Chapter 033: Surprise

Destroyers are the smallest warships normally used on the battlefield. They typically possess only the very basic amount of weaponry aside from their point defense batteries and counter-missile launchers. Some go as far as to lack any offensive weapons.

Their role on the battlefield is keeping starfighters and missiles away from heavier ships. Each of them possess a significantly better ratio of defense weapons per tonnage than cruisers and capital ships, making them a great way of establishing a cost-efficient defense.

“Destroyer” in this case is a name of a role, more than of some dedicated ship size. As a result, the official guidebooks of the Confederation of Mankind identify three main size classes of destroyers. The most common are the light destroyers (around fifty-thousand tonnes, seventy-five meters of length, sixteen of height and thirty-five of width, twenty to thirty crew members) and medium destroyers (around seventy-five thousand tonnes, one hundred meters of length, twenty-five of height and forty-five of width, around fifty crew members).

Everything playing the role of a destroyer while being significantly larger than medium destroyers yet smaller than two-hundred thousand tonnes is classified as a heavy destroyer. Ships heavier than that but using the same armaments doctrine are typically classified as defense cruisers.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 9, page 756.

***

EGS Echo, Enviro Deck

04:42 20.07.2610 STT

Cadet Christopher Hall

Normally, Christopher wouldn’t really bother to notice a random passerby. During their run to the Enviro Section they saw several other crew members. The Echo’s crew was rather diverse - while the majority were humans, there were enough Variants, transhumans and supposedly even occasional aliens to make things interesting (though the only one he saw thus far was Innocent).

While some of the crew was highly unusual, there was a limit to how long you could stay amazed by the unusual. At this point Christopher had mostly left the shock phase and more or less adjusted. So the majority of the strange people he got to see and meet had been barely more than a passing interest.

The woman in front of them proved there were still things that could surprise him. Or even overwhelm him.

“Tiriel, how nice to see you!” The woman decided to come closer, heightening Christopher’s mental anguish. “And who might your companion be? Got yourself a boyfriend in secret?” Tiriel wasn’t surprised by the remark in the slightest, so she had probably expected to hear it.

“No, that is Christopher Hall.” The elf replied with an angelic smile on her face. She was probably doing her best to not look at him and laugh. “A very audacious serf of mine. And the head of my recovery team. He is accompanying me on a walk, since he decided to get to learn the Echo a bit more. Christopher…” She finally turned her head towards him, with her smile only a bit impish. “This is Lieutenant Commander Ava Taim, head of the enviro section.”

Christopher was a bit too shocked to immediately stand at attention and greet her officially - she looked like the exact antithesis of a serious approach to work, so it was probably too much, yet it never hurt to try to act properly. When he managed to partially shake off his shock, she reacted before he managed to speak.

“At ease, at ease.” She waved her hand dismissively. “We are pretty casual about things in this section.” Christopher could see that in detail. “Well, I’m not going to interrupt your not-date anymore. Feel free to show him the place, Tiriel.” The elves nodded. The woman departed.

“Tiriel.” Christopher said when the Lieutenant Commander disappeared from view. “Do you think that Innocent will throw me out of the airlock if I strangle you to death?” It felt like a good moment for murder, since Innocent currently spent most of his time aboard the captured Seekers’ cruiser.

“Probably.” She made a victorious smile. “Then again, I have no idea why you are surprised.” She looked innocent. Too innocent.

“Tiriel.” He said once again. “Pray tell me: why is the ship’s enviro section’ chief walking around completely NAKED?” She made an ‘oh, that’s what you are about’ face.

“Not completely naked.” Tiriel wagged her finger in front of him. “You need to pay more attention to details. She was wearing slippers and had a crucifix on her neck. That is important.”

“Maybe for her feet and soul, not for the issue we’re talking about.“ He had more questions. For example ‘why was her skin slightly green, and why were there some small flowers growing in her hair’. But for now he focused on this one.

“Alright, alright.” She decided to come forward instead of playing dumb. “She is a Variant. One of those stable enough to not die out on their own, but with a basic premise being so incredible dumb that it is a miracle that someone back then thought that they are a good idea. The Variant’s name is Gaians, by the way.” He hadn’t heard about them. Then again, most of the texts concerning Variants he read only focused on some of the larger ones.

“And what’s so wrong with her Variant?” He asked. He was really curious what sort of biological changes make people into nudists.

