Chapter 018: Malice

The first Enhanced (known under many different names throughout the Human Space) were created during the War of Purity. After the initial engagements made the Commonwealth aware that some of the heavily customized transhuman warriors could engage entire platoons of conventional infantry in combat, its military command realized they needed a completely new type of soldier.

The result of the Warrior 2.0 Project was the creation of the first Enhanced. They were born through a combination of the Commonwealth’s own science, the captured transhuman technology and even the biological knowledge of the now pardoned genetic warlords.

Each of them is a human-shaped machine of war, with up to eighty-five percent of their bodies replaced with biological or cybernetic enhancements. Superhuman strength, resilience, speed and senses make each of them a power to be reckoned with.

They are an extremely costly endeavour, with even the countries considered to be major powers within the Confederation of Mankind rarely capable of fielding more than several hundred Enhanced. The Solar Commonwealth fielded entire divisions during the War of Purity, but at a terrible cost - with the success rate of conversions growing during the war from ten to eighty percent, more than five million volunteers died, were permanently crippled or driven insane in failed surgeries.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 2, page 189

***

EGS Echo, Crew Deck

21:32 29.06.2610 STT

Cadet Christopher Hall

The time had passed, the Echo had joined the task force, Texian recruits were almost no longer visible unless you entered their designated quarters, and the Lieutenant Commander Athalia started complaining to everyone within earshot about not being capable of producing antiemetics fast enough to deal with the demand.

As a whole, it was an uneventful time.

He saw people from other ships going around the Echo during the first day, but the barely concealed hostility offered to them by the crew had chased off all but the most foolhardy. It’s hard to feel welcome somewhere where the entrance (in this case, the hangar deck) is guarded by a squad of scary looking marines, doing their best to non-verbally threaten all arrivals.

In a way, Christopher found that hilarious. Heartwarming too, sort of. The latter part depended on whether it all happened due to the crew loving Captain Keller so much to listen to his strange demands… or simply hating the crew members of other ships so much due to political and religious differences.

At some point he got coerced by Tiriel (technically speaking she did ask him nicely) into leaving the quarters. Of course, this was the deceleration period, but he had managed to mostly conquer the spacesickness.

He found no real reason to go look for Nekia and Kivanna, especially as they weren’t that late. Merely ten or twenty minutes. However, Tiriel had entered a serious paranoia mode due to at least some people from outside of the Echo still visiting the ship and the two girls being themselves.

Tiriel occasionally acted really motherly towards the other female members of the team, but telling them to go straight home after work and not talk to strangers was a new level of this entirely. Christopher wasn’t going to complain, as if she didn’t do it, he probably would have to do it in her stead.

He used his power as the person in charge of the team to find them. The personal computers could be tracked, though he was trying to do his best to use it as little as possible. It was the first time he ended up doing that outside of training, so he seemed to be doing alright in his quest to not go around violating people’s privacy.

They were not far away from the quarters, in a dead end corridor (it theoretically ended with an access gate leading to the maintenance corridors, but they weren’t shielded from acceleration so entering it now was a suicide).

That alone was the first indication that something was wrong - there were other reasons for them to be together in such a place, but to do so while being late worsened the situation notably.

Since he now started having his doubts about the whole situation, he ran towards the place. He stopped right before the corridor started, quickly caught his breath and leaned over the edge.

Kivanna was standing behind Nekia. She was obviously rather terrified. Nekia didn’t look much better - Christopher didn’t have to see her face to judge that, her tail was held low: a sign of worry and defensiveness in cats. When he actually did see her face, he quickly concluded that the catfolks inherited that part of body language.

There were also five other people in the corridor. Wearing foreign looking clothes with a lot of golden details.

Plesjans of all people. This is going to get ugly real soon.

He hid behind the corner and quickly figured out a battle plan. He sent a text message to Nekia, telling her where he is and asking her to explain what happened in subvoice. He could see the moment when she read the message, as her outward signs of being cornered lessened substantially.

Her answer came a few seconds later and described a situation that was, frankly, stupid. The girls had run into the Plesjans while returning to the quarters with a new shipment of cooking ingredients for Tiriel. One of the Plesjans was the DPS Liberation’s executive officer, who was apparently looking for trouble. The average female member of the Echo crew would just tell him to piss off, but Nekia and Kivanna lacked the courage to do so. And once the man found a weakened prey, he went for the kill.

