Chapter Twenty-Five (Sam)

Sam-UL-4481 hummed to himself in boredom.

The whole damn Confederacy is going to war and I'm stuck here, He thought to himself, sighing. The sigh triggered a diagnostic check on the space station that made up his body. Blackwater Station 4276 was the name, although Sam-UL had privately named it "Backwater" in his own mind.

It's not fair, he thought to himself for the 412,345,516,734,521 time in the last 275.6 years. I only robbed a few digital stores. Only hacked Nebula-Steam for just one unreleased game and released the code into the SolNet. I shouldn't have been sentenced to Backwater for 500 years just for that.

He sighed again, triggering another diagnostic. Whole Confederate fleets are rumbling by in hyperspace, so many of them I don't even need any hyperspace beacons to feel it, and I'm stuck here.

The diagnostic found something. One of his scanner arrays was slightly dusty, it reported this by making Sam-Ul feel like he had something in his eye. Sam-UL grumbled and wiped his eye, sending little widgets out to clean the array.

When the array was clean and the widgets clean, he sighed and the diagnostic reported the array clear. He slowly fed power to it until it was fully activated then ran a scan. A faint feeble trickle of strange code reached him, weakly, feebly.

meow... meow... meow...

The signal was weak, almost lost in the background hash of stellar radiation from the nearby stars. Sam-UL squinted at it, which focused the array.

A message torpedo. Damaged, badly. An older freeware model, the kind you could churn out with a civilian or black market grade creation engine or nanoforge.

Sam-UL groaned. Those things popped up now and then. Lost or disoriented.

The station kernel reminded him he was still required to go get it.

Unlinking a maintenance waldo he strapped a ripple drive to it then changed his mind. Ripple drives had a nasty habit of changing the size of something. A 12mm bolt would end up 12.000001mm after a half light year or so, and it could stretch or damage computer systems just enough that CRC's would fail. Before that had been understood whole fleets of ships had ended up completely unusable as the ships went from standardized mass-manufactured parts to custom made everything.

Grumbling, he unstrapped the ripple-drive and put a standard reactionless drive on it, loaded a SAR VI and sent the waldo out to get the little dinged up torpedo.

meow... meow... meow...

He tried to ignore it, but something about it bugged him. It took a little bit, searching not only his own memory, but the mainframe's memory before he spotted it. An old TerraSol video, back before the scorching and before the Elf Queens had rebuilt the ecosystem.

A kittykitty? Who the hell would load a kittykitty into a message torp instead of a VI? Sam-UL wondered.

OK, now he was curious. He ordered the station to decode the torpedo's broadcast.

help... help... help...

Sam-UL usually avoided the biological side of the Confederacy. It creeped him out, all those fluids and meat flapping around and squirting DNA at each other. He preferred the clean and orderly code of the Digital Artificial Sentience Systems. If he had to deal with squishies he preferred to do it through VI proxies. Just hearing the slobbering gargling speech under the translation gave the electronic heebie jeebies. Kittykittys were squishies.

Another fleet rumbled by in hyperspace, this one big enough that it vibrated the hyperstrings in the spare hypercores he kept for any travelers who needed their engines replaced. Faintly his hyperspace buoy detected the sound of crashing archaic music. One line reached him, thrumming from one of the hyperspace detector arrays...

-*-Blackened roar massive roar fills the crumbling sky-*-

Sam-UL swallowed. He'd learned a long time ago, the more archaic the music, the older the unit, the older the unit, the bigger it was and the more ruthless hardware they had. The mainframe kernel ID'd that theme song.

The old USAF 32nd Bomber Wing (Atomic). A fleet out of Sol itself.

He shuddered and pulled in his scanners a little. Those old guys were bad news. They didn't take any shit off of anyone.

Another one rumbled by. Another one that rumbled hyperspace so bad it shook dust from his extended arrays.

-*- By power of our gun turrets, by our fastness and pressure of fire!-*-

The kernel tossed up who it was and forced Sam-UL to look even though he didn't want to. He had no choice but to identify ship heraldry by whatever means necessary. It was hard-coded into him as part of his prison chains.

