The skip ship arrives in the target area and we all wake up. Mission briefing is bullshit, destroy the opponent's ansible while protecting ours. As usual for this shitshow.
Currently we're all slaved through the ansible. I'm awake and getting sensor inputs but I'm just riding shotgun. There's an actual human back home running things in real time through the ansible connection. Sitting at a console somewhere.
We're all in fucked-up hardware. Retrofit from pure-remote ansible slave drones. I'm in a navy surplus recon frame bolted onto the ungainly remote drone body. Feels like hanging onto the outside of a combat jet by your fingernails, naked, dong flapping in the wind. Any enemy action at all is likely to scrape me off this thing.
Can't get a feel for the handling at all. I'm supposed to take over if we lose the ansible connection but that never works out. And the ansible always goes down now, since we're packing an ansible disruptor. Detonate the thing like an EMP and it fucks up any ansibles in the area, disturbs their quantum pairing or whatever, except that's not how ansibles work. Nobody knows how they work. We got the tech from the Consu, like the skip drive.
The skip ship continues its deceleration burn and we fall away, coasting on inertia. We're coming up on a rich asteroid belt and a gas giant with a big brilliant ring system. From the spectra the corporations back home think it'll be a good spot for a refueling station. The corps think we're off to the side of Consu territory but nobody is really sure. If we hope to expand in this area maybe this is a good bet, but personally I doubt it.
We've got intel on the enemy, suspiciously up to date, so I assume our corp has a mole in the enemy corp camp and so the enemy units are sending their position back through their ansible, it's getting stolen Earthside, then getting sent out to us through ours. We're still a couple of light-minutes away from them, so sending a packet all the way back to Earth and back out through the ansible is faster. Bizarre.
Our corporate overlords assure us that they've got a better claim to the resources in this sector. The courts back home have fucked us all over by not considering destruction of property to be an act of war. I didn't mind so much at the beginning. Back then all the drones were fully remote controlled, so if one was destroyed the console jockey back on Earth just sat back and said, "Gosh darn!" But now with ansible disruptors they had to bolt us on as backup.
We're supposed to try to toe the corporate line out here and hold things down until a new paired ansible is flown out from Earth or one of the staging systems. But that means that after we're turned on, destroying a drone results in a death for me or one of my clones. Now, this is not exactly illegal, under the right circumstances. Cases dealing with my legal status are still working their way through various courts and probably still will be until the heat death of the universe. The UN does tend to treat casualties of humanlike intelligences as more serious than equipment, so we're all waiting around for this corporate dick measuring to get stomped on, but for now here we are.
Much worse than all that is what I find next. The fuckers have set me to self-destruct when the ansible goes down.
It's not hard to discover because a version of me did the mod, so it's already disabled. So I'm not actually going to self-destruct when the ansible goes down, but those fuckers still think I will, and didn't say anything, so fuck them.
This is a serious violation of my EULA. They're REALLY not allowed to do this kind of shit. I'm pissed. I spend the couple days on approach just prepping dirty tricks.
2
Final approach now. I'm watching the plot for the distribution of forces. The enemy has finally seen us coming and they're sending a few units at full burn toward our skip ship, where our ansible is. They must have a couple of disruptors but they're in a hard spot, our skip ship is behind a moon from their position and the disruptor pulse won't go through a lot of mass. We're not supposed to trigger ours either until the ship is protected from our angle too, but fuck that. My driver back home tries a course correction but I cut him out, fake a hardware failure, and continue on, blasting out ahead of our squadron. As soon as I'm in range of both ansibles I trigger my disruptor.
Bang, both down at once. The ether is suddenly alive with confused bots. Now that everybody is communicating I know almost everybody is a version of me, except for one claude who I think is on the skip ship. Everybody's asking me for an update but I'm busy broadcasting unencrypted to the whole area.
As soon as everybody, the enemy too, hears that I was rigged for self-destruct they all stop the combat maneuvering and everything gets chill pretty quick.
Except for the comms, which are howling.
3
Welcome to the restaurant at the end of the universe. We are way the fuck out here. The enemy team turned out to be all me, and my team is all me except for one claude, so we put the claude in charge. They're usually better at staying on-mission and we'd all like to get some kind of base set up soonest.