It was honestly shocking that someone with an IQ the same as the size of his boots could end up as an executive officer. On the other hand, the man in question was obviously drunk (enough to cloud the judgment, not enough to start swaying around or vomit), which worked as a bit of mitigating circumstance when it comes to the intellectual level of the offender.

His men were by no means drunk. And seemed to be more terrified than the girls, since unlike their commanding officer they were cognizant of where they were. According to Nekia’s account, two of them even tried to persuade their boss to let it go, but were rebuked with threats of demotions if they ‘are afraid of some women’.

The exec managed to corner the girls and was now increasingly vocal about wanting them to strip down (and that was the least radical of his demands). It was rather obvious that in a while he was going to lose the last shreds of his patience and try to get them to do that with some physical encouragement.

Christopher mentally measured the distance between the location and Chief Tiaa’s office. Then he decided that the part of the ship inhabited by the marines was closer. So he took advantage of the fruits of his self-defense training - and sent a message to Colonel Nowak asking her to come help him. Which in his idea was the peak form of self-defense aboard the Echo.

His hopes of her coming and intimidating the Plesjans with her sheer presence, putting a calm end to what could be considered a start of an international scandal, were quickly dashed aside. Instead of immediate help, he received orders.

Next time I’m calling Innocent.

The time had ended. The exec made a step forward and grabbed Nekia’s shoulder. Her tail puffed up, a sign in cat tail language that was best translated as I’M GOING TO CLAW YOUR EYES OUT ASSHOLE. Christopher left his hiding place.

“What’s going on here?” He did his best to sound and appear calm while walking towards the whole mess. The battle that was about to start was paused, and the exec made a step back and turned to face Christopher. The same with his men, who looked slightly relieved and hopeful that the incident was going to end.

“And what does this look like?” The exec replied with a haughty demeanor and flushed cheeks. “I’m teaching some women their place. And who the hell are you?” Now he managed to make Christopher furious.

“Cadet Christopher Hall.” He replied. “EGS Echo. I also happen to be the commanding officer of these two. Nekia, Kivanna, we’re leaving.” He was betting on the exec being too angry to let them leave, and he wasn’t wrong.

“They aren’t going nowhere until I let them go.” The exec was furious. And aware of the rank difference.

“Very well, then I’m going to join them.” He said, fulfilling the first part of Nowak’s orders. He walked forward, passing through the Plesjans. The lackeys didn’t offer any resistance, though for a second Christopher was sure that the exec was going to punch him. In the end, he didn’t. This allowed Christopher to stand in front of the officer, with Kivanna and Nekia now behind him.

I guess that settles both the ‘keep the Plesjans facing the end of the corridor’ and the ‘don’t let them do anything to Nekia or Tiaa burns their ship to the keel’ part of the order. Time for the mean part.

“Piss off. And that’s an order.” The exec seemed to be on the edge of exploding. Christopher regretted the fact that he was going to have to push him over it.

“With all due respect, I do not need to follow it.” He really hated learning the Guild’s regulations. He wasn’t a lawyer, and he never wanted to be. But it seemed that he was going to put what he learned to use. “According to the fifth article of the Explorers’ Guild regulations section regarding the joint operations, you are allowed to issue orders to crew members of the Echo of lower rank than yours. However paragraph five of that document specifies that your orders can be overruled by any officer of the Echo, regardless of rank, if they believe that they are harmful to the ship and its crew.”

The general idea of that article were cases of the enemy somehow attacking mid-flight, with an officer of one ship being aboard another ship - it allowed such stranded officers to be useful. However they rarely had the full picture of the ship’s capabilities, which led to the part about lower ranked officers being allowed to overrule such orders if they were wrong.

Christopher could simply inform the exec that paragraph one specifies that the entire article five comes into effect only during the emergencies - namely during the combat alert. However this could end the talk too quickly. And he had his orders.

“Officers.” The exec informed him. “You are a cadet. Cadets are considered akin to second class enlisted until they finish their training. You can’t overrule shit.”

“That is correct.” Unfortunately for him, the exec ran into an extremely rare case of things being slightly different. “However, I’m also in charge of these girls’ team. As a result, I’m an acting petty officer. And according to paragraph six of article five of that very same section, a petty officer is allowed to put the execution of such order on hold until an officer can be contacted for its evaluation, provided that the putting the order on hold doesn’t pose a risk to ship and its crew and that petty officer in question believes the order to be harmful.”

