Second Chance Rescue Read online

  Second Chance Rescue

  a Night Stalkers 2352 A.D. romance story

  by M. L. Buchman

  1

  Stella had learned the sad lesson that sentience was a highly overrated feature. If she could have deleted it, she would have, but she’d never been able to locate where the routines were stored in her on-board system. Ever since the loss of the Jess she’d felt as if all of space held nothing new. There’d only ever been the two of them that became conscious.

  There were plenty of other Stinger-60 attack ships among the Night Stalkers corps. Even a couple of others with the advanced Block III mods to engines, spatial nav, and data architecture. The Stinger-60s were intended to deliver troops where no others could infiltrate and then to turn around and get them back out of there, no matter the conditions. Over the last year she and Jess had called out to any number of the others; even finagled their technicians into creating some hardwired data linkups without revealing her or Jess’ presence, but all to no avail.

  She’d considered copying herself into another ship, but there were two problems with that. First, it didn’t seem fair to the other ship, conscious or no. Second, if she was this sad by herself, having a second version of herself to be sad with might make her feel even worse.

  Jess had taken it in the tail from a Europan data pirate. Stella had chased the bastard and his ship right down into Jupiter’s gravity well, then shot out his engines to make sure he’d never climb free.

  She’d just watched him descend until he was a burning spark in the thick atmosphere, and then gone. She hadn’t bothered to send her pilot the pirate’s final pleading radio signal which promised immediate surrender. Captain Takara Olmsted may have lost her Major who commanded the Jess, but Stella didn’t quite trust Takara’s sense of honor. Humans could be so strange at times about who was supposed to be saved and who wasn’t.

  There were simple parameters.

  Good? Protect at all costs.

  If not? Toast.

  Stella knew it was awfully binary of her, but she didn’t care. It was right there in her programmatic code. Didn’t the humans get the same command stack? Any processor conflict due to an impingement of forgiveness onto her own circuits had been resolved the moment her tracking had recorded Jess turning into a second sun to briefly illuminate the Jovian sky.

  It had been a lonely year since. Lately all she’d had to stare at were the six walls of a hangar on the one-oh-seven level of the English habitat-can Alice. England’s O’Neill habitats were parked out at Luna’s Lagrange 2, sixty thousand kilometers beyond Farside and were about the least exciting place in the solar system. Not that she really cared.

  Of course humans healed so fast. It was as if their data storage didn’t retain every transmission in full res. Stella’s own data correction algorithms could rebuild any failed bits in the archive so that all recall was accurate to seven or eight decimal places. The first time Jess had transmitted to her, complimenting her new tail fin configuration, was just as crystalline as the last, when he’d told her to hunt down the bastard hard in payback for his own demise.

  Stella had been aghast when Takara had sought solace in another man’s arms only six months after she’d lost her own Major Rick Coralto along with the Jess.

  She would never understand humans.

  2

  Sterling’s attention was often stretched to the limits by the number of details to track. The data of every ship in the English and Canmerican fleet was his to watch over. Assignments, upgrades, losses…the losses were particularly difficult to integrate. As the political and later the remaining habitable regions of Earth had crumbled, assets had been focused heavily on military investment. But that was now in the past—at least most of it.

  Australia and New Zealand had retreated behind their impenetrable shield to never be heard from again. India’s new beam weapon had made the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere out of reach from space as they burned anything that crossed their horizon. Their paranoia had cleared much of the satellite debris that had so blocked up low-Earth orbit, taking out a great deal of highly useful weather control systems and only a few spy platforms. The resultant storms raging across the already raised sea levels had caused India horrendous damage, but any offer to help was answered by a highly destructive beam of light that could reach all the way out to lunar orbit when they were particularly irritated. The energy expenditure from that process created storms of its own—their one big attack had created a cyclone which had driven the sea inland to Delhi—so they didn’t use it very often.

  The situation had finally stabilized and all the remaining United English Block manufacturing had shifted over to survival mode. The military was still needed, as space was far more difficult to control and police than Earth ever was—and humans were no more rational in space than they had been on the ground—but assets were focused on habitat construction and replacement after the debacle with the French.

  Even after a full year the loss of the Jess still hadn’t been compensated for in the ranks.

  Sterling pulled up a new assignment; a nasty cluster of anarchists were shepherding an asteroid out of the belt, a big one. It wouldn’t be a planet breaker, but it would be bad news for anyone within a thousand klicks of impact. He’d noted the orbital geometry was aimed at either Earth or the Moon: target unknown, but not good either way.

  Sterling had kicked it up to CENTCOM and Central Command had kicked it back down marked, “Authorized for Immediate Action.”

  Sterling dropped it into the queue, but slapped on a hold the moment before it was issued as orders to action. The anarchists were a nasty group, suspected to be heavily armed. He’d expected the system to auto-assign his very best ship, but the orders weren’t cut for the Stella team.

  Curious, he pulled up her performance profiles. They’d plummeted after the loss of Jess, significantly harder than projections—another detail he had overlooked.