“Well, someone had a brilliant idea of making plant-people.” She said. Christopher sighed in an answer. The story barely started, and it was already incredibly dumb. “Apparently to have them cut a big chunk of food expenses by photosynthesizing. Then a lot of other people decided that it was a good idea, probably due to some strange ‘return to nature’ approach.”

“Strange thing to say for an elf.” Christopher decided to mention it. “Aren’t you pretty cosy with nature yourself?”

“All I am doing is questioning the idea of trying to ‘return to nature’ on that level.” Another dismissive wave of a hand. “Especially as the idiots in charge of the program did not think the idea through. Sure, Gaians do not need to eat a lot. But each arcology, ship and station where they live has to be remodelled to keep them bathed in the proper amount of light, or they start looking worse than Chief Tiaa before her morning coffee. Just permanently.” That’s where Christopher understood where it was coming.

“Hence, nudity.” He interjected. “Because the more clothes they wear, the less light gets through.” She nodded.

“And this is where we enter stage two of the drama.” She added. “If your entire culture evolves into going around topless, nobody is going to consider breasts to be a turn on. People are the most interested in things that are hard to get, apparently.” Christopher started to think that she might be conscious of how her modest clothes and behaviour worked on people. He’d heard gossip that she had an actual fanclub on the ship network.

“Let this process in its version for a full nudity brew for a few generations and you get Gaians.” She continued. “As a joke Ava once mentioned goes: the majority of Mankind needs a long psychological therapy or a mindsculpt to stop having sex. But Gaians need a long psychological therapy or a mindsculpt to start having sex. So their birthrate is abysmal, they have few worlds, and if something happened to those…” She shook her head.

“This concludes my suspicion.” Christopher nodded. “Whoever thought that the Humanity 2.5 Project was a good idea deserves to be shot. Alternatively their remains should be exhumed and then be shot. Now that I said that, I’m going to get back to the main subject: Tiriel, why?”

“Who knows, maybe I just wanted to see you startled by her.” She winked at him. “Your reaction was absolutely adorable. That hopeless battle against yourself to keep your attention on her face…” She shook her head, but with a barely suppressed laughter on her face. “That was priceless.”

He sighed. It was pretty apparent that she was going to joke about that very moment for a while. A joke at his expense, naturally.

“Come, I will show you around.” She suddenly changed the subject. “No more surprises, I swear!”

They spent a rather pleasant two hours. Some of it was informative, some of it was nice (he got to taste some of the freshest fruits aboards the ship - and some juice made of them), some of it was funny. But in the end, they started heading towards the exit.

Lieutenant Commander Taim - once again in her rather peculiar work ‘uniform’ - passed by them. Her completely innocent act despite her being completely naked still felt slightly surreal. Like lots of things in Christopher’s life.

“By the way.” Tiriel whispered to him a while later. “Do not have any stupid thoughts. She is taken, even if it is one-sided.” Her occasional jokish stabs about him certainly wanting to meet Lieutenant Commander Taim started to be slightly irritating at this point.

Ava Taim did show a lot of interesting things, but she felt a bit too mature for him. He was still in his 20s (however slightly late), and that was his strike zone. Early 30s were a nope, even if they were obviously very well-preserved and probably in peak condition. He dared not to ask how old Ava actually was. Some Variants seemed to age even slower than the human average.

“One-sided?” Though ‘irritating’ didn’t mean that he wasn’t interested in hearing a gossip or two.

“You never heard of Alexander Keller’s ‘little harem’?” She asked him. He hadn’t. It sounded like something he got to envy Keller for - but also something that he somewhat could see happening. “Apparently some of the single ladies high in the Echo’s hierarchy are totally in love with him, but it is all completely one-sided. Nobody seems to agree on the exact list of members of said harem, but Ava Taim is on almost every list I’ve heard.” She didn’t add that in the case of that particular woman, the feeling was probably mostly platonic.

“You and gossiping?” He clicked his tongue with a feigned indignation. “How sad.”

“Discern malicious slandering and innocent gossip, please.” She promptly shot him down. “If anything, I find that romantic. And not only me. There is apparently a fervent discussion of whether he has a wife on Illumination, or if he was in love with someone who died and stays loyal to them even now.” She rolled her eyes. “There are even some fanfics, for the lack of a better word.”

