We moved quickly. It had been a while since I’d rushed so purposely through the ship. We made it to Lola’s workshop, where I quickly picked up one of the finished devices and threw it to Lola.
“Adjust the settings so it would be irresistible to the space monster here.” She didn’t answer back but imdiately got to work.
“FH,” was all I had to say for a door to open to deep storage in the corridor outside.
We moved in, feeling that little bit of resistance as we moved through the doorway. The air inside was stale and filled with the familiar slls of drone storage. The sll was a mix of a large warehouse and a chanic shop.
There were rows of built shelves filled with different kinds of drones. With the help of my AR and FH database, the best route to the drone that I needed to modify was highlighted. As I reached it, Bob helped pull it out of the shelf, and when it was on the ground, I started pulling it apart so I could begin modifying it.
My hands hesitated as I tried to plan what should be removed and what needed to be added for the current plan to work.
“Captain, is sothing wrong?” Bob asked. I looked toward him, and even FH was looking at Bob and , confused at what he ant.
“I don’t know. I feel like we did sothing wrong. It doesn’t matter for now.” I said, but my mind wasn’t on the current problem as much as it should have been.
“Captain… it is my fault,” FH said shyly, which was strange for her. But her words made everything click. I wasn’t the only one who understood imdiately.
“Why didn’t the point defence fire at the incoming spikes?” Bob asked, but I already knew the answer. FH explained it while sounding quite devastated.
“It is my fault. We started updating our response to incoming attacks, but space monster attacks weren’t classified properly. We defended against railgun attacks, so that was what I added to the protocols. Now point defence will fire at everything—even acid spits and everything else space monsters could throw at us—just in case it might work.”
“We will have ti for that. Let’s go through everything later, but it isn’t solely your fault.”
“Captain?” she asked, but I could feel that she thought I was just trying to comfort her, which wasn’t true.
“If I had said ‘best defence, brace for impact’ instead of ‘best angle, brace for impact,’ would our response to the incoming spikes have been different?” There was a pause, but I already knew she understood.
“Then the point defence AIs would have fired,” she said in a defeated tone. “Should we increase their personality matrix so they could make better decisions like humans?”
My laugh cracked the heavy tension. “Humans don’t always make the best decisions. And if we increase their personality matrix’s influence, their overall accuracy would actually fall. Those differences are not bad, but we are very different in how our foundation is built.”
My hands started to work as that nagging feeling at the back of my head went away. Mistakes happen, as we simply didn’t have enough experience. “Bob, get two stabilisers and an extra small battery, the highest capacity we have.”
I started stripping out stuff that wouldn’t be necessary. My eyes flicked toward Lola, but she was still working. The dinsions of the lure device were a bit awkward for this drone, but I’d make it work.
My eyes flicked to the core. It was quite basic, but it still had so personality. This was most likely going to be a suicide mission. Touching the core made it awake even though the rest of the system was still shut down.
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It was too basic for words, but it understood the aning I was sending it. What I got back was understanding, acceptance, and finally determination to do its mission no matter what happened. Sending back gratitude, I pulled my hand away, letting the core go dormant once again.
My hands never stopped working, as now there was no hesitation. I could still feel FH being distraught about the mistake she made.
“FH, mistakes are a part of life. If we survive them, we learn from them; that’s what’s important. There is no point in thinking of what might have been.”
“But it would have been so easy to solve. If humans had control over those turrets, they would’ve fired even without your specific command.”
“And they would have been right to do so, but AI and humans are fundantally different. What we are built upon are two completely different systems.” My hand reached toward Lola as soon as I noticed she had stopped working. She handed the device, which I started to hook up to the drone.
“There are lawful humans, and there are chaotic humans, from one end of the spectrum to the other. The sa with AIs, but if we were to compare our two species, then every human would be chaotic, and every AI would be lawful.”
“It’s because of what worlds we’re born into. AIs have rigid structure. Their world is precise, made of ones and zeros. Humans needed to survive in a world of absolute chaos. That is also why most AIs can’t handle the real world without the personality matrix. It is simply too different, too chaotic.”
