Chapter 043: Mutiny

The early offensive against the Mechanist Hierocracy collapsed when the Alliance used the D-Gate network to circumnavigate the blockade of their worlds and capture both the hyperlane leading to Sector 01 and the capital system of Sector 03. The result was the start of the so-called Iron Cage campaign.

With no hopes of reinforcements and collapsing logistics, Admiral Kornatiev was forced to cease his assault on the Hierocracy. Soon his fleet stopped being an effective fighting force. With ships damaged beyond what the field repairs could fix and a lack of ammunition, he could only observe the Mechanist’s swift take over of the sector.

This lasted until Lieutenant Commander Frederick Keller of the Survey Corps - together with a ragtag group of refugees, surviving Commonwealth personnel, Unforgiven and even former warriors of the genetic warlords - managed to find the Symphony of Flesh. A Hyperspace derelict-turned flagship of Purifier, lost after his defeat during the Genetic Wars.

After some improvised repairs, its Silencer SW fired one last time - killing everyone aboard it, including Frederick Keller, but also knocking out all Mechanist vessels defending the hyperlane leading towards Earth. While they recovered quickly, it bought enough time for the majority of the Third Fleet to reach safety. This included one hundred seventy-seven warships of various classes, that after a visit in the shipyards of Hope took part in the Coreworlds Campaign.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 9, Page 312

***

TCS Cutlass, Command Section

02:12 08.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

The ship’s systems sprung back to life with no significant delays or error messages. It was almost suspiciously easy, not that Christopher was exactly going to complain about that. A simple boarding operation without shocking revelations or sudden threats to their lives was a nice change of pace.

“Everything seems good.” Tendrik announced after a while. “Some things booted up slower than they should, so I’ll check them later with Ryan. But it’s nothing major.”

Cycle joined the celebration by sending him a message that it checked through the now-active security system and found no one but them aboard. It was a large ‘phew’ moment for Christopher.

The Sidhe was currently in the security command, which for some reason was placed somewhere else than the command deck. Christopher had no idea why it was placed like that. It was like that on the Echo, too.

“Hmmm...” Tiriel spoke from the side. “Life support seems to work as intended. Air in twenty minutes, livable temperature in thirty minutes.” All according to the pre-boarding timetable. True miracle.

“It’s almost suspicious how everything seems to work so well.” Christopher said. “The Long Road was pretty much dead.”

“The Cutlass is a warship.” Tendrik replied. “Redundancies for redundancies and all that. It was built to last, even in a hostile environment. It probably cost about as much as the Long Road despite being twenty times smaller.”

“Mmm, makes sense.” Christopher replied. “Especially as the Seekers of all people probably didn’t bother about stuff like insurance for their transport vessels.” He could hear some chuckles in the network. He had no idea who was crazy enough to consider that a joke. “Okay, guys, so what do we talk about while we wait for the place to be liveable? It’s going to be a boring thirty minutes.”

“How do you feel about your second sudden promotion, Lieutenant Hall?” Tiriel decided to enter the minefield, despite his earlier warning signs.

“Thank you, Tiriel. I almost managed to not think about the depths of responsibility that was just pushed on to me for more than ten seconds.” Christopher replied, prompting another wave of chuckles. “You better stop with the laughs. You are going to be part of the crew of a ship commanded by the least knowledgeable officer in the history of space exploration. We’re probably going to crash into the nearest moon during our first flight.”

Chuckles died out. This was a truly horrifying concept. Sure, they were going to have an AI to handle the navigation (so they probably weren’t going to hit any moon), but it was still a major problem.

Of course, frigates weren’t supposed to fight anyone or anything. They couldn’t take a hit and hope to survive, because they lacked any form of armor. Only evasive maneuvers and shields stood between their crew and scary things outside.

“You think it’s too late to request a transfer back to the Echo?” Ryan’s voice came to them from his current position in Engineering.

