Theseus

Combat simulations instill a sense of reality onto the user for a reason. It makes them feel like they’re actually in danger. That there are actual stakes to the scenario at hand. That they need to take things seriously, or there will be serious consequences to the user, their crew, and whatever grander campaign they serve. It prepared the user to face the horrors of active combat and war.

Unfortunately, those simulations were built for things that couldn’t simply become lucid through sheer willpower, like an experienced dreamer. At the same time, their muted emotional capacity and non-existent desire to venture beyond established best practices allowed them to act through that tension, so they hardly needed to detach themselves in such a way.

Through my hundreds of skirmishes in my own systems, I’d eventually learned to mostly curb that artificial sense of reality to perform more effectively or more experimentally; to abandon the visceral fear of mortality and treat it almost like an extremely complex game. This, as it turns out, was a misstep on my part. It meant that when the real thing crashed into my life, I wasn’t able to numb myself to act under duress. I hadn’t developed that crucial ability a soldier had to transfer smoothly between calm and battle-ready at a moment’s notice.

Two ships, just beyond my local sensor range, started approaching in a pincer formation, ready to open fire on both of my flanks at once. I barely had time to think, mental muscle memory kicking in when my conscious brain failed to act on the sudden appearance of my opponents. I flicked up my thruster interface and pushed full power to everything, knowing I could gain extra speed by pushing the engines past cruising speed. It wouldn’t be sustainable long-term, but for the duration of a battle, it was safe enough to push the limits of my systems. Theseus began a jarring acceleration, trying to make distance from the pursuers before they could successfully flank me. I couldn’t think of a way to take advantage of the position at that moment. I only knew to flee.

“Meryll!” The call of my name jarred me from my automatic action, and I saw Doc and Mouse holding onto Ray’s unconscious body, trying to steady her through the sudden shift in momentum. My aged artificial gravity generators couldn’t stabilize the change in velocity as well as the ships I used in the sims could. Doc continued his scolding, “If we’re under attack, I get you need to do that, but warn us next time!” He pulled straps up from beneath the examination table, wrapping them around Ray’s limbs to hold her in place now that he knew to expect turbulence.

I clenched my jaw, returning my focus to the pursuers. My reflexive action had thankfully forced them to the rear, but they were gaining on me fast. Faster than should have been possible. No ship I had ever trained against could move nearly as quickly as they did. I knew the sims I’d been using were dated, but this was beyond an expected incremental upgrade in standardized ship thrusters. This had to be cutting-edge tech at work.

“You can’t outrun them, Meryll.” Lily stated, her voice cracking as she failed to keep her tone neutral. “That ship doesn’t stand a chance against Foundation fighters. Surrender before they’re forced to disable it.”

‘I am that ship!’ I sent, pushing the communication channel aside to focus on the battle. I glanced between my internal sensors, with Doc frantically trying to close the open incision in Ray, and my external sensors, gauging how long I had until the fighters were in weapons range. In the sims, I’d learned that standard cores had remarkably predictable firing patterns, shooting at the earliest moment possible at a calculation of the target’s current heading and velocity. This made dodging on the fly fairly easy to predict for a conscious person who had trained themselves to see the pattern. I just had to hope that they weren’t using experimental weaponry beyond my knowledge as well.

“Two approaching the rear, fast. Unknown ship models. Probably proprietary tech, experimental.” Aisling declared, working on something at her terminal. After a moment, I felt the limits I could push my various systems to lift further, limits lifting at the captain’s permission, and I pushed my engines a little harder. It wouldn’t be enough to outpace them, and it would blow my engines out if I sustained it for too long. It gave me an extra moment to breathe, though. “We need to take them out, Meryll. Don’t you dare hesitate on me now. You’ve done this hundreds of times. Remember your training.”

She was right. The simulation’s readiness training hadn’t taken, but I’d been through battles where I’d been outnumbered against technologically superior forces dozens upon dozens of times. I could do this. However, I hadn’t trained under this specific set of constraints before. I’d worked with damaged systems that allowed for limited flexibility in movement, but I hadn’t practiced what to do if I needed to deliberately limit my actions for the ludicrous scenario of active surgery happening on board during a dogfight. I never imagined that this would be something I’d have to deal with.

