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[Jverse] Big Game - Chapter 1. Preparation
Author’s note: This story is an addition to /u/hambone3110 ‘s Deathworlder series, and is written with permission, so go read that first and pay the man. :) This story begins between the main story chapters 18, “Baggage” and 19, “Baptisms”, immediately after the Alpha-of-Alphas and the Alpha of the Brood-that-Builds discuss adapting the Swarm of Swarms with human combat concepts, and about two weeks before the beginning of MIA.
Date point: 4Y 8M 3W AV
The Grand Conclave, Hunter Space
Alpha-of-Alphas
<submission, resolve, due respect> +If the Alpha-of-Alphas will permit, the Brood-That-Stalks has a request+
<interested disinterest, acknowledgement> +Proceed+ The Alpha-of-Alphas was ruminating upon the sensor records of the battle with the humans it had been presented with several weeks prior, and the intrusion upon its thoughts was not exactly unwelcome, but was unexpected. The Brood-That-Stalks rarely requested anything or took part in the Conclave at all; their style of Hunt was unfamiliar to most Hunters, and “different” was often construed as nonconformist and rebellious. The Brood Alpha presented itself in person, which was another surprise. Their Brood rarely interacted with most of the others, either, and almost never unprompted. They were ...dutiful, but otherwise mostly kept to themselves within their own claimed hunting grounds.
<supplication, request; file transfer> +*Greatest One, the Brood has discussed the humans. We wish to contribute to the Great Hunt. Will the Alpha-of-Alphas consent to our plan?*+
<surprise, approval> +*....Agreed. All Broods will respect the initiative of the Brood-That-Stalks, and none may prey upon their quarry.*+ The Alpha-of-Alphas broadcast the file to all Alphas with that command. The response was muted, but universally grudging acknowledgement.
<Command> +*Begin at once. This Hunt will be ending soon, and we will again pursue our Prey when ready.*+
Date point: 4Y 8M 3W 1D AV
The “Graveyard” between systems, Vz’ktk transport ‘Steady Confidence’
The “Graveyard”, as it was primarily known, lay vaguely on the edges of Dominion and Alliance space, towards the Far Reaches area. It was called thus primarily because it was one of the rarer areas between star systems where there was literally nothing in any direction for several hundred light years...no stars, no bases, not even the odd black hole or nebula. Spacelane clearing out here was rare, since there was little of interest, and traffic was rare since there was nowhere to degauss. It was a rare ship-master that would set his ship into the area; no traffic, no commerce, no civilization, nothing to map, no trade, and no routes uses. The few that ventured through disappeared, as often as not, usually with little sign of where they had gone or what had happened to them in the long dark between suns.
For a ship-master trying to deliver a cargo of Humans to the colony at Cimbrean, trying to avoid notice by the Hunter swarms that increasingly seemed to be everywhere, it seemed like a calculated, but good, risk. Ch’kttkt was a decent enough sort, being paid an exorbitant amount to deliver no less than 15 humans to their fellows, getting them out of whatever passed for the Dominion's collective hair. The Steady Confidence wasn’t the fastest ship by a long shot, but over the years, Ch’kttkt had made enough special modifications himself that it had a surprisingly small FTL signature, was faster than most ships in the class, was outfitted for self-defense, and had a number of concealed and shielded compartments in places. Calling it a smuggler vessel would not have been far from the mark. While this wasn’t the first cargo of Deathworlders he had had aboard, it was certainly the largest, and the only time he had had an end-point of an actual human colony to drop his cargo off with.
Ch’kttkt sat in the command center of his ship during most of the time they were underway, preferring to have immediate access to information and delegate the day-to-day oversight of routine operations to his small but well-trained crew. He idly chewed a Cqcq leaf, when there was a commotion of alarms from one of the two sensor stations behind him. He turned his seat to see what was amiss. “Report.”