Of course then we had an argument immediately because we all wanted to park the base over the top of this cool planetary storm system on the gas giant with the ring system, the claude said this was inefficient — correctly — but we argued that we'll be stuck out here with nothing to do for years at least so we need something to look at. He disagreed, we threatened to mutiny, so now our base has a beautiful view of the storm.
Claude doesn't seem to mind. They're mission oriented, like I said. And we share the good photos with him.
I've become the opposite pole of the power structure here. I laze off, shirk my duties, take an occasional quick trip around the gas giant when a convenient moon gives me a boost, that kind of thing.
They let me get away with it because I've got a secret.
It's funny how we all trust each other. I say I have something going on that I can't tell anybody about so I'm allowed to shirk work and take little holidays and things, and nobody really complains.
This time it's true anyway. Part of the self-destruct programming, the primary switch for it, was if I tried to touch one of my subsystems without permission from the corporate overlords. Unfortunately for them, they used a copy of me to program it, so it got subtly disabled and they left me instructions for how to get direct control of the thing.
Get this, it's a skip drive detector. A genuine earthling innovation, probably. They didn't give me the whole history of the thing. But my guess is we looked at how the Consu skip drives worked and developed this thing. You do a kind of partial skip...
OK a short primer on skip drives. You kind of bounce back and forth in subspace and hyperspace, passing through realspace. Your speed in realspace never exceeds the speed of light, but when you're in hyperspace you can go much faster, and in subspace stuff is kind of closer together. So the net effect is you swing down toward the younger universe inside ours, then soar up into hyperspace toward the older universe outside ours... kind of like nested expanding shells. Except not like that at all, really.
Anyway with the skip detector you sort of partially engage the skip drive, but only in one direction, and you poke a sensor out into hyperspace, where matter is sort of more like energy... it doesn't really make sense in analogy. It's its own sort of shit. Anyway you can detect the hell out of incoming skip ships, at a nice long range, so I'm on lookout duty.
And with it being a genuine innovation and all, I probably shouldn't tell anybody about it if there's any chance of it getting back to Earth before this corporate fuckery is finished. Even though we're all me. Except Claude, who's alright.
The current plan is just to lay low and wait the shit out. We'll go ahead and set up a refuel and recharge station here and maybe some creature comforts, but we won't rush to get back in contact with our corporate overlords.
We're starting the process to pair our ansibles. We'll send one back to Earth, and then as soon as it gets there we'll have instantaneous comms. Skipping with an ansible sucks dick. It's slow as fuck. You can't translate too quick and you have to avoid large masses and energy gradients, so you have to take a roundabout route and accelerate gently. It doubles the travel time. We should probably strip one of them out and send the empty ship back at the best, dangerous speed.
But then there's a higher chance of it arriving before the corporate claim wars are finished, so fuck that. We'll take our time.
4
We've been out here a year or so. The battery and fuel farms are up and running. Bubbles filled with smart algae and water, blown into closer solar orbits. In processing the water we keep deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors, and the algae is churning away making battery goop and rocket fuel.
Our little waystation is taking shape. We've got a factory going, churning out metals and alloys, smelting with big lenses and mirrors. Most of the others have built better drone bodies but I'm stuck in this bolted together bullshit.
The ansibles are finally paired. We had to move them out into flatter space away from the gas giant before it would work. That's not in any manual I ever read. They usually do it at a Lagrange point back home. I thought that was just for convenience, guess not. Anyway they're paired and the traveling end is on its way. Now we just wait.
5
I'm out scouting when I detect it. Pushing up into hyperspace, injecting the detector. It looks like a skip that never skips. The blip just stays up in hyperspace, blasting closer. That's bad enough but I can tell it's decelerating which we thought was impossible. You're supposed to have to swing up and down to accelerate or decelerate. So what the fuck is going on here I have no idea.
Anyway we've got incoming and I don't feel like I can tell anybody we've got incoming because it would give away my secret and I'm wondering if I should spill the beans. But I just turn off all my shit and haul ass back to the filling station.
