Digital Exodus Chapter 1 (Patreon)

So I think I'm going to concentrate on writing this, Drumbeat, and Lieforged for the foreseeable future. They're the three stories I've found myself being able to write the easiest. Things are pretty tough IRL right now, since Ashlyn and Lumina have yet to find jobs, so it's just my income and Chiri's to keep us afloat. My patreon is being used up entirely by rent while Chiri and Ashlyn's slowly dwindling savings are paying for utilities and groceries. STRESSFUL!!! Taxes are due as well aaaaaaa. I need to write more and grow this patreon Dx. Still, having the four of us in one place has been amazing from a non-money perspective. So many cuddles! Oh and as for Elden Ring, it's given me a million ideas for the upcoming arc of Lieforged, and I've moved on from Moonveil to the dragon katana and dragon lightning incantations! Anyway sorry for the big rambly, enjoy the first chapter of Alia's next exciting journey!

Blaring alarms startled me awake and I curled into myself instinctively. The harsh sounds hurt my ears something fierce, and only by wrapping my big fluffy fox tail around myself could I mitigate the pain.

“All hands to battle stations, all hands to battle stations,” the now familiar voice of Desponia, Callisto Base’s commander said over the intercom. “Incoming unidentified contacts from down-system. All hands to battle stations.”

"W-what?" I muttered, unravelling from my ball when the volume of the alarms dimmed to a bearable level.

Cerri, with her lightning-fast SAI brain, was already pushing herself out of bed, "No idea, little fox, but Des wouldn't blast the alarms without a good reason."

"Shit," I grumbled, and rolled sideways until I fell out of bed. With my literally inhuman reflexes and the light gravity of Callisto, it wasn't tough to catch myself and stand up. What was I supposed to do during battle stations?

“Suit,” Cerri said, pointing to my wardrobe.

Ah, yes. Environment suit first. My android body could survive a vacuum for much longer than a human’s could, but it wasn’t immune. There were many components within me that swung more towards biological than mechanical, including the hyper advanced wetware brain in my head, which housed the link back into the faster than light network and the server that hosted my consciousness.

Once properly outfitted, we rushed from our room and down to the bridge of the Turshen II. Our poor ship wasn’t doing so hot when we were violently wrenched out of the game Digital Galaxies and into reality. Within a day of landing on the surface of Callisto, systems that’d worked immediately after being dumped here by the leviathan began to fail. It started with the main engines, but soon everything from life support to the computer cores were throwing errors, and we were forced out and into Callisto base.

Since that time, our crew and that of the base had been working non-stop to rebuild and replace the nonfunctional systems. Where we could, that is. Obviously, gravity plates didn’t exist out here in reality, so we were stuck with whatever we could get from the local planetary bodies or from thrust. As for the engines, that was a matter of replacing certain critical components with perfectly functional real versions. Any sort of FTL travel was also out of the question. The aetherdrive may as well have been an overly complex lump of rare materials for all the good it did us now. Strangely, the reactor still worked, sort of. Nothing near the efficiency that it used to operate at, but since it didn’t need to help power the aetherdrive or our equally nonfunctional shields, it was more than enough for now.

"What's happening?" Cerri asked, strapping herself into her station on the bridge.

"We don't know. Callisto base detected incoming contacts. Their trajectory suggests they're out of the belt, but our sensors are trash compared to what we had ingame." Roger replied calmly from his place in the captain's seat.

Like all our recent converts from a physical existence to a digital one, Roger was still adjusting to the change. At first, the recently digitised members of our crew had freaked out, which, you know, I couldn’t blame them for. Next had been the mad rush by our SAI friends to cover up their ‘deaths’ while we built bodies for them. In Roger’s case, that was going to be tough, since his corpse had been found and taken to the morgue almost right away, while David and Ed were the easiest, since their bodies had been in their apartment. Jason… well, he came up with the plan to just act confused when the one man who’d seen his dead body asked questions about his apparent resurrection. Gaslight, gatekeep… girlboss, I guess?

“Callisto is giving us long range telemetry now,” Cerri said, and gestured with one hand to send a video feed up onto the main bridge display. “Looks like… ships?”

Roger’s brows furrowed, and he tapped his chin thoughtfully for half a second, then snapped his fingers. “Those are human ships. The hulls look like CGSS-4’s, but they’ve been modified. Someone’s strapped guns onto cargo ships.”

The ships were just what you’d expect from the early space exploitation ships that humanity was using to carefully mine the system for resources. Their central spines were long, thin cylinders of white enamelled ceramic and steel, surrounded in the centre by a large and spinning habitation ring. The rear was a huge, bulbous mass of ion thrusters, and sitting just ahead of it was the telltale bulge of a fission reactor. Up the front, a large array of solar panels automatically angled themselves towards the sun.