“That’s one thing I’m certain I don’t want to read.” If nothing changed from his time, he was almost certain that at least one such fanfic ships Keller with Athalia. If not Innocent. He was going to need a hard mentalsculpt to get rid of those mental images.

A few steps more he decided that he had to know. “And what about the other popular members of that harem?” She looked at him strangely. “Hey, I’m just curious. Keller has recently sounded as if he was trying to interest me with becoming a Guild’s captain. I really need to know if getting popular among the ladies is one of the benefits.”

“As far as I know, that would be Lieutenant Commander Eva Mendez from Communications.” Tiriel didn’t seem to react to his joking explanation at all, and gave him a name he didn’t recognize. “And, believe it or not, Tiaa Sistonen. Though it depends on whether the author considers their semi-constant banter to be a sign of some unresolved sexual tension.” She obviously wasn’t a part of that group of authors.

“You know, I’d even ship those two.” Christopher commented. “He is about the only person I know of who might be able to tame that particular tigress.” He wasn’t sure how much of her tough person act was limited to the work, though. He never got to see her off-duty.

“Yeah, but then he would pretty much be Nekia’s father.” She replied. “Keller as father, Tiaa as mother… nobody, you included, would have the courage to punish her for anything, and then she would go bad. Could you imagine that? A misbehaving Nekia?” Christopher clutched his head in disbelief.

“I take everything back!” He shouted, with a terror visible on his face. They both laughed.

They left the enviro section and proceeded towards their quarters. They were walking slowly, Tiriel either mindful of his stamina or simply wanting to spend more time teasing him.

“So, I hope that you liked my little surprise.” She announced at some point, while smiling wryly at him. “The views were to your liking, I believe.” She made it obvious what sort of views she meant.

“I dunno.” One tease too much - this time he was going to answer in kind. “I’d prefer yours.“

He changed during the stay aboard the ship. His old self - the one at the beginning - wouldn’t be bold enough to say that, even as a joke. But he went through a lot of things, and he gained some confidence out of his training. So he went through with his riposte.

It connected. She stopped walking. Opened her mouth. Instead of saying something, she closed it. Then she stared at him for a few seconds. Then she resumed walking.

“Alright, you got me there.” He had absolutely no idea what she was thinking about. And meta-empathy usage was a nope. “I admit that much. I guess I had it coming for teasing you about it so many times.”

“I’m starting to agree with you.” Christopher commented. “Startled people are adorable.” This time it was his time to shine. They bantered like that for a while, before they suddenly ran into someone familiar.

“Hello there!” The unexpected and cheerful voice coming from behind surprised them both. They turned towards the source of it. It was Ryan in his work clothes, now covered with various tools. Christopher kept forgetting that the surface of the bodysuit was selectively adhesive. “Wait, I’m not interrupting a date, right?”

“No, you aren’t.” Tiriel replied. She sounded a bit cold. “We finished what we were doing, and we are currently returning to the quarters. What are you doing here?” The tone of her voice made Christopher wonder if she was angry generally, or was her coldness directed at Ryan. Was she having issues with his rapidly changing love interests? She was incredibly hard to read occasionally.

“I’ve been fixing temperature control in one of the aeroponics halls.” Ryan replied. “But it’s working now, my shift is about to end so I’m going back to the quarters a few minutes ahead of the schedule. If you’re returning there, we could walk together.” He sent her his widest and most fake smile. “After all, I’m not interrupting anything important, riight?”

Christopher was surprised that he wasn’t electrocuted merely by standing next to them. That was quite an impressive tension.

“Very well.” Tiriel surrendered. Then she remembered that there was someone else in the corridor. “Unless you have something against it, Christopher?”

“The more the merrier.” He replied. Ryan was giving him a thoughtful look. When Tiriel started walking away, he quickly pointed towards Christopher and then her. This time with a question mark written on his face.

Christopher shrugged. He knew what the engineer insinuated, and he did include it in the list of potential explanations of recent Tiriel actions. But it was rather low on the list. To him, it felt more like friendship with someone who liked to tease him to hell and back.

Of all the people, Tiriel was the last person he would accuse of not having the courage to just openly state what she wants.

The silent talk would have continued, but Tiriel was walking away quickly. So they hurried to catch up with her.

That’s when the corridor suddenly exploded.

