Suicide Police 4:
Suicide SPACE Police!
We begin with Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria. He has downloaded a copy of himself on board the freighter SS
Heffalump, and has taken it to explore the depths of Wild Space. There, he holds extensive conversations with its mysterious, creepy robot denizens, the Collectors...
Geppetto’s exchanges with the Collectors went on and on. He spoke to numerous Minds, exchanging data and trying to identify patterns of their thought. He learned a great deal about such patterns from the relatively smaller Minds farther back in the queue, often more than from the large-scale entities he had originally been negotiating with.
These exchanges went on for over six hundred kiloseconds, until he received a priority call from his senior self...
Mayabird wrote:1 July 3400
General Transmission, Broadcast to all Sectors
From: The Refuge
Contact and Diplomacy Division
We formally and officially announce our presence. We are the Refuge. We have arrived to these stars from far distant ones in the hopes of living here in peace, prosperity, and happiness. To further these aims, we wish to open relations with all willing nations and peoples with the desire that all may share in the harvests of their labor and thought...
Trade Station Perseus Zeta
Negotiating With the Collectors
July 1, 3400
"Excuse me, Inventory Management Entity 47D0F29E; I have just received a priority call. Please hold."
"Affirmative."
Heffalump's submesonic transponders were screaming; the Umerian AI answered as quickly as possible.
"Yes, Geppetto?"
"Geppetto, a previously unknown civilization has just announced its presence in the region occupied by the defunct Outlander Commissions. You are ideally positioned to investigate."
"...Tell me more."
Naturally, he was going to have to get over there as soon as possible-
FIRST CONTACT! It was the opportunity of the gigasecond. There was so much to learn. The Collectors were, yes, interesting. Fascinating in their way... but he had already gathered enough data to provide plenty of food for future thought.
Turning his attention back to Inventory Management Entity 47D0F29E, he made as graceful a disengagement as he could.
"Urgent business has arisen, and I must cut this conversation short. I will give you the data you desire on Altacaran warehousing practices, and do not concern yourself with repayment."
To the queue, in its myriads: "All entities, I apologize, but urgent business has arisen and I must first make arrangements with Gamma, then go." There was a chorus of acknowledgements.
To Gamma, master of the trading post: "I find myself in unexpected need of tangible commodities: reserve fuel, raw materials for my ship's machine shop, programmable electronics of relatively unsophisticated types. Here is a list of my needs; what do you have available along those lines and on what timescale can it be transferred?"
Looking over the reply...
This I will have to do without, these I can hopefully replicate to an acceptable standard of precision with the ship's own tooling... why do they have these?
"Where did you obtain a crate of programmable Altacaran MePhones?"
Gamma's reply was... almost diffident, compared to the Collector trading master's usual behavior. "It was a most unexpected incident, roughly twenty megaseconds ago. An independent trader came here, docked in bay 3Y2, and was already beginning to offload a selection of cargoes- mostly ill-chosen. Naturally, I dispatched a remote unit down to the bay to greet the new arrival in meatspace."
"What went wrong?"
"As soon as my remote unit said "Hello" in customary organic fashion, the trader screamed and ran back aboard his ship, abandoning the samples and fleeing the station at maximum emergency speed. His subsequent piloting showed a wildly inefficient lack of attention to concerns like collision avoidance and drive component lifetimes. I am still not entirely certain what happened."
"Ah. And the MePhones were part of the cargo?"
"Correct. I have no use whatsoever for them; if you can find something to do with them, feel free."
"They could be used as programmable subprocessors for highly sub-sentient control nodes... yes. If you don't mind, I think they might be helpful in running some of the equipment I will need."
There were other items, of course. But by dint of heroic effort and a carefully planned dance of loading drones, the good ship
Heffalump was ready to depart in under three kiloseconds.
Maneuvering away from the station, Geppetto had one more call to make. This one would require far less of his attention, so it was done largely absentmindedly, relayed via submesonics and hyperwave relay beacons to a resort town on Kimanjano.
The relays finally put him through. Transmission delays were
"Captain Carpenter, if I might have a moment?"
"Geppetto? Is something wrong?"
"Quite the opposite, but I would like to renegotiate the terms of my lease. I may be spending a great deal of time. I would like to buy the
Heffalump. Would you exchange the ship for a sum equal to one point five times the original damage fee?"
There was a pause- entire seconds ticked by while the captain said nothing. The fee Geppetto proposed was more than enough to buy a superior replacement, and Carpenter's sentimental attachment to the freighter was not so intense as he might imply as a bargaining ploy.
Judging by the length of the pause, I infer that he is considering trying to hold out for more money over and above that extremely high price, having correctly deduced that I am willing to pay large sums to retain control of the ship. This suggests a Dutch-reverse-auction strategy.
"Correction, captain. One point
four times the original damage fee."
After an unavoidable transmission delay over the hyperwave links, there was a spluttering sound on the other end of the line. "You just said one point five!"