I only had seconds to come up with terminology to express to Doc how to brace his patient. Synthesizing my voice, I loudly proclaiming “Hard bank to starboard!” before rotating and rotating myself to the side, the fighters careening past with a strafing run of rapid fire ballistics, narrowly missing my hull. I directed my engines to return to maximum speed and try to fly at an angle that would take some time for them to redirect themselves toward.

“Fuck!” came a cry from my heart. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. Despite my woefully inadequate explanation of my complicated maneuver, the two had indeed braced themselves and Ray correctly to compensate for the jerk of motion, but one instrument holding Ray’s wound open had slipped. I saw blood pooling. I didn’t know much about what was happening inside of her, but I knew there shouldn’t be that much blood there. “Mouse, IV bag, the red one!” Doc yelled instructions at Mouse. I’d never seen him so serious. So urgent. Ray was in real trouble.

“No damage reported.” Aisling called from her position at the helm. “Can you get into a position to fire back?”

I grit my teeth. I couldn’t. I had thought about jerking back around and ripping through one of them with my cannons. That was entirely possible with how fast they’d shot past me, but that would risk hurting Ray even more. I should have taken it anyway because my priority should have been to end the battle swiftly, even if I had to make a risky move. The moment had already passed, an opportunity lost. They were already moving to pursue at my rear again.

“They missed…?” Lily mumbled, a perplexed expression on her face. She definitely wasn’t on either of the pursuit ships, that was for sure. I would have seen her reacting to their sharp movements. Even more modern gravity systems couldn’t eliminate inertia. She was still somewhere out beyond my sensor range, broadcasting from a command vessel with some kind of network range enhancer.

‘I dodged. Tell them to back off or I start taking this fight seriously.’ I bluffed, trying to buy us time to regroup. Lily did not seem like a military commander. Perhaps I could catch her off-guard with intimidation.

“Meryll, be reasonable. You can’t fight them. You got lucky. They have superior technology. Just surrender!” She was becoming distressed again, probably for fear of hurting me. I briefly debated telling her we had an injury, hoping she would back off to allow us a moment to ensure Ray’s safety, but I knew that would only make her double down on her insistence for surrender. She wouldn’t have empathy for my crew, she would just try to emotionally manipulate me into giving myself up for Ray’s sake.

‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do.’ I messaged while I planned my next maneuver. She threw her arms out to the side, expressing that I was being unreasonable. That my bullheadedness was going to get me and the people I cared about hurt. In truth, I doubt my crew would let me surrender if I thought giving myself up for them was the best option. They were just as stubborn as I was, and as protective of me as they were to anyone else on the crew. Not that I was considering it, but I didn’t have any choice but to fight.

I had to make each of my moves count if I was going to end this before Ray bled out. The ships were flying in a deliberately spread out formation. I wouldn’t be able to hit them both at once, but I knew I could nail one, and that would open up more possibilities. The shock of suddenly entering combat had worn off, and I felt in control again. Just like in the simulations, I planned out my maneuver ahead of time, plugging what I knew about core behavior and what I’d observed of the ship’s capabilities into formulaic plans. I knew exactly what was going to happen in the next few moments.

“Fuck’s going on up there!” came the intercom again, Joel this time.

“We’re under attack! Get to engineering and keep comms clear!” Aisling reprimanded him, then let go of the intercom button. “Tell me you got something, Meryll.”

I answered with my next warning call. “Banking forward, rolling to port, halting inertia, then accelerating! Expect cannon fire! 3… 2…” Just as I expected, their weapons fired in unison right when I pulled the ship around, twisting out of the way of their shots. I slowed down and banked hard, surprised by the maneuverability of Theseus when I really pushed myself to my limits. One fighter veered out of the angle I planned, but I locked right onto the other one with ease.