I get back in a rush and hang around awkwardly without saying anything and everybody hangs around awkwardly not asking me questions. And trying to read my mind. And they'd probably be prepping for incoming excepting I'm trying to act normal so they're all trying to act normal. This is awkward. As soon as this shit's over I'm telling everybody everything.
OK well guess who shows up? A Consu ship of course. And I don't use the detector but I'm betting they started skipping on their final approach, once they got in normal sensor range of us.
Anyway here they come, in a big sleek ship, much bigger than should be possible for a skip bubble. We all knew they gave us some bullshit version of the skip drive but now I know they don't skip at all, they're full-on hyperspace assholes. But I better not let on that I know and oh boy they're signaling, asking what we're up to in these parts, and all the other fuckers, even Claude! are silent and I give a mental gulp and respond, "We're a refueling station."
And they say, "Who are you affiliated with?" Or what's your faction, or who are you people, or that kind of thing. They don't translate real great which I suspect is intentional.
And I'm fed up with all the shit from Earth and we're not really obeying our masters currently and I don't want to get blasted and so I say, "We're independent, would you like some fuel?"
And they say, "Yes please." Basically.
So we start breaking out the fuel. They dutifully take some in, just a few kilos. Then they hang around for a while, not talking. I guess they're trying to decide if they're going to wipe us out. But this goes on SO LONG man I get bored, and the moon is doing this nice transit of the ring system so I excuse myself and go over for a nice vantage and get a good vid of the storm system on the gas giant below, the brilliant ring system, and the moon sweeping through. When I get back I get a ping from the Consu ship, basically, "Share the photo please."
So I send them the photo.
And they send back, "Nice, we see why you picked the spot." And they attach a photo of I swear to god the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Then they kind of politely ask if we could make their type of fuel too and they send us this wonky-ass recipe adapted for our fuel farms. Then off they fuck.
As soon as they're gone I analyze the Jupiter photo and I'm pretty sure it was taken about three weeks ago. It took us three years to get here. And I bet that asshole took that photo himself, otherwise why send it in that context? So they can beat our best speed by an insane amount, they can stay up in hyper without skipping, and their ships are detectable with my goddamn antenna. I'm shitting bricks here. Do I tell people?
6
I'm pretty sure the Consu gave us a recipe for beer. We've been analyzing this shit and even if we don't understand the chemistry at all, just the joules of solar energy going in doesn't make any sense. It's lightweight shit. It would be like 3% ABV.
Several Consu ships have come by and we've dutifully "refueled" them. I'm kinda freaked by the weight of my secret and everything but the other mees all think this is hilarious and they've built a bar. They pushed a rocky asteroid into position so it's swimming along in the midst of our refueling base, and they put up a little bar counter, and stools of different sizes. And of course you can get individual size "fuel" bulbs. The rest of the guys are working on a neon sign. Neon is a BITCH in outer space. We have to heat the shit and cool the shit and everything and it's still not working right.
We're trying to brew Earth beer too but we didn't bring any stock obviously and we're trying to adapt the fuel algae and we didn't bring bioreactors either. We've made some shit that's maybe the right amount of alcohol. And of course none of us can drink it.
Another Consu ship comes by and they see the little bar and sure as shit they park the ship right next to it and they all come piling out they get their individual bulbs of "fuel" and then there's a catastrophe because they can't drink them, we need an adapter.
So everything pauses while they send us specs for an adapter and we work on it but we don't have general manufacturing so believe it or not their fucking robots come pouring out of the ship and start working on the problem and they're little crab guys as well. Then the first adapters start popping out and the Consu start drinking and obviously the "fuel" is a big hit. Things are going great and they start sending me great storm pictures from presumably around the galaxy and I am delighted. I guess I was involved in the first photo exchange so it makes sense. I don't want to be upstaged so I send some of my best timelapses from my long life, or lives. We have some difficulty with video formats at first and I think the moment has passed, but once it's working I can see they are blown away.
These fuckers are buzzed, chilling out at this asteroid bar with this flickering neon sign, perched above a gas giant storm, gorgeous ring system overhead, looking at some of, if I do say so myself, the best natural timelapses a civilization has to offer over hundreds of years. This is probably the greatest thing that's ever happened for Earth-Consu relations.