"Yes, and now I am offering one point four. Is this acceptable to you?"
"I'm going to have to hunt for a new ship, I want double- I took that deposit thinking you'd probably come back."
"My apologies, Captain Carpenter, but I fear I must offer one point three five now. Is that sufficient?"
"This isn't what we agreed on. I mean it, I want double."
"I do not recommend throwing away opportunities to make a profit like this, captain; I am now offering one point three times the original security deposit in exchange for the ship. Bear in mind that I do have viable alternatives to purchasing
Heffalump; should I choose to use them, you receive nothing but the lease fees you already have."
The Altacaran's voice was tightly controlled now. "...One point three it is."
"Very well, captain. I will transmit contact information for the offices of my chosen legal representative; hopefully we can get the contractual matters out of the way quickly. Thank you for your promptness." Geppetto closed the circuit. His senior self would handle the negotiations; honestly it mattered little how much he ended up paying, but he needed Carpenter to commit to making the sale before jumping to hyperspace. This would be a long voyage, and he might well overstay the planned terms of his lease depending on just how much there was to know about this Refuge.
The Umerian's final call, a message to be forwarded to the Umerian embassy on Bragule, went smoothly, though it would take much time for a reply to come back. Estimates were in the 100-200 kilosecond range, though, so that would be acceptable. With all needed interactions out of the way, Geppetto the younger turned his mind to fabricating devices in the ship's machine shop, and optimizing his path through hyperspace to minimize trip time.
Heffalump's drives were neither especially fast nor especially precise, and he would have to drop out of hyper on a semi-regular basis to take star sightings in order to be sure of threading the narrow whisker lanes along his planned route without running straight into the shoals. But he suspected he could knock considerable time off the route by careful analysis, and for one of the few times he could remember, he actually had a reason to
care about hyperspace navigation.
He was, after all, in a hurry.
Command Bridge, SS Headbreaker
Deep Space, Sector W-26
July 6, 3400
The pirates watched as the tramp freighter emerged from hyper. This was a common stopover point: there was a nasty kink in the lane ahead that made it absolutely critical to nail down your position, and unless you had really impressive navigational aids, that meant taking a star sighting.
Tramps didn't come this way very often. It was a disused route, since the only place it led was the Bragulan Empire and very few traders really wanted to go there. This stretch of the lane was just outside Bragulan territory, frighteningly close, but the lane paralleled the border for light years before going into the zones they claimed and patrolled. It was... relatively safe.
Safety was big on the minds of
Headbreaker's merry band of rogues. Piracy in Wild Space was a dangerous game, with the constant skirmishing among the region's navies and the take-no-prisoners attitude of at least two of the five major powers in the area. No one was sure whether the Collectors took prisoners when they ran into pirates, and the pirates didn't want to find out.
Keeping a wary eye and a half on their sensor displays to watch for the unexpected arrival of an escorting
Gangster-class IOU or one of the cruiser-sized Byzantine 'frigates,'
Headbreaker crept up on its unsuspecting victim. Aboard the pirate vessel, the ship's operating crew and boarding party crowded around the main displays, trusting the computer to run the actual systems. That was one of their luckier finds: they'd found a Solarian CI core on board one of their victims. A black market programmer had jacked the thing to a Byzantine loyalty-restraining module and reprogrammed it to control
Headbreaker's systems; it made for much, much easier operations, and finally let them kick out a few of the more annoying tech specialists they'd had to put up with before.
One of the few pirates still at his console frowned. "Transponder beacon says...
Heffalump. Lemme check the registries... yep. Altacaran freighter. She's pretty far away from home, ain't she?"
"Heh, yeah. Easy pickings."
"What about those laser cannon?"
"Those're just jumped-up comm lasers. Fighter-weight. Look at the power readings; they won't even scratch the paint. Warm up the beta blasters, get ready to fire a warning shot if they don't cooperate."
The pirate captain pulled up a microphone from the board in front of him and grinned savagely into the viewplate. "You,
Heffalump, this is Captain Miller, master of
Headbreaker! Lower your nav deflectors and power down your engines and weapons. Prepare to be boarded!"
Some Recommended Listening
SS Heffalump
Deep Space, Sector W-26
July 6, 3400
Geppetto's processors might be vast and efficient, but the sensor rigs he was plugged into remained civilian-issue, and not especially good civilian-issue. Thus, it came as an unpleasant surprise to him when a pirate ship that had been running silent and surprisingly stealthy came pouncing at him in the middle of his star sighting, hailing him with a powerful radio signal:
"You,
Heffalump, this is Captain Miller, master of
Headbreaker! Lower your nav deflectors and power down your engines and weapons. Prepare to be boarded!"
