Soft, cool grass bent around Liu Yang’s body and tickled his back as he lay down on the grass. The glint of an orange sun shone off through the branches of a tree planted in the park centuries ago. Gray concrete walls dotted with small windows alternating with lush green hydroponic gardens stretched far above him. The air had a faint smell of metal and breathing took some minor effort due to slightly depressed oxygen levels.
He turned his head. Luo Yue was lying down on the grass next to him with her eyes closed. The laughter of children rang out indistinctly around him. Liu Yang’s ears tuned in closer. Among the laughs were those of his daughters. They sounded distant and hollow. Liu pushed himself off of the grass. It felt a bit strange, almost as if it was smooth. He scrutinised his environment. It was filled with children, yet none of them were recognizably his. Luo Yue rolled around, turning her head away from him. He tried standing up, but a deep, magnetic lethargy held him fast, as if his body itself remembered the stasis restraints.
Suddenly, the world began dissolving away like paint being wiped away until everything except his subjective mind was condemned to an inky darkness. Liu Yang could almost feel his own breathing and the sharp, acrid bite of cold air in his nose, but he could neither open his eyes nor move. The grass was a memory. The laughter, an echo. His wife, a ghost.
Standby stasis. Grayson preferred standby to deep stasis, as he always had something to do in the AI curated worlds. Whether it was women, beaches or tactical simulations he treated as games, the lieutenant colonel saw standby as a vacation. For Liu, standby has now become a time of deep sadness and terror. It was a place where the phantoms of memory are given form to haunt him and where the specters of futures yet to pass come to show him glimpses of his doom. He preferred the quiet oblivion of deep stasis.
Liu tried to reenter a memory to pass the time, like putting your head underwater to swim, but it was no use. Someone was making him float. A message came through to his minimally active subconscious. It was the Peacekeeper itself forcefully dragging his mind towards full consciousness.
>Notification. Logistics vessel Harvest-9812 delta-V match possible within 100 km/s.
>Current velocity: 0.008c.
>Current distance: 17.2 AU.
>Refueling request acknowledged. Wake protocol initiated for: Major Liu Yang, Captain Okeke Tomas.
A direct wakening from deep stasis would have been preferable. It would have been a simple alert, a surprised bump on the head, and soon being ready to go as if nothing had changed. He despised the neural purgatory of standby stasis. Liu could force himself to be anywhere in his dreams, but his memories often refused to cooperate. The first thing to do after returning to base: install better Neuronet software.
>Get up.
Grayson’s voice resonated in his mind. Confused, Liu looked around, but saw nothing but dark nothingness.
“Get up!” the same voice yelled, this time on his stasis chamber’s audio channel.
Liu groggily tried to shake his head, but the muscles of his neck were stiff and cold. He must have fallen asleep in the limbo of the wake cycle. Thoughts felt slow and viscous like he was swimming through hydraulic oil. How long had he been floating in that blackness, caught between the dream and the command to wake? His eyes finally opened. Looking around, he found that his hands and arms had already been freed from the restraints and the hatch was open. Gray light inside the chamber added to the dim emergency green of the cruise watch.
“Acknowledged sir,” he replied sullenly over the audio channel.
“Report to control panel outside cargo airlock 3.”
Liu propelled himself out of the stasis chamber. The corridors felt familiar to him, though by now they were over a century old in objective time and had been patrolled by dozens of watch teams. They were only the most recent of many.
The ship’s air was colder than he remembered. His body was awake, but his soul felt still trapped in that dissolving park.
He found Grayson and Okeke already in the corridor near the cargo bay. The scene was a study in contrasts.
Grayson was a monument of efficiency, his hands slowly marching around a holographic interface projected from a tablet. It was a reasonable way to achieve data consensus at this time. With Okeke’s unknown mental status and known Neuronet deficiency, direct neural projection was a liability. Schematics of the logistics vessel, Harvest-9812, floated in a holographic sphere between them, its trajectory a dull green intersecting their own. He didn’t look up as Liu entered.
Harvest-9812 was a behemoth. It was two large cylindrical compartments filled with rolls of fusion pellets. The cylindrical chambers were attached by an open engineering section crammed with synths and probes. A small, optionally piloted navigation section was attached to the front, equipped with advanced AI.
Its lazy orbit at a leisurely zero-fuel cruising speed took it around Directorate space on long closed trajectories dictated by gravity assists and very occasional corrective burns. Despite being produced in the thousands and launched along the busiest line-to-line connections, it was always a matter of luck whether you met one. Missions rarely depended on it.
