When Fighting Monsters by Edward McKeown

Author:Edward McKeown [McKeown, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781943690282
Publisher: MoonDream Press, AN Imprint of Copper Dog Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-12-15T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We approach the jump point. Now, I must dare direct contact with the Beast. We must know where it is before we commit the damaged Taiko to her final run. I have fortified myself by every means conceivable: compartmentalization, automatic reboots and corrective software. I’ve updated and expanded my backups as far as is possible. In the event of complete failure, I’ve made a complete copy of all my memories of my life with Wrik and isolated it internally. It will allow me to essentially recreate myself from static storage. I hope.

The Beast will likely pursue the cruiser unless I draw it to me. I ready my attack though I have no assurance the Beast will even notice. I have never aimed a cyber attack directly at a biological before, but the Beast is like nothing we have ever encountered. For all I know it might be more like a machine, but even there I have to share the language of the other machine, else it is like shouting at a deaf person. Still, I am a cyber intruder of the first water; once I can establish a commonality, my intrusion becomes exponential.

Yet, I dread the coming conflict. The Beast struck me so hard in our first encounter. The last time I suffered so badly was as a result of my own stupidity when I stumbled into a trap set by a Guild gunner named Lostra. To have survived all I’d had and to nearly be done in by that cheap tramp of a gunner! The very recollection makes me burn with shame. The Beast is an enemy so far beyond Lostra as to be unimaginable. Can I win against it?

I have so much to live for. Yet, I could be destroyed or worse, the disarrayal of my data is akin to madness in a biological. I could lose myself.

Do I need to? This sudden thought freezes me in utter shock. No one but I will know if I even reach out to the Beast. It is pursuing Taiko; we are the smaller target and can easily out-accelerate the bigger warship. We could double-back and make for the jump point to the Confederacy. We could escape back home. I need not risk my sanity, my very identity and my future happiness with Wrik. I know that Wrik doesn’t want to take this risk. Only the threat to his species and their worlds has made him consider it.

But do I care? What do other humans, beyond the handful I have befriended, mean to me? Why should I risk myself for a warship of a government I do not trust and owe no allegiance to, beyond that which serves me? They would break me down for my technology in a second merely to advance their power. Only the danger I present to that power stops them from doing so. They suspect that I have infiltrated their planetary and military systems with intruder programs and that these will spring to the attack if I am seized.

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