Chapter 005: Training

The primary method of FTL travel - for Mankind and all known alien species - is by using a Hyperspace Drive. It works by rupturing reality in front of a ship, allowing it to enter Hyperspace - a poorly understood dimension overlapping the Realspace.

In Hyperspace, the very space is compressed (at least when compared to Realspace). This means that a distance between two points will be much smaller, allowing ships (that move with STL speed) to effectively travel much faster than light. For example, 4.367 light-years between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri is shortened to mere light days when one draws the line between them in Hyperspace.

Gabriel Newman, a spaceship engineer and self-taught astrophysicist, constructed the first working Hyperspace Drive in 2156. Despite the scientific community seeing his device as nothing but pseudoscience, he managed to gather enough money from his internet followers to buy a small ship - baptized the Curiosity - and equip it with his FTL drive. Its successful journey to Alpha Centauri signified the beginning of Mankind’s interstellar expansion, the formation of the Solar Commonwealth, and the start of the Golden Age of Mankind.

Hyperspace travel isn’t safe. Prolonged exposure causes madness in all sentients (including sufficiently advanced AI). Sudden changes in spatial compression might tear ships apart. Pirates, alien raiders and a dozen more bizarre threats roam in its depths. Because of that, 98% of the hyperspace traffic is limited to well-tested routes alongside hyperspace beacons.

Warships sometimes brave the edge of the unknown, typically as a way of bypassing blockades and reconnaissance missions. Ships of the Explorers’ Guild, in the meantime, tend to consider the unknown as their home.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 1, page 420

***

The next few days were both hectic and entertaining. Once their full day of recovery had ended, Christopher and Ryan began their education. Captain Keller assigned each of them a teacher to train them. For Christopher, that was Tiaa Sistonen herself.

Each of them chose a different way of introducing their pupils to their work. Tiaa had Christopher sit down in front of a terminal in her office… and spend the next eight hours doing paperwork. To rub salt in the wound, she then informed him that all of that was redundant as the computer could perform that on its own - though the computer’s ability to do that ‘mysteriously’ depended on Christopher’s motivation during the training.

This ended with Christopher concluding that Chief Tiaa’s methods were unique yet very efficient. He immediately felt very motivated to learn. Of course, there was also a possibility that the spooky paperwork was some onboard meme he was too ‘old’ to understand.

He also got to wear the skinsuit. It was…a unique experience. The suit was tight, at first, but it shaped itself to fit him better. A few seconds later, and he barely felt like he was wearing anything. He almost felt naked. Modern technology was impressive, he had to concede that. The only part where he sensed something was his back.

According to Tiaa’s explanation, the suit’s power source and oxygen storage were located on the back. With the technology of the far future, all of that was squeezed into a slightly thicker segment of the suit (still flexible) instead of a large, backpack-like container. Of course, due to constraints in space, the suit had oxygen for around five minutes (less if he tried to use it to move around in space). But these were work clothes, not a real spacesuit.

From Christopher’s point of view, the weirdest part was parading around in a suit that you couldn't feel was there. It was downright unsettling when Tiaa was around.

***

Ryan’s first day at work was even more unique. To begin with, it started much later, as he had to wait around two full shifts until he was called to work for the third shift. So rather than twenty-four hours, he loitered around for forty.

Once he put on his suit, the map feature of his implants’ UI led him to some unremarkable part of the ship. He had no idea where he was - everything aboard looked the same to him. Most of the corridors were empty, though occasionally someone passed through (typically in a hurry). He didn’t wait long, though, before his teacher appeared.

The teacher was a towering and bulky man (between thirty and thirty-five years old) with an almost geometrically straight jawline, short black hair, and a beard. A substantially sized beard. He wore a black and yellow skinsuit typical for the Echo’s engineers. Though, in all honesty, his line of work would have been clear even without that, as he had many mechanic's tools attached to his suit. He also had the silver shoulder mark of a petty officer.

“So, you must be the new guy.” The petty officer waved to him and started talking once Ryan got close. “Name’s Bogdan Frolov. I’m the head of the engineering team you’ll be part-timing in. Here to teach you the ropes. Ready?”

Ryan nodded in answer.

“Excellent. Now follow me.” They walked for a while through the empty and a bit dimly lit corridors. “How much did they tell you about the job?”

“Fix stuff aboard this ship, help steal from other ships?”