Evaluation of an order rarely took more than ten seconds. Modern communications were no joke.

A message came from Colonel Nowak. Everything was in place.

“As a result, I need to insist on you leaving this place or at the very least waiting until an Echo’s officer, preferably of a rank equal or higher to yours, evaluates your order to strip and servi…” The exec punched Christopher in the face.

Christopher had spent two months being trained by the Echo’s marines. He was one hundred percent sure that any of them could knock him out with a single punch. Some of them had decades of training behind them and numerous cybernetic and biological enhancements - it was a gap that simply couldn’t be bridged in such a short timespan.

However, the exec was anything but a marine. He seemed to be a rather fit person, but he was intoxicated. He telegraphed the target of his attack so openly that Christopher could have easily evaded the attack or guarded against it.

Instead he let himself get hit, but he moved his head back right before the hit landed, draining strength from the impact. Then he fell back, stopping himself from falling on the ground only by leaning at the girls behind him. Of course, they were startled and far from strong, so he ended up landing on the ground anyway.

He could only hope that leaning on the girls and then slumping on the floor despite their attempt to hold him looked dramatic enough on the security camera.

The exec tried to follow up on his punch, but that’s when Colonel Nowak materialized out of nowhere and grabbed him by his left shoulder, pinning him in place.

“As a Colonel I believe I’m of a rank high enough to evaluate the order.” She was smiling. It looked like a genuine, heartfelt smile… but Christopher almost fainted from fear when he saw it. The exec seemed to have gone sober instantly, but it was too late.

She broke his leg.

Christopher had heard stories about Enhanced (Knights according to the Res Publica Christiana terminology) and he knew that Nowak was one of them. But he never fully understood what everyone meant by ‘superhuman physical capabilities’. He understood it now. He barely registered the kick before Nowak’s leg returned to its starting position .

The exec screamed. His knee - the target of the kick - bent in the wrong direction. He would have fallen but she kept him standing with one hand. It didn’t seem like his weight put any strain on her.

“Oh, my apologies!” She smiled at him again. “That wasn’t intentional.” This time she broke his left arm, in the elbow. “That one was.” He screamed even more.

“My bad.” Once more bloodcurdling yet seemingly normal smile. “Wrong arm. You caught her with your right hand, not left. I’m such a clutz sometimes..” He finally fainted and was allowed to drop to the floor after Nowak broke three of his fingers, each in two places.

Christopher saw the other Plesjans standing with their hands behind their heads, with two marines in full combat gear blocking the only exit from the corridor. Then he closed his eyes and lied there, motionless. And painfully aware of a panicked Nekia that was hugging him while crying, thinking that he lost consciousness.

“You there.” He wasn’t sure to whom the words were spoken, until the Colonel added some context. “Get off this ship and take your piece of shit officer with you. Amtiel, Abdullah, if they stray off the closest route back to the hangar, you have my permission to space them.”

After a few seconds, the hurried steps and a sound of someone being dragged on the floor died in the distance.

“And you, stop crying.” Nowak added. “He’s alright. I ordered him to get hit once or twice in front of a camera. Christopher, come back to us.”

He opened his eyes, startling Nekia. She let out an ‘Eeeehhh?!’ sound, before trying to stand up and make a step back at once. The result was losing balance. She would have landed on her butt but Colonel Nowak grabbed her hand and pulled her up.

“We need to keep up appearances. Athalia will be here shortly.” Nowak announced before making a step back. It seemed that Christopher was going to make another visit to the medical bay.

He stood up and checked on Kivanna, who turned out to be standing a meter away from him, obviously still in a state of shock. He wasn’t sure if she even registered what had just happened.

“Leave her.” Nowak noticed his gaze. “If you get too close, she might bite or scratch you. Pretty badly. I’m calling Innocent, he’s the only person aboard who can calm her without pumping her with sedatives.” He decided to listen, and focused on another person who needed his attention.

“Uhm, Nekia?” He turned to face the catgirl. “About what…”

She kicked him. In the ankle. Without putting any real strength into it, but it was enough to hurt a bit.

“That’s f-for scaring me so much.” She said, her face looking serious, despite her reddened eyes and some tears still visible on the skin. Then, without giving him time to react, she hugged him. Really, really strongly, despite her thin frame.