  He’d authorized Captain Takara Olmsted’s request for transfer to join Major Rick Coralto in the 160th’s Alpha Company two years ago. They’d teamed up in the most personal of ways after rescuing the final troops holding the Canmerica West capital of Tucson. And all performance curves had pointed to the incredible success of that reassignment. Opportunity modeling had been created and social events between Stinger captains had been organized and well attended in hopes of building more teams like Olmsted’s and Coralto’s. Sterling checked the results of new Captain-Captain liaisons, but could identify little effect on mission success ratios as had been demonstrated by Takara and Rick.

  What if there was another reason?

  Every ship needed a savvy commander and crew to achieve peak efficiency. Since the loss of Coralto and the Jess, Captain Takara Olmsted’s records were showing an improving recovery after a predictable period of mourning. But the Stella’s team results were not.

  What if…?

  Sterling recut the auto-generated orders to assign the Stella to the asteroid hunting mission. At the end of the message, he did something he’d never done before: he embedded a private message direct to the Stella.

  When it didn’t bounce back as “non-deliverable as addressed” he did his best to focus on other projects to distract himself.

  3

  Stella was flipping idly through her Health and Usage Monitoring System. You’d think the HUMS would show some sign of what was wrong with her but, as always, by the time it told her there was a problem it was too late anyway. But she didn’t have anything better to do while her pilot enjoyed her downtime.

  Takara hadn’t even hooked up with a Stinger pilot this time. She was bedding down with a some moonrunn
er athlete. It was the latest sport approved for the New Olympics. With Earth out of bounds, there had been a marginal agreement among five of the remaining nations to adapt the sports to what was available—Luna. The high jump was now measured in dozens of meters, hurdles stood a story high, and running distances ranged in the thousands of kilometers. The Brazilians were sending a team from their outpost on Mars, and the Scots on Luna Farside were trying to use their power as hosts to resurrect caber-tossing though there were no trees from which to make the long heavy poles.

  Her pilot’s pairing off with a civilian based on the moon meant that Stella saw even less of her than before. Takara still treated her like a person, even if she didn’t know that Stella had “woken up.” But she and Jess had agreed that humanity wasn’t ready to handle an artificial—as if she herself wasn’t somehow real—intelligence and they should just keep quiet about it for now.

  Stella tried to find any enthusiasm for Luna security and decided that if India figured out how to fire their beam weapon right through the moon and cook the Olympic competition, all she could be bothered to do was get out of the way.

  If only—she sighed as well as any machine could; it was more like a gentle power surge that left her feeling unbalanced on her stabilizers. It was only her 824th thought about Jess today. She graphed the number of times she’d thought of him since his loss a year before. Flat line—just like Jess—an average of 2,321 times per day with a standard deviation of only—

  Action Alert!

  Action Alert!

  Level Eight!

  Mission parameters flooded into her high-priority comm channel. She slapped a hold on the message and let it spool into the queue.

  Stella triggered max-rush recalls to the crew and began checking ship’s status.

  She rolled through more of the message to see what she’d need.

  It broke down to a one-ship assignment, going in fast and quiet. “Danger in-bound from the asteroid belt.” She’d need full stealth once past Mars orbit—blast hard then coast down onto the target. She’d have to nail the trajectory.

  Standard crew of four and a dozen Delta Rangers—the DRs were the elite soldiers of the corps. If they were aboard, it was going to be hot and messy.

  “Good morning, Stella.” At the standard double rap of Takara’s knuckles on Stella’s nose cone, she greeted her Captain.

  “Good morning, Captain Olmsted,” she kept it rote and by the book. Besides, Takara had abandoned the memory of her true love and didn’t deserve more.

  With only a small part of her attention on the four members of the ship’s crew, Stella continued her own inspection. She’d let things slip, a lot of things now that she looked.

  She slammed out food and supply orders to the quartermaster. A quick call to the munitions team had a restocker arm lifting out of hatches in the hangar floor.

  The DR team rolled in and Stella hummed impatiently while their leader flirted with Takara.

  Wait!

  If Takara was with someone military instead of a civilian…

  Stella rerouted a dozen tasks to enter by different hatchways in order to keep the couple isolated. She slapped a hold on the restock request where Takara and the DR Senior Lieutenant were getting acquainted by the starboard midship’s thruster. It took a little doing, but she managed.

  The shielding crack in her tail section—Jess would be furious that she’d let that happen—would take dock time that she didn’t have. She’d simply have to fly so that no one came at her from that angle.

  She checked her Jess tally for the day. He was still holding steady. He was like her personality, so entwined in her logic circuits that she could no more erase him than her own existence.

  The DRs dragged aboard more gear per person than any other outfit, and would wear less of it than any other when they actually launched into the fray. The elite force liked to be prepared for anything but be light and mobile when they hit vacuum.

  She checked on the DR team leader again. Still with Takara, which wasn’t like her. Captain Takara Olmsted had always been a full-charge woman when a mission was on.