“Yes.” Tiriel stated flatly. “Although if we manage to survive the inevitable destruction of Cutlass, we will be reassigned elsewhere, so there is still hope. I call dibs on the quarters closest to the escape pods.” Chuckles returned, this time on the border of being considered laughter.

At the very least, the morale was high. If only he knew why, he could take advantage of that. Instead, he could only marvel at the sight.

“Dryad, anything out of the ordinary?” Christopher asked. It wasn’t exactly a question he wanted an answer for. Instead, he just wanted to make sure that the AI was still there.

The small and occasionally changing geometric symbol (currently a triangle) in the corner of his vision shined slightly. Christopher had no idea why its designation was Dryad - he saw nothing particularly dryadish in it. Then again, there was a theme - other Truthseekers’ AIs had mythological names too. AI/ARACHNE, AI/PROMETHEUS, AI/APHRODITE… only the AI/MURDER seemed to be from a different naming department altogether.

“Nothing.” Was all the answer he got. It was spoken in a vaguely female voice, but it still sounded mechanical.

Making the AI actually contribute to the team's operations in more ways than just following orders was going to take a while. Innocent claimed that the AI was much more developed than this, and could actually just show itself with some much more human-like avatar, initiate conversations and generally be like a normal team member, only one living inside a computer. But the shock of what it went through (and small loss of data) was enough to traumatize it into acting like a Simulated Intelligence.

Christopher sighed. One more case of him having to babysit his subordinates. Negative side-effect of Captain Keller filling the crew to the brim with weirdos - the team leaders had to spend a lot of their time keeping their subordinates in a state remotely resembling working.

“Fine, so let’s wait until the air is breathable. Then we’ll get to explore the ship properly.” A few more months and he would perhaps get used to the horrible idea of actually commanding a spaceship despite having no idea how to do that.

***

EGS Cutlass, Command Section

03:15 08.08.2610 STT

Lieutenant Christopher Hall

The ship was small. Very, very small, at least when compared to the Echo. According to Dryad (or, to be exact, according to the text message it sent in response to the query) it was designed to fly around with anywhere from five to fifteen crew members, depending on how much its commanding officer was willing to trust computers. And how many spacers the Seekers had to spare.

It wasn’t shaped like a fat cigar with a slightly flattened upper and lower surface like the Echo and the majority of other starships, instead its shape resembled a number 3, just with the upper and lower ‘arms’ being more straight and facing towards the front. So something like a bastard child between 3 and a ]. Which only drove deeper the nail of knowledge that this ship wasn’t supposed to survive a hit.

The crew quarters actually resembled the one on the Echo. At least when it came to the private room and their size. Since said quarters included all crew members of the ship, there was no kitchen next to it. Instead there was a ‘mess hall’ a few steps away which was a rather colourful name for something the size of a normal kitchen and a dining room. The living room was out there as well, though it was rather scarce (thankfully, Kivanna was en route back to the Echo, from which she was going to return with their belongings - including some entertainment things).

Christopher, in the meantime, received a room that was almost thrice the size of the normal rooms. Perks of being the commanding officer. The bed was big enough to warrant Ryan and Ananti’s jokes about him having to quickly figure out with whom to share the quarters. Christopher noped out of the idea so badly that he actually decided to pick one of the smaller rooms.

He was going to be the commanding officer. Tiriel was, naturally, the closest they had to an exec, although without the part about actually leading bridge shifts - she was much too busy being both the enviro ‘officer’ and both the medical and science ‘officers’. Tendrik was the tactical ‘officer’.

Ryan was technically the chief engineer. If there was one thing more scary than being aboard a ship commanded by a person with absolutely zero experience then it was having an engineer with few months of experience in charge of both the reactor and the hyperdrive. Christopher had no idea how he had the tiniest bit of clue on how to operate things.

Did the Echo’s engineers have the Accounting Department sacrifice some prisoners in order to give him the necessary skills? It was the closest thing Christopher had to a theory explaining this madness.

