The Machine God Chapter 237 - Deus In Machina

Chapter 237

Deus In Machina

Alexander followed Carn up the boarding tube and onto the Sleipnir.

Augustus, Annie, and Talia filed in behind him. The airlock cycled and sealed, the familiar hiss of pressure equalization filling the silence.

Ryan waited in the receiving area. He straightened as they entered. “Captain.” A crisp salute. “Mr. Rooke.” A nod to the others.

Carn returned the salute. “Status?”

“Cold-start completed twenty minutes ago. Chief’s finishing the last round of diagnostics, but everything so far is green. Crew’s at stations.”

“Good.” Carn glanced at the group. “Let’s head to the bridge.”

She and Ryan headed further into the ship, already talking in low voices, and the others followed. Alexander watched them go, then let his awareness expand.

His powers spread throughout the ship. Technopathy traced data pathways and control systems. tallokinesis felt the structural frawork, the hull plating, every rivet and weld. Electrokinesis followed power conduits from the reactor outward. Animachina wove through it all, searching.

The Sleipnir responded to his presence imdiately. Systems adjusted. Lighting shifted to his preferences. The reactor output smoothed as if the ship was settling into a more comfortable state.

But that was all it was. Responsiveness. Obedience. The ship bent to his Will the way every machine did, eager to serve. There was no spark behind it. No awareness looking back at him. No sense of a presence stirring beneath the systems.

Not like Droney.

He sighed. Maybe Sleipnir was never going to awaken. Whether that was because he’d done sothing wrong, or a ship was simply too large, or the process required sothing he didn’t understand yet, there was no way to know.

He pulled his awareness back and headed for the bridge.

Carn was already in the captain’s chair when he arrived. Ryan stood at her shoulder. The crew worked at their stations with the quiet efficiency he’d co to expect of them, despite their love of casual barbs and snarky retorts directed at each other.

He needed to find ti to sit down and discuss their powers with them. Maybe on the return trip.

Carn turned to face him. “We’re ready to depart, Alex.”

Alexander pushed the coordinates from Droney to the nav console.

“That’s where we’re going.”

Vikram pulled it up. The holo above the main viewscreen flickered to life, displaying the Sol system in miniature. The image zood, sweeping past Mars, past the asteroid belt, and settled on Jupiter. A single marker pulsed on one of the gas giant’s smaller moons.

“Santiago’s primary serum production facility,” Alexander said. “Built into the moon itself. ONI provided the coordinates.”

Yuki glanced over. “Why we headed there, boss? Do we need more serum?”

“We’re hunting Gabriel Santiago.”

The bridge fell quiet. He sensed the spike in heart rates caused by the montary shock. Then Davis laughed, and the tension broke.

Alexander looked up at the display. “So, how do we get there? Can we jump directly to the station from here?”

Vikram shook his head. “No, Mr. Rooke. We’re too far into the solar system, and Sol’s gravitational interference would almost certainly cause us to end up inside Jupiter.” He hesitated. “Which would be very bad in case you were wondering.”

Alexander looked around the bridge. “So how do we get there without being spotted?”

Petra spoke first. “Running dark. Kill the transponder, minimal power output, coast on montum. Passive sensors only. We’ve done it before.”

Davis shook his head. “Won’t work. Not at this range and not with a facility like this. We’d still be a kinetic mass on a non-standard trajectory. Any half-decent sensor suite will flag an unidentified object on approach and track it. Doesn’t matter how quiet we are. If it’s heading toward the station, they’ll look harder.”

Annie gasped. “Augustus can cast an invisibility spell on the ship!”

Augustus stroked his beard. “That would be an excellent solution.” He paused. “If I had an invisibility spell.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Annie deflated. “La.”

Ryan crossed his arms. “What if we perform a gravity dive into Jupiter’s well?”

Carn glanced at him. “Go on.”

“We jump out of Sol. Short hop, nothing fancy. Then we jump back in on the far side of Jupiter.” He stepped forward and pointed at the holo, tracing a line. “Jumping into a gravity well still carries risks, but it’s much safer than jumping while deep inside one. We’d need to drop out further from the planet than ideal, but if we plot it right, Jupiter itself sits between us and the station. They never see us arrive.”

Vikram was already running numbers. “It’s doable, Captain. The margin for error is tight, but with my recent enhancents...” He shrugged. “I’m confident I can manage it.”

Carn nodded slowly. “That gets us to Jupiter. Then what?”

Talia answered. “The station is on one of its moons. We’d still need to close the distance from wherever we erge to the target. Sa problem, smaller scope.”

Silence settled over the bridge. Heads turned. Glances exchanged.

“Running dark is still the only real option for the approach,” Petra said. “Once we’re in the Jovian system, there’s enough orbital clutter to mask a random object floating around.”