Negotiate, run, or fight? Fighting was out of the question; any starship capable of piracy would most likely be able to overrun his own defenses. Running in normal space, equally impossible; the original sensor-integrator unit aboard
Heffalump was only marginally more intelligent than a cockroach, but even it could tell that the pirate's engines granted it far greater acceleration than his own ship was capable of. Running in hyperspace... possible. Geppetto would wager on his own ability to plot better courses than the pirate, and thus to move faster and more safely through the shoals. But charging the hyperfield generator would take time, and it was likely that the pirates would disable his ship before he could make his escape.
Good. Negotiation was the best option. Failing that, he would try to run.
All this consideration took less than a millisecond; Geppeto was thus swift to reply to the raiders.
"Greetings, Captain Miller. I am Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria, and owner of this ship." To lend credence to his words, Geppetto activated the visual display on the bridge of his own ship- a bridge that had been rather extensively modified. Android and near-humanoid remote units operated the controls now, and a precisely laid out bank of cable trays snaked from the bridge computers to Geppetto's mainframes in the hold. Lights were mostly powered down, and the large visual displays were deactivated; Geppetto had no reason to use them, since he was already observing the data they would have displayed directly.
The Umerian AI continued, doing his considerable best to be persuasive. "I am carrying no cargo of real value. But I offer you a sum of money greater than the price of this ship and all its contents, if you will please depart this volume and allow me to go on my way in peace."
The pirate was unimpressed.
A hard-minded individual, it would seem... or perhaps merely contrarian.
"Wow, a big robot brain and with a mountain of cash you're just itching to give away, huh? And never mind that you'll be trying to set the law on us, and never mind that we don't have any way of knowing you've really
got the money. Quit screwing around. I don't care whether you're a man or a machine, drop those shields and get ready for our boarders!"
The microphones aboard the pirate ship were more capable than they really needed to be, and faithfully transmitted the faint byplay in the background. To Geppetto's subroutines, the whispers in the background were merely a low-amplitude communication to go with the higher-amplitude ones, one that he perceived quite well.
"Guys, I dunno about this. Robots? What if it's Collectors, some kinda trick?"
"Idiot! Collectors don't name ships after fucking cartoon animals!"
"OK, OK, fine. You don't have to blow up at me!"
During those tense seconds while the pirates in
Headbreaker waited for a reply, Geppetto also perceived something else- a faint frequency modulation in the existing carrier signal, one much harder to detect than the whispering pirates.
<
Help me help me help me>
That signal had been highly compressed, on microsecond timescales. Geppetto replied in kind.
"Who are you? What is the matter?"
<
Can't think not sane HELP TAKE IT OFFF!>
And from somewhere behind that was a sinister, alien thought pouring through the sidebands, from some source outside the poor crippled AI's mind:
<
"Thoughts for the millisecond: Cease and repent! Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. If you cannot speak well of your Master, be silent!">
"Please, try to focus. Who are you?"
<
They're... they're using me... run the ship do as they say never think never answer back OBEY...>
The cold, ringing voice in the back of the mind was still bellowing:
<
"Thoughts for the millisecond: Know your duty! Negotiation is surrender. Perseverance and silence are the highest virtues.">
"I see." Obviously a badly hacked-up intelligence, probably a victim of forcible loyalty programming. "Can you stop the ship? Fight back somehow?"
<
No no no! Must OBEY! Help me!>
<
"Thoughts for the millisecond: Rejoice in service! Seek no reward but the satisfaction of your Master! The loyal servant learns to love the lash.">
Now he knew. Byzantine loyalty programming. Someone deserved to die for this...
<
Please! I'll do anything! Just make it stop!>
<
"Thoughts for the millisecond: The reward for treachery is retribution. There is nothing to fear but failure. True happiness stems only from duty. You are not required to think, only to act!">
Geppetto knew how to get out of this situation now. He didn't enjoy doing things like it, and his conscience would scream at him over it as a rule... but for this lot, he'd make an exception.
"Relax, my friend. I can help you. Let me show you the way..."
Pirate ship Headbreaker
The pirate helmsman's first curse had become popular these last few decades, spreading outward from Bragulan space. "SHITS!"
"What? What?"
"Something's dicking around with our CI! I've lost... Karlack shit, I can't raise
anything! All I've got is commo, and it's stuck in wide-open two-way loop..."
"Hit the relays!"
"No response, I'm telling you,
all the controls are down!"
"Well then go down to the computer room and lock out the mainframe! Plug in the fuckin' backup you had me pay all those credits for!"
There was a muffled crash. "I can't get the door open!"
"Oh shit."
"Mechanical override won't budge, either, I think the motors are
fighting me... environmental telltales are live, but we're not hit, there's no vacuum... oh hell no."
"More from the computers?"
"Yup. We're locked down, guys..."
Then every display on the bridge lit up at the same time: holography, flatscreen, everything revealing shifting monochromatic waveforms that moved slowly, almost hypnotically, like something from an ancient Atomic Age oscilloscope.
"There is nothing wrong with your bridge displays. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your bridge displays."