Cycle was helping Ryan with the programming part, but it was also a certified engineer. And, technically, one of the two marines aboard the ship. While it was practically unkillable and carried the firepower of a small tank (the joint training exercise was… enlightening), its experience was counted in days.

Ananti had skills and experience barely better than Cycle, and he became (in name only) head of the ships’ marines. Which made him the chief of security. Nekia was a weapons-dedicated part of the engineering team, and Kivanna became the shuttle pilot slash secondary navigator.

It was an absolutely improvised roster, which didn’t implode on itself only because they had a Class-Two AI which emerged on its own from the Long Road’s Simulated Intelligence. Which meant that it knew how to operate ships and was extremely familiar with Seekers’ equipment. Dryad was supposed to be make sure that Christopher didn’t break the ship by some stupid maneuver (making it a bit of a primary navigator) while also doing pretty much all of the things that weren’t covered by the slightly numerically limited crew.

Of course, it was still an AI-equivalent of a hyper-introverted shut-in. Christopher could only hope that it wouldn’t break further. Or wouldn’t get suicidal.

Christopher also got a few thousand gigabytes of data concerning the accelerated training for the job he just received. He couldn’t help but think that it should happen before receiving independent command.

He concluded the tour by showering Captain Keller in curses.

***

EGS Echo, Command Deck

05:17 08.08.2610 STT

Commander Lena Drathari

Finally, the dot representing the Cutlass began moving towards the second planet of the system. Seventeen minutes of delay and no visible explosions, a good start for a space adventure, even if the course plotted by the frigate’s navigators wasn’t the most fuel-efficient one.

“Ah, they grow up so quickly.” Keller commented. He was notably more stable than earlier, but still a far cry from the nonchalant and ferociously brave behaviour he showed her at the beginning of her service as Echo’s exec.

It was her shift on the bridge, and he was off-duty. Yet snorting derisively at your commanding officer was as far from the expected behaviour of a rethani paladin as possible. So she withheld her reaction.

“You seem awfully negative, Lena.” If there was one disease common to all crew members of the Echo, then it was their pathologic inability to take a hint. She didn’t want to have that talk, yet Keller refused to honour that.

“That’s because it can end in two ways.” She replied, looking at him sternly. “In the first one, once this mess is over, the Guild will investigate us to hell and back over you allowing someone without any sort of qualifications to command a ship under its flag. And even if the Guild buys the ‘special circumstances’ explanation, the whole affair will still follow me during my career like war crimes accusations following a Pact of Steel officers. Alternatively there will be no investigation because you are secretly a god-emperor of the Explorers’ Guild. In which case I’m going to lose the last vestiges of respect towards professionalism of the whole organization. I lose in both cases.”

“It will be the latter.” He replied calmly. “I might not be a god-emperor, but the Keller family has a guaranteed place in the secretive committee running this circus ever since the creation of the Guild. Perks of being a distant descendant of both Frederick Keller, the unofficial patron saint of the Solar Commonwealth’s Survey Corps, and Augustus Keller, the president of the United States of America during the closing years of the Unification Wars and a chief proponent for establishment of the Explorers Guild.”

This came out of the blue. She stared at him for a few seconds, busy trying to find an answer for the obvious question: why did he tell her all that?

“I also thought that we had a talk about you having a healthy distance to the rules, or at least understanding why others maintain it.” He continued, unaware of her internal chaos. She made sure that none of it was shown on her face.

“We did.” She replied. Her face was stoic. “But you keep pressing the boundary further and further. Almost to the point of breaking. What the hell’s going on with you, Captain?” She said, in a slightly hushed voice. No need to have the crew members present on the bridge hear it. “WIth the way you are acting, I occasionally start considering taking advantage of article 72.”

This took him off-guard. The article in question spoke about a lot of things, but you didn’t need a doctorate to know what she was talking about. The part of the article mentioning when and how the executive officer could take the command from a Captain that was obviously unfit for duty.