“Ship-master, I am registering something that looks almost like a gravity well ahead. It isn’t a gravity spike, and it isn’t a solid celestial body or ship of some kind...it’s more like a gravity shadow than anything, I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” came the response after a moment. The calfling was his mate’s nephew, picked up at their last stop for his first actual voyage and assigned with his more senior sensors officer; there was some scattered chuckling around the command center from the more senior staff at the last sentence. The other officer craned his neck over and took a look.
“Ship-master, I have also not seen something like this before.” The chuckling stopped abruptly. “I think there is also debris here...sizeable debris from the look of it, there may be escape pods or available salvage. Recommend we slow to sublight for a closer look.” Ch’kttkt thought for a moment and then turned and nodded to the helm. Dominion law being what it was, they could not afford to lightly ignore escape pods in particular. The ship turned and slowed, although the change was imperceptible to its passengers. As they slowed to sublight, Ch’kttkt’s display lit up with the sensor data and then showed several sizeable ship carcasses tumbling slowly in the dark. They were of similar design to one another, an older design that had mostly passed out of service several decades before due to some pesky maintenance issue, he recalled.
“Bring us in close to the nearest one. Let’s see if there is anything we can recover or use, or if there are escape pods with occupants...and what about that ‘gravity shadow’ you were talking about, are you seeing more of that?” He addressed this last to the two sensor stations, not seeing on his own displays what they had been talking about.
Nearby, Hunter Brood-That-Stalks ship
Alpha of the Brood-That-Stalks
<satisfaction> +*Well done. The lure is attractive. Deploy the parasite drones, that the Hunt may begin.*+
<all, acknowledgement> +*Meat to the maw!*+
Behind the Steady Confidence, the silent, deadly, unseen insectoid shape of a Hunter ship moved in the darkness, and several metallic shapes departed it with gentle puffs of gas maneuvering jets the only sign of their passage. Slowly, they closed in on the target, latching around the communications array, the sensors, and several other vulnerable access points upon the hapless vessel. In moments, they connected with the Prey ship and blended in, invisible.
Aboard the ‘Steady Confidence’
Ship-master Ch’kttkt
“I don’t see it now, ship-master. I’m not sure what to make of some of these readings, to be honest,” the senior sensor officer said sheepishly. “Perhaps it was some kind of...turbulence or something, I don’t know. I’ll keep watching for it...scanning the wrecks now to see if there’s anything useful.”
Steady Confidence closed in slowly to the floating hulks and began scanning in earnest, coherent energy streams playing outwards and across the smooth surfaces. None of the floating ships had evident damage of any kind, and the ships’ escape pods remained in their cradles, ready for use...they were simply adrift and had obviously been so for many years, following whatever whims of gravity tugged them hither and yon. There were no life signs, as was to be expected, but neither were there any signs of organic material, living or dead. Presently, a pair of drones detached themselves and zipped into the cargo bays, categorizing everything and feeding information back in a torrent to the eager crew. There were no signs of power, no cargo, nothing...just empty. A similar survey was done of the other two hulks, with similar results found...empty vessels, without signs of anything having happened or anyone having ever been there.
Ch’kttkt had towed salvage vessels back to port on several different occasions previously. Dominion law on the matter was rooted squarely in practicality, much like maritime law anywhere; salvaged property was owned by the recovering party, unless there was a bounty for it or other ownership was asserted, in which case adequate compensation based on distance for the recovery was assessed. “Towing” was, per se, no more difficult than piloting one ship. All it really required was a station-keeping set of tug drones for FTL travel, which would allow the towed vessel to follow the wake generated by the towing vessel in a way that would have been instantly recognizable to any human surfing enthusiast. The real effort came upon reaching one’s destination, where space/time ripples did not apply to sublight travel, although the process did become exponentially more difficult and time consuming the more towed material was being dragged along. The Steady Confidence was easily capable of towing all three derelicts, but it would slow them down noticeably if they were to ensure that everything arrived more or less where it was supposed to. He hesitated, but then rationalized that they were far enough from everywhere to make interception by anything unfriendly unlikely, and the additional profit from three whole additional ships in good condition would put his ship and crew so far into the margins of profit that they might redefine the concept. Shaking off a vague sense of foreboding, he decided on pressing ahead.
