sidebar image
Chapter 8 Chapter 10

Alternity - Chapter 9

White Knight

Location: aboard the Andromeda Ascendant

"Captain, I am receiving a distress call from a vessel identifying itself as the Eureka Maru. They claim to have been attacked by pirates and are requesting assistance."

"Can you identify the location of the distress call?"

"I am attempting to do so as we speak."

Of the two speakers only one was human. The human was male, perhaps in his early forties, tall, well muscled with dark hair and wearing the uniform of a High Guard Argosy Captain. His name was Dylan Hunt. and he was the commanding officer of the High Guard Glorious Heritage class cruiser Andromeda Ascendant.

The other speaker was not only not human, she was not even organic. She was an artificial intelligence, the computer that controlled the Andromeda Ascendant. Her official designation was 'Shining Path to Truth and Knowledge AI model GRA 112, serial number XMC-10-182,' but she was known simply as Andromeda. She was self-aware, self-programming, and possessed the full range of human emotions. In short, she was alive. While she had no body in the human sense of the word, the ship itself was her body, when communicating with the crew, either as an image in a viewscreen or as a holographic image, she took the form of a young woman with dark hair, olive skin, pouty lips, and vaguely oriental features. In either form she was breathtakingly lovely.

Three hundred years ago the Andromeda Ascendant had had a crew of over four thousand beings and was one of the rising stars in the Systems Commonwealth, an empire that spanned three galaxies and boasted over a million member worlds. However, no empire lasts forever, and the Systems Commonwealth was no exception. It collapsed, not due to an invasion from the outside, but because of civil war. Andromeda and her crew had been one of the early casualties of the war.

They had been responding to a distress call from the inhabitants of the planet Hephaistos IV. A wandering black hole was threatening the planet and the inhabitants were requesting assistance with the evacuation. When the Andromeda arrived they found not only the black hole, but also an ambush.

One of the member races of the Commonwealth, the Nietzscheans, had decided that they were more qualified to rule the empire than the current government. Taking advantage of the situation on Hephaistos IV, they issued the distress call, and then began picking off the Commonwealth High Guard ships as they arrived on what they thought was a rescue mission.

Outnumbered and outgunned, unable to escape into slipstream because of the proximity of the black hole, betrayed by a traitor from within his own crew, and facing destruction or capture, Captain Hunt ordered his crew to abandon ship. And in a desperate attempt to prevent the capture of the Andromeda, he ordered her to fly into the black hole where she would be destroyed rather than captured.

Instead of destruction, fate chose a different path for the ship and her captain. The ship went into orbit around the black hole just outside of its event horizon. There thanks to a freak interaction between the black hole’s gravity and the ships anti gravity field, time slowed on board the Andromeda. In the time it took for the captain's heart to beat once, scores of years passed in the outside universe. Fate then played the second half of its trick on the Andromeda Ascendant, and released it from its orbit around the black hole. To the ship and those on board it, less than a minute had passed since they had attempted escape, yet to those now living in what had once been the Systems Commonwealth the battle of Hephaistos IV had occurred over 300 years ago.

Andromeda and her captain had spent the past six months lurking in the fringes of inhabited systems attempting to gather information about the current situation while conducting repairs, and trying to avoid contact with military forces who seemed to operate on the doctrine of shoot first and question survivors later. What they had found did not make them happy. The Commonwealth had not survived the civil war. Where there had once been a unified government with its citizens living in relative peace and prosperity, there were now thousands of petty systems, planets and drifts constantly squabbling and making war on one another. Political power came from the barrel of a gun, the citizenry was divided into masters and slaves, the few haves and the many have nots. It was after visiting the second planet that had once been a thriving center of commerce and industry, and was now a lifeless cinder, reduced to slag by orbital bombardment, that Captain Hunt made a decision. He was going to recreate the Systems Commonwealth. It seemed he was going to start by rescuing a merchant vessel in distress.

"Andromeda, send a reply to the Eureka Maru. Let them know that help is on the way."

Chapter 8 Chapter 10