“Oh, uhm, I don’t think officers would be with you on that.” He said, before chuckling. The chuckle died when he saw her completely unmoved face. “Wait, they are with you on that?!” He really didn’t expect that.

“Let’s just say that I made a subtle query.” Subtle, and unfinished. “Although I’m not so sure on how trustworthy the results are, as I played said query as me looking for support before having a corrective talk with you. But it seems that people are seriously worried, and their list of preferred commanding officers has me between your usual self and your current self.”

Honestly speaking, she was risking a lot. But it was her job as exec. Sure, removing one of the top dogs of the Guild from his seat would be a killing blow to her career, but it still felt like a better idea when compared to her survival chances hanging on someone as unbalanced as recent Captain Keller.

Besides she had that talk unofficially. If she wanted to make things awkward, she would have demanded her ‘corrective talk’ be mentioned in the ship’s log. Good way of shielding yourself from bureaucratic harm when the clouds part. But she really didn’t care about that. Survival was far more important.

“Well, that explains why Innocent hacked my personal computer and replaced my alarm clock sound with a hymn about some Catholic saint that used to be a Navy captain, and got martyred by his traitorous officers.” Keller announced after a few seconds of stunned silence. Lena made a mental note to have a serious talk with Innocent about what ‘keeping things under the radar’ meant. And on why hacking people’s PCs was super forbidden.

“Well, my plan isn’t to martyr you.” Lena clarified. “More like… temporarily retire you from direct decision making while still listening to your opinions and forcing you to have some serious therapeutic sessions with Innocent. And even that, only if things get even worse than they currently are.”

“Oh my, that has to be the gentlest mutiny I ever heard about.” He chuckled bitterly. “Well, I honestly can’t blame you. If there was an alternative, and I could just leave this whole mess, without remaining on the pitifully small group of ships stranded in the middle of nowhere… well, I would be tempted to take it.”

After translating this from captainish into some more common language it was something like that ‘I’m absolutely and totally scared’. The last thing she expected to hear when she decided - against herself - to start this talk a bit earlier.

“You do know that the recording of what you just said is enough to justify me taking over?” A bit strainy justification, but enough to make her avoid serious legal problems. “Wait, of course you do.”

“Hey, I think I did mention that I really like that moral spine of yours.” Keller replied. “If you decide that I’m no longer fit for the job, go for it. I’m going through some serious problems right now, and I’m not compromising our survival chances over that. I trust you enough to know that you won’t make any terminally stupid decisions.”

The entire talk was derailed very far from what she expected to happen. She decided to try to take full advantage of it.

“Any chances of you actually telling me what’s the problem?” She could see that the answer was no. It was clearly written on his face. “It’s about the Discovery, isn’t it?” This hit a weakspot. He froze for a few seconds.

“I see. So you know.” He sighed. “You know what, fine. I’m going to tell you. Perhaps actually telling someone even a fraction of it will make things easier for me. But, before I start talking, I need you to know one thing. It’s not going to be just classified. It will be super classified. No worming your way through that censorship program with some petty officer tricks. If you do that, you will end up mysteriously disappearing. Forever. No exceptions. Still want to hear what it's all about?”

To be honest, this only made her more interested. Her curiosity knew no bounds. It was one of her most defining features. There was going to be a small issue of her being unable to fulfill her promise to Athalia about telling him what she found out. But her duty to her superior officer did take precedence. Although she was going to explain that to him face to face.

“Fine. Isolate us, please.” She was technically in charge of the bridge, so doing it himself was out of the question. She quickly activated the isolation mode of the captain’s seat area. Now no one could overhear what they were talking about. “Still want to hear the big secret?” She nodded furiously.

“Very well then.” He nodded. “The leadership of the Explorers’ Guild and a select few leaders of the Confederation have been aware of the existence of ‘angels’ for a few decades now. And are vaguely aware of where they actually hail from.”

