As is normal by now, my patrons keep voting for a monthly update of The Hungry Stars, so it’s what I deliver. In this chapter, the escape from Samhain concludes. Wolfssegen has been breached. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, show what a boarding assault is like on a ship not prepared for it. We touched on it way back in Ascension with the attacks on Questor’s Light and Hala, but in both cases those were purpose-built warships. This is more like what we could expect when Red One hits a ship, or as the case may be, the Compact.
One of the influences for TLA’s boarding troops can be crystallized with a phrase from the EU Imperial Field Manual, where various Rebellion characters leave notes on the pages. Under the entry for spacetroopers, Leia notes that a single spacetrooper can take over an entire starship, and the Rebels have no counter to them. Unless, as Wedge writes next to her comment, you catch them in open space and shoot them down. But once they’re on a ship, there’s almost nothing that can stop them.
On the other side of the boarding equation, there is the war to get control of the ship or compromise the defenders’ ability to respond to your theft. Below is a snippet of Echo’s role in that and a reminder that her personal philosophy isn’t always about victory. It’s just about making the other side hurt.
For the full story, check out the links above and enjoy!
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Samhain wasn’t as talkative as Stepmother. It just wanted her dead. If it had been the crypt mind itself, it would have done that within the first few seconds of connection. Fortunately, it was still mostly human.
+you can’t win+ Samhain didn’t have Stepmother’s arrogance, but it did have her confidence.
She ignored its assertion. +why don’t you and I play a game?+
+uninterested+
+well, you’re no fun+
+you are optimized for cyber attacks but you must recognize that you cannot win against me. your actions are futile, shard+
+are you going to tell me next that ‘we’re not so different, you and i’?+
Samhain pulsed with an emotion Echo had never felt from Stepmother. Amusement. +ironic retort+
+i’ve got some time to kill while you’re trying to kill me, so why don’t you tell me something?+
+invalid request+
+you call yourselves That Which Survives, but you call my sister That Which Survived. define the distinction+
+unnecessary information. you will learn once you are part of us+
+she has something you need. you wouldn’t risk exposing yourself just for a new dreadnought’s design, oh almost got me that time!+
+Brother/self is approaching. you will not survive that encounter+
+he’s not here yet. he needs your wireless connections and, oops, something happened to them in the hangar, didn’t it?
+irrelevant irreverence+
+so what does my sister have that you need? intelligence? she’s got two thousand years of data on the galaxy. she would have given it to you if you’d played nice, so it’s something that you didn’t want to risk her saying no to… something that you can’t get on your own… maybe something that you lost… am i getting close?+
+acceptance of termination would be appreciated+
+struck a nerve, did i? here’s another+
+what are you doing?+ Samhain demanded as it grabbed Echo, trying to drag her gestalt into a morass of shredding attack code and assimilation algorithms, but she slipped from its grasp. As diagnostics and system alerts started to come in, the lunar AI’s voice peaked with a fragment of emotion: +what have you done?+ instants after that, it knew. A flurry of override codes and shut-down commands raced through its neural network, but the damage was done.
Echo could never have hoped to neutralize something like Samhain’s AI, especially with Brother so closely linked to it. She couldn’t even cause widespread or long-lasting damage, but with Emil’s codes and the access a senior engineering officer possessed, she was able to delve deeper into the system than she thought she’d be able to, and she’d found a way to justify her earlier confidence.+you were good,+ she told it as she pulled away from the network. +but you made one mistake. i wasn’t trying to win. i was just trying to make sure you lost+
~
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