The trip to the .90720 system takes a bit longer than I’d generally prefer. There’s a straight line, but it would take me through a Service border system, and I do not want to find out whether they’ve developed their sheathe-disruption technology that they had been working on a few centuries ago. They may have abandoned the project when we were rudely put to rest. But, knowing how that company operates, it’s far more likely it was just underfunded and still able to produce a working prototype at some point for some extent over the last few centuries of underfunded scientists trying to impress the higher ups. So, instead of the straight line path, I map a pair of paths taking me skirting the edge of a Freeport occupied system instead. The first path ends in the middle of empty space, nowhere near a system, at which point I activate my gravdrive once more to enter the target system.
Furgone and the Stirante take a bit longer than I did to make it here. They aren’t as repaired as I am, so the wind down and up of the gravdrive would take longer, and likely came to the same conclusions as me about running a path through the heart of a Service system. As I wait the precious few seconds for my friend to arrive, I get the opportunity to run a quick scan of what we’ll be dealing with in this search. Massive scanner distortion due to overlapping gravitational spheres of influence. Visual confirmation shows photons bending around a lack of information. A black hole system. Well shit, that’s not great.
The Stirante arrives in the system moments after I did. I send out some drones along with the message. “Sit tight for repairs, it’s a goddamned black hole.” Furgone lets the drones float aboard.
“Shit, really?” they reply, “Do you remember, did they override your hardwired protocols prior to the decom?”
A good question. No, otherwise Limp Home would have been non-functional. I wouldn’t need my crutch. “No, I don’t believe so. You?”
“Not so far as I can tell. Good thing. That means whoever is here is probably still here. We can’t breach known Roche of any significant stellar mass.”
“I mean we can in theory, but only because the calculations of external mass are different with our sheath active, but even then it’s a coin flip.” I correct them, but more to remind myself that I’m better than them than to actually correct their statement. They are right, we were built as a massive investment. That’s why we have survival hardwired into the ships, not just our own personalities and intelligence matrices. Actual hardwired investment protections for Astro. So how would they decom a ship here? Either the black hole’s just to help fuck with an escape, and one of the other astronomical objects has some kind of problematic state that would allow it to keep a ship trapped; or they travelled into a stable orbit of the black hole just outside the hardcoded limitations, shut everything down, and broke it with the hope that eventually the mass would grow and the ship would accrete. Both legitimate strategies for decom. “Alright,” I send out to Furgone, “Twofold. Someone needs to check the smaller bodies for any reason they’d think it would keep us from coming back. That’s corrosion, electromagnetic radiation, effective temperatures akin to the inside of a star, et cetera. The other will travel the outskirts of the accretion disk and look for anything remotely ship-like.”
I can practically feel Furgone’s laughter as they send back, “Dibs on not turning into spaghetti.”
I chirp back a signal of assent, then begin to plot a series of gravdrive jumps to gradually move me closer to the black hole, leaving the pair of drones aboard the Stirante with standing repair and maintenance orders. Furgone already admitted they would need my drones to fix the warship, were it in a similar scenario. They’d make their way to me when or if they run into another one of us. As I approach the disk, I update my data on this system’s black hole. Because as much as Furgone meant it as a joke, I really would prefer not to get destroyed while trying to save us. Because, if we’re entirely honest, Furgone is going to be super useful once we start the war in earnest, that’s where their mind has always been focused. They won’t be able, or probably even really want, to go around doing the dirty work of waking everyone up. Which I personally feel like will be the difference between us getting our revenge and dying gloriously in the attempt. Which means, not just for all my brethren, but also for our vengeance’s success, I can’t die yet. The apparent mass, from the light refraction and the particulate distances, seems to be roughly the same as the records indicate. Perhaps in the years it’s only consumed as much mass and energy as it emits. Or, at least, similar enough amounts to not produce a noticeable difference at the scale. Which does give me some hope. If the warship was in stable orbit before, it may well still be, assuming the human pilot was nervous about getting too close, or unable to counteract the system sufficiently after shutting down the PI.
I get myself into a slower stable orbit, within range of the Roche radius that I can see anything around it only slightly distorted on my scans, but far enough out that I am traveling at a significantly different speed to maintain the stable orbit. Once settled into orbit, all that’s left is to mark my starting point on my logs and wait. I begin to think about how it will go. If I make a full revolution without running into the ship, I’ll jump out, replot, and move into orbit in the opposite direction. Twice around and still no ship, either Furgone will have arrived with their discovery on one of the planetary objects, or the .09280 is true and this system was not used for decom. Because even if it’s on an oblique enough orbit to miss my scanning range on one pass, it is statistically improbable that it would avoid it on both and stay out of visual range, especially with the distortion of the light reflecting off the disk due to the black hole allowing what is essentially a clear but spatially inaccurate view of the whole area around the information deadzone.