She expected a talk about feelings. Instead she got that. She decided that the part about disappearing mysteriously could have actually been serious. It was too late to bail out, so she continued listening.

“They are some form of Extradimensionals from what media called the Void.” He continued. “Stupid name by the way.” She couldn’t agree more. It was supposed to be some different frequency of Hyperspace discovered relatively recently, and still too lethal to use as FTL medium. But the early research already brought some voidtechs…

… like the Godhammer. The Void Cannon installed on the Echo. She connected the dots almost immediately. Keller somehow noticed.

“Yeah, you can say that we got some… gifts from them.” He said. “They are both incredibly powerful and completely enigmatic. We know they intervened in our history on a select few occasions. There are some that suspect that Newman received the Hyperdrive blueprints from them. And some consider the idea that contact with these ‘angels’ is what separates civilizations still climbing the Wall of Reason with those at the top of them. In the end, it’s all pure speculation. And the optimistic one.”

“And what are the pessimistic speculations?” She knew that he wanted to tell her. She could as well play her part.

“Well, we still don’t know why all the post-Wall of Reason civilizations we encounter are, well, dead.” He replied. “Save for the Sidhe and Berserks, which at some point climbed the Wall down, and the Shades and Screamers, who apparently are both omnicidal maniacs that we aren’t sure if they technically count as sapient anymore. On the other hand, the part about contact with said ‘angels’ being a trigger for ascension is just one of many theories. What we know for sure is that we are facing incredibly powerful Extradimensionals who are apparently very interested in us, and understand us to an uncanny degree. As you can imagine, folks leading the Guild are incredibly worried about the whole affair. Hell, for as far as our knowledge goes, they could really be angels. We know for a while that sufficiently advanced technology is akin to magic, perhaps it's time to find out that sufficiently advanced religion is akin to technology.”

It was an interesting theory. Incredibly interesting. Although it didn’t seem to cover the very reason why she took part in it. There was no answer as to why Keller was acting like he did. She was about to ask, but her face betrayed her intentions.

“Alright, alright, I get it. It was just a bit too lengthy of an introduction to the subject at hand.” Keller sighed. “I happened to be part of Mankind’s first direct contact with them. I was a twenty-something Enlisted back then.” She had problems imagining him as an Enlisted. It was probably quite a while ago.

“Is it correct to assume that a Discovery-class frigate was a part of that first contact?” Lena was almost certain that whatever ship was used during that, there was a significant chance that it looked like the Discovery. Especially considering the Captain’s reaction to that design.

“Yeah, you are right.” Alexander sighed. “The problem is… the voidtech weaponry and equipment isn’t the only thing that they are handing out for inexplicable reasons. Let’s just say that a boon I received has significantly lowered… pretty much to zero, in fact… the chance of myself dying. Which made risking my life with calculated risk tactics a bit less, how should I put it, uhm, mentally taxing? Unfortunately, the recent events, especially certain elements of Christopher Hall’s little meetings with his guardian angel, have made me realize that I might no longer possess that privilege.”

She stared at him for a few long seconds.

“You are trying to tell me that you are recently scared of everything because you were pretty much immortal before that and now you are forced to face the fact that you can actually die?!” It was hard to describe what she thought about that. In part it was akin to hearing that your idol was a fake all along. In part it was… something. She wasn’t sure herself.

If he was telling her the truth. Something in all that didn’t add up, but she had no idea what.

“You’re not one to criticize me for it!” He replied loudly and quickly. He must have seen a growing disdain on her face and decided to salvage the situation however he could. “Do you still remember your first combat mission away from the cybernetic hub that you call your home? The one when you, for the first time in your life, could potentially die due to being lost to a Hyperspace or your ship being destroyed in combat? What was your reaction to that, huh?”

She looked through her memories of that time for a few seconds. Finally she made a ruling.