I had never fired my cannons before. I’d tuned my simulations to have similar specs to the installed guns, so I knew what kind of range, spread, and recoil to expect, but this was a very visceral experience, feeling the pieces of myself I’d never used before spin into motion and unleash hot metal through the vacuum. A rush of predatory instincts made me grin. It made me feel powerful. And that grin only grew wider when I saw my shots tear through the underbelly of the pursuit fighter, several rounds ripping through its armor, its left wing, and its main thruster before I slammed back into full acceleration and made some distance from my victim. I didn’t know what had come over me, but I guessed there was a dark part of me that enjoyed crippling another ship.

The injured ship made a cursory attempt at returning to speed, but it couldn’t maneuver properly anymore. In a few moments, it was out of local sensor range again, its momentum carrying it away from the battle, unable to continue its chase while its partner circled back around to continue after me.

Lily leaned forward in wide-eyed alarm, her mouth hanging ajar. She let out a bewildered croak, unsure how to respond to what she’d just witnessed. I was still smiling, feeling a sense of primal superiority over the unthinking, unfeeling pilots of the pursuit crafts. They were well-trained, but they had nothing on someone that could actually reason and create, who could break protocol and do something suboptimal to achieve superoptimal outcomes. The results of my training spoke for themselves.

The intercom lit up again, Joel again, down in engineering as he’d been told. “You’re pushing her too hard, Meryll! keep doing shit like that and you’re gonna blow something apart! Need Mouse down here!”

“I know my limits!” I shouted back at him through the intercom as I focused on tracking the other ship’s position. He wasn’t wrong. I could tell I was stressing a lot of different parts of the system. My body temperature felt like it was running higher than it should have been. It felt like a blistering fever, or heatstroke. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was psychic sympathy making me feel the heat of my reactor or if it somehow actually made my body hotter. If I’d been able to practice with Theseus’s full custom model in simulation, I might have been able to perform these maneuvers more elegantly, but I was working with what I had.

Another call from my heart. Doc sounded distressed. “She won’t survive another move like that, Meryll. Are we clear? Tell me we’re out of danger and you can stop shaking us around!” I clenched my teeth, looking at the mess of Ray’s abdomen, at Doc’s crimson-stained gloves, at Mouse’s horrified countenance, staring at the carnage he was helpless to aid with any further. I trusted Doc could still help her, but I also trusted he knew what he was talking about when he said she wouldn’t survive another maneuver like that.

The other pursuer had probably figured that trick out by now, anyway. Cores couldn’t create, they couldn’t reason, but they could still learn, and I’d pulled essentially the same dodging maneuver twice already. It might have changed its prediction model by now, or its crew might entreat it to act irrationally if they didn’t have enough data on what I was doing. I had to come up with something different, something less physically demanding on the crew.

I took a deep breath, trying to keep myself from panicking. Breaking down emotionally right now wouldn’t help anyone. “Copy.” I called back to Doc, “I’ll stick to a single vector of movement if I can.” It would be hard. Perhaps I could bank on it expecting me to do the same maneuver again and hope that it overcompensated when I made a simpler movement. Or perhaps… I could take a minor hit to my hull. A hopefully glancing blow on my psyche, in order to keep Ray safe. It might mean another psychosomatic bruise. Or it might mean catastrophic organ failure. I wished I had just put the damn damper back in when I could.

Part of me wondered if I could get away with opening the core module and putting it in, but I needed to make the fighter’s next pass count, and I definitely couldn’t do it that quickly. If I could dive into computational time now, I would certainly let it do its thing this time.

That gave me an idea.

There were more ways to attack a ship than just physically. I only had a few moments, drafting a fast and sloppy script in my system. An information bomb. I shoved junk data from my own system and loaded it into a payload of self-replicating processes. It was amateur. It probably wouldn’t get far through the core’s security protocols, but it wasn’t meant to be a virus, just a distraction.

I’d learned in my hellish week-minute with the psychic damper that a purely logical self could still be distracted. It was why the core module existed, after all: to eliminate distractions entirely. But if there was a distraction within, an emulated sensory overload of a desperate, screaming emotional prisoner, for instance, that logical self couldn’t perform optimally. And that’s all I needed, to drag this other ship just a little further from optimal.

