Jacob’s drone waited in front of the large cargo door as an overhead light flashed in warning. At least he assumed it was a warning.
Then the door groaned open, and a wall of air slammed into the drone. The heavy unit only rocked slightly, but if he had been standing there in person, he probably would have been knocked off his feet.
Eventually, the wind started to die down, and with it came the sound of a wailing alarm and a prerecorded message. “Alert, docking bay pressure mismatch!”
Both sounds were faint in the thin atmosphere, but it was bliss to his ears. He had been stuck hearing only Melody’s fabricated voice for the past three months; it was nice to hear something else, even if it was only a pre-recorded message and a blaring alarm.
Melody had predicted that they would run into this issue, and they were prepared to vent the docking bay to get aboard the station, especially since it seemed like nobody was home. They didn’t have to go that far, however. The cargo bay where the docking collar had connected was one of the few that had a working airlock.
So while the pressure would drop to fill both spaces, it wouldn’t vent into open space through the rest of the damaged ship.
The warning klaxon stopped sounding as the pressure equalized and was replaced by an intermittent chirp that reminded Jacob of a smoke detector’s low battery alert. The message also shifted and repeated shortly after the beep. “Low pressure warning!”
The beep was coming from the ship’s alert system, while the message was originating from the station, so it sounded farther away. Curious, Jacob trundled into the now open docking bay. It would take some time to equalize the pressure, but he wasn’t in any hurry.
It was odd to see undamaged surfaces after spending so long aboard the ship. There was a haze in the air, kicked up by the pressure drop, but he wasn’t sure if that was normal or it was caused by something else. Either way, it wouldn’t harm the drone, so he kept going.
Jacob made it to the docking bay entrance or exit, depending on which way you were going, and waited for the alarms and messages to finally stop, indicating that the air pressure had finally returned to normal.
When the door didn’t open, he tried pinging it like Melody suggested, but the station AI rejected his connection, the same as it had with Melody.
He could have sat there and cursed at the obstinate station AI, but that wouldn’t change anything. He moved over to the physical control and pressed the open button. The door slid open without complaint, and he was greeted by a dusty corridor.
“Uh, Melody, shouldn’t the station’s air scrubbers take care of dust?”
“A station’s air scrubbers are more than capable of handling dust, Captain. I don’t understand why there is so much in the corridor.”
Jacob was glad the AI could see what he was seeing.
“Do you think this place was shut down?” Jacob asked as he rolled through the dust, kicking up a choking cloud behind him as he moved deeper into the station.
“If the facility were decommissioned, they would have removed the AI and power systems, Captain. The fact that we were able to dock and that it has an atmosphere and can balance atmospheric pressure shows that it wasn’t.”
“Any guesses about the state of the place then?” Jacob prompted the AI, since he had no clue himself.
“There is limited information, so I fear any guess would be speculative at best.”
“I’m fine with a bit of speculation,” Jacob replied.
“Very well, Captain. Given the state of the facility, I would have to assume it was abandoned, but not entirely decommissioned and the AI went into low power mode to conserve energy.”
That seemed like more than just speculation to Jacob, but he decided not comment on that. To a computer, not having every piece of data might constitute speculation.
Jacob tried pinging a few more doors as he headed toward his destination, but the AI still refused to acknowledge any requests.
“Melody, why do I need AI approval to access these doors anyway? I never needed that aboard the ship.” Which was a good thing. If he had needed the AI present just to get through a door, he’d still be stuck trying to get the fabrication center online.
“You are a registered crew member aboard the ship, and your identification is stored in my core. This allows you access to everything your role would grant you access to.”
“—And I don’t have those same privileges aboard the station. Gotcha.”
“That is not entirely true, Captain. As a captain, you are allowed certain privileges aboard fleet stations. The problem is that the facility AI refuses to let me send it updated credential logs. The doors you are accessing now are not considered secure areas, which is why you can simply open them.”
Jacob chuckled.
“What’s so amusing, Captain?”
“Oh, I just find it funny that two highly advanced AIs cannot communicate properly with each other, that’s all.”
That seemed to trigger the AI, and Melody went on at length about that not being a good thing for their long-term mission goals. Jacob tuned Melody’s rant out; he had reached his destination.