***

EGS Echo, Command Deck

07:42 20.07.2610 STT

Commander Lena Drathari

Her shift was about to end, and she was busy planning her next attempt on the life of a certain irritating boss when warnings suddenly popped up all over the display.

Several bombs of varied strength exploded all over the ship. The Godhammer went offline—she could only hope that the attacker blew up the communication line between the weapon and the fire control, and not the weapon itself. Fire in the enviro section. Two explosions in the engineering deck, and Lieutenant Commander Khazrim, the reclusive chief engineer, couldn’t be reached.

Ninety-nine percent of time spent in her workplace was calm, simple and ordered. The remaining one percent was an attempt to enforce some sort of organization over the total chaos. Naturally, her education in the Navy was focused on that last percent - though it did take her a while to get used to dealing with organics.

Emergency procedures saved a lot of lives. Then came the time for her to act. She started organizing the effort of the crew, secretly hoping that Captain Keller would come to relieve her of the job of being an impromptu head of a disaster relief operation. He knew the ship best of them all.

She could only hope that the explosion hadn’t ruptured anything really important. Something like a sleeping extradimensional cocoon of yet another space myth that Keller recruited but forgot to mention that to anyone. Chief reason why execs and other officers shouldn’t be left out in the open with stuff like that. Like in every professional Navy out there.

He reached the bridge five minutes after the alert sounded, checked for the location of Cadet Hall, and then ran away while shouting to her to keep doing ‘God’s work’. Her resolve to PK him in the computer game tripled.

Five minutes later she started losing control of all the systems. Hacking attack in progress, that much was obvious. One of the bombs in engineering had managed to shut down the shipnet connection in the area where the local programming department resided. While also trapping everyone on-duty who could respond to the hacking.

The ship’s Simulated Intelligence was only a cunning animal, so it was losing ground. Lena joined the battle, and a number of off-duty programmers did so as well, but even then they were still losing. The attack was horrifyingly well prepared and was going through every firewall like a hot knife through butter.

Ten minutes later she had another unexpected guest. Lith Athalia walked into the bridge, carrying what looked like a flamethrower with a large canister on his back.

“What the fuck are you doing here?!” She shouted at him. “Get back to the medical bay, we have an emergency!” She was in no mood for subtleties. The shuttle carrying Innocent was preparing to dock, and all programmers aboard the ship - her included - were busy trying to keep the attacker from taking over the Echo’s point defense batteries and firing them at the shuttle.

“I noticed.” He replied calmly. “Although I have something else to do before I start helping people. Namely, I need to kill someone.” Suddenly she was gripped by a horrible realization. Her hand started slowly closing in on her pistol.

“First of all, I do not consider you someone, but something.” Athalia noticed her movement. “So by extension I couldn’t mean you. Second of all, if I wanted, I could take the gun away from you and shoot you in the head before you manage to pull the trigger. So sit on whatever passes for an ass among your misbegotten kind and let me save us all.”

She was still standing there, puzzled, when he pushed the end of his ‘flamethrower’ into the floor grate. And pulled the trigger.

Rather than fire, there was air inside his backpack. A lot of compressed air. Enough to almost send flying some unfortunate - and rather petite - lieutenant who had the bad luck of standing near a floor grate two meters away from Athalia. The man himself was unaffected.

Five seconds later she was forced to look away. The image on the display changed, as the hacking attack suddenly ceased. Two seconds later her internal computer finished analyzing the air blowing at her from below.

It contained a lot of suspended nanomachines, though her analysis had no idea what it was supposed to do. The very fact that Athalia just casually dispersed unrecognized nano without asking those potentially affected by it for consent violated so many laws that it would take hours to note them all down.

Suddenly she understood.

“The Seekers’ infiltrator.” She said. He nodded briefly while taking down his gear. “He is down there?!”

“And how do you think it could beat the hell out of half of our programmers despite being only a single sapient human-level AI?” He asked her, not even bothering to try to hide the disdain. “It had to be directly connected to the system, no remote hacking can achieve that unless you have t-code or a Class-Three AI. And bridge computers have connection priority and administrator's rights.” He added, while pulling out a floor grate with surprising strength.

A Virtual being verbally accused of hacking or cybersecurity incompetence by a person completely without implants was a rare sight. But what he said made sense. Lena noticed to her own shock that she was panicked to the point where she hadn’t thought about it.

On the other hand, neither had the remaining programmers.

