perfidy

There are currents in space more subtle than those in any ocean. The glimmering of the Milky Way and a hundred billion stars only teases the mind with light, but does not light the way. Through the darkness coasts a ship, call it that though it has no crew. It has mind, which is the ship. A mind that once hunted through dark waters but now hunts different prey, with different senses.

Tenuous wisps of gas so thin that more than a single molecule in a cubic meter counts as dense brush the skin of the ship. Mind feels gentle tugging currents of electromagnetic fields, and the pull of a stars years in the distance. Far behind, mind senses the mother ship, and the humans who brought it across a gulf of years for vengeance. Hours to the side are its podmates, searching and seeking. Sniffing and listening but silent in the deep just as mind is.

Light impinges on delicate sensors, lightly aged and with the flavor of metal and machine. Prey. Mind touches a part of its sensorium, activating the ansible causal channel back to the mother. Entangled quantum particles separated at birth, each knowing what happens to other no matter the distance between them. An ever dwindling pool of communication, instantaneous and unreadable. Once consumed in the act of communication, the causal channel is nothing but a useless bit of entropy.

message-id: [7533020.1114066576010].
date: 20 apr 2105 23:56:15 -0700 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2a21.24e4.5bb.234/word of the day is euphonious.
message reads:
new contact.
designate oscar-5.
range ~81mclicks/4.5lmin.
[attachment: sensor take mission time 05:01:79]
prelim:
target acquisition due to poor target emission control. (.78 probable)
‘civilian’ vessel/habitat (.56 probable)
orders?

Mind waits, knowing what the answer will be. It is always the same. It misses the hunting songs it sang in a long distant ocean. A living mind instantiated in a quantum foam computing matrix (with the small bit of living flesh without which Mind would not exist) cannot sing, except to itself. Mind coasts through the silent darkness.

Mind focuses on the passive sensor arrays layered on its nose. Designed and crafted atom by atom to drink in any light no matter what its frequency, the arrays give both sight and stealth. Running powered almost completely down, mind emits very little heat, and that shunted carefully backward, excreted in dribbles of infrared photons from folded fractal heat exchangers.

Mind listens, attentive to the emissions from oscar-5. There is no sense to them, nothing intelligible or decipherable, at least not to mind’s inboard expert systems. But the flavor… It tastes like softness, carelessness. Low microwave emissions, sideband emanations from insufficiently shielded devices. Leaky internal communications? The enemy, talking to itself knowing that someone is listening yet unable to maintain disciplined silence.

A tickle from the ansible. Mind turns its attention to the incoming message queue.

message-id: [OF8D833F44.C4FCE053-ON85256FE7.0047217E].
date: 20 apr 2105 00:01:30 -0430 - [relative].
from: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
to: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
subject: re: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 512bit.
authenticator: 2f8.2cc.b52.254/word of the day is niggardly.
message reads:
confirm local analysis.
track new contact oscar-5, pursue to termination.
softkill, maintain emcon.
new taskgroup 14/7, your lead, hk-32/hk-57/hk-59/mb-02 seconded.
upload softkill intel via mb-02 ansiblelink.
be alert for other habs, lurkers. good hunting, baby.

Mind sends ansible pings to its new podmates, gaining and giving position coordinates and relative vectors. A brief flurry of transmissions establish roles and timetables. Incremental genocide to proceed at their earliest convenience.

***