Bogdan chuckled. “Yes, in short. You are part of the Recovery Team, and that’s your focus. However, the ship doesn’t like carrying people who are dead weight for most of the time. Just as marines, recovery team members double as regular crew members. You are to become an engineer, working under me.” Bogdan already mentioned it earlier, but he seemed like a person who preferred to explain everything when speaking to rookies. Which made perfect sense. “Something breaks or requires periodic maintenance, we receive notification from the AIs. We get there, we fix the problem. We can’t solve the problem, we notify the AI and soon a small trolley comes in with the parts to replace, or a missing specialist is called. This is the trolley’s rail.” he engineer pointed towards a line on the floor in the center of the corridor. ”If it lights up, that means that transport is underway. They go fast, so it’s best to move away.”

Ryan failed to notice it earlier, though now that he thought about it, it was there all the time. Surprising, and a bit discouraging.

“The AI?” Ryan asked. He didn’t feel comfortable with them being around. He had heard enough scary stories about things happening when an AI malfunctioned.

“The ship has two central AIs that help us keep everything working.” The engineer continued. “The External AI oversees all ‘outer’ systems, like weaponry, sensors, and propulsion. The Internal AI oversees everything other than that, from energy generation to toilets.” Ryan nodded, despite being even less happy than before he had asked. “Less scary than you think. Neither sentient nor sapient, and very modern, so there is no danger.”

He still had mixed feelings about it. On one level it was comforting, but the very fact that the engineer felt the need to reassure him was… less reassuring. Was it because the man knew about the AI perception, or because he knew there was something potentially problematic?

“When there is an issue, the AI calls us.” The engineer continued, unfazed by Ryan’s sudden doubts. “Both AIs have blueprints and backups of both the hardware and software, so they will offer you suggestions via your implants’ UI. Stuff like ‘this cable shouldn’t be burned’ and so on. Though from time to time the AI fails to notice a problem, or the damage is… unconventional, so developing your skills in the field is a superb idea we’ll work on.”

“Sounds like we are all just biological maintenance robots for the ship.” Ryan commented. Tavia might have been a technological backwater, but he still saw robots from time to time. Though they never did maintenance, just cleaned stuff.

“Well, in a way.” The engineer chuckled. “As long as it works, and the ship works, I guess.” Suddenly, he stopped, in front of what looked like a maintenance hatch. “Right, that’s the place.”

“Place for?”

The petty officer turned towards him and grinned in answer. “Well, for your first assignment, of course!” Ryan expected that. “There is a place behind this hatch where the cables powering several subsystems go through. And while they aren’t very important, having the power supplied to lighting and temperature control on this level is still a useful thing.” If lighting and temperature control weren’t important, Ryan didn’t want to know what was important. “Sadly, it seems to have a malfunction. We require someone to check it out. It’s most likely nothing important, just some loose screw.”

Something was fishy. Ryan noticed it. This whole ‘mission’ probably wasn’t even ordered by the AI. And why was an engineer (and a petty officer, a leader of a squad of engineers) escorting him personally? Beginning of training, right, but still…

“Now, do you see those red and black stripes around the hatch?” Bogdan continued. It would be tough to not notice the massive stripes painted on the metal surrounding the hatch. Ryan nodded in answer, irritated by the obvious question. “Do you know what those stripes mean?”

Finally, a question he couldn’t answer. A challenge. Learning seemed to have started for real.

“Danger?” He tried to guess.

“Yes, and no. It’s a warning about danger, but only about one special type of it.” The conversation quickly evolved towards being interesting. “Listen. The ship’s acceleration and deceleration is a pain for everyone aboard. 5g acceleration, which means five times the Earth’s gravity, exerts enough pressure on your body that if you were lying head-first towards the direction of the ship’s movement, you would lose consciousness because of blood being pushed away from your head. “ Now that was quite scary. “That’s just one of the myriad of troubles it could create. Thus, to travel through space with a sensible speed you need to suppress the effects. This is accomplished by diamagnetic field generators spread around the ship. Diamagnetism, for your information, is the weaker form of magnetism that, unlike ferromagnetism, works on everything.”

He was aware of that, though none of his teachers mentioned that diamagnetism was employed as a method of inertia compensation.