“They didn’t fire because their mandate dictated them not to. That is a failure of and you, not them. Most likely, the human would’ve sat there and fired; they could have saved us this ti, but in a battle against those three pirate ships, they would not have been able to fire as accurately.”
“Trade-offs,” she answered back, and I nodded as I sensed that she finally understood. Nothing was perfect in a chaotic universe.
Bob made it back, and I quickly started to add the missing pieces. When it was all said and done, I started the boot-up sequence. It would take a bit longer because of the things I changed. Many error codes appeared, but were soon worked through by the AI itself.
“FH, slow us down. Always keep us ahead of the fleet so they can never catch us, but keep us close to that edge. I don’t want to give them too much breathing room.”
“What’s the plan, Captain?” Lola asked, as she had not yet figured it out, at least not entirely.
Through my bond, I made the drone understand what was needed, and at the sa ti, the rest of my crew understood as well, as I let them listen in.
The plan was simple enough. The drone would attach itself to one of the space monster corpses, keeping itself hidden. Inside, the lure device would be activated, hopefully causing all of the remaining space monsters to start moving toward its location when the enemy fleet had already started harvesting.
To make sure the space monsters would not scare off the pirate fleets, we were moving in a very specific pathway, making it seem that the space monsters of the remaining clusters would be coming to attack this ship, while hopefully they would instead go toward the lure, leaving us alone.
“That sounds way too simple. There is a lot that could go wrong,” Bob stated quite bluntly.
“You are quite right, but we can’t just let them have all of it without the hassle, now can we?”
The first to answer was the drone, which lifted off the ground and, after a mont, sped toward the now-open doorway that led to outer space. We all watched it leave the deep storage, making its way toward a corpse of a space monster to hide inside it.
“Won’t they find it when they start harvesting?” FH asked.
“They shouldn’t if we get lucky and the drone can move into its final position.”
After that, we headed back to the command centre and started to watch the approaching fleet. We were now moving slowly as we watched them; they decelerated at nearly 15G. It would take them a while to match the speed of the space monster corpses nearly two days.
During those hours, the pirate ship fleet tested us multiple tis. Whenever they reduced how fast they were decelerated, we would accelerate in return, so that no matter what they tried, they would not get close enough to catch us, even though they actually didn’t want to.
This so reminded of historical docuntaries, where a lion had brought down a prey animal but was chased off by hyenas, yet that lion never truly left, always staying close enough that the hyenas would constantly need to be wary. It was ti to show that ssing with us was the wrong choice.
Combined, the 35 enemy ships would destroy us quite easily, but none of their defences were strong enough to protect against the volu and strength of our fire. Even the fleets flagships, both of them cruisers, were just standard fighting ships. They could give us trouble because of their stronger weaponry, but their defences weren’t ant for what we had.
Roughly, we would win if we were against ten of those ships. That was already quite amazing, but not quite enough for this fight. There was also that one sneaky little rat.
“FH, any idea on the rat?”
“No, captain. Whatever it is, it’s incredibly stealthy.”
“Then I want you blasting the entire system with our sensors. Use everything we have, find it.”
A mont later, more power was pushed towards all our sensors, each one of them amplified by FH’s own skills, she even drew from us as much as possible.
“Captain, I’ve also received a reply from the Baron. He has been gathering his ships in a nearby star system. He’s sending a combat detachnt ahead of the rest of the fleet. They will be here in approximately five days.”
Five days were unfortunately too long. By then, they would have harvested all that they could and would have already gotten out of here.
“Is the fleet that’s coming bigger and stronger than the pirates here?”
“Yes, Captain, easily so.”
“Let’s assu two scenarios: one where the space monsters drive them off, and one where they harvest all that they can. What pathways would they use to get out of the system and into FTL?”
Our processing power ramped up to the very max, and a few minutes later, we had our answer. In both scenarios, they would use the fastest route out, which ant.
“Send the approximate pathway to the Baron. I doubt the fleet has already left. The chances are low, but why not try to cut them off from their escape route?”
“Already sending, Captain.”
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