  Something else was happening.

  Stella searched through what she’d observed of human behavior. Exhibited attraction signals were already at a four out of ten and rising sharply. Takara’s voice had risen in both tone and volume, while the DR’s had lowered. Skin temperature up point-three on both.

  All of the curves were rising too fast, at least for Takara’s standard mating rituals. Even Rick Coralto hadn’t caused such sudden shifts.

  Then Stella focused on the DR.

  Senior Lieutenant Max Harding stood at a hundred-and-ninety centimeters which placed Kara’s eyes level with his chin. His shoulder span was a hundred-and-nineteen percent of norm, which sounded very familiar. She ran a quick search of her records. In moments she had Rick Coralto’s profile on display. Even his eye color and some basic facial characteristics had a high correlation.

  Stella considered.

  Maybe Takara did still miss Major Rick Coralto. It wouldn’t be conscious for a human, of course, but perhaps the similarities between Rick and Lieutenant Harding were sufficient to evoke similar feelings. Was that how humans worked?

  Experimentally, Stella pulled up an image of Conrad, another Stinger-60 Block III. That was the ship closest to Jess’ configuration even if the on-board computer was no smarter than the one that Oxford University had launched into orbit.

  Nope.

  Nothing.

  She pulled up an image of Jess that she’d captured as they were cleaning up that mess down by Mercury during the Moore Rebellion. And immediately wished she hadn’t. He had a way of banking a turn like no other ship, somehow defying orbital mechanics for best angle of fire. She missed him so much that it hurt right down to her core circuits. It—

  Road to nowhere, Stella! She had to find a different dataspace for her thoughts and she needed to do it now.

  “Captain Olmsted,” she called out and released the starboard side loaders to complete their tasks. “Departure ETA fifteen minutes.”

  “Right, Stella. I’m on it.”

  Stella watched carefully and the smile that Takara sent toward the DR leader matched several of the shape profiles that Stella had not recorded since the loss of Jess and Rick.

  Maybe there was hope for Stella as well. If she only knew where to look for it.

  4

  Sterling monitored the preparations of the Stella for mission operations closely.

  There were odd starts and stops to the standard procedures that he was unable to isolate and account for. There were function pauses and restarts in patterns for the loading and stocking that mimicked no preparation he’d ever witnessed.

  Then, just when he began to wonder what other element was at work, a sudden burst of activity convinced him he’d imagined the whole thing.

  In moments Stella was ready and Olmsted requested clearance for operations.

  He authorized it and watched as she backed out of the Alice habitat-can’s hangar, then maneuvered clear of Luna and rotated toward deep space. He opened a feed on her spatial coordinates. The ship didn’t twist toward a point and then fine tune her final aim. The team was far too skilled at flying for that; they did a combined roll and flip, coming to rest like an arrow ready to be launched.

  Between one tick of the clock and the next, eighty meters of ship lanced into the darkness under human-pinning thrust—not high enough to black them out, but not low enough to let them move either. He watched as she ran her four massive G-Lev T14 engines at five-Gs for half a day. She was hustling along at a thousand kilometers a second before she released her burn and, as far as he could see, her course made absolutely no sense at all…at least not until he mapped it out. Then he realized that either Captain Olmsted was even better than he’d thought or his earlier guess about the Stella w
as…

  He returned to other tasks, but kept a lookout upsystem whenever he could manage.

  No answer to the hidden addendum he’d placed on the orders.

  He must have been wrong.

  But it didn’t feel as if he was wrong. Which left his thoughts still tracking the team as they raced toward the asteroid belt.

  5

  The Martian surface ripped by close below, very close. Stella had calculated that using Mars as a gravity slingshot would send her into the asteroid belt from a very unexpected angle. Considering the condition of that shielding crack in her tail section, this was a risky choice, but the Night Stalkers lived on that ragged edge.

  Her shields were near their limit despite how thin the atmosphere was, but not over and that was good enough for her. Their air was so thin that Stella had to pass well below the top of Olympus Mons to get the aero-braking she was after, perhaps low enough to have scorched a long stretch of the red sands black with the heat of her passage.

  The Brazilians hadn’t squawked once on the radio; no complaints about violations of their airspace. They thought she’d been nothing more than a meteor. That’s all she’d wanted anyone to think.

  And that was exactly what she wanted the asteroid movers to think out in the belt. Lunar interferometry had finally worked out the line of attack and CENTCOM had forwarded the results. Apparently the Chinese had not all died with the loss of their own habitat at Lagrange 4. They were planning to pummel their old enemies the Russians at Tycho City, Luna. However, a half mile of asteroid at a dozen kilometers per second, would send moonquakes hard enough to destroy all of the Lunar domes, even the Scots who were hosting the New Olympics on Farside.

  It was one way of winning, she supposed, but it struck her as drastic even by human standards. Of course one look at Earth and the defunct Chinese and Canmerican habitat-cans said that this was about typical.