“Ceilings, walls, floor, all of them have entire arrays of field generators. It’s also what’s responsible for artificial ‘gravity’ here. It’s not perfect, as people still can perceive slight fluctuations of the magnetic field. It takes a while to get accustomed. I can still remember feeling nauseous weeks after my first travel.” Ryan noted in his mind that he should have a chat with Christopher. This unspecified sense of malady and stomach upheaval which had both of them in its tight grip for most of their first day aboard wasn’t caused by Tiriel’s cooking. What a relief. “Safe acceleration is 5 to 10g. When it’s an emergency, we can go up to 20g, but nobody likes to do that because if the field generator malfunctions…” Ouch. “Now I’ll ask again. What do those stripes mean?”

It was clearly something associated with the acceleration thing, as Bogdan didn’t look like a person to just stand around and give useless expositions about things (then again, education was pretty much exactly that). This didn’t leave many options.

“Area without inertia compensation?”

The engineer nodded. “Correct. Covering the walls with diamagnetic field generators makes it a bit more difficult to perform repairs to all those pipes, cables, and so on. So all those maintenance tunnels are much more… exposed. Because of that, it’s forbidden to enter areas marked by red and black stripes when the ship is accelerating or decelerating. Or during combat. Especially during combat. Evasive maneuvers are a pain in the ass.” Ryan could imagine that. ”If you forget, the UI will display a warning. Despite that, accidents still occur.“ That was even easier to imagine. Ryan knew at least a few people for whom switching off warnings and system announcements was an absolute necessity to use something. “If something is seriously messed up and we need to fix something during the acceleration, we have to put on a specialized suit. If combat alert is sounded, you have to wear it by default, as the ship getting hit during the evasive maneuvers might break the inertia compensation. But the most noteworthy thing you have to learn right now is that leaving a mess around is NOT an excellent idea.” The man paused, staring at the trainee as if waiting for Ryan to say something.

It didn’t take long.

“Because all the items we leave around get affected by acceleration too?”

Bogdan nodded. “Not bad, not bad. That’s the problem. Once we had a trainee leave a screwdriver in the maintenance area. A few days later the ship started slowing down, so the screwdriver flew through twenty meters of the tunnel, gaining momentum, before piercing through an incredibly important cable. The entire deck lost power, and we ended up having to cut through bulkheads to free people trapped inside. Moral of the story? You can effortlessly glue things to your suit for a reason.”

He paused for a second. His eyes jumped around, an unmistakable sign of using UI. Ryan waited patiently for a few seconds.

“Right, so the ‘basic introduction about safety regulations’ thing can be ticked off. They expect us to give trainees that talk before letting them into maintenance space.” Ryan was surprised that someone around here cared for work safety. Surprised and relieved. “If I didn’t do that, the system would notify chief Tiaa, and nobody wants to bother her unless it’s vital. I want you to go inside, follow the UI pointers, and fix the defect.”

Ryan spent his entire life in a totalitarian regime, as a son of its critics. Sure, Tavia was one of the less cruel and only moderately paranoid regimes in the Galaxy - even his parents recognized that. It even tolerated its critics, as long as they kept their protests civil and not excessively loud. The sole reason they purged Ryan’s friends (and tried to kill him) was because one of them sought to bomb some government official, and that’s where the tolerance ended.

But there were enough people who tried to take advantage of the system. Nothing easier than ‘befriending’ some enemy of the regime and then notifying the police of his every move for money and other benefits. Tavia knew how to make the opposition’s sympathizers' lives harder without resorting to physical violence.

Ryan learned it the hard way. And this experience screamed that petty officer Bogdan Frolov was up to something.

Not following the trainee at all? Not giving him any spare parts or tools? Suspicious.

“S… I’m expected to fix it.” The engineer nodded. “Alone? With no spare parts or tools?”

“Oh, that malfunction is a recurring thing.” The answer wasn’t satisfying at the slightest. A recurring malfunction with an AI overseer and regular maintenance? “The thing is, this place has a bit of an unpleasant reputation. Five years ago some guy had a mental breakdown and ended up killing himself somewhere around here, and now people are claiming that the area is cursed. Nobody admits to believing it, but we assign the duty to the new people.”

Tiaa had mentioned something about the crew members often scaring the new guys with spooky tales. Ryan was a bit amazed that it cropped up in the first ten minutes of his work, though.

“I see. So, there is a ghost there. And he causes the energy cables to malfunction.” Ryan summed up. It was so inconsistent and irrational that it wasn’t easy to say aloud without a condescending tone. Ghosts on the SPACESHIP?

“Well, that’s how the stories go.” The engineer admitted. “Even though many people saw the ghost, nobody made a single photo of him. Something about the ‘unexpected disturbances in the implants’.” To Ryan, it sounded like a convenient lie.