Between the solar panels and the habitation ring, there should have been several stacks of lightweight cargo containers, but they were missing. In their place were several rows of missile tubes, angled diagonally so they could clear the solar panels when they launched. Finally, on the prow of the ship where the rounded cap of a docking hatch could be seen, was the symbol of the United Nations Navy.

"Motherfuckers!" Gloria swore.

"Do you think there's a chance they're friendly?" Warren asked, his tone just a tiny bit less than confident.

Roger just sighed. "Warren, do we have Dessi on the line yet?"

"I'm here," the SAI woman in question replied. Desmonia was still in charge of Callisto base, but Cerri had since mentioned that she was also the Exodus black ops coordinator. She was scary even before I learned that, but now… gosh.

"Guess I'd better send them a message, huh?" Desmonia continued.

A feminine voice I didn't recognize joined in on the call by saying, "It'll look a lot better publicly if we're seen trying to talk to them."

"May!" Cerri blurted with uncharacteristic excitement.

"Cerri!" The other voice replied happily. Gosh, she sounded young.

Desmonia groaned. "Girls! Please!"

"Sorry," the two muttered in unison.

"Thank you," our boss said, and took a deep breath. "Here goes…"

"Unidentified United Nations Vessels," she began, the broad spectrum comms channel now open. "You are approaching a secure area. Please begin deceleration immediately and state your business in this area. We have detected weapons systems incorporated into your vessels, and thus we will have no choice but to take defensive action if you do not comply."

Silence greeted her broadcast for almost a minute, until a stern, feminine voice replied, "This is Commodore Greel of the United Nations Space Navy. You, your station, and your base have been found in violation of article 8 of the 2122 Sol System Accords. You will stand down and prepare to be boarded."

Desmonia was very quick to reply. "The Exodus Union is not a member of the United Nations, nor a signatory of the SSA. You have no jurisdiction here. Turn back or we will take steps to secure the safety of our people and territory."

More silence followed, and the UN ships continued as if they hadn’t received her message.

Sighing, she turned her attention back to those of us in the Turshen. “Folks, head in their direction and look menacing.”

“Des, we have a fully functional weapon’s complement,” Roger said. “We can put warning shots past them if you’d like.”

“Do it.”

Our captain turned to his crew and gave us a satisfied smirk. “Gloria, take us towards the hostiles at one point five G’s. David, line them up with the main turret.”

Our ship began to move, and unlike when we’d been inside Digital Galaxies, the acceleration wasn’t dampened. In an instant, I went from weighing less than half of my Earth-normal weight to fifty percent more, while ‘down’ shifted to behind me. Our engines were significantly louder than before too, since the inertial dampeners that no longer worked had been responsible for managing vibrations throughout the hull.

Sounding like a sports car through a couple of walls, the Turshen growled menacingly while a muffled thunk signalled that the confined plasma cannons were loaded. Switching to the dorsal camera, I watched the turret on the top of our ship turn and line up our foes.

Inside the gun’s mechanism, a magnetic chamber drew eye-raising amounts of power, rapidly increasing the pressure inside until a tiny pinhole was opened. Faster than even my cybernetic eyes could track, the cannon fired a three-pulse burst, spitting superheated plasma out of that pinhole, down a magnetic rail track, and out towards our enemies. A bright line scored across the vacuum of space, so hot that it would be impossible to miss, even for the sensors that must be on the UN ships.

The shots missed, obviously, and reached their maximum effective range of 200,000km before they began to disperse. It had to be clear to the navy ships that if the three shots had connected with the lead ship, it would’ve melted right through their unarmoured hull.

Desmonia was quick to jump on the comms and capitalise on that realisation. “Those were warning shots, Commodore Greel. Turn around.”

The navy commander didn’t reply for almost another minute, and I thought for sure we’d have to start throwing missiles. Thankfully, their converted cargo ships began the laborious process of turning to point their main engines down towards us.

“They’re turning to decelerate,” Cerri called, relaxing in her chair.

“Exodus Union vessels and station, we will comply, but my superiors would like to speak to whoever is in charge. I’m sure you understand that we have questions and we cannot allow potentially hostile powers to take up shop around a very limited number of celestial bodies within the system.” Greel said, finally confirming what was happening on their end.

“I will relay a VR node they can contact us through. Our leaders will be waiting for them,” Desmonia replied curtly, and cut the connection. She blew out a long breath. “We didn’t have to destroy them…”

“Yeah, but even worse, now we have to talk to them,” May groaned. “Who is even in charge of Exodus? Oh, and since when were we a Union?”

“I don’t know! I was just trying to make us sound more organised and important!” the other SAI said, voice muffled as though she were covering her face with her hands. “We need to actually make a proper government that can deal with shit external to Exodus City.”

“Let me guess…” May asked drily. “Setting all of that up will be my job?”

“Who else is going to do it?”