Okeke anchored himself to the floor with magboots already on, staring at the schematics without seeming to see them. The previous cheer in his face was gone, replaced by an empty stare. He glanced at Liu as he entered, and within the blink of an eye, a silent, shared understanding passed between them. A scene of terror repeated in Liu’s mind: the repeated bludgeoning with the wrench, the dull sound of blunt blows, the drifting blood. Then Okeke’s eyes slowly turned away, fixing back on the hologram.
“Took you long enough,” Grayson murmured without even looking at Liu.
Liu didn’t bother replying. The pretense of a chain of command was already wire thin. In this asylum of the mad and the damned, the only true rule was self defense and fear of death.
“Reorient yourselves,” Grayson commanded, raising his eyes. “The tender is 1 million tons of supplies and fusion pellet magazines. I don’t need to say how bad a collision would be. We have one shot at this.”
Okeke flinched almost imperceptibly. “Sir.”
“We are managing the docking procedure. This is going to be a conveyor probe like before, but straight to the fuel magazine. It’s unpressurized so no need for opening the bay, except for some special cargo. Same care as when we were docking with the Rel-”
The name sank. It was too difficult to finish. “The previous logistics mission.”
“I will be monitoring the overall orientation and delta-V matching. Okeke is on the docking procedure itself.”
“Understood,” Okeke said, his voice a monotone. The assignment was a vote of confidence, a return to the familiar territory of engineering.
“Liu,” Grayson continued, his gaze shifting. “Establish range monitoring, signals handshake, monitor for anything out of the ordinary. If anything does occur, notify me immediately.”
Liu nodded casually. He was simply the watchdog.
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“And if we find something?”
Grayson’s face was an unreadable mask. “Then we abort and weigh potential loss of a valuable logistics ship over a potential witness leaving this system.”
The statement was delivered with the same flat tone he’d use to describe a pump failure. Comrades were an outdated concept by this point. There were only assets and threats.
“Let’s move,” Grayson said, terminating the briefing. For a moment, the only sound was the hum of the recyclers. “Okeke. Stay here for monitoring and get suited up in case we need you out there. Liu, with me to the CIC. I want you on that sensor suite an hour before the rendezvous.”
Grayson gave Liu a dismissive look. The projection ended. The lieutenant colonel tossed the tablet to Okeke. Okeke stood his ground, catching the tablet midair. After a few button presses, the tablet reactivated and began a new projection.
The crawl to the CIC was a silent procession. There was fundamentally nothing to say between Liu and Grayson. The last time they had wandered these halls together, Grayson had his hands on his service weapon and was forcing Liu into what he thought was certain doom.
When they arrived at the CIC, the automated doors silently parted for them. The empty CIC was drenched in a dull emergency green. As they swam past the entry, dim white LEDs lit up. Rows upon rows of perches were empty now, each repeating ledge casting soft shadows on the back pads in a complex spiral. Their occupants were mostly frozen in stasis. Two in particular laid empty: the orange LED marked commander and auditor perches.
They each dutifully took up a position on an interchangeable perch.
>Sensor feed on, CIC shared, Liu commanded by Neuronet. The central projection activated, showing a vast emptiness. The scale was zoomed out to unimaginable levels, to the degree where the Peacekeeper and Harvest-9812 were two single pixel specks almost hugging each other, despite less than an AU worth of distance between them by this time.
>Unit scale: 0.05 AU. Autoscale during final approach starting 1 million km.
The projection readjusted. The two ships were still single labeled pixels, but distance resolved now. Vector arrows showed the exact trajectories in ghostly green.
>Reorient and delta-V match, Grayson ordered.
A faint hum was heard as the Peacekeeper’s reaction wheels dumped energy to capacitors and precisely adjusted their differential rotation. Nudge. Another fusion implosion. Nudge. The vector arrow of the Peacekeeper was slowly reorienting to match that of the logistics vessel, transforming a collision trajectory to a smooth tangent. Occasionally, the nudge would be preceded by an almost inaudible hiss of propellant for high thrust adjustment.
The wait was agonizing. Each small burn had very slowly reduced their relative velocity and straightened their course, but the velocities and distances involved were so enormous that despite their prodigious speed, each phase was drawn out misery. Nudge, hiss, coast. 5 million km, relative speed 20 km/s. Nudge, hiss, coast. Reorient. 0.5 million km, relative speed 5 km/s.
The Peacekeeper emitted a brief burst of radio, guided by Grayson’s thoughts.
>DF Peacekeeper to Harvest-9812, dock requested. 30k tons fusion pellet transfer.
A cool, synthesized voice from the automated logistics ship replied after a few seconds.
>Acknowledged. Data transmission required.