Oh, well. Sounds easy enough.

“Right, so I’ll go check it out.”

***

The information on the UI led him through a long and narrow corridor. Walls and the ceiling were a mix of metal grating, pipes, and what looked like cables. Big cables. The floor was there only partially, as from time to time he had to walk on tightly connected clusters of pipes.

It was claustrophobic. And quite hot. Plus there was a quiet and unsettling humming in the background, created by various machines and mechanisms keeping the ship running. In short: it was the perfect place for a human to see or hear things, as long as he was superstitious.

Ryan wasn’t. And even for him it was still pretty unsettling. The thing that Bogdan said got to him, though he wouldn’t admit that even in front of himself.

After maybe three minutes, he made it to the place where the malfunction happened. There was some box on the wall, opened up and with exposed wiring inside. A few of the cables were plucked out.

The AI suggestion was to put them back in. The suit was shielding him from getting electrocuted, which made the repairs easy. He just followed the AI instruction and pushed the cables back in.

Then he heard a loud wailing sound. He turned towards the source of it… and froze.

He looked at a face watching him from between the power cables. Pale skin, vacant eyes. He opened the UI and tried to take a photograph of it (Tendrik taught him well), but he ended up with a window opening up in front of him. With a large ‘ERROR’ on top of it.

“Seriously?” He whispered to himself, maintaining the contest of stares with the face. Ryan could scarcely believe what he was just seeing.

A ghost? For real?!

No. No way.

The ghost wasn’t moving around, nor did it charge at Ryan. This provided him with some much-needed time to think. He moved a few steps sideways. While the face’s eyes were empty, something in it shifted. The empty eye sockets seemed to follow him.

“Alright, fuck it. I don’t believe in this shit.” He mumbled. Partially as a statement, and partially to persuade himself. He gathered enough courage and marched towards the face with his head high.

***

A few minutes later Ryan emerged from the maintenance tunnel. The engineer was still standing there.

“And? How was it?” Bogdan said.

“I fixed the issue.“ Ryan answered. Then he pulled the item out from behind his back. “You’ll need a new ghost, though.”

In his hand was a small ball, with the face of the ghost still plastered on one side. It was malfunctioning, the face moving from one position to another, as it tried to make its eye follow both people present.

The engineer laughed loudly. Then he slapped Ryan’s back. “Great job! Normally people just leave the place, scared. From time to time someone has a panic attack. A person just getting closer to the ghost and dismantling him is unusual.”

It was a test. Ryan realized that the second his fingers confirmed that the ghost was, in fact, perfectly solid.

“Quite fearless you are, it seems.” The engineer concluded. “Well, congratulations. Too bad we’ll have nothing to laugh about.” Ryan didn’t consider it a bad thing. “Well, time to start the job for real. Come, you’ll meet the rest of the team.”

***

“I hate being right.” Captain Keller said, his eyes still focused on the monitor in front of him. “How many?” He had just arrived on the bridge, and he already didn’t like what he saw. The fact that he foresaw that this could happen didn’t help.

“One battlecruiser, two light cruisers, and four destroyers.” The Echo’s exec (known in some fleets as the first officer) Lena Drathari reported. “Quite a number for an anti-pirate patrol.”

She was an undeniably beautiful woman, though much too… artificial for Alexander’s taste. Typical humans didn’t have half-lavender and half-crimson red hair. And, as far as the captain knew, blue skin and single color eyes (with neither irises nor pupils) were even rarer.

Lena was a peculiar one. She was an outsider, attached to the Echo by the Guild’s higher-ups as the last exam before turning into a captain of her own ship under the Guilds’ banner. There were things that she had to learn, things that were best left unwritten. She had to learn them from the captain.

Captain Keller was also expected to search for any hints of disloyalty. He was chosen for that role because he was rather good at it. And, which was an added benefit, he didn’t go genocidal when ordered to work with transhumans. A rare trait.

“You don’t send your navy’s flagship to look for pirates.” The captain answered briefly. “And as far as I know, that battlecruiser is the biggest ship in the Tavian navy. Besides, it’s rather peculiar that they seem to be adhering to the same route as we do. Did you try to contact them?”

“Yes. I feigned interest in traveling to the next system together. They declined.” Lena might have been a bit too bizarre for Alexander’s taste, but she was a rather competent addition to the crew, as she just proved.

“Unsurprising.” It’s hard to fake a hyperspace disappearance if people see you leaving the system together with the victim.