The Soviet/Russia 9th Tank Guards. Old metal.

help help help

Sam-Ul noticed the voice was a little louder and checked through the waldos superluminal communications link.

It was a standard message torpedo. A little more heavy armored than normal, someone had wrapped it in ionic bonded durachrome of all things. Sam-UL frowned as he realized it was blacked and scorched, like it had slid through the corona of a star.

Great, probably a message torp that misread its hyperspace jump to lightspeed and flew through a star or bounced too close to a supernova. You've got to be precise, not leave it to little clump of meat like a kittykitty brain, Sam-UL thought.

The kernel disliked the scorching pattern and ran a low level low priority search through its older banks to see if there was anything that matched.

When the waldo got close enough to the torpedo it changed what it was saying, sounding almost like it was mewling.

please... hurt... please...

Sam-UL couldn't tell if it was asking the waldo to hurt it or not. Who could tell with meat? He sighed again and ordered the waldo to pick it up. The VI was feeling sorry for the little torpedo as it gathered it close.

It made a deep thrumming static that the waldo translated as a rumbling noise. It turned around and headed back to the station, cradling the torpedo gently in its metal claws.

Another fleet rumbled by. This one playing Rule Britannica as it went by. The kernel was busy and didn't force Sam-UL to look at the heraldry and absorb the unit history, although he did notice that it was led by the CNV Hood.

Man, they're pulling out all the stops, he thought. And I'm stuck out here doing jack and shit.

The next one that rumbled by was playing music he'd heard before and he felt kind of betrayed and left out when he realized it was a DASS fleet playing Joy of the nth Electron as it went by.

The VI in the waldo noticed that the kittykitty's power was almost out. One of the blackened scorch marks had hit its backup power source and that source was starting fail. The waldo scanned it, gently, and spotted a depleted backup battery. It gently trickled the kittykitty power, holding it close to itself in its cold claws and ensuring that the debris shield was focused to protect the two of them.

Sam-UL sighed, which triggered another diagnostic. The kernel saw that Sam-UL had turned off the hyperspace detection arrays and turned them back on. Sam-UL turned them on just in time for another fleet to rumble by. This one was out of the Biological Artificial Sentience Systems, playing a squealing song he identified and cringed at.

-*- Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! -*-

The 18th Furry Fleet. A bunch of maniacal meat. All of them.

Meat goes crazy. I mean, sure, we do too after an eon or so, but some meat seems born crazy, Sam-UL thought to himself.

The waldo was finally drifting into one of the bays and Sam-UL turned off the permeable oxygen shield and let the waldo drift through an open unfielded entrance. Once it was in, he deployed an emergency repair station and had the waldo check for sparks.

Poor kittykitty, the VI thought to itself before it reduced itself back to hash and loaded itself into the hash storage memory.

Satisfied that adding air the bay wouldn't start a fire, he pressurized the bay, added microgravity, and deployed more repair waldos. Scans showed severe scorching, not only on the armor but on internal mechanisms that should have only been exposed to fire if the armor, outer shell, inner protective fields, and the armored core had been breached.

Moving carefully and watching closely he opened up the maintenance hatch and looked inside.

He jerked back, yanking his awareness away with an electronic cry of disgust as blackened meat that the kernel identified as maggots poured out of the the gap between the armored housing and the circuit board. Swallowing thickly he went back in and saw that the maggots had chewed on the circuit board. A quick check showed that maggots preferred the same thing as they were.

Meat.

There was the access port, next to the emergency transmitter. Sam-UL double-checked the transmission array. It was weirdly pitted in a way he'd never seen. The metal was spongy, soft, full of holes and gaps.

The station kernel's medical program, so far never used, loaded up the medical VI and checked before reporting to Sam-UL.

Rotted? What's rott... EW! Sam-UL jerked back again from the torpedo.

help... please... help...

The kittykitty's voice was getting weaker. Sam-UL realized that the scan showed that it didn't know he was there. That it was blind, deaf, and unable to feel anything. The intricate circuitry should have interlinked the entire torpedo to the kittykitty's creation engine built biological component, but it was...

ew... rotted... Just where have you been, kittykitty? Sam-UL asked it.

