Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata (11 page)

We had a few major obstacles regarding the sloop above and beyond getting it up and running. First was its location within
Heart
himself. Unlike his holds, the fabrication bays lacked the standard airlocks. It wasn’t designed to be used as a means of quick egress, meaning that the sloop had to be moved to a different location within
Heart
for when I was ready to go ashore.

Unfortunately, because the sloops’ size we couldn’t take it down the main passageways either. This meant taking it outside of
Heart
. Back on Luna in his hanger, this would have been a complete non-issue. He had the ability to shift large panels aside on the outer skin to allow entry, but the procedure was not simple by any means.

Since we were surrounded by seawater, once we opened the panels we would flood the section with seawater and have no real means of removing it. At best we could methodically flood it, then seal it, and slowly shift the water to other areas, and attempt to vent it. As a space-faring vessel,
Heart
was generally designed to keep the atmosphere in, as opposed to pushing it out. In space decompression would take care of the issue but in the ocean, he just lacked the ability to shift that amount of water. The alternative was attempting to use the fabrication bay’s limited air conditioning capabilities but we didn’t think they were close to what was needed.

We decided the simplest solution would be to treat it like a compromised space, and seal it off. As our goal was to move the sloop from its location to one of the transport holds instead the first order of business was to shift as much equipment as possible from bay three over to another bay for storage. We were able to use his droids for most of it, but the remainder was tedious and sweaty work.

Once completed, it was a matter of opening up his outer hull and shifting the sloop itself. I had donned full kit as a safety precaution even though the AGS had a decent air supply. It was a tight fit inside the sloop, and I was fighting a touch of claustrophobia, as the water flooded into the bay at what I felt was a too fast speed. My dislike of being in water did not help the situation at all. If docked, on normal land the process would be an hour-long event at a minimum. Hiding in the Kermadec Trench, it felt like an eternity.
Heart
could obviously read my fear through my suit and did his best to keep me calm. “Ari, we’ll have you in the secondary hold very soon. Unfortunately, I need you to maneuver the sloop as I do not have the ability. Were I able to do this remotely you would not be in there.” I lied and told him it was fine. I’m not fond of tight spaces to begin with, and only the combined presence of the sloop and suit were keeping my fear of water at bay. Part of my control issues. I like to be in control.

I felt like we were in pre-drop mode all over again. When the outer panel finally opened, and I felt the clamp unhook beneath us, I had to consciously avoid gunning the port directional. I feathered the controls and brought her sideways so I was facing the hatch. “Easy Ari, you don’t have rear propulsors, only the sublights. You have to back the sloop out. I don’t know what will happen if you attempt to engage the primary engines this deep, but I don’t think it will be good.” I gave
Heart
a quick thanks and released my death grip on the wheel. I counted out to one-hundred aloud, trying to keep myself calm and slowly spun the sloop’s tail 180 degrees. Getting myself effectively perpendicular to the bay wall, I applied the bare minimum juice. I’m sure it didn’t take much to clear
Heart’s
skin but felt like forever.

After finally making it outside, I could feel the flow of the currents. I had to use the directionals to stay relatively steady. I was hovering about five meters from
Heart
, trying to get my bearings. Being this deep, we had almost no visual capability. I knew where he was only because I had recently come out, and because my helm was giving me a constant feed down to the centimeter.

“Ari, I am displaying your present orientation in relation to myself on your primary display. As discussed, we need you to go under me in true terms, and then proceed to the port secondary hold. I already have it open. You are to retain orientation, which is reverse to normal. You will be coming in upside-down; however, I have adjusted gravity in the bay to neutral. There are light personal shields on the sloop, and your containment suit will handle well above these pressures. If I see any indications, I will magnetize the hull, and we will walk you in.”

Since I was not aboard,
Heart
was getting uppity, and I let him know I didn’t appreciate it. “Ari, you can chastise me when you are back aboard and safe. Until then, we have our proverbial hands full.” I pointed out between us there was only one real hand and stifled a giggle for a second.

