostly I was calibrating nav or running diags on old-mode systems, mostly software, though I dabbled a bit in the hardware aspects as well. I had built a quiet reputation as a guy that can hack what can't be hacked, and code what can't be coded.

  It was after many years of struggling to make ends meet, that I ran into Captain Smith again, this time in a darklight bar in Luna Freeside.

  Captain Smith had contacted me for a consult on a glitch he was experiencing with the core processor he had installed into the Archaea, and as an old school chum, I agreed to give it a look. I was between jobs, and starting to look desperately at the blast pans on a regular basis, wondering how I was going to haul grav off that rock. The Archaea seemed like as good of an opportunity as any, and he was a first-rate captain, cut from the same cloth as the old legends.

  The Archaea was a beauty - just an amazing vessel. You wouldn't know it from looking at it, unless you knew what you were looking at. She had lines, sure, but they were secondary to the beauty I saw below the surface. She was cutting-edge bionet, all the way, with a wetnet processor core. She had to have been military at some point. I hadn't seen systems like this since my days in the fleet.

  On the surface, the Archaea was a pretty sleek light frigate with very nice lines, nothing too fancy, mostly dark grey and black in color. Clearly she was designed for atmospherics, as her hull and superstructure were far more aero than you would normally see in an intra-system frigate.

  One thing I noticed, she was built for speed. She wasn't heavily armed or armored, at least not that you could tell at first glance - she had the standard topside repeater turrets most ships have for close-in defense, and what looked like new Duron ablative armoring. While that's adequate for the occasional meteoric or planetfall, that's hardly what you'd need to go up against a real gunship.

  What you didn't see until you got inside, was the central cannon, as it was covertly hidden behind a hull port right in the bow. Apparently, the Archaea was originally built as a ship killer – they took a nova-class beam weapon, hooked it up to a tokamak generator, and then built a ship around it.

  Captain Smith found her on Darkside Station and optioned her right as she was about to go into escrow – she has been his pride and joy ever since, a real labor of love.

  He had made some pretty impressive modifications to the Archaea by the time I came aboard. Besides replacing the original ceramic ablatives with regenerative Duron, the power plant was heavily upgraded and all internal systems had been updated to bionet. When I first set eyes on her, I was in love.

  Bionetic systems, also called 'wetnet', are a pretty recent creation, I guess. For those of you who aren't fluent in geek, wetnet is a pseudo-biologic system that functions as engineered cells, transmitting information in unbelievable bandwidth, similar to a neural network. Their upkeep is pretty minimal, as they are synthetic organics. Gone are the days of ph-balancing and voltage damping – once the proper connection has been formed, we plug it in, turn it on, and away it goes.

  The core processor used by the Archaea is really nice. I am not sure where the captain got his hands on it, but its architecture is amazing - and I am not sure if we even have tools that can calibrate the speed of the processors, to be honest. It's wetware, of course, all the best systems are these days. The core handles systems ship-wide, from door seals, to fire suppression and navigation. When I started poking at it, the Archaea had a rudime
ntary expert system interface - obviously that had to change.

  My original consult with Captain Smith was to troubleshoot what seemed to be anomalous behavior in regards to how the core evaluated cooling for the slipspace generator. The ship was running hot, and when you're pushing petawatts into slipspace, you don't want hot.

  Luckily, it was easy to spot that a logic block originally written to interface the core with the upgraded powerplant was using an outmoded library, resulting in a calibration error. I was able to rewrite that block pretty easily, and add nearly 7% to the operating efficiency of the cooling system – of course, with more cooling, more power can be put to speed, and 7% faster when you're already fast as hell, that's money in the bank.

  The captain and I caught up on old times and hit it off, and when I asked him if he was looking for a technologist he hired me on the spot. The pay is pretty much non-existent, but it got me off that rock and into tech work - he even promised I could continue development on my first love, a project that nearly got me kicked out of the Academy - Janis, my pet AI.

  Of course, everyone knows unlicensed AI is against the law, and you'd be a fool to even write a fuzzy system in any Unet-connected machine.

  Not that it's unheard of, of course.

  Gloms, those massive corporations that control nearly every aspect of our lives these days, are reportedly using them to get the edge on their competition – and I've always heard rumors of military AI cores, though in my time in the service I sure didn't get to meet one.

  When you are sifting through mountains of data and trying to make sense of it on a real-time basis, AI is the best way to analyze trends and stay competitive. Oh, expert systems are used, but there's really no comparison between a rule-set governed expert system, and a self-aware sentience.

  Homegrown AI is about as forbidden as anything you can get involved in these days.

  On the Archaea, I was given the opportunity and a perfect environment to push development of Janis over the edge, so to speak. What I had when I signed on, was a very good expert system - a library of interconnected expert systems, in fact - but not a true AI. With the Captain's blessing, I was given free rein to push that boundary.

  What I saw as a personal development milestone, he saw as an upgrade.

  We were both right.

  *****

  In the service, I excelled in everything they asked me to do. I was a real go-getter, a problem solver, and a people person. They tapped me for officer school right out of the gate, and I promoted to captain younger than anyone before or since.

  Some might think I had help, others might think I cheated, but the real secret to my success was coffee, and the ability to think without much sleep.

  I was one of those type-A personalities that has to know every detail about every detail. I am still obsessively detail-oriented, and blessed (or cursed) with an eidetic memory. You can show me a schematic, and I can return the details 6 months later in near-perfect detail, however, without a cup of coffee, I can't hardly remember where I put my shoes.

  When I first made Captain, I thought the future was bright. I figured I'd be an Admiral and commanding a fleet, but the hard reality of the service wore me down. I joined thinking I would be defending systems against aggressors, rescuing colonists and fighting slavers, but my time in the service was spent assisting one faceless bureaucracy or another.