I extended my influence through space, reaching out with practiced control of my psionic resonance, extending my network to the other core, and I felt immediate, immense strain on my mind as a flood of new data threatened to overwhelm my system. I wasn’t overly reliant on that system, though. This maneuver was based on instinct more than logic. After all, it was something I’d never tried before. I let the other core grope its way into this invasive new system, pushing into my network, unprepared to do anything meaningfully harmful to me, barely even understanding what it was looking at. I haphazardly shoved several copies of my bomb into its stream, over and over again.

“Meryll? The fuck are you doing? I’m reading more outside network traffic!” Aisling called, “Are they hacking you again?”

I didn’t have time to explain. It was time to pull the trigger. “Killing momentum.” I called to the intercom, my voice glitching harshly under the strain of an increased computer load, but I hoped my instructions were still clear. It was hard to concentrate on voice synthesis right now. “Brace.”

I stopped my thrusters suddenly, throwing them hard into reverse, nearly full-braking the ship in space as soon as the pursuer entered firing range. Clenching my jaw, I prepared for the worst, as it took its shots. I swear I felt the heat of one round graze my wing, but no damage registered before it flew right past me. I cut my end of the psychic network and opened a full salvo of all three of my cannons into the ship that had just buzzed past me.

An emotional rage blinded me at that moment. I poured everything I could into concentrating my fire on that ship. I may have tried to scream out a furious battle cry into the muting pool of lubricant that surrounded me. The next thing I knew, there was a minor explosion. The ship decompressed violently in front of me, three large segments and a field of small debris spreading out from the points of impact, the momentum of the incredibly fast ship carrying each of its pieces out in several directions.

I waited for just a few moments. If I sensed another ship moving into position around me, we would have been screwed. I was sitting almost completely still on the battlefield, breathing hard. Adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins pumped hard through my veins at the surprising animalistic satisfaction of watching my prey fall apart at my hand; another thing that I had evidently suppressed when I learned to bypass the reality of simulations. It was Lily that brought me back to my senses. She shifted in her seat, sitting back down with a defeated slump, still in wide-eyed shock as she tried and failed to stammer out a response to what had just happened.

All my training had paid off after all. I had been given an impossible scenario, and I’d been able to navigate it. Maybe I could have handled it better, but we pulled through. I panted a few more times, taking stock of what had happened before I directed my engines to a gentle acceleration back up toward maximum speed, trying to go easy on my poor strained reactor. I was a little worried that I had been momentarily paralyzed, not in fear, but by morbid satisfaction. That was something to pack away for later, though.

I looked inward to my heart to see Doc frantically suctioning blood from Ray’s wound, and prepping another needle full of something. Ray was still alive. Hopefully, he could keep her that way. “Bogeys down.” I declared soberly over the intercom, not wanting to betray my lingering mania in the synthetic voice. “You’re free to continue the procedure.”

Doc nodded slowly. “Right. Continue it. And the four other procedures she needs now,” he mumbled. “Mouse, suture. Add this to her IV.” he reached back and handed the teenager a vial. “Just like I showed you.”

“Meryll… that was wild.” Aisling declared, eyes still locked to the navigation terminal, watching closely for any sign of additional targets. “Is that the kind of shit you do in those simulations? No wonder the grading scale hates you.”

“If you’re done doing stupid shit, I think I can probably keep this thing from exploding, but I’ll need Mouse if we’re still in a fight.” Joel called from below. My heart beat in time with the thrumming reactor, which is to say, entirely too fast. I’d pushed both my ship and somehow also my body to their limits. I needed a moment to compose myself.

I concentrated on the square in the corner of my vision. Lily still stared, gaping, at my accomplishment, frozen in place with some mix of fear, reverence, shock, and awe. She hadn’t thought this outcome possible. In that moment, as I came down from the strange high I’d experienced, I thought maybe I understood a fraction of what Cassandra got out of emotionally overwhelming someone. I definitely didn’t want to pursue it the same way she did, but I understood it a little better. I opened my channel to Lily again. ‘I told you. Don’t tell me what I can’t do.’