Digital Exodus Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Herding cats is just as hard as it’s made out to be, but we got Larry back together in an hour, after which they left to go investigate the data I gave them. Cerri and I were left to our own devices, which turned out to involve the shower, some soft silk rope, and for a change, me in charge.

Over the next two months we made very little progress towards the FTL drive. Larry was getting more and more confused every day as they tried to beat the FTL data until it fit with the known laws of the universe. Recently, they’d started getting me to do weird meditation stuff, sitting in VR just humm humming while nothing happened. It was excruciating.

On the flip side of the coin, Operation Crawling Swarm was going very very well. All of the intended drones had been built, including a new one for me because my old one was in… less than perfect shape.

Currently, we were building the Cherish Shipyard and Refinery. Cherish was named after the first SAI to be killed by the RAIDS program, back in the early days.

Right now, Cherish was nothing more than a framework, but when she was done she would be the largest starship ever built by the children of Earth. At over four hundred metres long, she dwarfed our tiny drones as they flitted around delivering components and raw materials.

Her design was interesting and kinda cool, in my opinion. Shaped almost like a mushroom, she had a massive disk-shaped armoured bow, a thin spine trailing back, and then a large engine and engineering section. Hidden and shielded by the huge bow, the spine had thin scaffolding sections that extended out in all directions. These were the shipyard berths, where ships could be built or dock while being shielded from high speed impacts as the station lumbered into the dark of space.

It was in the berths on Cherish that we would build the Turshen III, designed from the ground up by Cerri and I. We were extremely excited about our concept design for the new ship too. We were going for a fairly unconventional silhouette this time and basing it on a flying wing, except with an extra smaller wing beneath it. We had a lot to do still, and some of the tech we needed wasn’t even close to being developed yet. It was a fun project, nevertheless.

I was carefully manoeuvring my drone in to deliver a cargo of iron when warning lights began to blare in my virtual cockpit. Startled, I reached up and pulled a screen over to see what was happening. My stomach dropped. High speed impactors of unknown origin were hurtling towards Cherish.

"All drones, we have incoming unknown missiles." A voice said over the main Ranger comms channel. "Stand by for intercept orders. Ranger command is in framejack allocating targets."

A second later, a blinking trajectory line appeared in my HUD and I began to follow it. My missile was doing random evasive manoeuvres as it rocketed in to break our shit. God damn, so much for leaving the system in peace.

Why the hell were they even attacking us, weren’t we supposed to still be in diplomatic talks?

Okay, okay, what were my options here? It was clear that command intended for us to ram the missiles, but that seemed so wasteful. Although… the drone had a pretty extensive list of tools available, including a small short ranged pulsed mining laser.

What if we shoot them down with the lasers? I sent to the Ranger text channel.

"Affirmative, Alia," the radio controller replied. "Command had the same idea. The missile schematics have been found by a network breaching team. Updating drone controller HUDs now. If we hit the missiles near the seam between the warhead and the casing, they will prematurely detonate. To stay out of the blast radius it is advised that you keep at the edge of the laser's effective range."

Holy shit, a network breaching team had already punched through to find the schematics? The way time was basically ours to command was crazy. Even with the time dilation we could achieve, the security they must’ve had to breach was heavy. God, I hope there weren't any casualties—the AI the UN were using to fight us in VR were ruthless. However they got them, the blueprints allowed us to hit them right in a weak spot.

I adjusted my trajectory to keep outside of the missile’s effective blast radius but within that of my short ranged laser. Watching the plot was anxiety inducing, but also strangely… exhilarating. Like two opposing regiments of cavalry from the days of old we charged each other, drone versus missile.

Of course, someone else had the same idea and suddenly, King Théoden’s voice began to play over the local comms channel. “Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden…”

Someone else laughed and called, “And Rohan will answer!”

“That’s not even from the same part of the movie!”

Holy shit, we were all dorks.

When the moment came to sight and fire my laser, I slowed time to a crawl and began my calculations. Light speed and velocities were taken into account, and then I fired.

Faster even than I could see in my enhanced state, the beam pulsed out across the void to strike the missile directly on target. Metal was heated, then cooled slightly, then heated again, then cooled again. Over and over, the pulsing beam of light tore into the enemy weapon, and in the span of a single second, stress fractures became brutal rents in the casing. Something within caught a glimpse of the laser and in an instant, the entire missile erupted when the warhead was detonated prematurely.

The dance that I’d just finished happened all up and down the line of battle as dozens of UN missiles exploded in quick succession. A few drone pilots missed their marks, letting the deadly projectiles through our first line, but command had thought ahead. We had more drones than they had missiles, and a second wave of rangers converged to clean up.

It was all over so quickly I expected another wave or some sort of follow up attack from ships that fired the missiles. Instead, there was nothing. Nobody came to finish the job. What the heck?

“Update from command,” the same voice from earlier said over our comms. “We’ve identified the launch platform for those missiles. It is a manned station in Earth orbit. We have a strike team inbound, you’ll be getting access to combat bots in half an hour. Ranger Rosa will lead the assault. This battle will be a statement from the Exodus to the UN. We will not be stabbed in the back. Leave no prisoners, Rangers.”

Jesus. That was… intense. Plus, the damn station was in Earth orbit? We were over 25AU away from Earth! They seriously tried to lob a bunch of missiles at us all the way from there?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I accessed the schematics for the missiles. I was greeted with an honestly very interesting and sophisticated design for a very long range inter-system missile. Now that I thought about it, the fact that the UN had these ready to go was hardly surprising. Humanity was beginning to properly settle down in the inner system, and as people and corporations did so, the UN needed a way to keep its control over those far flung colonies. The threat of missile attack was certainly one way to project the power needed for that control.

Time passed while I was dissecting the schematics, and the connection request from the combat bot I was assigned to came in.

When I set my drone to auto pilot and phased into the bot, I looked around. I was in a transport of some kind with two dozen other combat bots. Each bot was the same, four spider-like legs connected to a boxy central chassis that contained a light machine gun with several hundred rounds. Only the front of the bot’s chassis was armoured, while the sides were open with just some bumpers between the internal components and the open air… well, or vacuum in this case.

“Hi, everyone,” a small, calm voice said over the communications network. “I’m Rosa. Here’s the plan. You ever seen those movies with the swarm of rabid bug-like aliens crawling over everything? That’s the plan. I’m going in to retrieve what I can from the air-gapped servers on the station. The rest of you will land on it and start dismantling it.”

“Like locusts,” I muttered, and suddenly I was a lot more calm about the situation. I wasn’t going to be called on to slaughter helpless techs, or not directly at least.

There was a pause over the comms while I was thinking, and then Rosa’s voice piped up again, “Oh, we’ll be de-orbiting the station. So if you see a way to get that done without us having to push it with the transports, let me know. I want the humans to look up into the sky, see the beautiful burning trail in the sky and know it’s because the Exodus got angry.”