Transcendence (2010) by Mckitterick Christopher

Author:Mckitterick, Christopher [Christopher, Mckitterick,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hadley Rille Books
Published: 2011-01-14T19:11:17.203000+00:00

Fleet Boss

EConautics Fleet Boss H.C. stared through an ultraglas porthole of the fleet’s flagship, Locust. His naked, crooked body floated in fetal position, left foot drawn up beside his cheek. He absently picked at the disproportionately large big toe.

Outside, ten thousand ships glinted like knives against the black of infinity. Inside, the knives were hollow; they were tiny islands, most uninhabited except by AIs, the most efficient long term space warriors. But about half of the vessels contained a single pilot, a redundancy backup. A few of the larger craft—torpedo platforms, really—held larger crews. These would be first to heave their contents during battle, first to breathe vacuum.

H.C. had been kept in a plastic grain cylinder until he was eight, so he never developed a taste for virtuality. In fact, never in the following 35 years did he subscribe to a single show. An employee of his father’s at the grain elevator found H.C. one day while searching for the source of a bad smell.

H.C. lived the next ten years in a government orphan facility, where he received his basic citizen’s card. The doctors also performed extensive surgery to remove painful growths and correct severe deformities. There, he learned how to please those in authority. He learned how to survive among gangs, but, mostly, his grotesqueness kept dangerous people at a distance.

In the long run, the cylinder gave H.C. the advantage of small size, so he required less lifesupport to sustain his body onboard spacecraft, making his craft lighter, more maneuverable, and capable of carrying greater arms. The vivid 3D imagination he had developed to entertain his sensory-deprived brain made him unbeatable in fighter-pilot training, so he rocketed up the ranks. He even defeated the suit camp AI combatant. Familiar with enclosed spaces, he never suffered the kind of claustrophobia that often disabled other one-man-craft pilots; however, that did not mean he was not terrified both of closeness and of the immensities stretching in every direction just beyond the thin hull.

Defeating those fears was his greatest challenge. When he succeeded—through self-induced desensitization—he felt invulnerable. At 39, he became the youngest Fleet Boss in EConautics history. No one challenged his ascendancy, for reasons he never quite grasped. One possible reason, he thought, was that he recognized Luke Herrschaft as the true Boss of EarthCo, and treated the man as such; in fact, when H.C. decided to issue the ultimate challenge to the former Fleet Boss, Herrschaft was the first person he approached. Two hours later, H.C. destroyed the Regency Optima vessel and claimed the title of Fleet Boss. The Director himself endorsed the promotion.

H.C. was yanked out of reverie by a word echoing in his head:

“Begun,” said the voice of Luke Herrschaft, as if thinking of the man had summoned him.

H.C. finished the phrase: It has begun.

He savored the moment briefly.

No rush. Time for savoring. Ten thousand warships quivered at his command. Each was armed enough to destroy a city, pop a thousand tin cans NKK called spacecraft, kill and destroy. H.

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