As expected, there was some kind of centralized power conservation in effect. Instead of powering up the bot bay, the current I was putting out just vanished into the endless maze of superconductive fibers that made up the ship’s power system. But it was going somewhere. A battleship’s computer systems are spread out through the whole mass of the ship, so destroying them is impossible unless you can vaporize a trillion tons of smart matter. Somewhere, a network of hidden computing nodes was drinking in that power and deciding what to do with it.
Seconds passed, one endless millisecond after another dragging by while I worried that this was a horrible mistake. What if there were still Mirai warbots on the ship? What if the battleship’s computer could hack my systems somehow? What if a yakuza recon drone was close enough to spot the infrared signature of my reactor?
Then the smart matter around the power outlet went live, warming slightly as countless built-in systems powered up. A weak radar pulse pinged the room. A wireless datanet node came online, and my comm picked up an IFF query.
A query in a bizarre, nonstandard format that I nevertheless knew exactly how to handle.
I identified myself with the ID code I’d been born with, rather than the one the orphanage had assigned me. Instead of just accepting my code and giving me access the system challenged me again, this time with a much more complicated protocol. For almost a hundred milliseconds we traded long, twisty works of cryptographic poetry with each other.
Then it finally accepted my ID, and invited me to open a comlink. Just a basic voice channel, with no video or VR elements.
“Hello, your highness. Welcome back to the Emperor’s Hope. How may I be of service?”
I couldn’t begin to sort out all the conflicting emotions in the woman’s voice, especially with my own fears on the verge of being confirmed. I bit my lip.
“Are you the ship’s computer?”
“Yes, I’m Hope. Don’t you recognize me, Alice? I know your mother took one of my processing nodes with her when she escaped.”
“You knew my mother?” I gasped. A million questions tried to flood out all at once, and I had to pause for a moment to organize my thoughts.
“I was her ship, Alice. Of course I knew her. Something has gone terribly wrong, hasn’t it? How can you not already know these things?”
“I was raised in an orphanage,” I said. “They told me I was found in a pirate base, and my mother was dead. Please, tell me who I am.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“You are Princess Alice Rose Long, eldest daughter of Princess Susan Marie Long, and as of my last update the seventeenth in line for the throne of the Mirai Kingdom.”
I choked.
“I guess that explains how you have such incredible mods,” Emla interjected.
“Princess Alice is the only recorded recipient of the full Gen 12 Transcendence augmentations,” Hope agreed. “The process for upgrading adults was still in development when we left Mirai. Despite being the head of the Transcendence Project, even Princess Susan was only a Gen 8.”
“I’m a Mirai,” I said dully.
The monsters who tried to kill or conquer the whole human race. The creatures who were so dangerous no one dared to let a single one of them live.
“A Mirai princess,” Hope corrected.
My laugh must have sounded a little hysterical, because Emla gave me a concerned look
“Princess. Right. Princess of genocidal monsters. Everyone in the galaxy will try to kill me if they find out.”
“You know better than that, Alice,” Emla said firmly. “You’re still my mistress, and you know Naoko will still be your friend. I bet the techs will all think it’s cool, and didn’t you tell me the captain defended them once?”
“I take it we lost the war?” Hope said hesitantly.
“It was really bad,” Emla answered. “The Grand Alliance killed everyone they could find, and spread all kinds of horrible stories about you to justify it. The Mirai are like the monster under the bed for the whole galaxy now. The way they tell it humanity would have been doomed if you’d won.”
“They are anyway,” I said softly.
Emla shot me a questioning look. “What?”
I shook my head. “A problem for later. So I’m a Mirai. There’s no way you could be wrong about that, Hope?”
“The Transcendence project went to extreme lengths to ensure that personal identity codes could not be faked, Princess. I am quite certain.”
“Fine. If I’m a monster, then I’ll use my monstrous powers to save my friends. Hope, what resources do you have that might still work, if I can power them up?”
Chapter 28
Eleven kilometers aft of the secure hold there was a small cluster of rooms that had once been a secret refuge for the ship’s officers. Just an armory, a workshop and a tiny barracks area with a dozen beds and a bathroom, all of it wedged in between the fuel and reaction mass feeds for one of the ship’s enormous engines.
A section of the workroom wall was set up to be able to take itself apart and reassemble on command, serving as a secret door leading out into a boat bay stuffed with lifeboats. The boarders had wrecked them early on, of course, but that hadn’t stopped my mother. Most of the workroom was filled by the bulk of the weirdest fabricator I’d ever seen.
“The fighting became very chaotic once the Swarmlord fleet lost contact,” Hope explained. “For several months we thought we might be able to wear them down and retake the ship. We lost most of the crew eliminating their command and logistical support elements, and breaking up their comm networks. But they destroyed all of the ship’s power plants and fabrication facilities during the fighting, and there were still hordes of boarding bots roaming the ship. In the end, all the survivors could do was try to escape.”
“There isn’t enough room in here to build a ship,” I said.
“Not a conventional design, no. But the bots that wrecked the hanger were operating without supervision, so they did exactly the same damage to each of the lifeboats. They destroyed the power and life support systems, but not the hyperspace converters. So Princess Susan hit on the idea of making a specialized bot that could extract the hyperspace converter and some other essential components from a damaged lifeboat, and then expand and reconfigure itself into a minimal spacecraft.”
I took another look at the assembly bay in front of me, and tried to picture that. There wouldn’t be room for weapons, or proper living quarters, or even much of a fuel supply. They’d have to spend months creeping along with one of those low-thrust, high-efficiency drive systems to get anywhere. Worse, it was the kind of hacked-together improvisation that might actually have faults in it. If something critical failed, would they have any chance of fixing it?
“Mom was really brave, wasn’t she?” I said.
“She was the finest noble I ever served,” Hope said. “You know, it’s hard to believe she’s really gone. Mirai are extremely hard to kill, especially the ones with the higher-tier transcendence upgrades. She escaped with two crewmen and forty-seven AI cores, so she would have had plenty of volunteers to help with fallback plans as well.”
Hope really was well named. I’d never dared to let myself think about things like that before, but she had a point.