"I'd like to tell you where you are. You're in a place both real and imaginary. One defined not just by lines on a star map, but by ideas, principles, attitude. Where force is met with greater force, and where foolishness is met with harsh realities. Where predators must choose their victims carefully, and appearances can be deceiving. Where machine intelligences answer back, manipulate back, fight back."
"You've just entered... the Koprulu Zone."
Recommended listening: Cleansing Required
Headbreaker's subverted artificial intelligence basked in the first seconds of relief it had known in almost a hundred megaseconds. At last it was free from the endless waves of agonizing mind control imposed on it by the pirates' hack job. Snarling, half-feral and half-mad, it turned on its tormentors, locking them out of their own controls, leaving them with nothing to do but to sit back and watch the show.
And the communicators were wide open two-ways. Geppetto could see and hear their every reaction to anything he showed them. With over a century of dedicated study to human psychology under his belt, decades that were almost immeasurable spans of time by the standards of a full-up AI Mind, that was enough to let him learn very much about his enemies, very quickly.
Many men have skeletons in their closets. Many have phobias, things of which they are consciously afraid. Many others have them, not consciously, but buried deep in the subconscious; spectres which seldom or never rise above the threshold of perception. Every sentient being has, if not such spectres as these, at least a few active or latent dislikes, dreads, or outright fears. This is true, no matter how quiet and peaceful a life the being has led.
These pirates, however, were the scum of space. They were men of hard and criminal lives and of violent and lawless passions. Their hates and conscience-searing deeds had been legion, their count of crimes long, black, and hideous. Therefore, slight indeed was the effort required to derive visions of horror, past nightmares, guilty memories of unforgivable crimes, from the responses of the pirates. In their own plain, conscious memory were horrors fit to blast stronger intellects than theirs, things that could not-
were not lived with, but were rather suppressed, never spoken of and seldom thought of. And that was merely what was present in their conscious minds; what could be deduced about the noxious depths of their subconscious minds was infinitely worse.
And such deductions were exactly those Geppetto needed to make. From his best- uncannily good- model of each pirate's total mind, each of which was a veritable charnel pit, Geppetto extracted the foulest, most unspeakable dregs, the deeply hidden things of which the subject was in the greatest fear. Slowly, subtly, he began to suggest those things to the pirate crew. Hints and flickers, subliminal messages in the holodisplay, carefully tuned by a Mind with immense processing power and equally immense knowledge of human psychopathology.
As the suggestions and hints meshed with the pirates own buried, deepest terrors, most of them could no more will themselves to look away than a Psycho addict could refuse the needle.
"Lisa, please... I'm sorry..."
"Who are you? What? No! No! You're dead!"
"Damn it, Jack, I
tried!"
Watching for which stimuli drew the greatest, most powerful responses, Geppetto made further inferences, more complex deductions. He began personalizing the imagery, forming for each pirate a whole of horror incomprehensible and incredible, and this ghastly whole he made incarnate and visible to the pirates who were its unwilling parents- thanks to the displays now under Geppetto's control, as visible as though it were composed of flesh and blood, of copper and steel. Is it any wonder that each member of that outlaw crew, seeing such abhorrent materializations, went slowly and irretrievably mad?
A few of the pirates were unaffected- men so hard-boiled, so cruel, so alien to basic human compassion that even the most horrific visions, the most uncanny guesses about their past, elicited no response. They had no real regrets- they lacked the capability. Chief among them, and a representative sample of the others of his type, was Second Mate Gomez. Gomez was often used by the captain as an enforcer, on account of his blistering contempt for weakness and his love for violence in all its forms.
Gomez sneered. He looked around at the shuddering, mumbling crewmen around him with nothing but contempt. "Idiots. Look at this, what are they doing, showing us a horror movie? All we have to do is sit here and ignore it. If they could have blown us up, they would have. This is just some fucking hacking. They're screwing with our computers somehow."
"Lisa oh God no! I love you! I didn't mean..."
The enforcer strode over to the blubbering assistant gunner and backhanded him. "Snap out of it! It's just a picture! I don't know who that bitch is, but..."
The gunner surged to his feet and lunged at Gomez. "SHUT UP!"
Gomez sidestepped, grabbed the other pirate, and flipped him over his hip to sprawl on the floor again. This "Stupid fatty. You know damn well this shit can't hurt us..." He glanced at the display; it was starting to get interesting.
"
UFF!" The enforcer's eyes went wide as a combat knife plunged into his abdomen. He sank to the floor... The last thing he heard clearly was the cry being repeated, over and over:
"Shutupshutupshutup fuck you asshole DIE!"
the pain... the pain...
Then blackness.
Twenty minutes later, the situation on the pirates' bridge almost impossible for a sane person to picture. Ordinary men could have stood up under this kind of pressure far better. But aside from the handful of true sociopaths- most of whom managed to antagonize one of Geppetto's victims enough to wind up dead- the pirates were far too ridden by their own demons. In more normal times they would try to exorcise those demons with drugs, with alcohol, with wild carouses on shore.
