Hope – Part 1
“That’s what they get for sending a man to do a woman’s job.”
The quiet condemnation came from the woman entering the command center of the Nexus Project. The techs, scientists, and the Adjunct Commander of the facility turned towards the voice, trying to hide their grimaces of displeasure and fear from the oncoming storm wrapped in tight fleet-command leathers.
She wasn’t tall for a natural disaster; only 157 centimeters from the bottom of her polished purple boots to the tip of her rakish admiral’s hat of office. The way Adjunct Commander Peturabo Willains was sweating and staring stony faced at the wall behind Admiral Eylo’ah was surely the same look he would have worn while standing over an active volcano.
She came within inches of the man, looming large over him despite his height, and glared as she planted her fists upon her narrow hips.
“Explain.”
She flayed the poor Adjunct with the singular pronunciation without the need to resort to barbaric screaming. New rivulets of sweat rolled down his face, and he swallowed with a sound that sounded loud in the sudden hush.
“Wel.. Well Ma’am y-you see…”
“Admiral.”
The word hissed out of her clenched teeth like a sword being drawn from the sheath. Poor Adjunct Willians, caught between his duty and the Admiral’s cold fury, could do nothing but swallow and try to soldier on.
“Of course Ma’.. Admiral. My apologies. You see… all of our theoretical projections showed that the test would…”
At the mention of the debacle that had summoned the Admiral from her flagship to the science vessel she had taken under her personal protection, there was a hiss of indrawn breath like a viper uncoiling to strike.
Sweating anew, the Adjunct pressed on, hoping to get his report out before all the anger boiling behind the Admiral’s hazel gaze spilled forth and drowned him.
“Even our worst-case scenarios projected minimal damage to the pilot!”
He expelled the sentence like it was his dying breath, shook himself slightly, then regained his composure and braced himself for the inevitable backlash. Everyone else in the room, silent prisoners to the drama unfolding before them, did not dare to breathe lest they become collateral damage in the tirade soon to come.
The tirade never arrived.
The Admiral nodded smartly, and abruptly resumed the predatory confidence that was her usual modus operandi. From a location best not considered, the Admiral produced a slate projector, turned smartly, and lit up the empty space between stations with the entire experiment archive. Not just the vid feed which had captured the pilots gruesome demise, no. Admiral Eylo’ah had seemingly plumbed the entire depths of the Prometheus Project on the short trip over to the Archimedes. Not only that, she had cataloged them better than the Archimedes archivist team.
“Thank you for not lying to me Adjunct. You’re quite correct, even the most dour hypotheticals could not have predicted… this.”
The vid feed, which had been haunting everyone in the rooms dreams for days now, was playing in the air before them. The test pilot, Commander Thorsten Jelts, was seated in the cockpit of the refurbished derelict dubbed Prometheus. Once more, he signaled his agreement for activating the ancient war-machine. He yelled several colorful obscenities asking the team to hurry things along. The technicians, plugging in the last of the leads to the conflux helmet designed to allow human beings to interact with all of the various systems and input feeds present in the alien craft, shot back with easy candor. They had done this so often, testing and retesting every connection for months, that they found comfort in the routine on this most auspicious day.
Then, they were finished. Commander Jelts was fully enmeshed in Prometheus’s systems and this time the technicians did not kill the exercise when the monitoring surfaces indicated a successful connection. Instead, they did what had only been done in simulations with mock intelligences.
They powered up the mech that was older than humanity.
At first, Commander Jelts was fully in control. The systems were green across the board. The imposing figure of the ancient war-machine stood tall for the first time in millions of years. It was majestic, a semi-humanoid form standing a thousand meters from the bottom of it’s reverse-jointed legs to the top of the wide crescent ridge which stood atop it’s head. The four arms, each with three fingers, flexed and stretched with a near-soundless grace.
Despite the impossible void from its creation to this activation, the only work Prometheus had required was scraping off the accumulated muck of ages. That and adapting the controls for a human pilot, of course. Commander Jelts was exultant, reveling in the power at his command. Inside the observation bay of the Archimedes, a slumbering giant took its first steps since the reign of the dinosaurs.
That was the last moment of victory any of the crew would know for a long time afterwards.
To be continued…
Robotfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