“Now I’m going to pull a cable or two before it recovers from my little dedicated countermeasure.” He added, while standing above the opened floor. “Oh yes, I got to note that down. Dedicated Countermeasure, awesome name for a weapon.“ He said, this time to himself. “That thing is quite deep, and this particular place wasn’t at all optimized towards human access. Thankfully, I’m small and flexible, so I can somehow bend myself enough to fit between a lot of pipes and cables. But I need to be REALLY small and flexible.” She stared at him for a few seconds. Then he got impatient and made a gesture suggesting…

She quickly turned her back on him. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but she was a Virtual. She suspected that getting shot was much less of a deal than having to see Lith Athalia undressing. She spent half a minute issuing orders, but with the hacking over the worst was behind them.

She took a peek at the hole in the floor, but all that she could see was the medic’s outfit lying on the floor next to it. There were some rather strange noises coming from under the floor.

“By the way…” She couldn’t restrain her curiosity. “How did you find it? Even Innocent failed to do so.”

“Innocent would have found it, if he was aboard.” She heard from under the floor. “But since I know that this thing was somewhere on the same ship as me, I decided to make my own preparations. Just in case. Hall’s DNA is making me giddy with excitement, I can’t let them kill him!” The last sentence was said in a voice that sounded almost lewd. “So I put together some programs that were supposed to help me narrow down the spy’s location if it tried to act. I also made a small SI that was supposed to delay if not outright sabotage any computer activity that wasn’t sufficiently routine if it happened anywhere close to Hall. It asked me for clarification something like three hundred times a day. Absolute pain.”

The medic had just casually admitted to committing another few hundred violations of the law and rules. She still had no idea just how exactly he achieved all of that, it sounded weird even to her and she was very good with computers.

So that’s why the bomb in that corridor exploded after Hall passed by it, and not while he was in front of it! I thought it was a complete fluke when the Captain checked the data, but it was actually Lith? Who would have thought.

“Can I see these programs?” She had to make sure that they wouldn’t blow up the ship now that they were obviously very, very active.

He had no implants so he just quickly instructed her how to find a secret folder with their source codes.

She used her perks as a Virtual to simultaneously skim through the code and continue working on taking control of the chaos aboard the ship. Five minutes later she decided to say what she thought.

“Are you sure that you don’t want to become a Virtual?” Being able to anger him a bit for an added value. “This code alone would open half the legs in my country.” It was beautiful, precise, and could do some rather scary things. Also the optimisation was simply to die for.

“What you just said is ewww beyond all ewwws.” She heard his answer after a while. “I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that instead of wasting valuable time to crawl out of this hole and make a cybernetic sashimi out of you.”

She had absolutely no idea how he was so good at programming. He was easily an equal to Innocent, and he was the best programmer she ever met. And Innocent, just like the Virtuals, was predisposed to this line of work. How Athalia achieved the same was a mystery to her.

Was he doing stuff like that in his head? Had Keller been slightly more literal when he called the medic’s head a ‘biological computer’? So many questions, so few answers.

“And there goes my secret plan of becoming head concubine of Emperor Lith the First of House Athalia, may his reign over Virtuals lasts forever.” She added. The mumbled curses coming from under the floor were a great reward. She would have continued, but she decided that getting the medic to finish up and get back to the medbay took precedence in the circumstances.

Two minutes and a loud curse later, the medic announced that he was getting out, so she averted her eyes - while silently hoping that he wasn't pissed off to actually shoot her this time. In the end, she was spared. When she was allowed to look again, he was already fully clothed, and with a hand-sized ball in his right hand. There were signs of some external cables being ripped off, and what she suspected to be the machine’s legs.

“Great. That’d be all.” He announced, before throwing the ball at her. She managed to grab it before it hit her face. “Damn… I mean, great catch. Get to some properly isolated chamber and have Innocent take a look.” She wasn’t exactly supposed to listen to him, but what he said made sense, so she decided to make an exception. “I’m going to return to the medical bay now, posthaste.”

“And your hand?” She asked, just slightly worried. He looked down at the bleeding stump of his left hand.

“Oh that. It had some fight left and managed to slice it off.” He said. “Nothing I can’t handle.” He pulled his left hand from behind him with his right hand. Then he waved it in front of her. “I’m just going to sew it back on real quick, and then I’ll start saving lives that actually matter.”

He ran away in a hurry, leaving her at a complete loss of words.