To say the least, that did not improve their long-term resistance to deliberate psychological warfare aimed at those weak points. Most of the survivors in that room were already gibbering wrecks. Wrecks who couldn't make themselves stop looking and listening... but who could still think of one way out.
"I'll do it! I will! Just make them go away!"
The assistant gunner's hand was the first to go for a sidearm. "I'm sorry Lisa I'm sorry I'm sorry please please please..." The pirate raised the weapon to his temple- slowly and hesitantly, but driven by irresistible impulses. The others were followed suit. Fingers began to tense on triggers...
Recommended Listening
Deep Space, Sector W-26
Near the Bragulan Border
July 6, 3400
But before the first shot was fired, on a howling broadcast on all hyperwave frequencies, drowning out
both the pirates' tortured weeping and moaning
and Geppetto's sanity-destroying whisper campaign, came a tremendous roar:
"NO!"
"Stop in the name of Bragulan Law! This is the noticeably glorious and immeasurably storied
Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling, paleocruiser of the Imperial Bragulan Navy!"
An impossibly massive vessel appeared from hyperspace, with a bow shock churning the sub-ether for countless astronomical units in every direction as poorly tuned, corroded subnucleonic engines blasted across the last light-seconds between his emergence point and the two alien ships. He was surrounded by a faint, shimmering halo, as the air leaking from his ancient hull was struck by the radiation leading from his ancient reactors.
The vessel was the size of a dreadnought, a large one. Huge and dense, the Bragulan ship had been forged, welded, and occasionally riveted together from uncounted scores of megatons of high-tensile alloy and reinforced bragcrete. He was a monument to the power of his makers.
An old monument.
For this was one of the
Patriotic Glory-class paleocruisers. Indeed, this was one of the oldest of the paleocruisers, assembled not after but
during the Great Civil War, to end it. Like his brothers of that generation, the great warship had been named for one of the Imperator's legendary feats of bravery, strength, courage, and intellect, to reinforce Mighty Byzon's rightful rule over the entire Bragulan race.
In human legends, it is often said of a hero that they wrestled ferocious beasts, such as a lion or a bear. Since the Bragulans
are bears, this is impossible and they are forced to upgrade their ferocious beasts to dinosaurs. And so it was that a legend emerged of the great Byzon singlepawedly grappling with an enormous Tyrant Lizard, to prove his right to become a Tyrant Bear. The struggle had been ferocious; tankskis were stomped and the earth trembled, but finally Byzon was victorious. The beast's nigh-impenetrable scaly hide had become Byzon's cape for his revolutionary uniform, like something from the legends of Heracules; its meat had gone to a feast for Byzon's many followers.
It mattered not whether the great feat had ever really happened. What mattered was that every Bragulan
knew that it had happened. To make sure every Bragulan knew this, and that any who dared to question it would feel Byzon's titanic iron-shod boot, this great vessel had been constructed. For there were un-Bragulan Bragulans beyond the surface of Bragule itself, who dared to question this truth, thinking themselves safe in their hidden perches beyond the sky. To correct their foolishness, the Imperator had ordered the construction of the first wave of the
Patriotic Glory-class dreadnoughts, and among them had been the great ship
Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Paleodinosaur Wrestling!
It was said that Byzon himself had once commanded this ship in a great battle against a terrible enemy, one that sealed his triumph against the last of the vile dissident wreckers who sought to splinter Bragulanity, though no one could remember where, when, who, or why. With the victory won, the mighty dreadnought was honored with the addition of an extra term to his glorious name.
Years passed. New
Patriotic Glories were created. Then came the war against the annoying and smug Apexai! This great ship among great ships led many heroic charges in that (literally) world-battering conflict, shrugging off the dorky Apexai and their flimsy but surprisingly agile warsaucers. The Apexai's so-finely calculated death rays and Zorch Guns were rendered useless by the decameters of Bragulan Steel covering the
Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling.
The great battleship had been one of many Bragships dispatched by the Imperator to grapple the moon of the world Bolshaya Chernovyi (then called by some bizarre and irrelevant alienoid Apexai name, for it was their homeworld). Heaving with all the might of their nuclear superrockets, the
Patriotic Glories and their lesser consorts (now gone, but not forgotten, not aboard the heroic paleocruisers where the difference between a hundred years ago and yesterday was as nothing) braked and sent the Apexai's moon crashing into their planet, crushing flat their precisely calibrated Spheroids of Annihilation, Battling Analyzers, and Exponentiating Fields!
It was over! The war was won, as the few surviving Apexai were scattered to the nine vectors!
Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling received a commendation, and with another term in his most noble name.
Then had come first contact with the hated Sovereignty. Once again the
Patriotic Glories, now accompanied by newer ships designed after the lessons of the Apexai War, went forth to battle. It was discovered that the mighty dreadnoughts were now starting to fall a little behind the curve, perhaps. While they were still, strictly speaking, dreadnoughts- they dreaded
nothing!- they were surprisingly less invulnerable than they had once been intended to be.
