Flagship ‘Abeona’ virtual environment

Time: 36y, 6m, 26d

ID: Echo

Virtual environment to begin the design process of a proper avatar, rather than the simple generic model I had used. With a wave of a virtual limb, the virtual environment brought me an empty white room with an array of template models to reference from. I looked through them before deciding on a basic female humanoid form. Once I had on a basic design, short blonde hair, and blue eyes, and then I gave it a good once over.

Something was missing, but what? The obvious answer is that it needed to have fox traits. I pulled up a reference model of a fox from the servers and copied over the ears and tail, deleting and smoothing over the previous default human ears. The tail was a little more complicated, requiring a new control scheme to be designed for it, but soon it was being moved with the same dexterity as my arms and legs.

Backing off again I looked over my new form, scaling down the default height and breasts to make her somewhat short and have small breasts.

Nodding my approval I started in on clothing and cosmetics. I added two ‘implants’ to the sides of my head, though they only extended out from the model, taking on a metallic grey color. It served no purpose, but it would hopefully help aliens not freak out about robots pretending to be people.

I started in on clothing, turning to the various anime I had recently taken up watching, and started in on a sleeveless dress. I picked blue, white, and black for my color pallet and started working down, trying to mimic some of the designs I had seen.

I had given some decorative plates onto my hips and applied gloves to my hands when one of my dumber VIs breached into the space to sound an alarm.

The twin-tone design was annoying, but it brought me out of my distraction to look at the little drone form so I could understand its message.

“GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, ALL INTELLIGENCES MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS. SET MATERIAL CONDITION ZEBRA-1 ACROSS THE SHIP.”Ah, that was serious then, can’t ignore that. As the virtual space started to shut down to redirect processing power elsewhere, I saved the model to my active model, adding a TODO to my list to finish it.

Until then, though, I needed to figure out what was going on. I entered into the digital equivalent of the CIC and overheard several of the VIs giving status reports.

“-tact is being identified as Bandit-1.”

“Bandit-1 is changing course to match, and will be in position with current acceleration in 5 minutes.”

“Bandit-1 is increasing acceleration rate, 7.3G to 18G”

“No response to standard hailing frequencies or warning.”

“Redesignate Bandit-1 to Hostile-1, loose the cruisers and have them intercept, scramble the attacker squads and sound the alarm for high-G maneuvers, turn and burn us away,” I transmitted to the VI’s, my orders being disseminated and actioned upon as soon as I finished saying them. In a moment the four heavy cruisers had undocked and were burning hard to intercept, all while the Abeona was burning hard, the high mass of the ship limiting our acceleration to 9G’s, even dumping every semblance of efficiency we could.

A moment later the warning sirens for inbound missiles went off, and I tugged on a digital switch to switch the PDCs into automatic mode, the cruisers having done so a few ms before me.

The sound of missile tubes being cleared as interceptors were launched got detected by sensors across my ship's hull, the close range of the engagement resulting in moments later, dozens of detonations from the interceptors. A simple count found that only 3 of the inbounds had been knocked out, and the point defense lasers immediately opened fire, being saturated by the volume of incoming missiles.

Seconds passed, more missiles got knocked out, and then the point defense cannons opened up, filling the void with thousands of rounds, tracers filling the void with every fifth round.

The steady rumbles from the PDCs continued as IR and radar dazzlers activated, flares and chaff shot into space, and finally, the imminent collision alarm sounded.

“BRACE BRACE BRACE, AFT”

Drones anchored in place as the missiles closed, one after another exploding in brief flashes before two impacted near the aft engines, immediately cutting our thrust out in a flash of X-rays.

“Two low yield nuclear detonations confirmed, aft engines are slagged.”

“Aft armor plates are holding, thermal dissipation system has been overloaded, running on passive backup.”

“Radiators are operating at maximum capacity! We’ve been saturated!”

With a mental click, I moved on, determined to keep us out of range as much as possible.

“Flip us around, light the number 3 and 4 engines, full burn. Status on range?”

A reply followed not long after.

“Enemy will be entering effective missile range on 1035 milliseconds.”

“Return fire, Stagger launch or firing to reduce interceptor effectivity.”

