This was speculation. The ship would decide when and where to skip after processing more information than any of them could imagine. That was how the AI worked: It sucked in unimaginable quantities of raw data and produced decisions that were better optimized and more nuanced than any human could manage. They would be notified once it had made up its mind, and have just enough time to scramble to station and strap in.
“If everyone could file clips first, that’d be super,” said Beanfield. “There are a lot of people back home following our feeds, and leaving the solar system is a big moment.”
“Clips,” Anders said. “How long do we have to keep that up?”
“Forever,” Beanfield said. “You know this. Gilly, that means you, too.”
He nodded. He’d been lax with his clips. He’d never enjoyed them in the first place and had instead sunk time into tinkering with the ship, which so far had turned out to require a slightly shocking amount of maintenance. In theory, the ship was self-sufficient, able to diagnose and repair faults via a fleet of small crablike welder robots. But in practice, everything it fixed seemed to break again three days later. There hadn’t been a problem with anything that really mattered, but Gilly had spent a lot of time shooing crabs away from leaking pipes so he could figure out the root cause.
There was a short silence. This time tomorrow, they might be engaging with salamanders. They had spent years imagining it and twelve months intensively training for it and now it was here.
“About time we did something useful,” said Jackson.
“Amen,” said Anders, his mouth full of loaf.
* * *
—
They skipped but there was only empty space. This was to be expected: It would probably take a few skips to locate the enemy at first. After their first engagement, the ship could use the data it had gathered to search more effectively.
A week passed and Gilly began to wonder if the war would be over before they did anything.
“Look at this,” Anders told him over comms. He sent a clip to Gilly’s film: Sword of Iowa deploying a million tiny drones to unpick a salamander hive. Everywhere was debris. “We should have gone there.”
“Don’t question the ship,” Gilly said. “It’s smarter than you are.”
“Then why can’t it find anyone to shoot at?”
Gilly opened his mouth.
“I don’t want a real answer,” Anders said. “I’m venting.”
“Oh,” Gilly said. “Well, I’m sure it will be soon.”
Anders sighed dramatically. “If I don’t get to grill some salamanders, I want a refund.”
* * *
—
The next day, Gilly was on F Deck, clad in a coverall, heavy gloves, and a helmet, wrestling with a pipe that kept wanting to spray the corridor full of steam, when the walls turned orange. A klaxon began to sound. His film displayed:
ALERT ALERT ALERT
ENEMY IN PROXIMITY
PROCEED TO STATION
It was all he’d been thinking about, but still his breath caught. A feather of fear tickled the back of his throat. He pulled off the gloves, ditched the helmet, and began to squeeze through the corridor.
Jackson popped into his ear. “Crew to station. We have hostiles.”
“I see it. On my way.”
Anders and Beanfield chimed in, confirming their locations. They sounded calm and focused, as he hoped he had. The floor was painted with animated arrows, or so it appeared through his film, and he followed them to a transport rail and let it shoot him back through the ship. He then proceeded through two thick doors to Intel station, which was a cramped room with a harness of heavy, flexible straps, a board, and a wraparound wall of screens—real screens, not projections, with cables wired into physical systems. Everything in here was insulated and redundant several times over. He strapped in and felt the harness grip his body. The screens lit up with data.
“Intel checking in,” he said.
Jackson: “Acknowledge. Life?”
Beanfield: “En route. Thirty seconds.”
“Weapons?”
Anders: “Almost there.”
Jackson: “I have eyes on the enemy. We have a single hive, eighty-yard diameter. Contact three minutes.”
Gilly swept his board, just like in the simulations. “Wall-to-wall green here.”
“Thank you, Intel.”
Beanfield: “Life, checking in. All green. There’s a little desat in Engine Two but nothing out of band.”
“Thank you, Life.”
“Weapons, checking in,” said Anders.
“Thank you, Weapons. Hive is expelling hostiles. Counting ten . . . twenty . . . fifty . . .” Gilly could see none of this. His screens were all charts and numbers. When the engagement was over, though, he would be able to play it back with visuals if he wanted. “Intel, you’re green?”
“Confirm green.”
“How’s Armor?”
“Everything’s up.”
“Thank you. We have two hundred hostiles and the hive appears about empty. Weapons, status?”
“Green as grass.”
“I’ll take a full status, please.”
“Pulse is warming up. Mass projectors standing by. Laser batteries two, three, and four relocating fore.” This meant they were crawling along the skin of the ship to reach optimal firing position. The ship itself wasn’t maneuverable at all: It took an hour to turn around, in the sense of arriving at the same location with the opposite bearing. So the guns had to move.
“Thank you. Hostiles are spreading. Contact in thirty seconds, assuming a turn.” Recent engagement data from other ships showed that when first encountered, salamanders would peel off their hive in every direction, as if they were fleeing, then all turn inward together, like a school of fish. “How long until we’re pulse-ready?”
“A few seconds.”
“And there’s the turn. Contact imminent.”
Anders: “Pulsing.”
Jackson: “I see it. Intel?”
“Cores rebalancing.”
“Pulse was ineffective. No targets destroyed.”
“None?” said Beanfield.
“Confirmed. No enemies down. I’m reviewing. Ah. They turned again. Anticipated the pulse. They were outside its maximum effective range at the blip point.”