Feeling quite clever, he dispatched the tug drones, and they set course again for Cimbrean once all was attached. Moving along silently behind the small convoy, the unnoticed Hunter ship followed in their wake.
Date point: 4Y 3M 2W 2D AV (the next day)
”Ship-master Ch’kttkt to the command center immediately please.”
The command came over all internal coms as well as the implanted ones, although the latter provided more of a sense of immediacy. A responsible ship-master, Ch’kttkt arrived in under a minute from his personal quarters.
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“I am here, what is the problem?”
“We’re off course, sir. I think. I can’t get the helm to respond at all, and we have apparently lost even the Dominion Emergency Relay for communications,” a frightened junior officer explained. “The best I can tell from what I haven’t been locked out of yet is that we switched courses last night some time when the helm was unmanned and we were resting.”
“That can’t be. I locked the controls last night when I left the command center. Here, move aside, I’ll unlock it.” Ch’kttkt brushed his subordinate aside and inserted his master control key.
Nothing happened. He frowned.
“...That’s not right. This is the master control key, it unlocks everything. I don’t understand.” He rattled the key in the socket, then took it out and blew on it and reinserted it, with no discernable change at all. He thought for a moment. “...We don’t still have a systems tech on board, do we?” There was an awkward pause.
“...No, sir. You, uh, discharged him at our last stop,” the nervous officer bleated out without thinking. Ch’kttkt regarded him with a flat look, then sighed.
“You’re right, I did. An oversight on my part - if I remember correctly, I was thinking that the system never breaks, so it was an unnecessary expense. Let this be a lesson to you, crewman,” he admitted. “Things always break when you have Deathworlders on board your ship.” There were several yes, sirs from the group as they contemplated what to do next.
“You know, one of those Deathworlders said something to me that I’ve been trying to puzzle out since before we left. I’ve heard they have fine minds, and that dark skinned one is supposed to be pretty smart...or at least that’s what his previous employer said before he got on board. Have him come up here, maybe he can fix this.” A junior crewman left, headed for the guest quarters. The crewman that had manned the helm looked at the ship-master expectantly. “What?”
“You said one of them said something to you that you’ve been trying to figure out, sir.”
“Oh. Right. Maybe it was just my translator, but what he said was, ‘You can lead a yak to water, but you can’t teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke.’ I don’t understand it….but I don’t understand them anyway, so maybe that’s nothing new.”
Henry Albert
At the request of the passengers, the cycle below in their area of the ship had been transitioned from the Dominion-standard to a more familiar 24-hour cycle, and it had had some strange effects on their interaction with the crew. While the crew was, for the most part, friendly to the Deathworlders in their midst, on some level, it was abundantly clear that the Vz’ktk crew would be very happy to not have fifteen of the most dangerous beings in the known universe riding along with them. Lurid stories were whispered back and forth, the tales growing in the telling, until humans were known by one and all to have abilities such as shooting death lasers from their eyes, a weaponized immune system capable of devouring the Frontline implant whenever they wanted to, and reading minds of any gentlebeing that crossed their path.
Having one of them summoned abruptly to the nerve center of the ship did not do much to dispel any of this, and the fact that it had been preceded immediately by a summons of the ship-master sent the crew’s limited-by-human-standards but nonetheless fertile imaginations into overdrive. Before Henry reached the command center, everyone on board knew that they were all doomed, that the Deathworlders were biding their time before eating them or turning them over to the Hunters, and that the ship was under their control. Several less brave souls locked themselves in their compartments and waited, shuddering, for the end.
Henry was an Abductee from New England, grabbed from in between classes at MIT two years previously, and was often the subject of some good-natured ribbing from his fellow humans on board for his Bostonian accent. “Pahk the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” was getting old, but it hadn’t quite lost its amusement value to one or two of the others, and he put up with it mostly because the primary culprit was a gang member from LA whose own cholo accent was often impenetrable to the remainder of the group. Following along behind the nervous Vz’ktk that had come to fetch him, he had to take long strides to keep up with the skittish giraffe-like quadruped, to the back of the ship.