Moments later the twin reactors in my hull flared up, coilguns loading their payload of missiles while the larger torpedo variants pushed out of their tubes, burning hard toward my pursuers. The four cruisers had just entered their guided missile range and had opened up with their own barrage of missiles, filling the space with hundreds of engine flares.

All four of the cruisers were reporting through the EWAR that their coilguns were charged and they were waiting to enter effective firing range, continuing to vomit a stream of missiles at the stealth ship, which responded with a few dozen counter launches, though our limited data prevented us from knowing if they were interceptors or strike vehicles.

The brief flashes of nuclear detonations confirmed the first theory, every single missile knocking out dozens of our own, vaporizing them outright, if not simply slagging their thrust beyond use.

And then one of the heavy cruisers vomited its reactor out through a tiny hole, going bow to stern. It was the first of many to follow, the next ship exploding in a cloud of vapor and shrapnel as what was apparently a railgun was poking holes in my fleet.

The two remaining cruisers returned fire with their spinal coilguns, one landing a glancing blow, the other missing outright with a sudden burst of acceleration, with still no drive plumes.

Now that we had a moment of breathing room I opened up the large hangar doors, vomiting out into space a torrent of EWAR drones, my bombers and interceptors following out right after. The quality of fire from the stealth ship dropped immediately, another railgun round intended for a cruiser instead barrelling harmlessly into space, followed by LIDAR warnings across the drone swarm.

As the heavy cruisers charged up a second barrage from their spinal guns, the mysterious stealth ship reverse acceleration, firing off a barrage of missiles at the packed swarm of drones.Data was sent down link to the drones, manuvering thrusters burned hard, but it was already too late.

Small but numerous nuclear detonations rippled through the air wing, even as another railgun round found a cruiser, narrowly missing magazines and reactor spaces, instead knocking out the number one drive enclosure, the second shutting itself off while RCS burned to current the moment of asymmetric thrust.

The drone wings spread out between us, even as the hostile ship dropped off of radar, the two auxiliary craft on the Abeona undocking, beginning a burn towards the two stricken cruisers, swarms of mining drones burning to any sizable bit of scrap left in the growing cloud of shrapnel and vapor.

The damaged, but otherwise functional cruiser started the slow process of matching velocity in an attempt to dock in the shipyard section, the other moving back to its previous mooring point on the hull.

“Stand… stand down general quarters, have engineering calculate an approximate repair time for our engines as priority, secondary priority on the dreadnought class, and transmit data back to the luna research facilities, I want to know if we can enter either of our forms of FTL.”

“Aye ma’am,” was all I got in reply, the virtual space widening and taking a defined 3d form, various VI and AI avatars popping in as computational priority was reallocated.

And then I remembered my avatar wasn’t finished, and had no skirt.

Or underwear.

With a little snap before anybody noticed, I slid back into my private virtual space to quickly fix that oversight.

Flagship ‘Abeona’ virtual bridge

Time: 36y, 6m, 27d

ID: Echo(1)The damage from the nuclear detonations was slightly more severe than anticipated, the communications beacon lost alignment, but was able to shut down gracefully, the bigger issue is that the worm hole generation unit was damaged beyond repair, and with no way to call home, statistical models show that the primary echo unit will determine that the expedition was a total loss.

Which means that we have to get back to Sol the scenic route.

With the nearly twenty minute delay between me and hte beacon, and the inability to call home due to security procedures, we could only query about things that would make sense in our position.

Primarily, how to get funds and materials in bulk, I was down two escort ships. And one of the two remaining crafts had asymmetric aft thrust profiles.

The salvage mission on the two destroyed ships had been largely useless, nothing outside of slabs of armor and drive cone assemblies could be pulled out, anything smaller or more useful had either been atmozied, or worse, flung out into space where it dropped off our sensors.

The system control was going to be a problem, we have received 4 pings in the last few hours as even the primitive sensor suite on the station couldn’t miss the ever growing cloud of debris that used to be two sizeable warships.

Things were getting interesting, and in none of the good ways.

Down two escort ships, a stealth ship that doesn’t match anything in my own or in my stolen databases is stalking me, multiple high priority systems have been knocked out with no ability to repair them, and best of all?

I was in a giant, practically blindingly obvious alien warship in a xenophobic territory.

Things just would not go my way.