Following his directions, I brought the sloop around.
Heart’s
position blocked most of the current, and let me focus on moving the sloop in what felt like, to me, up and over the bridge, and then rotate back towards the bays. He had chosen the path so he could physically block from above. Although he hadn’t said anything, I had a distinct feeling his shields were also on full while I was outside. Even though I couldn’t see it, the sloops sensors were picking up odd readings. Something about the way the water was interacting several meters out. Or my paranoia was getting the better of me. Eventually, I reached the bay and brought the sloop in.

Going in was a different kind of stress than backing out. I was able to use my bottom directionals without a problem; however, the instant I passed into
Heart’s
angrav field, I was forced to compensate in the opposite direction, and try to create a semblance of neutral buoyancy. Within seconds I felt a magnetic clamp grab hold, fighting the sloop and my attempts to control its direction. “Cut power Ari, I have you,” and I reacted to his instructions as quickly as I could.

“Closing primary doors, and will vent the hold momentarily. Adjusting gravity orientation.” As soon as I saw the bay doors start to move, I popped the seal on my helm and shoved it into the passenger seat. The air inside the sloop was only slightly less stale than my suit, but at least it didn’t smell like ninety minutes of bottled up Gadsden fear. It was another twenty before I was able to get out of the sloop, but getting the helm off helped a lot.

As soon as I was out of the sloop, I felt the tension drop off. I hadn’t realized how terrified I was out there. I started laughing. I don’t know how long I went on, but I finally heard a too loud and very worried
Heart
over the loud-speakers. “Ari? Your helmet is not on. You cannot hear me.” I waved him off and sat on the floor. Laughed more and more until one of his idiot drones dragged my helm to me.

Our argument finally reached a head the following day. If
Heart
had his choice, we would have bolted back to Luna. His view was if we were dead, there was no way to accomplish our mission. My stance was if we left Terra, we were never getting back, and that ended the mission as well. This was our one shot, and we’d best make the most of it.

It boiled down to conflicting programming. My primary conditioning was on mission accomplishment. The Legion drums the concept into our heads. Mission first. It’s so ingrained I wasn’t able to push past it, even when survival was potentially at stake.
Heart’s
focus was on crew welfare. To him that meant me. I was his top priority, not the mission.

My little breakdown after moving the sloop had him thinking I had redlined, and despite my assurance uncontrollable laughter was how I jetted stress, he was having none of it. So we argued. But we argued while we worked. The problem with arguing with a computer is they have all the information. They’re also able to pick apart any flaws in the logic chain. The reverse is AI don’t usually have the same flaws, so even if he made them I wouldn’t catch them until much later.

The one piece of ground he left me was the importance of the mission, changing the argument from being about me to being about Luna and even Terra. The discussion became purely quantitative at that point. How much was my life worth in comparison to others? “Ari, I know you. I do not know them.” It was a pragmatic outlook. Wrong, but pragmatic. I reminded him he also knew Lysha, and the General, as well as everyone they knew, and so forth.

Heart
disliked thinking about relationship complexities past people he personally knew. The potentialities were painful for him. His ability to extrapolate the future forced him to deal with issues of life and death. I’m not sure how many people he had known during his sentience, but from what I had gathered, all of his original crew was gone. My bringing those past friends up was a dirty trick and I knew it. “So what do we do? Our mission intent was reconnaissance.
Our encounter makes that not feasible. If our foe was able to identify our arrival time, we must assume they can identify you, Ari. The mission is important, but so are you. How much risk is acceptable?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I’ve always leaned towards not over-thinking the problem if I can avoid it. Deal with the closest problem first, and then shift to the next one. Our current problem was our position in the ocean, and getting me ashore. I wasn’t unaware of all the issues ahead of me but I considered them a were a low priority for the moment.

I had a bit of tunnel vision and
Heart
was right to point out that particular failing. Our initial plan was ruined and we needed a rough outline of something new. We were no longer able to land and allow me to act as a tourist. Instead of passively fading into a crowd, my goal was shifted to something far more active. Not only would we have to get me ashore, but we had to keep a low enough profile once I was there the mission wasn’t instantly compromised again.