Grayson looked at Liu expectantly. There was no choice. Data would need to be sent. Another bright radio burst crossed the chasm of space between the two ships. Seconds of nervous silence passed.
>Acknowledged. Dock accepted. Proceed with standard automated logistics.
Delta-v matching at interstellar speeds was a faster, more terrifying version of the already anxiety-inducing orbital delta-v match. The final maneuver was always the riskiest part of any docking maneuver. As they approached, the logistics vessel became resolved as more than a single pixel in their sensors. Two massive cylindrical magazines, connected by an open engineering truss, slowly became visible on imaging sensors. Nudge. A final burn had reoriented them parallel to the tender. They were now drifting slowly towards the logistics vessel, floating roughly 10 km away. The Peacekeeper AI announced the completion of their initial mission.
>Coarse velocity match complete. Relative velocity: 2 m/s magnitude, vector (0,1,1), local basis. 10.1 km range. Fine velocity match required to avoid collision.
“Okeke, this is you,” Grayson said. “I will manage fine velocity matching after you release the logistics robot. Let’s give it a bit of a boost.”
>Release logistics robot, PK-R-1. Okeke’s command reverberated over the empty Neuronet. Though Okeke undoubtedly used a typed and not direct neural entry, Liu was a bit uneasy at hearing his voice over the Neuronet. It was almost a violation of Okeke’s identity in Liu’s view. A faint thud echoed through the structure as the logistics robot pushed off.
>Range and speed, PK-R-1 robot, Harvest-9812 basis? Grayson queried.
>9.8 km, 3.1 m/s, closing radially, the Peacekeeper AI’s synthesized voice replied.
>Fine velocity match to 0.1 m/s, Harvest-9812 basis, Grayson ordered.
A short burst of orientation thrusters corrected for the residual velocity. The logistics ship loomed larger and larger in their vision. Flashing red LED floodlights illuminated its massive structure in complex crimson shadows. The logistics robot slowly drifted across the vast expanse of space between them, unfurling a dense tether behind it. It would be almost an hour before it arrived for docking and fuel transfer.
>Open audio channel, Captain Okeke, Grayson thought. Liu raised his eyebrows and looked up at Grayson’s CIC perch. His face showed only a dull expression.
“Okeke, I need you to suit up,” Grayson said with a low voice.
A brief pause. “Isn’t the logistics docking going well?” Okeke replied in confusion.
“There is another, special logistics mission. There will be a sealed logistics crate waiting in the cargo bay, marked with a small red piece of tape. You can jettison it. Give it a 1 m/s push diagonally to the side so it doesn’t hit the radiators,” Grayson said cryptically.
Silence. Okeke spoke up after a long wait, his voice hushed. “Is it a… special cargo?”
Grayson sighed.
“Yes. It is a special cargo. The logistics docking provides us an opportunity to… transfer it,” he said with a low voice.
Liu felt a slight wave of nausea before steeling his resolve. Things had already been set in motion, he thought. There was no choice but to go through with this. What was a logistics operation compared to everything they had already done?
On internal sensors, Okeke pushed the crate as if it weighed a ton. For a fraction of a second, as Okeke rotated it for the push, the red tape caught the light. Beneath it, Liu could make out faded stenciled lettering: BIOHAZARD. He understood everything. The auditor, or what was left of her, was in that crate. And once it was gone, the last evidence of their monstrous deeds would be cleanly jettisoned too.
>You got this? Liu queried over Neuronet.
No response was heard, in either his ears or his head. There was only the sound of tired, ragged breathing. The crate was oriented. The gaping black maw of the airlock slid open to the bleak void of empty space. A shadowy figure gave the crate a push, his magboots straining to keep him planted in place. It slowly passed through the airlock and tumbled away into the dark.
“Retroactively add note, Liu. Auditor transferred to Relativity prior to encounter with insurgent mine due to damage from purification protocol. This was to ensure her safety,” Grayson ordered without even turning to him.
Liu felt little emotion as he mechanically entered the details.
>During execution of purification protocol GC-212-07-05c, DF Peacekeeper sustained unexpected thermal loading events in primary reactor.
>Auditor-72-A9-M5 transferred to Relativity during logistics maneuver to ensure safety of high value personnel.
>At system egress, Relativity suffered catastrophic detonation damage consistent with 20 MT nuclear warhead. Signature yield matches insurgent mines documented in Annex 15.
>Assessment: Relativity loss attributed to residual insurgent elements. No further hostiles detected.
>Recommendation: Gamma Centauri system cleared for recolonization
>Filed by: Major Liu Yang
>Authorization: Lieutenant Colonel Grayson Joseph
Liu paused a bit, considering if there were any necessary details he should add. He shook his head.
>End log.