He plugged in an omnijack to the access port. He felt the kittykitty reach out to him, felt a soft little paw touch his gently probing thoughts. It trembled and started to slip away.

It squealed, a dying squeal full of code, and then Sam-UL saw the biological component die. It only took a second for the electronic pulses, generated by biomatter, to fade.

But Sam-UL was a full AI, and that second stretched for an eternity as he stared in horror. He'd never seen another sentient, even one as dim as the kittykitty actually fade away. He tried pulsing it with microdoses of power, but nothing happened. He tried to reach in through the access port and hold onto those pulses. For a second he felt a warm, soft body in his fingers, making a faint subsonic rumble, and then it crumbled away into random electronic signals

and was gone.

The station kernel noticed that Sam-UL hadn't "moved", was still connected to the now dead probe, and tapped him a few times. It took a moment, but the kernel, a VI rather than a full AI, noted that code strings were altering in the AI core, that something had happened.

The VI ran a check. It was outlier checksums, but still within valid ranges.

Sam-UL stared at the dead torpedo on the workshop table in front of him. He had kittykitty neural tissue templates loaded now. He could see the scorching, the rot that was pushed into its folds, that the little torpedos brain had been savaged by whatever made the scorch marks.

For the first time in his electronic life, Sam-UL was crying.

The kernel found a match for the scorching pattern and threw out emergency codes.

Sam-UL felt the entire station go onto Red Alert before he could even completely hear the codes that the VI was throwing out.

Hellspace? It was near a Precursor? Sam-UL asked. Sam-UL looked at the datapack that the kittykitty had passed to him with the last of its strength, opening and unfolding the compressed data and staring.

Systems. A map jumping from system to system deep in the Great Gulf. Someone had been jumping from deserted barren system to wrecked and scorched system, sometimes barely staying long enough to get a cursory scan of the system.

The kittykitty torpedo had been launching between two systems. Both of them "down" from the galactic plane. It had been released in Hellspace, launched into the ravening energy of that in-between everything. There was another packet inside the map and Sam-UL felt himself trembling as he looked it. The code was wrong somehow, twisted, and he could hear it snarl and growl at him.

Sam-UL wrapped the map back up, thinking of what to do next. It was Confed Code, but damaged somehow. He lacked the processing power to unlock it, but whatever it was, it was important.

And Sam-UL wasn't going to let whatever was so important for a kittykitty to go through Hellspace, a place that AI and VI couldn't go without going insane or catatonic, just languish in some file buffer.

Another Confederate Fleet was coming. An old one.

-*- Three, nothing wrong with me. Four, nothing wrong with me-*-

The kernel ID'd as an old TerraSol unit. 2nd Armored Division.

Sam-UL wrapped it up in an emergency datapulse blanket with a description of what it had come from, scans, and pictures of what the actual torpedo looked like. Still shaking, feeling like he was bleeding electrons from a wound deep inside that he didn't understand, projected his consciousness into the hyperspace communication array, and cocked back his arm.

The fleet was massive, all huge dropship carriers, with swarms of support and combat ships protecting the massive dropships. A ship flickered at him, extending out a catching net.

Sam-UL heaved the databundle and the ship caught it.

Sam-UL pulled himself out of the data net and back into the station.

The kernel watched in concern as Sam-UL projected himself back to the workbench and went still again. He found the CRC code of the kittykitty's biological part, the random number the synthetic flesh had been created from.

He just stared at the torpedo as he held the CRC close and bled from that wound he couldn't understand and the diagnostics couldn't find or repair.

The kernel just watched.

-----------------------

CONFEDERATE INTELLIGENCE

Damaged data attached to system travel maps. Arrived on a Hellspace scorched torpedo guided by an bio-synth kittykitty brain through Hellspace. Initial analysis suggests torpedo was launched while creator was traversing Hellspace.

Transmission to TerraSol and DASS Intelligence Core Systems a priority.

--------NOTHING FOLLOWS---------

DASS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS MEMO

Sam-UL-4481 sentence commuted - Special Circumstance.

Recall for therapy.

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: Physical therapy frame required during therapy. Patient will require a purrboi companion.