Heart
and I had been trying to work out the best plan to no avail. Back when I was in the Legion, we’d have teams develop a few different ideas, and the old man would pick the top three for further development. We’d split off into groups, refine the options, and based on those select the best. The nice part of that process was the back-ups if things went to hell. We could swap gears because we already had ideas. Unfortunately, our situation was so far outside of the current mission, we couldn’t use anything we had already thought about. At least not yet.

Our other issue was with only the two of us, we weren’t able to make the same kind of leaps needed to come up with something completely new.
Heart
is amazingly smart. His very presence reminded how much smarter than me he was. But his intelligence is evolved around the human standard. He thinks like us, meaning although he had infinitely more access to data, and could compute it faster, he fell within the human spectrum of intelligence. He managed to explain the idea to me once, without making me feel too stupid.

“Imagine gears and cogs. Each one has to connect in sequence. If one is going too fast, or too slow they won’t connect properly to the one next to it. My personality, the gear making me, me, is set near human speed. It connects to other systems, which run progressively faster, like my communications array or even my hyperspace drive. I am not in direct control of those systems, much as you aren’t always in control of your breathing or blinking. They are things I can do, but not things I must consciously think about. The processes happen far too fast.”

“Another way of looking at it is like a city full of roads. You and I can both go to the same places inside the city, but I can get there faster and visit more places in the same amount of time.
My limitation is not my speed, but the data I have access to. You could eventually come to the same destinations; it will just take you significantly longer.” He paused for a moment. “For me to truly exceed your capabilities, I would require additional inputs to reach the next level. However, if that were to happen, I do not know we would be able to communicate anymore.” He sounded less enthused about that idea than anything else. I would have imagined it would be great to be smarter, but he made it sound downright lonely.

It made me question whether we could have multiple versions of him attempting to come up with plans. “Unfortunately, no, I do not have that kind of power or even hardware. It would require reallocating space, then fragment my personality, and attempt to duplicate it through the new space. I am not comfortable with that idea. It would be like two of me existing in a single shell. But beyond that, which would be the real me, and how would we merge them back together?” That was a scary thought. The last thing we wanted was an AI with split personality disorder. People with mental conditions were rough enough. I was positive having a computer with one would be a bad deal.

With that option off the table, we were left us with trying to come up with ideas by ourselves. It did allow us to stall and hopefully reinforce the idea we were gone to the outside world. This was a double-edged blade because added quite a bit of safety, but neither of us wanted our friends back home to think we were gone. We were almost hoping the word of our demise hadn’t reached back yet. Radio silence had always been part of the operation, so perhaps with a little luck, we hadn’t put Lysha through some unnecessary heartbreak.

Although I thought about her constantly, I always shoved those thoughts down hard. She was a distraction, which could risk
Heart
and me if we didn’t stay vigilant. The little things kill, not the big ones. The big ones are easy to spot and easily avoided. Unless it’s missiles flying while trying to make planet-fall. Those aren’t quite as easy.

Perhaps that was the key. Changing the way, I thought. After fifty years, my thought patterns were so ingrained to the point of indoctrination. Maybe if I could think like Lysha or General Campbell, I could come up with something different. I’d love to say I could put myself in the female mind, but girls have been a mystery to me since I was old enough to realize there were girls.

Having spent a solid fifteen minutes trying, I swapped to the general. I figured I would have much better luck imagining myself older and smarter. Putting myself in his shoes was easier if only slightly. I didn’t know him as well, not by a longshot, but he was a personal hero and I knew a lot about him. Taking his personal history and replacing my own, I decided to think of the problem logistically instead of operationally. Our situation was no longer a case of what we wanted to do; it was a case of what we could do with the assets available.

Our old plan relied on many conditions that weren’t true any longer. So what conditions were static? What could we leverage? No sooner had I said it aloud than
Heart
caught my logic chain than a strategy started to form.