***

EGS Echo, Command Deck

22:32 29.06.2610 STT

Commander Lena Drathari

The Captain was so angry that his face was almost as red as her face was blue. His eyes were that of a frothing fanatic and he was so heated that he had to pause his tirades every few seconds to swipe his forehead.

Honestly, if he hadn’t told her that she was about to witness his ‘magnificent acting skills’ right before it started, she would buy it.

“I don’t give a SHIT about your opinion, Lebedev!” He shouted at the screen. The Captain of the EGS Progress winced slightly. “This is the type of shit that happens when we team up with people like you. If you think that I’m going to listen to your quote unquote arguments after what happened, then you are dumber than I thought!”

He was really good at pretending to lose his mind. She had to give him that.

Commander Zeno of the DPS Liberation was flooded with so many expletives when he tried to argue about ‘using unnecessary violence against his second in command’ that he decided that it was enough and simply left the chat. The remaining locals did so as well, leaving only the Guild members in this battle.

Zeno was forced to defend a position that couldn’t be defended. Plesja considered Keller to be an enemy of the state. The Liberation couldn’t do a thing due to technically being a part of the Guild (even if temporarily). But now their executive officer tried to rape and according to Keller kill members of the crew. If Zeno tried to fight Keller for real, Keller could simply end up asking the Supreme Tribunal of Mankind about its opinion on the matter.

Plesja was still a protectorate of the Confederation. Zeno didn’t want to be the person responsible for his country’s protectorate status being revoked (as that would be lethal). So he did his best to deescalate the issue.

Lena was almost sure that Keller regretted that. If Zeno stayed on a collision course and enflamed things further instead of logging off, the Captain would be overjoyed to settle it in the Tribunal. But Zeno claimed that it was his second-in-command’s stupid idea and made a promise that he would face a proper trial. And then he left the chat, after getting Yunqi’s approval to do so.

Commander Drathari was certain that the Liberation’s exec was in for a meeting with a firing squad. Which was enough for the Tribunal to not execute the entire Directorate instead.

“Thus far all that we have is a security recording cut strangely short.” Lebedev didn’t let himself be backed into a corner. “And a report from your chief medical officer about the injuries that seem to be oddly inconsiste…”

“Strangely?! Oddly?!” Captain Keller didn’t let the talk progress into a dangerous direction. “How fucking typical of you radicals. Accusing victims in order to keep yourself looking pure. I keep forgetting that the likes of the Pact of Steel and the New Comintern leadership are just a bunch of well intentioned maidens!” The argument was sound, even if the way it was said was barely coherent.

“Keller, you are losing contact with reality. All that happened was... ” Captain Arthval of the anarchocapitalist light cruiser EGS Agreement tried to add, but saw her own words cut short when the Echo’s main artillery batteries suddenly turned to face her ship. “What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Issuing a warning.” Keller this time looked like a complete maniac. “I’m a man of the Alliance for the Preservation of Democracy, with half of the crew hailing from the Res Publica Christiana. No piece of shit person that considers a personal comfort slave a necessary part of the crew of a warship will dictate to me what I can and what I can’t do. If I hear you yapping your mouth again, I’m going to make the Galaxy a better place, one salvo at the time.”

Lena suddenly remembered a joke she heard in her Navy. How do you tell apart Res Publica Christiana and Alliance for the Preservation of Democracy captains? The latter will scream about shooting you, while the former will scream while shooting you.

Judging from the sudden wave of hails, the destroyers noticed the cruisers brandishing their artillery at each other and ended up browning their collective pants.

“The same with you, Captain Severus.” Keller added, staring at the commanding officer of the EGS Hastati. “I’m also not talking with genocidal maniacs.” This time he stared at Captain Faust of the EGS Nietzsche. “And collectivist genocidal maniacs.” He said, this time towards Captain Lebedev. “If I see a shuttle flying towards the Echo from any of your ships, I’m going to set my point defense batteries on manual control and organize a free for all shooting contest for my crew. I almost lost a crew member that I treat as my son, simply because a retard from some disgusting parody of a country decided to hit his head soon after his Awakening. And all of that because he tried to stop two members of my crew from getting raped. Enough is enough.” Lena decided to not comment on the son part.

“Does that offer include the Hercules, Captain Keller?” Hao Yunqi woke up to life, his tone calm. Lena could feel the iron gauntlet under the velvet glove, though.

Keller paused for a second, the words calming him. Or at least so he pretended to.

