Continued from Prologue 0.01 -- The Anomaly Frankenship
Uencial had already been passed out for the better part of sixteen hours. The sounds of the engines cycling were enough to rouse him after it occurred to him that if they were powering up, it would mean the ship was going to be jumping to hyperspace and he was not giving the order.
He paused for a bit before opening his eyes, hoping that he was just dreaming or the engines would shut down by themselves the same way they started up. The hum and resonant vibrations from the engines were starting to lull him back to sleep just as a sharp hissing sound woke him with a start. Before he could sit up, the cushioned sides of his compartment inflated with air filling in the void spaces around him and he was locked in place. Aw feck, he thought; now how long am I going to be stuck here?
"TACHIE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" he shouted just before the engines kicked in and the g-forces caused him to pass out again. From experience, he knew as he was going under that the hangover from this blackout was going to be much worse than the one from the Gnusmasian ale he'd picked up on Bryonia Outpost.
The mechanism holding him in place was supposed to be a makeshift solution he'd put in and had never replaced with anything better. The idea was to have something that would protect him from flying around the cabin if he were asleep and the ship jumped to hyperspace. Depending on the direction of travel, he was subject to Newton's first law of motion, and although he had artificial gravity that allowed him to lay at rest on a flat surface, sudden movement of the ship in any direction would send him smashing against the opposite wall. He found out the hard way once, if the ship ever decided to move itself, he'd need some sort of protection from it.
As long as he were on the bridge, in the gyro-chair, and giving the orders, Uencial was fine. His solution was outfit his chamber with a sleeping pod with airbags that would fill up the space around his body and hold him in place until the inertial displacement field and extra g-forces dissipated and the insides of the ship "caught up" to the speed of the outside. Uencial's solution had to be independent of the Tachina's frame and chassis so not only would he not die, the extra components he stowed for the system didn't alter or add to the ship's design.
Regular cargo hauler engines were outfitted with inertial dampeners which ensured that they could never accelerate nor decelerate suddenly, and thus never risk shifting heavy loads of resources which could tear the ship apart. Less importantly, they also minimized the g-force stress on the crew that could pop like little, bony, juice bags. Because of this design, normal cargo haulers only maintained artificial gravity while in flight. When stopped, loading/unloading at a space port, or refueling at Alliance Depots, it was zero-gravity aboard.
Uencial had tried install inertial dampeners, but the unpredictable change it made to the Tachina's behavior was too much for him to handle. Without inertial dampeners, whenever the Deuterium Tachina's hyperspace engines started or stopped, the speed differential could be fatal for any living thing aboard. This wasn't necessarily a flaw in her design.
Obviously, the Deuterium Tachina was not a regular hauler and there was nothing normal about her at all. Underneath boxy cargo holds and other piecemeal compartments welded together around the core of the Tachina's structure was an ancient, sentient battleship made of a ferrosilica-based, crystalline life-form which Uencial had managed to pass off as a "frankenship" to Consortium Cruisers, but over which he had no control. Uencial had no idea who originally constructed her or the extent of her capabilities, but they'd managed to work out a symbiotic relationship over the years.
The life-form's consciousness was embedded within it's physical structure, which appeared to the various races of the known Galaxy like a smooth, metal fuselage. Modifications and additions to it altered the personality and its behavior as it literally assimilated and fused together with the additions. Her aggressive tendencies were moderated by her modifications from a battleship into a cargo hauler.
Uencial had to help to keep her under control for both their sake, so he came to understand what changed the way the ship handled through trial-and-error. Both of their lives changed after he installed a salvaged AI computer from the debris field of a Consortium command ship. The sentient life-form was able to communicate through the AI computer, and Uencial was finally able to figure out why every other mod he'd made had produced such unpredictable results.
Officially, the Deuterium Tachina was registered as a simple heavy cargo hauler with the Shipping Authority of the corporate Consortium, multiple empires, and hundreds of independent systems. Of course, all of the filed papers were forged and filed away with bribes all across the Galaxy. Her appearance was clunky and unlike any other heavy cargo ships, She was literally cobbled together from the fuselages of derelicts to hide the fact that she was a battle cruiser from a long lost civilization.
Unofficially, Uencial Rithiventi was a criminal pirate with a ruthless crew of criminals who plundered outposts and who had destroyed dozens of Consortium Cruisers through crazy, unpredictable tactics and wit. In reality, it was all an invention to cover the times Uencial had lost control of the Tachina and she destroyed some ships or ripped open the hull of a cargo vessel to pull out something from inside that caught her attention, like the reactor core. Some of the most outrageous crimes that Uencial had been credited with could basically be described more accurately as the Tachina acting like a curious but homicidal child exploring what was around it with autistic detachment.
Although constructed by a race who knew how to manipulate the life-form's purpose, in many ways, the sentience had no sense of being owned or even piloted. It considered Uencial something of a simple pet or ward. Other times, it heard Uencial's voice in the back of its mind and considered him just a memetic product of random code which has patched itself together into something unique, just like with it's latest fuselage. As long as he was not harmful to her systems, he wasn't purged and put out into space.
More to come...