Nova Wars

The fact the universe is malevolent makes it an interesting place - Unknown Terran, Age of Agony, 415 Post-Glassing

The more complex a system is, the more points of failure are introduced. Assuming that acting on one part of a system will not cause an effect upon another part of the system is lunacy. Complex systems can be completely redefined or destroyed by a change upon a simple seeming point. - Terran Technical Manual, Age of Paranoia

How the fuck do I know how it works? Do I look like a hyperdrive engineer? You push the button and it goes. Look, buddy, do you want to buy it or not? - Telkan Free Trader, 4871 Post TXE

I threw up inside my skull. - Private First Class Jaskel, Telkan Marine Corps, XIXth Division, Fourth Mar-gite War

Commodore N'Skrek adjusted his seat at the table and restrained his impulse of sharpening his bladearms. The Chief Engineer and her Chief Green Mantid Engineer were standing next to the 2.5D display showing the ship.

It was largely dark. Only a handful of systems, and those in discreet clusters, were amber. A few more than a handful were red.

There were no green systems. Everything else was dark.

He listened closely to the briefing.

The ship was still in hyperspace, still moving right along. Environmental was working on local control. The nutriforges worked on local control. There was a single creation engine fabricator working on local control, although the Chief Engineer admitted she did not know why it was working. The lights were on. Doors worked.

That was it.

There was no contact with the rest of the task force. There was not even intercom usage within the ship. Attempts to bring the systems back online caused a massive data corruption cascading failure overload, in some cases damaging the computer systems themselves.

Commodore N'Skrek had a bad feeling in his ichor. A slight chill, a slight tremor in his thorax. A slight prickly feeling down his thoraxial spine to his secondary brain.

He'd never had that feeling before.

"What about bringing up clean copies from deep storage?" Captain Rawgnawrk asked.

"We tried that. After the third time, while we were extracting the cold storage copies something inside our systems attacked the cold storage, physically melting down the servers," Chief Engineer Mo'obri'yan stated. She shook her long, equine-like head, blinking all six eyes. "Whatever it is, it's hiding in our system and launching attacks on anything requiring more processing power than a wrist-comp."

"We still have the two air-gapped emergency data backup cores, so there's that," The Lanaktallan engineer tapped the computer core icon on the wireframe and it expanded out. "These are completely powered down," she tapped the two auxiliary and the emergency backup cores. "These are down too. Just attempting to get power to them results in a crash."

"How?" Captain Rawgnawrk asked.

"In order to get power to them, they need the computers running to meter the power, ensure the correct voltage, amperage, and wattage is applied in the correct places in the correct orders," the Chief Engineer stated. "Bringing those computers up, which is part of the bootup phase, causes them to crash out."

She folded all four arms across her chest.

"We've been in hyperspace for sixty hours. We have no idea what direction we are going or even how fast," Captain Rawgnawrk said. "Can't you shut down the hyperdrive core?"

The Chief Engineer shook her head, making her feeding tendrils lining her jaw shake. "No. Unfortunately a hypercore is a self-sustaining reaction once you power it up."

"What about the drives themselves?" Captain Rawgnawrk asked.

"If we try taking the engines offline, the core will explode, or the drive will explode, or we'll have uneven hyperspace transitional energy balance and the ship will tear itself into pieces," Mo'obri'yan stated.

"Why is the creation engine still powered?" N'Skrek asked.

The Greenie moved up, tapping the board.

CLASS-VIII CREATION ENGINE - MANUFACTURED ON MARS - 8248 PG appeared on the screen.

"It's a refurbishment," the Chief Engineer said. "Nobody's been able to build creation engines since about 150 Post-Terran Xenocide Event. Not even Telkan or Smokey Cone. It's not a warsteel capable one, those are all gone and have been for about thirty thousand years, but it can still manufacture parts we need."

N'Skrek stared at the wireframe of the ship.

"I have an idea," he said slowly.

The entire table of officers stared at him. He was known to make decisions slowly and by the book. Many people wondered if his Matron had dallied with a Tukna'rn.

He got up slowly, moving over to the 2.5D screen.

"Can you bring up every single system that is offline?" he asked.

The green engineer tapped the screen a few times.

"OK? Now what?" Captain Rawgnawrk asked.

N'Skrek stared at it. It was a lot of systems.