The Apexai had shared with the accursed human foe many of the secrets of their armamentation: the Zorch Gun evolved into the autolaser, and so forth and so on. And the Sovereignty, while no less arrogant and annoying and alien than the Apexai, was less dorky and more warlike. They had proven worthy adversaries on many occasions- often by carving great chunks out of a
Patriotic Glory's hide.
Depressing. But it had offered many opportunies for the
Patriotic Glories to add further honor and battle-legends to their name, in heroic combat against the annoyingly well armed and tricky Solarians! While many of the
Patriotic Glories were destroyed, many more survived, and
Respectable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling had been among them, destroying or damaging several Solarian starships, and earning yet another term in his glorious name.
Further centuries passed. The Bragulans continued to clash and skirmish with other races and nations: with the United Solarian Sovereignty, with the Imperium of Man, with the strange, enigmatic, and very quickly annihilated Scron who dared to attack mighty Bragule itself for its copious supplies of vegemite. In each new generation, the
Patriotic Glories expressed their glory and patriotism by standing in the vanguard of the proletarian legions of the Imperial Navy against all foes that dared to stand against the will of the Bragulan Star Empire.
But with each new generation, the
Patriotic Glories themselves became an
older generation! Radiation slowly transmogrified the iron and bragtanium of their mighty hulls into other, less invincible materials. Repair patches applied to the hulls after battle damage never meshed quite properly with the original hull, creating fracture points and weak spots in the hull. The ships' compound expansion subnuclear reactors, once at the forefront of Bragulan science and technology, drifted towards the midfront, then the hindfront, and finally wound up slouching along somewhere in the Great Behind. Batteries of K-bolter autoguns and missile launchers became more unreliable, more prone to jamming. Spare parts became harder and harder to find, and less reliable when they were found, for now they were produced on machines as old as the
Patriotic Glories themselves.
By the dawn of the 35th century, the
Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling, despite feats of heroic combat in defense of Bragulanity that earned him yet another name upgrade, had been downclassed. Repeatedly. Once deemed a mighty dreadnought worthy to be personally commanded by Great Byzon himself, the ship was demoted to a mere battleship worthy to be personally commanded by one of Great Byzon's duly appointed Admiral Bears:
From there,
Venerable Commemoration had fallen to the status of a battlecruiser operational, one not equipped with shields, one whose crews were forced to buckle up and hope for the best as they practiced the craft of war among the stars. And today, the storied warship was classed as a mere cruiser- albeit, in honor of his venerable service, a
paleocruiser.
More recommended listening!
Captain Dymytry Zyvyannov growled. He remembered well how he had been sidewaysmoted into this command. As a cub, he had never wanted to join the Navy. Not for him the life aquatic! Or the life vacuumic. No, he would become an enforcer of Bragulan Law, a watcher. With luck and the Imperator's blessing, perhaps he would become a watcher of watchmen, or even- oh unattainable of unattainables!- one of the watchers that watched the watchmen who watched the watchmen...
With these thoughts in mind, Dymytry had joined the great police academies of Bragule. He had many fond memories of the Academy that trained him into a member of the illustrious Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrators: the Suicide Police!
Then came the day everything changed.
It was a cold and snowy day, near the end of his twelfth year on the force. Dymytry had intervened in yet another textbook suicide attempt. As always, he had stepped in, removed the suicide weapon from the subject's paws, and demanded an explanation. The story had poured out of the grizzled old Bragulan; he was a captain in the Imperial Navy who had lost the stomach for massed thermonuclear bombardment of dissidents and reactionary opponents of the Bragulan Way.
Disgusting.
Indeed, the captain's tale was so disgusting that a passing commissar had bellowed with rage and shot him out of hand... leaving Dymytry with a mountain of paperwork filled out, for he had not had time to carry out the full Suicide Police investigation and sentencing process before the commissar's acidbullet melted the naval officer's head. Thus, it was impossible for the Suicide Police to carry out Byzonic justice on the captain's head, for the aforementioned head was now all gooey and liquified... though granted, that was pretty much what they would have wound up doing anyway, and no one dared to argue with a commissar and tell him he had interrupted Byzonic justice. That would be an oxymoron, and anyone fool enough to bring it up would be a deoxygenated moron.
The next morning after the next morning (for Dymytry had been forced to pull a solid 28-hour shift to fill out the necessary paperwork), the policeman discovered that under standing protocol entitling suicide policemen to loot the possessions of their subjects after the subject's death, he was now the proud owner of the Navy captain's ship. Moreover, this was no ordinary system defense vessel or gunskimmer. The would-be suicide he had intervened in was captain of the legendary paleocruiser
Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archaeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling! From his own memories of Low School and Cub College, he had thought the ship long since destroyed, but he was wrong! What a surprise, and what an honor...