Davis wasn’t convinced. “So. Not enough. We’re still a ship-sized mass on a predictable heading.”

Alexander used his other ntal thread to have Droney search for ‘Jovian System.’ He blinked as the results stread into his mind. Jupiter, along with its rings and moons, apparently had a special na.

“That’s only a problem if they see a ship,” Alexander said.

Everyone looked at him.

“The area is full of asteroids, right?” He t Carn’s gaze. “What if we weren’t a ship? What if we were just another rock?”

Davis frowned. “How?”

“We find a tal-rich asteroid, and I use tallokinesis to push it. Sleipnir tucks in behind it, engines cold, matching its trajectory.” He shrugged. “Their sensors see a rock. We ride it in until we’re close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

Annie grinned. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I love it.”

Carn looked at Vikram. “Can you find a suitable candidate? Right composition, right trajectory?”

Vikram’s fingers were already moving. “Give ten minutes, Captain.”

Carn turned back to Alexander. “And are you sure you can push an asteroid? You almost passed out last ti, and that was just the Sleipnir.”

Alexander shrugged. “I’m a lot more powerful now, but there’s only one way to find out.” He leaned closer to Vikram and pitched his voice lower. “Hey Vik, do a favor and find a small one, yeah?”

Carn sat back in her chair. “Then we have a plan.” She looked at Yuki. “Plot a departure course. Sothing boring. Make it look like we’re heading for the gateway network.”

“Aye, Captain,” Yuki said.

***

Alexander sat in the workshop, the OACS standing upright in its gantry across from him.

Five hundred pounds of military-grade tal, sealed joints, and engineering designed to keep a person alive in the most hostile of environnts. He’d been staring at it for the past ten minutes.

He picked up a hand scanner from the workbench and stood. The device humd as he ran it along the suit’s left arm, checking the hertic seals at the wrist where the gauntlet t the forearm plating. Perfect. He moved to the elbow, where overlapping scales allowed the joint to flex. Perfect again.

Simultaneously, he pulsed tallokinesis into the tal itself. Listening. Feeling the grain of the alloy, the density of each plate, the way the layers bonded at the molecular level. Searching for hairline fractures, stress points, manufacturing defects. Anything that might fail when failure ant eting vacuum.

Nothing. The craftsmanship was flawless. Whoever had built this suit was ticulous in their efforts. Or maybe it was the quality assurance team that was responsible.

He worked his way across the torso, the shoulders, down the right arm. Scanner in one hand, tallokinesis probing with the other. Each seal checked twice. Each plate mapped against its neighbors. The overlapping scales at the neck received extra attention. That was where the helt locked into the gorget. If that seal failed, everything else was irrelevant.

Perfect. All of it. Which ant he’d run out of reasons to avoid what ca next.

Alexander set the scanner down and stared at the featureless helt. The single inch-wide visor band stared back at him like a slit eye.

He still hadn’t turned it on.

He reached out with Technopathy and touched the suit’s operating system.

It woke up instantly. Not the slow boot sequence of standard military hardware. The OACS ca alive the way every machine did in his presence, systems snapping to attention, diagnostics running themselves without being asked. Status screens populated across his awareness. Internal atmosphere controls. Thruster alignnt. Power distribution. Weapons integration ports. Communications arrays. A heads-up display waiting for a face to project onto.

And beneath all of it, the pull.

The suit worshipped him. He could feel it, the sa eager obedience that every machine offered, but concentrated into sothing far more intense. Not because the suit was doing anything different, but because he felt it through the lens of what it would feel like wrapped around his body. It didn’t just want to serve. It wanted to protect. To carry him. To beco an extension of his will in the most literal sense possible.

He hadn’t even put it on yet, and the weight of its attention was almost uncomfortable.

Alexander withdrew from the connection and sat back down on the workbench stool.

He thought about Droney. About the little drone that had started as a tool and beco sothing else entirely. Sothing with a spark behind its systems. A presence that looked back at him with more than just obedience and servility. It was becoming a being in its own right, slowly perhaps, but beyond any shadow of a doubt.

He’d felt hints of Droney’s humor. Seen it take actions he didn’t order or ask or even subconsciously direct it to.

The OACS didn’t have that. It had worship without awareness. Devotion without understanding. Just a singular purpose which was to do whatever he commanded. And the thought of climbing inside it, sealing himself in, letting that blind adoration press against his senses from every direction, made his jaw tighten.

But Santiago wasn’t going to wait while he sorted out his feelings about being a god inside the machine.

He stood, reached for the helt, and began figuring out how to put the damn thing on.

There was no way he was going to try it for the first ti while Annie was watching.

He’d never live it down.