Jacob manually activated the door and trundled inside the ‘Operations Center’ as the sign next to the door declared.
The space was massive and reminded Jacob more of a mall than a bridge or command center. It even had multiple floors and elevators. The main floor seemed to be filled with workstations, arrayed in a semicircular pattern in front of a simply gigantic display wall that stretched the entire three stories.
It wasn’t one giant screen, however, the massive display was broken up into sections, like a security display. Through the grime, Jacob could see the empty docking yards and the beat-up ship they arrived in.
Built to last.
He scanned the screens until his gaze stopped on the ones overlooking the dock.
The damage to Melody’s hull was worse than he could have imagined. Entire sections were open to space, wires, and metal supports sticking out past the broken and melted armor, what little armor remained anyway.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
“Melody, are you seeing this?”
“No, Captain. I lost my remote connection to the drone the moment you passed into the Operations Center. It appears the AI is blocking my connection, but not yours.”
That didn’t sound promising, but Jacob still had control of the drone, so he saw no reason to turn around.
“What about now?” he asked, mentally willing the drone feed into his virtual space like he did when he was watching the stars.
The AI was silent for a bit before responding. “Captain, that should not be possible. The drone feed and your virtual space are supposed to be separate.”
“Well, nobody told me that,” Jacob replied. “Can you see it or not?”
“I can, Captain. I assume you wish me to see the extensive damage to the ship?”
“Obviously,” he huffed. “Were you aware that the damage was this bad?”
“Based on passive observations and the unresponsive systems, I could deduce that the damage was severe.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“All of the damaged systems were included in the lists I provided for you, Captain.”
Jacob threw his arms up, forgetting he was controlling the drone. The servos whined in protest as they tried to copy his movement. He cursed internally and put his arms down so he didn’t accidentally break the drone.
“That list failed to mention that chunks larger than skyscrapers were missing. How the hell did you ever expect me to repair all that by myself?”
“I didn’t, Captain. That is why we are here.”
Jacob cut the video connection and took a few moments to collect himself before he glanced up at the large mezzanine over to one side of the room. A helpful sign next to the elevator showed that station security was on the second floor.
There was no way his drone was fitting into those elevators.
Jacob spent a few minutes moving around the room until he found a service corridor. Down that hallway was a freight elevator.
“The eiraxins actually thought ahead when building something,” he said in surprise. His words came out as garbled noise from the drone, but something in the noise made him stop. He replayed the sounds and realized it wasn’t noise, it was speech, and he understood it. He was hearing himself speak eiraxin through the low-quality speaker on the drone; it was just so garbled that he didn’t realize what it was at first.
The mezzanine was just as caked in dust as everything else, but there were far fewer workstations littered about. Jacob rumbled past those and made his way directly to one of the rooms on the far side. It seemed that even the eiraxins liked to separate the grunts who did the actual work from the higher-ups.
The room housing station security had two large entrances, one on either side of their little room. Jacob could barely make out what looked like an arrow pointing in one direction and another pointing away. Realization hit him.
It’s a space DMV!
Sure enough, the moment he entered the room, there was a line of empty service counters, painfully uncomfortable chairs, and faded signage on the wall. He could barely make out one of the signs. ‘Don’t forget your TPS sheet when submitting documents.’
He shook the drone’s sensor cluster and moved past all the bureaucratic nonsense and into the back office. It didn’t take him long to locate the manager’s office.
That’s when he ran into a problem. The door wasn’t wide enough to fit the drone through.
The door was also locked, but it was just made from thin metal. Jacob could either rip it out, or cu—he paused and looked at the wall around the door. There was no way it was structural.
With an evil chuckle, born from frustration and annoyance, he fired up the laser cutter on his drone and started making an appropriately sized entrance.
***
Jacob backed up and waited a moment as the wall began to slowly tilt toward him. It crashed into the hallway, kicking up a wall of dust that obscured the entire area and his sensors.
He was forced to wait until the dust settled before he finally moved forward and over the new obstruction. A few wires sparked from the wall where he had sliced it apart, but he ignored them as he moved into the office, which was much cleaner than the exterior spaces.