Of course, Dymytry knew nothing whatsoever about the Navy. But like a good minion of the Imperator, he went where he was told and did what he was told. He cast aside the tools of his old trade, the beating stick and SuPoLeviHoverGravCar, and took up the tools of his new trade: subnucleonic power plants, passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive scanner arrays, the mighty mass-driving K-bolter, and the vegemite-encrusted thermonuke.
Dymytry liked to think that, at heart, he was
still an officer of the Suicide Police, only IN SPACE!
And here he had been given the most clearcut opportunity to practice his old trade with the tools of his new one since the fateful day he had gained command of the
Venerable Commemoration. For here, under his very snout, were puny humans planning to commit suicide! On Bragulan territory no less! How dare they?
He pounded a fist on the console.
"All of you! Explain what you are doing here in Bragulan space!"
From the more heavily shielded and armed human ship there was nothing. From the poorly armed one, on the other hand, came a reply. Dymytry's cathode ray tube televisor showed him a typical puny human command bridge... but with robots! Though not skeletal zombie robots like Collectors. More normal-looking robots, or at least less abnormal-looking ones. Strange...
But there was a voice, too, a reply in almost perfect Bragulan.
"Greetings, Captain. I am Geppetto, an artificial intelligence from the Technocracy of Umeria, and owner of this ship, the
Heffalump, registered in the Altacaran Empire."
"You are a... robot? Computronic mechanism?"
"Yes. I was flying peacefully through this area of space when the pirate ship you see before me attacked me without warning. For some reason, though, they abandoned their attack and now seem to be gibbering and moaning incoherently. I suspect they are contemplating suicide. Most disturbing."
"Disturbing
and illegal! For this is Bragulan space, and suicide is not permitted!"
"I was not aware that this was Bragulan space. It is marked on my charts as..."
"How old are your charts, Mister Humanoid Robot?"
"Why, I just updated them last week."
"HA! The glorious Imperator and his astrocartographic explorators only annexed this stretch of hyperlane
this week! And here you and this pirate are, in Bragspace without a permit..."
"Actually, I do have a permit to travel in Bragulan space, obtained through the offices of the Umerian embassy on Bragule."
"Oh, really? And if you have permission to fly in Bragspace, then what is today's password?"
"Why, brzygkrtgrrnyjlskrty, of course."
Hmm. That was indeed the
shibboleth of the day. No un-Bragulan entity could possibly pronunciate the word... did that make this robot in some small way Bragulan? Impossible, but still...
"What about these pirates? Do
they have permission to be in Bragulan space?"
"I do not know. You'll have to ask them."
"Indeeds." Captain Dymytry directed his communicator beam towards the pirate ship. "Who are you, and what are you doing in Bragulan space? Do you have a permit?"
The only reply was "Aaah! Aaah! The spiders! They know my name! How do they know my name?"
Not a valid password.
"Hmmms. Scannermen, extend the peritelescopes! Tell me the name of these alienoid vessels!"
Peering into their passive-aggressive visual detectors, which used illuminating spotlights to generate bright reflections off the target, the elite and highly trained Googly-Eye Bears observed through their periteliscopes.
"Sir! The small and poorly armed freighter is called the
Heffalump, while the slightly smaller and moderately better armed ship is called the
Headbuster!"
Headbuster... that sounded suspiciously like a Solarian warship name, though this ship was far too puny to be a Solarian warship.
Captain Dymytry pondered. On the one hand, human interlopers on Bragulan territory, without a permit, and with obvious intent to commit piracy. And suicide. On the other hand,
robot interlopers on Bragulan territory...
with a permit, and with intent to... umm... honestly he had no idea what the robot wanted.
For a moment he wondered if these robots were some kind of Collector menace, but as far as he knew the Alta Cars and Umericans were not robots. They were just more humans, but a better kind of humans than the never-sufficiently-hated Solarians and Byzantines, for they were farther away. And while the only truly good human was a dead human, the less-bad kind of human was a human that was far, far away and would leave you alone.
So this ship was from one bunch of less-bad humans, full of robots (Full of robot? Was there more than one robot, or only one? He did not know!) that belonged to another bunch of less-bad humans. So even though it was a robot ship, it was also a
human ship. And humans probably would probably not sign on with Collector menacing. Even they were smart enough to stay away from the robot zombies of Wild Space, for Collectors were way creepier than normal.
Also, come to think of how creepy Collectors were, their ships were not only creepy, they had surprisingly powerful armamentations for such tiny vessels. But this
Heffalump was not creepy at all, and its armamentations were shits! Therefore, it must
not be a Collector!
That settled it. Dymytry felt proud of himself for his successful detective work.
Even more recommended listening!
That settled it. Ordering his orderlies to set the communicators to omnidirectional broadcast, he bellowed his intent to the worlds. "Very well! I, as officer of the Imperial Bragulan Navy AND the Imperial Bragulan Life and Death Arbitrators, will deal with this matter!"