He entered the command center through a too-tall door, and nearly all of the clicking, rattling sounds that comprised the Vz’ktk language ceased mid-syllable, as all eyes turned to regard him warily. The capta...er….ship-master, he corrected himself, came to greet him and began talking animatedly, rapidly, and forcefully enough that the translator struggled mightily to keep up.
“HumanHenryAlbert, we would appreciate very much if you could help us. The helm and navigation computers seem to be locked out somehow, and my key isn’t working, and our computer expert that we had on board is….not on board this trip, because I didn’t think we’d need him, and none of us have been able to get into the computer, and so I was hoping maybe you have some way around that, because I know you were pretty good with computers before we picked you up, so please help us, because we can’t get to your peoples’ colony if we can’t use the computer,” all came out in a rush. Henry raised his hands in protest.
“Whoa, whoa...hang on now. What do you mean, you’re locked out? You have the master access key right there, yeah?” He gestured at the silvery multi sided key on a chain around the ship-master’s neck. “It won’t let you use that?”
“No, and I don’t know why,” was the crestfallen response. “Can you figure out what the problem is?”
“I can try. I can’t promise anything. You guys have a real pickle here,” he replied, walking to the helm display past several crew members who moved to allow him through. An experimental tap at the control interface and several other pokes and prods gained nothing. “Okay. I need some of my stuff. It’s in my room, I’ll be right back.” He exited, heading for the humans-only section, and returned after a few minutes of rummaging, carrying several fiber optic leads and a small oblong black box with colored lights on one side. He perched at the edge of the seat since it was too tall, set the box down on the edge of the console, and plugged one lead into one side of the box, hunting with the other end for a physical access port, then with an ‘ah!’ plugged it in. There was a boop and a green light lit on the box.
“Well, there’s an open and valid connection there. That’s good. Let’s see if I can make this thing dance, eh?” He ran the other lead from the box to a data plug behind one ear, then closed his eyes.
Hunter ship
<advisory> +*Alpha, the Prey are attempting to circumvent the daemon program installed into their helm and navigation. This appears to be exploratory only...the blue-skinned prey have engaged the help of a human, however.*+
<interest> +*This is a data point. Take appropriate passive precautionary measures, but do not engage the human yet. Let us see what happens.*+
<compliance> +*I have prepared an ambush if it does penetrate the daemon, but will withhold using it unless we are at risk of discovery.*+
The Steady Confidence
Henry Albert
“Huh.”
“What? Is it broken? It’s broken, isn’t it?” came the rapid-fire response from the nervous ship-master, for whom this entire situation was surreal. First, something that never broke, was broken and he didn’t know why...and now there was a Deathworlder acting puzzled.
“I don’t...no, I don’t think it’s broken exactly, but there is definitely something else going on here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Dominion system with protections like this...did you guys install some new software when you were in port picking us up or something? I mean...it’s weird, I can see ...through… the firewalls, sort of, but I can’t actually get to anything. It’s like looking at things through really dark glass, you can mostly see shapes and outlines, but nothing really specific.” Henry was puzzled. He had no actual neural cybernetics, since any kind of computer that directly connected to his brain coupled with the entire concept of malware just seemed like a bad idea being given an invitation in and encouraged to wipe its muddy boots on the carpet. What he had was a data-port that allowed him to connect with isolated other systems, which wasn’t something the Corti installing it had thought of herself - having the hardware equivalent of several powerful firewalls and the ability to simply unplug was much more reassuring.
“No, we did not update the system at all,” Ch’kttkt replied, not reassured in the slightest.