Looks like we pissed the locals off more than we thought. What a bunch of losers.

“Can we take them down?” Lena was sharp enough to know that there was no chance of a single heavy cruiser taking down a much heavier battlecruiser accompanied by a considerable escort. But the Echo was much more advanced than anything some meager subsector country could muster (even without counting the numerous archeotechs that it was equipped with), and Captain Keller had a reputation as a devious tactician.

“Not without receiving serious damage.” He would have to resort to bringing out the Godhammer, and that was something he was determined to avoid in all but the most dire of circumstances. Or when it would be sufficiently hilarious. “Let’s consider that plan B. Innocent, I have a question for yo…”

The tactical officer looked up from his place on the bridge.

“Statement: It is done.” What?

***

Rear admiral John Evans of the Tavian Republic Navy was unwittingly doing the same thing as Captain Keller. Standing in front of a monitor showing their soon-to-be opponent... and trying to conjure a plan.

The Echo was flying through the nothingness in the midst of the Tavian system with 0,03c speed. It was the standard marching speed for ships. A moment of acceleration, a lot of time flying forward with stable velocity, and then a while for deceleration before one reached the spot where they could access Hyperspace. The standard method of travel. One could go quicker if in a hurry, but more acceleration meant more fuel consumed.

Rear Admiral Evans planned to take advantage of that. Officially, his forces were in a hurry so they accelerated longer and were now sailing with a velocity of almost 0,05c. They would access the Hyperspace earlier and then wait until Echo did too.

It wholly depended on whether the Echo was aware of their belligerent intentions. Otherwise, it could wait for the pursuers to disappear in the Hyperspace and then travel to another edge of the system. For now, however, it seemed that the Echo’s crew wasn’t aware of the threat.

Rear Admiral Evans wasn’t sure about it. Captain Keller had a… dangerous reputation. And a lot more experience than the entire Tavian fleet combined.

The entire mission was lunacy, and he recognized it. The Guild was assured to investigate. And no amount of advocates in the Supreme Council of Mankind could help Tavia if they antagonized the Guild. He could think of at least two major factions in the Council that would be pissed off by Keller’s death. But despite having an uncle in the Ruling Council (who zealously opposed the idea), Rear Admiral Evans received his orders. Engage the Echo, pillage the remains, kill everyone.

He sincerely hoped that they were going to figure out his intentions and avoid contact. He had enough connections to avoid being branded for incompetence. But that was increasingly unlikely.

Should I go for a missile engagement? Probably not. They have better technology, this means better ECMs and missile targeting systems. Artillery duel sounds like a better solution, though…

That’s when the monitor in front of him went black. And this shouldn’t have happened.

What the…

Rear Admiral Evans glanced at the captain of the Guardian, the flagship of the Tavian Republic Navy that he currently resided on. After a short while, Evans received an answer.

“Looks like a sensor malfunction. We should get the feed back soon.” Two seconds after the captain concluded his report, all monitors on the bridge died out simultaneously, save for those in the enviro section. Then the lighting went out, and it left them in darkness illuminated only by the still-working computers overseeing the life support.

Then all the monitors lit up again. All of them displayed the same picture of a building with white walls, stained glass in the large windows and a cross adorning the tower. All of it accompanied by a large text.

‘Meet hot, single churches in your vicinity?!’ What the f…

***

“You did WHAT?!” Exec retained the ability to ask rational questions through Innocent’s explanation. Captain, in the meantime, was on the verge of asphyxiation caused by laughter.

“Clarification: I have injected computer viruses into the systems of all heavier warships of the Tavian Republic.” It was amazing how smug Innocent could sound despite speaking in a robotic voice. “Once switched on, they mess up everything other than life support systems. That’s one of my best viruses. They will require at least two days to purge all computer systems, as nothing less will stop my viruses. Then they will have to do a clean reinstall of absolutely everything. They can do it faster by copying the programs from the escort vessels, but that only counts for the hardware they have in common. Unless their commander is deranged, he will not attack us with his entire heavy artillery completely dead. I estimate that they will require at least three days to repair everything besides their heavier guns, and before that they can’t even decelerate, much less shoot us.”

“Not precisely what I meant.” Lena said while the captain abandoned all pretenses of decorum. He laughed so hard that he lost breath, falling on all fours yet still laughing like a madman. Sometimes he enjoyed exaggerating. For comedy’s sake, as he often explained.

“Smug answer: What can I say? Each age gets the method of evangelism that it deserves.”