“Ah,” Gilly said. “That’s . . .”
Beanfield: “Are they supposed to do that?”
“It’s a new tactic.” Gilly had studied every engagement of the war: None had involved a double turn.
Jackson: “Turned again. They’re coming again. Weapons, advise pulse status.”
Anders: “Pulsing now.”
“I see it. Pulse effective. Eighty hostiles down. A hundred or so remaining.”
Gilly said, “Three turns! They’ve figured out our pulse range.”
“Noted. We’ll discuss in debrief. Weapons, full status, please.”
“Laser batteries one, eight, nine in position. Two, three, four in transit. Pulse ready in five seconds, three, two. Pulsing.”
“Confirmed. A good one. Got just about all of them. Life, update?”
“All green here.”
“Your desat is normal?”
“Yes. We get dips in Engineering after each pulse, but it balances out right after.”
“All right. We’re coming up on the hive.”
“Firing. Laser batteries one and eight, thirty percent.”
“Thank you, Weapons. Hive is destroyed. Ten to fifteen hostiles remaining. We’ve got a lot of debris now. Intel?”
“Engines scaling down. We’re forty points off peak. Those laser batteries are decommissioning, too—correct, Anders?”
“Yep. They’re heading home.” This could happen before the end of an engagement if the ship believed they wouldn’t be needed. “Guess we’ve got this one in the bag.”
“Weapons, please continue to call in activity. We just pulsed, yes?”
“Ah, we did, yeah.”
“Then report it. There’s some kind of bubble hanging around the hive. Three or four workers, maybe. Confirmed. I can see them.” Workers were small, fat, pale salamanders who didn’t fight. Every hive had at least a few. They were harmless, but it was Service policy to destroy them.
“And pow,” said Anders. “Pulsed.”
“All hostiles down. Scanning debris. Please stand by.” They waited. “Confirmed no target. There’s nothing out there bigger than a golf ball.”
“That’s it?” Beanfield said.
“That’s it.”
Anders whooped. “We’re on the board.”
“Fire of Montana has 604,322 kills,” Gilly said. Montana was the first Providence. It had been roaming around space for two years, cleaning out target-rich environments. “We’ve got a ways to go to catch that.”
“But we’ve started,” Beanfield said.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Gilly said.
“What’s that? Poetry?”
“Just a quote.”
“So that’s why they selected Gilly,” Anders said. “Bring a touch of class to the place.”
“Why’d they select you? Because that was some shoddy-ass work on Weapons.”
“Oh-ho-ho,” Anders said.
“Shut it down,” said Jackson. “This is a combat channel. Intel, close engagement, please. We’ll meet for debrief in thirty minutes.”
“Engagement closed,” Gilly said, smiling.
* * *
—
They fell into patterns. Each day, Gilly rose, ate in the mess with whomever he was sharing a duty rotation that day, and performed ship maintenance. Sometimes he wrote reports for Service. He recorded clips. When the klaxon sounded, he attended station. The engagements changed in the details, but the underlying dynamic was always the same, always salamanders dying in the hundreds before they could get anywhere near enough to spit a huk. It became routine, and occasionally he felt his mind drifting, as if he were watching a movie he’d seen before and knew by heart. This was something Service had warned them about, and which Gilly had initially found hard to believe: that the mission would get boring. They were pushing into unexplored space inside the mightiest piece of military technology ever created, fighting an alien species; it was hard to think of anything more interesting he could be doing. But the reality was that the ship’s AI controlled almost everything that mattered and was so good at its job that there wasn’t much for him to do. So he felt restless.
“What about the valve problem?” Beanfield said, in one of their check-in sessions. “You fix that?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. Even now, he was plagued by intermittent pipeline failures. He had developed a dozen painstakingly researched theories that had all turned out to be wrong.
“Because that would be good. To not have pipes bursting all over.”
“I’ll fix it. I’ve been spending time on swarm analysis.” Beanfield’s eyebrows rose. “Figuring out why salamanders move the way they do. Trying to predict their tactics.”
“Did Service ask you to do that?”
“No.” He felt slightly embarrassed. It was unlikely he could figure out anything Service didn’t already know, or that the ship couldn’t deduce in a fraction of the time. Gilly, who had developed sequencing algorithms for Surplex’s AI division in his life as a civilian, knew this better than anyone. Still, it was the part of his day he looked forward to more than anything else. “It’s just kind of fun.”
She smiled. “You’re a puzzler. I bet you do crosswords, the really impossible ones.”
“I do,” he said. “Those are the best.”
“Good,” Beanfield said. “Keep that up.”
* * *
—
They reached a hundred thousand salamander kills in six months, and doubled that only a few months later, when the ship discovered a particularly richly infested part of Firebrick Zone. Gilly kept up his clips, but found himself increasingly disengaged by news from back home, which felt less relevant with each passing day, like a show he used to enjoy but had lost track of.
Two years in, Anders pinged him from L Deck and said he had something to show him.
Gilly was in his cabin, checking his messages. By now they were so far out that they could only communicate with Earth when they came within range of a relay, which had just occurred for the first time in five days. But he headed down to L Deck. It was mostly storage down there, rows of tightly racked crates rotating on a belt system. Inside the crates were raw materials the ship could craft into whatever it needed, including parts of itself. Gilly could toss a boot into a recycler and a day later it would be part of a pipe.