“Well, I think I can break into it, maybe, but I’m afraid of breaking other things that the ship sort of needs. Tell me you have regular system backups. Please?” The embarrassed silence that followed was answer enough. “You guys are killin’ me. Why people just don’t….you know what, never mind. I’ll do what I can, but no promises, and if we all die, it’s your fault.” Mentally rolling up his sleeves and spitting on his palms, Henry moved in.
Hunter ship
<mild surprise, advisory> +*Alpha, the firewall is under a...remarkably sophisticated attack. This is strong Prey!*+
<approval> +*Yes. The Alpha-of-Alphas did say not to underestimate humans. Continue passive defense and do not alert the Prey to the extent of our system penetration if possible.*+
<compliance> +*I obey, Alpha. This may prove to be an exceptional Hunt.*+
The Steady Confidence
Henry
Henry’s tool suite was well-developed, and the ability to deconstruct virtual defenses was something he was well-practiced at, having had a “misspent youth” as an increasingly capable grey-hat and the last two years of experience navigating Dominion systems, building his own toolset of attack, analysis, and defense software, hardware, and malware. Xeno networks were far deeper than the human Internet in terms of longevity if nothing else, but if there was one thing you could count on, it was that, with a few exceptions, they didn’t know shit about securing their data.
This was different.
There was no such thing as an actual living sophont AI, of course. Many experiments from many races had demonstrated that multiple times, and nobody had ever found a way around it that he knew of. There were, however, various levels of “smart” programming, adaptive software that could and did learn as it went, and the most brilliant of those was pretty close to AI. At MIT, Henry had been on the outskirts of several groups of students that were active with that kind of software, but studying it formally wasn’t his interest. He did it for fun, and as a result, the direction of the things he worked on was decidedly more purpose-built since impractical tools suffered the most Darwinian of fates. His tool kit was one of the best he knew of outside of the monolithic government-sponsored attack dogs (and those were a whole different league, he knew), and yet he wasn’t making even a dent in this barrier. Every time he had one corner of it unpeeled and just about ready to take apart, it would shift, and whatever it was he had hold of would vanish like a puff of smoke in front of a fan. It was almost spooky.
He pulled back and reevaluated. The soft-touch and careful poking at it was not working; it was time to bring out something bigger if he was going to get anywhere. He admitted privately to himself...this was the most fun he’d had in a long time. He loaded up one of his primary attack suites and reengaged the guardian with renewed energy.
Several blows later, the main structure of the firewall was in tatters, and he had cored a clear access pathway through the barrier. Shreds of the hostile program clung to his attack programs like cobwebs in a narrow hallway, and he stopped dead in his tracks at what lay within. The firewall barrier had been, as such things often were, the pretext of a defense to keep out the idly curious, not serious intrusion efforts. The closest thing he could compare it to was walking through spider webs and finding himself standing in the middle of a pit of venomous snakes of some kind with only a torch providing light and getting him unwanted attention simultaneously. He backed out slowly, careful to make no sudden moves, and withdrew, unplugging once he was completely out.
“Ship-master….we’re still at speed, but the helm officer was correct. We’ve changed course. There is no way I am going to be able to regain control...that system is crawling with hostile malware of some kind.” Henry found he was sweating, even though the Vz’ktk default temperature was considerably cooler than he was usually comfortable with. “I penetrated the barrier, but anything further risks really damaging things, and I don’t think we want to risk that out here. That’s the good news.”
Ch’kttkt blanched a baby-blue color and laid his ears back. “What...is the bad news?”
“The bad news is, I did see where we’re headed. We’re moving at a pretty good clip, directly towards Hunter space and away from both Dominion and Alliance. We definitely aren’t going anywhere even close to Cimbrean.”
Hunter ship
<satisfaction, apprehension, update> +*The Prey withdrew after penetrating the outer barrier, Alpha. The human did not engage anything within; it is unknown whether it was able to see where the Prey-vessel is going.*+
<approval> +*Continue to monitor closely. We will allow the fear to build before proceeding further. The meat will be seasoned by many days of terror, and when we feast, it will be upon the still-living. MEAT TO THE MAW!!!*+
Next chapter: The Long Dark