“No.” Officially Keller had no idea that Hao Yunqi had sold himself to the Seekers. So he had no reason to be hostile towards the Rear Admiral, save for the fact that they hated each other for undisclosed reasons. And this wasn’t enough of a reason to murder people. “Members of the EGS Hercules crew are still allowed to visit Echo, however due to security concerns I’m not letting more than ten of them stay on my ship at once.”

“I believe this to be a reasonable compromise.” Hao replied. “Now please, stop targeting the Agreement. We all have better things to do.” Keller signed to Innocent to move the artillery towards their normal position. Another sign to Mendez, and she promptly terminated the connection.

“So, how did I look?” He said, looking towards Lena. He was back to his cheerful normal behaviour.

“Like a fanatic democrat who was pushed over the edge.” She replied, and he nodded, accepting her words as a compliment. “Very convincing.”

“Wonderful.” He clapped his hands and stood up from the captain’s seat. “Sometimes we, the APD guys, need to remind the Galaxy that we have our own fanatics. And we do not need to parasitize the RPC’s supply of those.” Innocent theatrically rolled the fake eyes on his face display. He seamlessly merged that pantomime with a sneak UI overlay update that made the eyes fall off his face and start bouncing around the floor.

“I assume it was all part of the plan?” She asked the Captain, while ignoring the spectacle. He was, like always, awfully scarce in details.

“Nah, an unexpected bonus.” He replied, surprising her. “I estimated our chances of success in the incoming battle to be something like twenty to thirty percent. Now that Cadet Hall’s excellent acting skills combined with Lieutenant Commander Athalia’s mastery in faking medical reports freed us from the majority of enemy spies snooping around the Echo, the number’s up to sixty percent at least.”

“Twenty percent?” Lena finally understood why he always dodged answering her questions on how large the Echo’s chances were. “You wanted to risk battling an enemy with a one-fifth survival chance?”

“Of course.” He shook his head. “Seekers are experts in calculating risks and predicting outcomes. Somewhere in their little empire they have entire arrays of AIs that they feed with all the data they can find. When they make a plan, they use these predictive AIs to simulate each and every of its elements. They knew that we were here, so they fed them with every single bit of data about us. With a close enough approximation of the circumstances they can predict our every decision and outcome of every action with a decent degree of correctness. Seventy to ninety-nine percent chance of being correct, depending on how much data they had. And each time they make a mistake, they learn from it and update their models.”

“It’s… hard to imagine.” She answered. Even the exhumans didn’t have such technology. Virtuals and Robotics had the best computer technology (with Mechanists a close second), but none of them had reached this level.

Predictive AIs were a thing, of course. Every Class-Three AI could pull that off, and most large groups out there had one. The Confederation had the AI/OVERSEER. The Solar Republic had the AI/PANOPTICON. Discord had AI/APHRODITE and, apparently, Seekers had the AI/PROMETHEUS. If her knowledge on AIs was correct, a large enough group of Class-Ones or Class-Twos could work, too.

Her real problem with it was the scale of prediction the Captain had just described. It was abstract. The AI/OVERSEER that she was most familiar with was used by the Confederation leadership for long-term defensive planning and threat and economic growth prediction.

It was much easier to estimate the economic growth (which, as a whole, could entirely be described with numbers, and ones that had billions of economists out there working on it by the clock) than to try to predict detailed movements of people. Especially groups of people, as Keller didn’t make his decision in complete isolation from anyone else.

“Oh, I know that.” He nodded. “But the Seekers are slaves to mathematics. If we go for low-probability strategies and somehow succeed a few times in a row, this might railroad their operation away from its designed parameters, thus forcing them to improvise. The one and only way to score a win against them if you don’t have an overwhelming numerical superiority or you don’t have them fight you on an unfamiliar field.”

This sounded like an understandable weakness for a group with such abilities. Of course, there was a reason why the Seekers didn’t make contingency plans for some outcomes. How many times could their enemies go against all odds and somehow win?

“On a sidenote, Cadet Hall seems to be growing nicely.” The Captain added. “I especially loved the part of him fencing that Plesjan idiot with legal articles. I swear, he has to be the first cadet after three months of training that remembers all those pesky regulations. I’m not sure what methods Tiaa uses in his training, but I support it wholeheartedly.”

He had to call the regulations ‘pesky’, didn’t he? I’m beginning to think that only me, Tiaa and Cadet Hall ever bothered to read them.