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12
THULIAK
My little pod hurdled toward Eden at a significant portion of light speed, but I couldn’t feel it. I was weightless and out of breath.
The engines had finally shut off, which meant I was halfway to Eden. I’d only be weightless for the time it took the pod to flip around and fire the engines again, beginning to slow itself down so that we’d come to a stop just in orbit around the virgin planet.
There was a smal jerk as thrusters fired and started the pod rotating until I was facing away from Eden. The engines fired, and once again it felt like my skin was trying to crush my bones and turn my organs to soup.
I blacked out a few times, and I woke up to an urgent message from the Hivemind.
It was Airlock. Tschenkar had taken her.Wrathhad flagged him as a hostile threat, but my ship was too far away—over thirty light-minutes from here—meaningWrathhad just caught Tschenkar over thirty minutes ago, and anything I told it to do wouldn’t get to it for thirty more minutes.Wrathknew what I’d want it to do: Anything possible to get her out of Tschenkar’s dirty hands without risking injury to her.
The boarding pod was mostly just engines and life support, though it had enough Hivemind machinery in it that I could squeeze out some processing power—provided I was willing to divert some power from the engines.
Even without the Hivemind, I knew what the napkin math looked like. The pod was already burning at near the maximum thrust I could take without dying. That would be enough for me to come to a standstill in orbit around Eden. To actually get back toWrath, I’d have to burn hard again, do the same fucking turn-around maneuver halfway, then thrust just as hard again so I could slow down in time to dock withWrath.
Cutting the engine power so I could get the Hivemind to work out a plan meant I was covering less distance, but it also gave my body a brief rest. The lowered engine output meant I no longer had to focus on not swallowing my own tongue. I’d kick the engines back on at full thrust the moment I’d worked out a plan with the Hivemind.
What if we increase thrust by 50%? I asked the Hivemind.
You’ll die.
25%?I fucking hated haggling.
With a 25% increase in thrust, there is a 50% chance you’ll die from the thrust alone, it said.There are additional risk factors, as the trip will still take several hours, and—
It stopped speaking, because it read my thoughts and knew that I’d connected the dots. I’d have a 50% chance of dying, and I’d still be hopelessly late even if I didn’t die.
Some scions were critical of being overly reliant on the Hivemind for strategic planning. The Hivemind may have been the smartest thing in the galaxy, but it could never lay a perfect plan through the chaos of battle. There were too many unknown variables. One sweaty palm or one commander making an error in judgment could undo even the most carefully laid plans.
For this kind of situation though, there weren’t so many variables. There were a few ships moving around. There was my body—which may or may not be strong enough to survive whatever the Hivemind decided was the best course of action—and there was the risk of a Grasp Drive creating a black hole. It was maybe just few enough variables that the Hivemind could make a clear call.
I gave it full authority, asking it only to run the finished plan by me before executing.
It took the Hivemind just a few seconds—which was a few seconds shorter than it took me to digest the plan and give it the okay.
The Hivemind’s plan appeared fully formed in my head, but I thought the whole thing through so I could give it a very quick mull over.
The plan was fuckinginsane. Khetar were not big readers, but as kids one thing we’d loved to read were stories of Hivemind insanity. The Hivemind was usually cool and calculated. It operated on principles that humans referred to as “Ocham’s Razor,” or “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” namely it would always go for the plan or course of action with the fewest moving parts and the least amount of risk. Occasionally, though, the Hivemind would find itself in a spot—like this one—where there was no simple solution, and so the only way out was to do something totally fucking insane.
Those had been my favorite stories as a kid. Like when Karios, scion of theMindflayeroverloaded his packship’s Grasp Drive to intentionally create a supermassive black hole, which he used to slingshot himself up to 99.9% of lightspeed, crossing the entire galaxy without his fucking Grasp Drive, just flying past everything like a big dumb rock hurtling through the void.Mindflayerwas moving so fast that his pack experienced almost no subjective time, and even though the trip took just over 100,000 years, the whole trip felt like it only took them a day or two. What he had to do tostopbefore he flew out of the galaxy forever was even more insane, but needless to say the Hivemind could get pretty fucking creative when it ran out of simple options.
I just never thought I’d be one of those Khetar from the legends. If this plan worked, kids would be reading stories about me, but if it failed, no one would ever remember my name.
If I were still just trying to get to Eden, the engines should have already fired to start slowing me down, but the Hivemind had begun executing its plan instead. Pieces of the already small pod were reforming themselves, while at the same time huge chunks of the pod were simply being ejected into space. The walls started to sink in toward me, and the tiny little chamber I sat in soon filled with mist. The mist hardened around me, squeezing me tight enough that it hurt my bones.
My HUD readings had disappeared as the Hivemind reformed my pod, but now they were flickering back on. I’d gone from having several hours of breathable air left to just twenty minutes. Life support in general was a small fraction of what it had been. Already I felt the deep cold of space seeping into me. According to the HUD there was still some heating element functioning, but it didn’t fucking feel like it as the cold of space seeped deep into my bones.
“Get me to Airlock,” I growled.
Your suit has very little oxygen remaining, scion, please refrain from speaking, moving, thinking, or breathing heavily. Keep your heart rate down—
“My human is—” I started to shout, but the Hivemind injected me with something. It felt like coldness rushing through my veins—on top of all the coldness I was feeling on my skin—and I gasped and fell silent.
This concoction will harden you for what we are about to do. Brace yourself, scion.
It had called my pod “a suit.” I was nolonger in a small spherical pod with engines and life support attached. I had just become a suit floating through the void. The engines hadn’t shrunk much though, so all of that extraneous shit that guaranteed I wouldn’t die en route to Eden was gone, meaning I could accelerate and break a lot faster since there was so much less mass than before.
