Ravens of Eternity

99 Chaos Theory, Pt The last of the four Federation frigates cleared the hangar and joined the others in advancing on the fighter swarm. Their own fighters had done their best to quell the pirates, but were slowly losing.

Drones were meant to be a supporting force, not a main attack force. The fleet desperately needed frigate support on their side as well.

On the bridge of her ship, the Admiral watched as the battle unfolded before her. Drones harassed the pirates while her fighters polished them off. Their discipline and skill were certainly an advantage over the more reckless and chaotic pirates.

“All ships,” she ordered. “Sync up to the asteroid’s false transport signature. If they’re successful with their port, we need to jump in with them!”

Though she was appraised of the fight in general and maintained control of the whole fight, she was far more interested in one specific fighter. A great deal of her attention was glued on Eva, her core, and her performance in battle. As she had said earlier, the data from that was invaluable.

No amount of testing or maneuvers would ever compare to real-world application, especially in terms of combat.

The Admiral was overawed as she watched Eva’s readouts. Her brain response times had shot through the roof and were exceedingly fast. Far faster than any human could do with their own bodies.

109.3ms... 117.2ms... 101.4ms... 106.6ms...

Her heart thumped wildly in her chest every time Eva’s numbers hit close to 100 over and over again. Every time it did so, she felt more and more validated about Prometheus. Every line of code that she wrote, every bespoke part she built, every bolt she torqued.

.....

All validated.

Now all she needed to do was keep it out of everyone else’s hands. Her hands curled into fists and shook from the pounding in her chest.

“All frigates! Push forward! Provide immediate fighter support!”

~

Miko sat behind Redstar as they cruised down Tartarus’ main street on a sleek military jetbike. Their speed was intense, and both absolutely loved it. Redstar more so. The fact that they were the only source of light amidst the vast darkness of the base only added to that intensity.

Redstar expertly wove between a number of hoppers that littered every street – civilian vehicles drew energy from the city’s power grid directly and were forced to shut down. Those stuck inside them watched in awe as the two of them zipped by in a literal flash of light.

The jetbike itself was a sleek two-seater with a number of jet thrusters for maneuverability, and an antigravity platform for ride height. The canopy around it allowed the two of them to talk, despite the speed they traveled at.

“Why’re we even going back to the habs?” asked Redstar. “Figured you’d be all over that battle out there.”

“Only Freya enjoys fighting,” Miko replied. “I only do it because it is part of my job.”

“You know you’re just a teenager, right? You don’t actually have to work. Or kill people.”

Miko blinked. In her old life, everyone needed to work in order to earn enough to simply live. People needed to eat, to sleep. But she didn’t have to do either of those things. It took her a moment to realize the reasons why she did any earning at all.

“I wish to build things,” she said. “Cores and chassis and systems and modules. I want to put them together in different ways and see how they all work in unison.”

“Kinda like the Admiral, huh?”

Miko nodded in agreement, not that Redstar even saw.

“Nn, exactly. However, one cannot have an engineering lab of their own unless they have enough credits. We have noticed that the best payouts are often paired with lethal requirements.”

Redstar was a little shocked at her statement. Most girls her age were concerned about boys or friends or whatever thing was hot that year. She hadn’t met any who was saving up blood money to build her own lab.

This fuckin’ evil genius is aiming to build herself a secret lair. Holy hell!

They had since gotten off the main highway and slowed down as they approached their habs. Redstar effortlessly glided up to the front and parked softly in one smooth motion. The canopy around them slid open, and the two of them hopped off the jetbike.

Miko then ran towards her hab with Redstar right behind. She slid open her door and hopped inside. All manner of parts were strewn all over the shelves, counters, tables, everywhere. And though it seemed like a chaotic mess, everything was grouped together and set in orderly patterns.

“Wait – why are we here again? You never answered.”

“Not only do I enjoy putting things together, but I also greatly enjoy taking things apart. Machines, code, these sorts of things.”

Miko sat down at her workbench, which had her three Bluffs on it. She had picked one open to study it. She had even broken down each individual part into their base components. Seeing as it was completely useless, she moved those parts aside and moved one of the two remaining Bluffs to the center.

Redstar watched as she picked up her tools and opened up the Bluff. Miko hardwired her datapad to the Bluff’s microsystems, then scrolled through the code embedded within its logic circuits. While she poked and prodded it with tools on one hand, she broke into its systems with the other.

“The pirates had mentioned that our signal was being overridden by their Bluffs, yes?” Miko continued. “I believe it might be possible to alter their override and throw a wrench in their plans.”

Redstar’s mouth gaped open. Miko returned here just to continue fucking with the pirates! While Eva was outside fighting, Miko was inside subverting. She began to understand why the two of them had so many fans – they were both relentless in their pursuits and unforgiving against their enemies.

She made a note to start watching their OmniCast.

~

The battle began to turn against Valos and his pirates when the Admiral came to support her own fighters and drones in the fight. More and more of their pilots fell to their guns as the seconds ticked by.

If his own frigates weren’t spread out, they would have easily overpowered them. But now that they were more than halfway through their calculations, they couldn’t just abandon their port to fight off the Admiral.

“Why the hell is it taking so damned long?” he yelled. “It only takes thirty seconds for the whole fleet to port! We’re gettin’ hammered in the meantime!”

“Apologies, Templar,” replied an officer. “The asteroid is all sorts of large and crazy and filled with people. Plus we’re faking it’s signal. Easy isn’t the word. So it’s all taking a bit longer for the navigational comps to figure out and sync.”