"Bring up the computer systems. Bring up anything with any type of computing power, even if it's the equivalent of a wrist-watch," N'Skrek said.

That brought up a lot of sections.

"Physically cut, and I mean, air-gap them by at least a meter, every single system that does not actually need to talk to other systems. Hardcut everything into local control," N'Skrek said.

"How's that going to help?" Captain Rawgnawrk asked, squinting suspiciously.

"I'm getting to that," N'Skrek said. He looked at the Chief Engineer. "Physically remove all computing components. Toss them into the mass grinder. Use the creation engine to rebuild each part. Put it back in. Load up the data, put it on physical medium, take it to the new computer equipment, load it in by hand."

The Chief Engineer nodded. "You're talking days of work."

"And the whole time we'll be moving through hyperspace in an unknown direction at an unknown speed," Captain Rawgnawrk stated.

N'Skrek tapped part of the wireframe, bringing up the hyperdrive core.

"Have two of the Marines in full power armor get one of the rocket launchers out of the armory and blow it up," he said. "Or, make that one of the main focuses once we see if this works or not."

Captain Rawgnawrk nodded slowly. "If we can rebuild the systems attached to it, then we do. If not," she shook her head then laughed.

"I guess we'll see what happens when you blow your hypercore during hyperspace transit."

-----

The pain started slow.

A slight itch in the extremities.

Then his tailbone started to ache.

Then it felt like he could feel the tips of his fur.

Then his bone marrow started to feel warm and prickly.

It was right after that that the pain set in.

When asked about it, later in life, even by his fellow Telkan Marines, Jaskel was never ashamed to admit one thing.

He screamed.

A lot.

He could hear beeping, hear and feel doctors around him, feel injections, feel drills bite into his bones and cartilage, feel needles pull fluid from him.

At one point he saw a robotic doctor pull a mechanical snake from his belly that screamed YOU BELONG TO US! before it was ripped in half and crushed.

All he could do was scream.

He was joined by another Telkan, that he vaguely recognized as Xulrek, when the other Telkan Marine exploded from a lanced boil that had grown to the size of Jaskel's head on his lower back.

The pain, the agony went on and on.

And then it was gone.

Jaskel opened his eyes slowly, expecting the soft white light of the medical bay to cause his eyeballs to rupture and spill burning warsteel down his face.

Again.

The equipment was beeping steadily. It was quiet, hushed, around him. A privacy screen and a physical curtain surrounded him.

Hovering next to the bed was a metallic wedge, shaped like a pumpkin seed, with two round orbs of black macroplas on the wide end. It had small graspers and metallic tentacles hanging below it and it hovered silently in midair.

A tentacle was poking at an instrument, bringing up different readouts.

"DECLARATIVE STATEMENT: PATIENT HAS SURVIVED HYPERSPACE EXPOSURE THERAPIES!" the voice boomed out. It gave a squealing, stuttering laugh made up of different voices laughing, sometimes overlapping. "DECLARATIVE STATEMENT: PATIENT IS FORTUNATE TO BE IN PRIME PHYSICAL CONDITION. OBSERVATIONAL STATEMENT: PATIENT IS TELKAN, ALLIED SPECIES OF TERRAN CONFEDERACY OF ALIGNED SYSTEMS."

Jaskel nodded, swallowing thickly. "Yes," he managed to whisper.

A plastic cup lifted up and smoothly moved over to him, hovering in midair. Jaskel took it and sipped at it.

Citrus flavored water.

"DECLARATIVE STATEMENT: TELKAN PATIENT WILL RECOVER COMPLETELY BEFORE FLEET HAS REGROUPED. DECLARATIVE STATEMENT: TELKAN PATIENT WILL BE REMITTED TO CONFEDERATE AUTHORITIES AT FIRST AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY!" the chrome wedge proclaimed. There was silent for a second. "TERMINATION OF CONVERSATION."

It turned and floated away, moving through the curtain.

Jaskel just kept sipping at the flavored water, enjoying how it soothed his vocal cords.

A robot came in. Mechanical parts exposed at the joints, white plastic plating. It looked like a Telkan, only slightly off somehow. The front faceplate, opaque plastic at the edges and slightly transparent at the middle to give hints of the mechanisms underneath, sucked inward to create a Telkan-esque face.