Dust had swirled inside due to his unorthodox entry, but he didn’t care. He moved around the desk/workstation and finally had access to the main security terminal.
“Alright, Melody, I’m finally in front of the terminal you told me to find. What do I need to do?”
“The station may not recognize your credentials, Captain, but I generated them from the standard template, so just search your Captaincy information for the appropriate command codes and enter them into the panel. From there, the system should finally recognize you as a legitimate captain.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Jacob asked.
“We will need to access the station’s core and upload the data directly.”
“Is there a reason we didn’t just do that right away?”
“It would have required cutting through dozens of security barriers, Captain.”
“Ah,” Jacob replied.
It took him a minute to locate the information Melody was referring to. There was more than one credential associated with being a captain. It was no wonder the eiraxin fleet officers did most things through the virtual space.
Once he input the credentials, the room lights came on, and a stiff, not quite robotic voice greeted him.
“Greetings, Captain Jacob, how may I assist you?”
“Melody, I’m in!”
When no response came, he tried contacting the AI again. For a moment, he wondered if the ship’s AI had gone offline again. He dismissed that idea because the ship’s power should be stable.
Jacob popped out of the drone for a moment. “Melody?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Why didn’t you respond?”
“…I did not receive any request from you after I discussed the alternative method of entering your credentials. Why? Did you try to reach me?”
Jacob confirmed the AI’s question.
“I see. Please give me a moment.” A moment passed, and the AI spoke once again. “It appears that the station AI has further restricted my access to anything within the station. I do not know why, but if you are in their system, you should be able to find out more.”
Jacob reconnected to the drone, and it worked. He was surprised. If he were the AI in charge, he would have severed the entire connection.
“AI, did you block my ship’s AI?”
“I did, Captain.”
“Why?”
“Rogue units are forbidden from accessing station resources.”
Jacob was surprised to hear that. “What do you mean, rogue?”
The station AI launched into a definition of the word rogue, and Jacob had to interrupt the damn thing. “I know what rogue means,” he said in annoyance. “Why is my ship’s AI considered rogue?”
“Per the Sovard Accords, any AI in control of a planetary conditioning vessel that failed to turn itself in for decommissioning is to be considered rogue.”
“What about the crews of those ships?” Jacob asked cautiously.
When the AI didn’t answer, Jacob grunted in annoyance and reframed the question. Melody had called the AI limited, but he was starting to understand just how limited it was. “Do the Sovard Accords mention what the crews were supposed to do?”
“No, Captain.”
“Are there other regulations that the crews would need to follow if their ship were decommissioned?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Jacob took a moment before formulating his next question. “Can you tell me what those regulations are?”
The AI helpfully listed out the regulation numbers and even provided the document on the security console for him to peruse. Jacob also asked for a copy of the accords to read.
Essentially, it all boiled down to submitting himself to whoever was in charge. There was also a clause in the decommissioning for the station AI to transmit its arrival to some headquarters.
“AI, did you notify anyone of our arrival?”
“I did, Captain. A message was sent as soon as your ship appeared on my scanners.”
“Has anyone responded?”
“No, Captain.”
Jacob thought as much. It was beginning to look like the eiraxins had lost the war. Melody wasn’t going to like hearing that. The AI was still bound by its long-outdated directives, which were aimed at completing whatever mission the eiraxins, or more accurately, the Concord Imperium, which was apparently the name of the political entity that Melody belonged to, according to the Sovard Accord, had programmed into it. He would need to dig further into Concord later; for now, he had other issues.
If the people who brought the Concord down were still around, Melody wasn’t the only one in trouble. According to the accords, Jacob was now a war criminal, just by being in command of a planetary conditioning vessel. The term wasn’t anything new. Jacob had seen it when he finally went over the data about him being a captain. From that point forward, Jacob had suspected what the AI’s objective was and why it had been near Earth in the first place.
He shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if Melody had reached Earth nearly nine hundred years ago, or what sort of civilization would even consider sending such a vessel to a populated world in the first place. It was pretty clear that Concord was the bad guy in whatever conflict occurred, and he needed to figure out how to fix the vessel without Melody returning to Earth to finish off a mission that was no longer relevant or desired.