“Dammit! Well how long until we’re outta here?”

The officer tapped some of her controls and ran a quick status check on their navigation intelligence’s calculations.

“Two hundred and nine seconds, sir.”

Valos groaned audibly. He had to endure his fleet getting ripped to shreds for two minutes!

“Send a comm to the fleet – we’re incoming and need support the second we get there!”

“Sir! We’ve got a situation – two, actually! Frigate captains are reporting someone’s messing around with the Overtake Grid – a whole team of hackers it looks like.”

“Well just fuckin’ great. Can they stop the port?”

“No, not where they’re at. But our teams are doing what they can to lock ’em out. Just closing off functions and applying double encryption, crap like that.”

“I don’t need the details, just gimme results!” yelled Valos. “Now what the hell was the second thing?”

“We’ve got a fighter attacking a frigate.”

Valos rolled his eyes. Unless that fighter had a rail cannon strapped to its belly, no way could it penetrate their armor. He was about to complain about being bothered by something so trivial, but was elbowed in the ribs by Merlin.

His hard glance reminded him that the base was filled with experimental weapons.

“Order them to crush the shit out of it with absolute fuckin’ prejudice!”

~

Eva boosted her way to the closest frigate possible. Although she wanted to go after Merlin and Valos first, time was running short and she needed to take down as many as she could.

She figured she would just tear her way towards Merlin, and maybe scare them a bit in the process.

As she neared, it fired its double 88 guns at her. Its shells burst open in front of her, and threw razor-sharp shards in every direction. They blanketed the area around her with smoke and shrapnel in an effort to stop her advance.

She expertly spun out of the way of each and every blast, but even with her heightened abilities, she couldn’t escape all of the shards. Some of them tore through her fighter like it was paper.

As they tore through her armor, she could almost feel them scraping against her structure. The hairs behind her neck stood on end – a direct hit from one of those shells would have destroyed her completely.

She instinctively upped power to the repair module and nanites stitched her armor back together just a bit faster than normal.

Eva spun and dipped low as she approached, which limited the frigate’s arc of fire and gave her the opportunity to strike back. But she wanted to pull her punches. The last thing she wanted to do was tear through the thing and hit the asteroid below.

So she located a major armaments storage, drew back her strength to exactly 10%, and fired a single particle charge. In a fraction of a second, a twenty meter section of the frigate collapsed in on itself in a perfect concave shape, and glowed red-hot from the friction of the impact itself.

The force of the shot pushed the frigate a dozen meters out of alignment, which caused its portion of the glowing energy lattice to flicker and weaken.

A second shot smashed right through the concave impact point and into a massive case filled with anti-aircraft shells.

The charged particle ruptured and crushed a number of shells, which spilled their viscous propellant everywhere. The heat of the impact itself ignited the propellant, which caused a chain reaction that spread across all of the shells.

Multiple explosions tore apart the entire rear of the frigate, and caused a massive amount of damage. Pirates were sliced in half and scorched to death as flaming shards ripped their way through every deck.

As its pieces flew in every direction, its connection to the grid immediately dissolved, and all of the lines it held fizzled away in a snap.

~

Templar Valos paled as he watched one of his frigates collapse and turn into a fiery ball of destruction. Whatever the Admiral had brought to the field wasn’t something they could contend with. Not with what they had.

Valos quickly hailed the Federation pilot and hoped to lure them to his side.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s clear that you’re an incredible pilot. Your skills are wasted in the Federation, honestly. Why don’t you come work for us instead? You could make billions with us.”

As Valos waited for a response, a second of his frigates exploded. This time however, it was closer.

Sweat fell profusely from his brow as he watched the timer continue to fall – 87 seconds until they ported. It was still possible as long as they still had eight frigates on the field. He prayed that they would still have enough.

“Train all guns on that fighter,” he ordered. “Shoot everything the moment it’s in range.”

~

Miko dove headfirst into the Bluff’s code. Hacker teams on each of the frigates attempted to keep her from changing any of the codebase. As she flipped code, they snapped up behind her and reverted it.

They also attempted to lock her into specific logic circuits to tie her up, but she simply jumped to one of her Sparks – of which she had planted dozens.

But that was fine. She needed them to be busy cleaning up or building walls – that was all a pointless fight in the end. While she made a lot of noise with her entry, she also secretly pushed out a secondary thread just underneath.

With the security teams distracted, she was able to sneak past their lines undetected. She quickly hopped into their network and planted her Sparks at the nexus. They immediately spread out in every direction and pointed out the locations of all major shared system intelligences – core operation, navigation, defense, coordination, and communications.

She headed directly for the Navigation Intelligence, as she needed to find a way to disable it completely.

As she made her way, one of her Sparks notified her of the port countdown, and that it reported thirty seconds. Another Spark notified her that a third frigate had exploded, and their assets were no longer available to manipulate.

.....

When she arrived at the NI, she quickly dismantled its security system and opened up the databank. At the same time, alarms hit, and every pirate hacker suddenly realized their mistake. They sped towards her location with reckless abandon.

Miko relocated her Sparks to block their path and slow them down.

With only seconds left on the clock and with the pirate hackers on their way, Miko didn’t have time to stop the port from happening. But she was able to do the next best thing – scramble the destination coordinates. She erased their coordinate entries for Tartarus for good measure, then disconnected from their systems.

Then, moments later, the entire asteroid glowed a bright white as it, the frigates, fighters, and drones ported out at the same time. All that was left in the middle of the asteroid field were the scraps of destroyed ships and dead silence.