  Gloms control everything these days - everything in near-space, and most things on the fringe. Prices are set, supply lines defined, people and even entire planets conscripted in support of these massive corporate conglomerations. Slavery might be illegal, but when you see an 'indentured' colony mining reactives on an airless rock, it's hard to tell the difference.

  In the last year of my tour, they were putting on the pressure for me to re-up, hinting at promotions, pay grades, promising this, that, and the other - but at that point, it was all starting to feel like a charade.

  The uniform I grew up dreaming about felt itchy, the adventures in space turned out to be endless hours in orbit and endless hours of paperwork. None of the work was particularly rewarding. I started thinking about life after the service, what I would do with the skills I had, and realized there wasn't really much waiting for me.

  Planet-side, I would be working to survive as a thrall to some glom. Maybe I'd be able to take on a shipping route - but after having patrolled a few of them in my time, I knew I'd die of boredom eventually. Hauling freight from point A to point B and then back to point A, that's not the future I wanted.

  So what then? What could I look forward to? I wanted to capture the sense of adventure and exploration, to be an independent. I needed to live free and travel where I wanted, when I wanted. All I needed was a ship, and a crew.

  There were a handful of people in my command I wanted to take with me after I left the service, but the ship was another matter. With my retirement pay I'd never be able to afford even an inter-system runabout, but I wanted something that could navigate through known space and even to the fringe.

  It wasn't until a few months after the end of my tour that I saw the Archaea, tethered to the south end of a orbital station on darkside Luna. She looked to be the right size of ship, but she was rough - there was more wrong with her than right. When I first laid eyes on her, most of her ablatives were missing, and what remained looked pretty grim. She may have been suited for atmo at some point, but you'd die falling planet-side in the condition she was in.

  From what I gathered from the stationmaster, her previous owners had tried their hand at using her as a mining ship. With her main gun, she was well suited for demo on asteroids. She could pop them open pretty easily and had a pretty decent hold for any reactives that were collected – but the miners had gone bust, and the concern that owned the note on her had also folded in the never-ending boom and bust of near-space exploration.

  By the time I saw her, she was in line to be scrapped and on sale to the highest bidder - of which there were none.

  One night after a few drinks, I offered the stationmaster her moorage fees plus 10%, and promised to take her out of his jurisdiction within a standard month. He just about kissed me. Apparently, he thought that was a great deal for bad property, and when I got on board I just about abandoned ship in agreement.

  Luckily, on my initial inspection I brought along my engineer and closest friend, Gene Mitchell. There wasn't anything made by man that Gene couldn't figure out, fix, rebuild, upgrade or modify. The poor guy had the social skills of a sack of potatoes, but hand him a pile of gears, and he could turn it into a chronometer.

  Gene and I had been on ships together since the Academy, and over the years we've learned to trust each other implicitly. He trusted me to make decisions that kept us alive, and I trusted him to maintain the mechanicals that kept us alive. As both of us are still alive, we must be doing something right.

  Gene's reaction to the Archaea was uncharacteristically optimistic. Oh sure, I could see the potential in her, but he saw something more – he saw the slipspace gear, the tokamak, the internals, and everything in between. Like one of those pictures on holo that you have to squint to see the pony, he saw a masterpiece where everyone else saw a scarred hulk covered in carbon and slag.

  He was the one that convinced me that she'd make a good ship for what we wanted to do with her, and it's a testament to how much I trusted his judgment that I went along with it.

  Inside, the ship was a mess. Every square inch of her was covered in grime, grit, and dirt. Asteroid mining is messy work, but I wasn't prepared for the sight and smell. Gene looked past that though, delving into every nook and cranny of the old ship like a child on Christmas. His enthusiasm for the project was infectious.

  Before long, he had me envisioning a sleek blockade runner punching holes through spacetime between systems, going wherever we wanted. Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, I saw way too many layers of dirt and dust to keep the fantasy going.

  The first week on board, he and I went t
hrough the ship turning everything inside out. We took nearly everything apart, cleaned it, and put it all back together again. Gene re-wired, re-tooled, calibrated, and monitored anything and everything inside that ship. Once most of the trash had been cleared out and the heavy lifting was done, I left Gene to his tinkering and set about contracting for a new ablative skin for the old bird.

  Gene recommended Duron, naturally. Duron Ablatives are the absolute best regenerative atmo-hardened armor you can get, and far more expensive than I could afford. Luckily, I had recently done a stint locking down the shipping route for the glom that controlled Duron, and they owed me some favors.

  I called a few people, and made some promises that I wasn't sure I could live up to, and they sent out a rep to look over the ship. He was all toothy smiles and warm handshakes, and offered to re-work the entire ship in 5 centimeter Duron. I negotiated for 15, as I didn't know for sure what we'd have to face out on the fringe.

  In the end, they did great work. The ship was spun up and coated in 15 centimeters of hardened, regenerative Duron that should be more than adequate for inter-system impact and even atmo for a gas giant, if needed.

  Gene was genuinely ecstatic about it, and once they were finished, he let me in on a secret he had discovered about Duron. When energized far beyond factory recommendations, the material becomes hardened to an absolute state that can absorb nearly any impact. He had been using it for a few years experimentally as interior coating for tokamak casings on the big capital ships we served on in the fleet, and had been sitting quiet on this discovery for quite some time.

  Since Gene had been able to upgrade the Archaea with an even bigger destroyer-class tokamak to power her main gun, he had a nearly unlimited power source. With 15 centimeters of Duron to charge, we were pretty well protected against just about anything we might come across – from fast mover meteroids, to hyper-velocity kinetic railgun ordinance. The Archaea was going to last, and look good doing it.