“Okay, point taken.” She did act awkwardly similar to him. To a lesser degree, then again her first mission was a completely safe and trivial patrol. Not fighting for life away from friendly ports and with no chances of helping coming. Immortality was a potent drug, and with equally potent withdrawal symptoms. “So what now?”

“Well, now I need a while to figure out where I’m standing with all of that.” He replied. He seemed to be relieved that she agreed with him in the end. “So please, bear with me for the time being. In the so-called meantime we are pretty much screwed, whatever we do. My last plan of how to turn it all around on our own was to try to capture the Seekers’ ground base. Interestingly enough, the AI that Hall’s team found confirmed the presence of a potent superweapon in it, which we could use to turn the table on Discord or the Seekers’ forces. However the angel has said that it is occupied by a ground force of what it calls ‘the demons’. As a result, my desire to attack it just shrank tenfold. Angels are… they are actually quite powerful.”

“Oh? Like that Extradimensional we encountered on Pristine Jewel?” She had issues imagining something more powerful than a being who shaped a large cargo vessel into a weirdly hypnotic fractal.

“Let me put it that way.” He sighed, obviously uncomfortable with it. “The angel that was sent as an emissary to the Confederation’s leadership has manifested its actual level of power by terraforming a planet the meeting was on. Within five minutes.”

She stared at him. It moved the angels from ‘emigrants from a soft sci-fi world’ category to… Lena wasn’t sure herself. How was it even possible?

“Not exactly an angel, though.” Keller added. “At least not the same as the one following Hall around. So perhaps some sort of ‘archangel’. But Keller has met at least a single angel of unknown power level that might have not been archangel, but instead something even stronger.”

This talk was an absolute rollercoaster of existential dread. And Keller was yet to finish delivering it.

“Good news is that at least theoretically all that spatial distortion superweapons that our Hyperspace research spawned should be able to kill them if things come to that.” Keller added. “The Guild did kill a few hostile Extradimensionals with them. But we have at best a hundred something superdreadnoughts carrying those within the Confederation, so not having to test that would be preferable.”

He didn’t add that, but the Guild probably wasn’t one hundred percent sure that those would work. Or that an angel would bother waiting to be shot instead of attacking.

Besides, Mankind learned a lot about waging war during the past centuries. Not attacking opponents who surpassed you in quality of their forces before finding out the quantity of theirs. Who knew how many angels were there?

“We now know that, we also know that there are some sort of demons, although apparently they seem to have ‘ground forces’, so they are slightly more mundane, if not just an angelspeak for hostiles.” Captain continued. “This entire trip is an absolute goldmine of valuable intel. If something happens to me, consider bringing this back to the Guild an absolute priority.” He leaned towards her a bit, his voice lowering to a conspiratorial whisper. “Absolute priority, Lena. Even if you have to play Vorontsov, it has to reach the headquarters.”

“Now I’m starting to feel like the whole revelation about yourself and the angels was all just a build-up to this.” She commented. It was better than focusing on him just telling her that the lives of the entire crew are now considered a secondary concern.

“I might have rediscovered the fear of death and need some time to get over that, but it doesn’t mean I suddenly went senile.” He replied with a slightly bitter chuckle. “I can fulfill more than one goal within a single discussion, you know? My executive officer needs to be more or less aware of what we are facing, even if it happens to be the top-secret-shoot-yourself-in-the-head-before-reading stuff.” Lena suspected, despite all, that he actually had absolutely no right to enlighten her on that particular field. But it was just her suspicion.

“For now, we should focus on using the lovely data we got from our new AI friend to fix some of the Seekers’ ships, including the Deadweight.” He continued. “Plus, of course, fixing the rest of our ships, training the crew we have and fervently praying to every god imaginable that the Seekers and Discord will battle it out for as long as possible.” He sighed. “I don’t exactly like the idea, but it seems that whatever the angels are plotting for Christopher might be our one and only hope. And that’s, my dear second in command, is why I gave him the command of the ship.”