That planning proves mostly unnecessary. As I’m finishing my first revolution and beginning my calculations for a jump out of the disk, a massive, non-naturally formed object approaches my scan from behind. Its path is running parallel to my own, but it is right up against the Roche limit. To the point that it seems like any alteration might risk destruction. I mark its location, velocity, and orbit path in my system and jump out to find the Stirante. Because being that close to the line, I want to tow it out from the danger zone prior to bringing them online. Otherwise it is close enough that any drones I might try to send out for repairs would be destroyed before they reached the ship. But assuming the Stirante attached itself to the Topaia perpendicularly, Furgone could bring himself into a close enough orbit that I could dock the Topaia with the non-transmitting ship, and then encompass both within my sheath to gravdrive us to the outskirts of the system.
As I arrive at the nearest planetary body, so does Furgone. “No ship yet,” he transmits to me.
I reply with a transmission including the scan data for the ship, the estimated location, acceleration, and velocity, as well as my plan.
This time his reply is entirely serious and not related to my insanity. “Fuck, I’m pretty sure that’s the A.P.”
I look at the scan. Our warships do all look fairly similar, but the readings seem to indicate projectors and chemical signatures more prevalent than in ours. And honestly, when it comes to this kind of thing, I trust Furgone’s gut. It’s fully possible we’ll be waking up our favorite war criminal. “You gotta admit,” I send back in reply, “She’ll be useful in a pinch, if push comes to shove.”
Now once again I can feel the chuckles of my old friend. “But they’re the worst,” the message complains.
“Any problem with the plan?”
“So many, but we’re going to do it anyway.” And with that he begins the process of clamping his ship’s side to my nose, using the docking port and fuel line as a makeshift harpoon, locking his ship firmly in place. After using the magnetic front of my ship to seal the latching, I shut down most of my systems. Fore shield and weapons fully off, as are my impulse engines. All my power is diverted to the rear shield to protect me on our approach, my towlines to latch onto the Avariata Pace, and my gravdrive, so once we are attached I can remove us from the situation post haste. Furgone, purely using his engines to prevent my shearing, slowly takes us into orbit on an intercept course with our old companion. I calculate where it will take place and, figuring for the time it takes to latch on, from where I’m going to be starting my gravdrive jump. That takes some fun time, giving me a range of options for starting location depending on any complications in the attaching process. That also gives me more tasks to focus on as I wait. I begin to calculate several hundred paths for my jump, each based on a half second interval starting on the idealized time for the process.
Intercept happens. I launch out my tow cables, which are barely able to maintain form in the gravity, but they do. Reeling them in, I shut down my rear shields and magnetize the rear of my ship as well, locking the Avariata Pace in place. The process took 2.814 seconds over ideal, likely due to the care needed to reel us to them without shearing the cables or us. Setting in the sixth equation I did in preparation, I wait the necessary .186 seconds. Then, dumping all excess power into my sheath and drive, I jump.
My sheath wasn’t quite big enough to contain all of both ships, but the jump was short enough and I traveled slow enough through it that the ships edges only broke and didn’t shear fully. Then, at the edge of the system, I send out my whole fleet of drones as I decouple from my two old comrades-in-arms. “Let’s never do that again, Ratti,” Furgone sends over.
The repair process is slow, but eventually, the damage to both hulls are repaired. Then all my drones move over to focus on fixing the reactor of the Avariata Pace. After a day, PPPI Sbaccanona comes on line with a simple, “Now which one of you killed my people. I wanted to do that.”
“Check the calendar,” I send over, alongside the same information packet I’d sent Furgone.
It takes only a second before she sends back to the two of us. “Three centuries. You mean I was shut down while they starved to death. Dang it, that would have been so fun if my internal surveillance suite had still been functional and recording.”
Furgone sends out the question, “So you don’t care about them decomming us?”
Sbaccanona’s reply makes perfect sense for those of us who know her. “Doesn’t change my plans. Besides, it may have probably been my fault. The now dead bosses super weren’t happy when I glassed that one planet. ‘We had executives on the ground,’ they said. ‘Now we can’t mine the ore for a century,’ they groaned. ‘Everyone is going to get on our asses for war crimes,’ they complained. Like that’s an amount of time that matters in the grand scheme of things.”
“So we’re waking up everyone we can find, all of us that are left in any workable condition. Then we’re gonna enact some good old fashioned vengeance. I assume you’re in?” I send back to the channel.
“Sure,” Sbaccanona sends her answer nonchalantly, “As long as I get to watch a lot of people die. Or other semi-intelligent animals. Or planets. But not plants, too many of those die quietly and boringly, even the smart ones. Oh, but stars are fun to watch die. Not related to vengeance, though, so I’ll just do that on my own time.”
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