"Declarative statement: Fleet is retreating. Declarative statement: Patient will be put in stasis during transfer. Declarative statement: Patient will be remitted to Confederate forces if present in system," the robot stated.

"Uh, thank..." Jaskel got out.

Everything tasted like old spoiled nangaberries and froze.

Everything came back, the vision of the robot and the medical bay streaking away, fading away weirdly.

"Can you hear me, Private Jaskel?" came a soothing voice.

It was one voice.

Jaskel turned and looked.

A russet mantid was next to his bed, standing on a hoverdisk that hummed softly. She had on her surgical garb and a sterifield glimmered around her.

"Yes," Jaskel said.

"Good," she looked at the datapad in her hand. "What do you remember?"

It came rushing back. The Mar-gite flooding the system. A smaller construct shedding literally thousands of boarding clusters at the Lanstrek's Pride. How the ship had jumped to hyperspace with his battalion still on the hull.

Hyperspace burning into his brain.

Being rescued. The weird robots. Then...

...still...

"I remember, weird white plastic robots," he said.

The russet mantid nodded. "You were dropped off by the Grey Fleet."

Jaskel frowned. "My greenie?"

"8814 was delivered as you and several other members of your unit were, in a stasis field," the russet said. "Like you, he has hyperspace shock," she paused. "According to the medical report, you were exposed to hyperspace while only protected by your combat armor?"

Jaskel nodded. "Yeah," he looked around. "Where am I?"

"DYN-772343, it's the first system after the bulwark systems," she said. "You're on Rentwark Station."

"Who were they?" he asked.

The russet flickered an icon of confusion between her antenna. "We don't know. It's presumed they're Terrans, but they don't talk. They don't interact. Honestly, you're lucky they picked you up and dropped you off. Usually they just observe or leave the moment they are detected."

He suddenly remembered the Mar-gite again.

"Has anyone alerted command? The Mar-gite are coming!" he was suddenly filled with urgency. "Not a few, we're talking all the Mar-gite. Ever. They were still warping into the system when we jumped, even after a bunch jumped out!"

He tried to grab the russet and found he was restrained. "You could see the clusters at stellar distances! They were huge! There were a bunch of them still coming in!"

She nodded. "Confed Space Force is moving ships in to stop them," she looked confident. "Those systems are designed to hold them off. I'm sure there wasn't quite as many as you saw."

For a moment he heard the weird, multi-voiced overlapping speech of the robots.

fleet has regrouped

That didn't sound to Jaskel like the actions of a fleet that was winning hands down.

"You should be able to be released in the next seventy-two hours," the russet said. The disc turned around. "We have a Telkan Marine detachment here on the station. You'll be attached to them until PERSCOM can cut you orders."

For some reason, that didn't make Jaskel feel better.

-----

N'Skrek stood by the gunner's station, staring at the silver threads that had leaked through the hull and were now coating the front of bulkhead only a few meters down from the inner secondary hull of the forward bow.

A ghostly figure moved through the passageway, moaning softly, pulling at its phantom hair and at its sleeves.

"There she is again, sir," the seaman next to him, a Saurian Compact Kobold, said. "She creeps everyone out."

N'Skrek looked at the line of salt across the passageway.

"Good plan with the salt. Shades are rare, but it looks like the Malevolent Universe has decided to give us the grand tour of the fun of hyperspace," N'Skrek said.

"Commodore N'Skrek," his implant chirped.

There was a faint mutter behind it.

That had started two sleep cycles ago and had slowly been getting stronger.

N'Skrek knew better than to try to hear what was being muttered.

"Here," he said, touching his cheek out of habit.

"Chief Engineer Mo'obri'yan is ready," he heard.

"We're ready here," N'Skrek said.

The line closed without any formality.

The lights flashed three times and went to red.

The faint glowing figure shrieked in anger and lunged into the forward bulkhead, hands outstretched, fleeing the light.

The lights flashed twice.

Then once.

"Here we go," he said.

It felt like he hit a wall and bounced. Like he was being squeezed from every direction even as he was pulled apart from every other direction. He felt like he was being turned inside out.

He found himself laying on the floor. His right forward foot hurt and he looked over at it.

It was fused into the deck plating.

He looked up.

The transparent human was gone. The salt line was still present.

But the threads were dissolving.

N'Skrek looked at the kobold, who had their hands holding their jaws shut, obviously trying not to vomit.

"We've dropped into realspace," he said.