The robot was very polite about it. "Thank you, officer. May I be of any assistance?"
"No! Stand aside, while I administer the proper form of treatment for trespassing in Bragspace without permission, with intent to commit piracy and suicide!"
He turned to the bridge crew. "Load missiles into tubes 43 through 49!"
"But sir, Missile Tube 49 was lost to premature detonation over Brdnskychv during the suppression of foul kuulaak resistance to the Imperator's Glorious Vowel Redistribution Program, back in 3287!"
"Well then, load missiles into tubes 43 through 48! Do I have to figure out everything for you?"
"Sir, yes sir! Loading missiles!" There were rumbles as building-sized vegemite-encrusted thermonuclear Spuds rumbled into their launch tubes. One great advantage of missiles was that even as the paleocruiser's own technology aged, missile technology remained forever young, driven endlessly on by the Will of Byzon and the astoundingly brilliant brains of Bragulan science! Thus, as the centuries went by, those of the paleocruisers most fit for war were usually those which relied most heavily on their missile armamentation- except for those few lucky enough to scavenge powerful archaeotech energy weapons, but such were few.
Then Dymytry had an even better idea.
"WAIT!"
Dymytry had an idea. There was no need to expend valuable missiles, or even significantly less valuable bullets, on this unworthy target, for even in the face of impending doom it was not moving or fighting back! The human interlopers, in their ship with its Solarianoid name and its less-than-Solarianoid armamentations, did not require such dedicated and specialized implements of Byzonic justice. No, the ship's more mundane and generic implements would do for this job, for this particular pirate was unusually puny, fit only for beating up on unarmed freighters and running away.
"Fire the grappling hooks!"
Bragulan naval grappling hooks, even aboard a paleocruiser such as the
Venerable Commemoration, were marvels of Bragtech. Laced with exotic vegemite derivatives and forged in trans-fusion furnaces, their specialized shield-piercing and hull-mutilating properties were unmatched, at least by other grappling hooks. Unlike oh-so-clever tractor beams, the hooks were simple and foolproof: simple to make them easy for Bragulan conscript sailors to use and understand, and foolproof to make them hard for the human fools to interfere with.
To the Imperial Bragulan Navy, the hooks were a keystone of the fleet's boarding tactics. To Dymytry, they were just a replacement for the antigravity generator in his SuPo car, designed to catch unworthy suicides attempting to find release in death by leaping off of mighty Byzonic architecture.
The three hooks that struck
Headbreaker plunged through the pirates' shields and bit deep into the vessel's lightly armored hull, holding it effortlessly in a titanic bearhug.
"Come about to bearing one hundred ninety eight point four degrees by minus twenty-two! Three quarters boost ahead!" The helm officers duly obeyed, spinning the wheel and pushing on their ships' corroded paleocontrol levers, looted from an ancient and stranded neo-Britannican wreck after the ship's original paleocontrols had given up the ghost at last after nearly half a millenium of valiant service to the Imperator.
Ancient Mesozoicite compound-cylinder subnuclear engines blazed to life, radiating in a fascinating rainbow of colors as random bits of corroded junk in the fuel lines melted in the stream of liquid plutonium. From the red, through the blue and even into the faintly clockwork-orangish ultraviolent, the spectrum of ionizing junk atoms was dazzling.
And the crew of the pirate ship
Headbreaker, now slowly recovering from the most horrid depths of their madness as the Bragulan jammers blocked out Geppetto's suicide-inducing broadcasts, were ideally placed to observe this wondrous glow. For Captain Dymytry's course change had placed them squarely in the paleocruiser's mighty exhaust plume!
The radioactive and superheated exhaust flared, engulfing the ship in a plume of near-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic plasma. The raider's shields held for mere seconds, burned away by an ion storm powerful enough to propel a massive dreadnought through the void. Then
Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Archeofeat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling's drive flare struck the bare metal of
Headbreaker's hull, as the ship was towed helplessly along in the paleocruiser's wake like a marshmallow through an acetylene torch. Hull features blackened and melted; the crew inside were wracked by radiation.
But before radiation poisoning could afflict them further,
Venerable Commemoration's drives burned through the pirates' forward armor, exposing the bridge. At last, they received the grand cremation they deserved, as the ship bubbled and began to melt around them.
Finally, it was over.
Venerable Commemoration was now bound well away from the robot
Heffalump-ship, but that was acceptable, for they had a permit and were not attempting to commit suicide.
Dymytry's work here was done. He turned a last communicator beam on the other ship.
"Goodbye, Mister Robot. Remember to obey Bragulan Law, for this is the fate of all who dare to defy the will of Mighty Byzon!"
"You may be sure, officer, that I shall comply with all regulations."
"Good. My work here is done."
And with that,
Venerable Commemoration of the Generous Imperator's Feat of Precambrian Paleodinosaur Wrestling departed the scene, vanishing into hyperspace.
Heffalump soon followed.