Chapter 6:

Bridge Mode

The Villainess of Caerleon


To be honest, despite all my indignation, I didn’t learn about Nightwing until my final year at the IFA. And, had it not been for the coincidence of alphabetical order, I might have never known she had existed.

I was researching the combat record of one Admiral Jean Acadian, captain of the Albatross Contango, who I had only chosen because he was the first name in a list of most decorated Caerleon military personnel, ordered by last name and then the name of their ship. Part of my research required that I review battle footage from the admiral’s adventures outside the Imperial Rim. Admiral Acadian had tracked a host of political defectors who had planned an unsuccessful assassination of Arthur’s father almost fifty years earlier.

Admiral Acadian’s accomplishments were exquisite. There were no other words to describe it. Long naval campaigns were completely unheard of at the time. Traditional modes of engagement didn’t work in outer space. Living off the land was impossible because most planets were either uninhabitable or not cultivated for human consumption. Supply lines were easily raided. Defendable waystations with encrypted coordinates had not yet been invented. Hydroponics were good but required science vessels that could be targeted at great expense to expert life. Fleets could slip past the other in the dead of night, and the attacker was always at the mercy of being stationary and scouting through the fog of war.

The admiral’s pursuit lasted over ten years, and yet he expanded the outline of the Imperial Rim and rarely lost a battle. His only losses stemmed from minor ground engagements and unmanned autonomous fighters provided by the Federation of H. No one in the history of the fleet had ever spent that long on campaign and retained so many ships and personnel.

Jean Acadian’s achievements were so outstanding that I couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t a mandatory part of the curriculum. The omission made me suspicious. Either Jean Acadian was not the genius that his accolades suggested he was, or there was a reason why the academy was hiding him from the broader student body.

I went back and reviewed the footage and discovered a recurring anomaly. Jean Acadian deployed a corvette from the underbelly of the Albatross Contango at the opening gambit of every battle. The corvette’s wingspan was wider than convention, but its rounded nose and sleek black body was in line with standard corvette configurations. I initially wrote off the ship as an espionage vessel, but soon realized it packed too many weapons to be wasted on spy work.

This corvette, I realized, sat at the heart of Admiral Acadian’s operations. It would vanish at the beginning of battle, and soon after, the enemy formation would scatter in disarray. I had chalked this up to Acadian’s brutal and accurate bombardments from his heavy destroyers, but I spent another month computing the firing accuracy of Acadian’s fleet.

His destroyers hadn’t hit jack shit. Admiral Acadian was no tactical genius. It was this mysterious corvette that weaved through battle like an unavoidable solar storm. I penned a report, requesting to know the identity of the ship.

Military police appeared outside my dormitory the following morning.

That afternoon, I sat in the interrogation room across from one of those spooks from central intelligence. The agent looked young. His suit was too neat and his fingers too unblemished to be a field operative. He pressed his thumbs together and tried his best to mimic an intimidating stare.

“How did you first find out?” he asked the obvious question.

“Alphabetical order.”

“I’m sorry?”

I sighed. Making fun of him was no fun.

“Look. IFA doesn’t spend trillions of credits to train idiots,” I replied. “If you put unredacted footage of classified ships in the archives, someone is going to spot it. This is not the first time this has happened.”

“Perhaps we have different definitions of the word ‘idiot,’” the agent folded his hands over the table. “You sent a request for specs on secret military hardware through public channels. Now some would call that…?”

“Har, har,” I snorted. “So are you going to grant me access to the specs or not?”

“That depends. What do you intend on doing with it?”

“Learn everything about the ship,” I answered. “Figure out how she works, how she fights, track down her captain and ask them–”

“The captain’s dead,” said the agent. “Siege of Caerleon.”

“Wait,” I shook my head. “That means… That means it wasn’t Noble Interception who repelled–”

“Yes.” the agent replied flatly. “Yes.”

“And the ship?”

“Lost with all hands.”

I paused.

“Then can I just ask for the specs?”

The military allowed me access to a restricted wing of the library. Under close supervision, I was allowed to retrieve files on Nightwing for my final year report provided I allowed for heavy redactions. Despite all the optics, it hadn’t been the first time that someone had discovered the ship’s existence. The books I borrowed showed signs of recent use; some even showed signs of having been touched that year. I felt like I had stumbled onto a secret everyone at the school already knew.

What was all the subterfuge for then?

One thing was for certain, though. Nightwing was a beautiful ship. Like many of Caerleon’s prestigious vessels, she was built on Fortress World Hadrian. Her hull was fashioned out of rare graphene alloys. A hidden railgun tucked beneath the belly of the beast gave her an unexpected punch. Curved wings and an oversized engine room gave her speed and maneuverability over even Federation ships.

Then I learned about Bridge Mode.

One researcher called it, “Revolutionary. A seamless integration of conscious experience.” I didn’t understand the science myself, but the technology bridged the minds of captains and their subordinates together. The captain would have access to the thoughts and information of their navigations officer, the munitions expert, the chief engineer, and vice versa. The result was near instantaneous reaction speeds. A crew that could respond to information immediately could not lose.

But knowing about something and experiencing it were two different things.

When Diane initiated Bridge Mode, I thought I died. I didn't know what dying actually felt like, but I stopped breathing. I lost all sense of taste or smell, as if my body had evaporated.

Then I started hearing voices and I was certain I had moved on to the next life.

“Target acquired,” came a disembodied voice that bounced around me from different directions. I tried covering my ears, but oh right, no hands. Or ears for that matter…so where was the sound coming from? “Four thousand distinct missile signatures and counting. Radiation shielding on. The engine core’s overheating. Removing safety locks on the main gun. Shields sitting at twenty three percent. Tracking the first carrier. Intercept in–Three point one four one five nine two six–”

“You can actually breathe, you know,” came a clarion voice. “Stop thinking about it so hard. Also stop reciting pi. Everyone can hear you.”

“Diane?” I wondered.

“Don’t think of questions you already know the answer to,” Captain Lunova murmured. “Bridge Mode doesn’t have infinite neural bandwidth.”

This is Bridge Mode?”

“What the hell did I just tell you?”

My eyes began to adjust. I exhaled. Nothing on the bridge had physically changed. What I had experienced wasn’t death. Quite possibly I had undergone the complete opposite, rebirth. Bridge Mode had overloaded my senses with an unprecedented density of raw information. Everyone on the deck was now linked in a collective consciousness, sharing their thoughts simultaneously, and I was experiencing it for the first time.

I could only describe the sensations of the battle as if events had happened in linear fashion, one after the other, when in reality thoughts had become dialogue, conversations a tumultuous harmony of synchronized voices, the battle almost an afterthought.

“Caerleon ships exiting subspace into the killzone,” I recognized Emiko’s smooth voice. “Detonation in three. Two. One. Detonate. Priming short burst subspace entry.”

Where there was darkness, now there was light. My eyes winced. The galaxy lit up like fireworks.

Ah, of course. It was a classic trap. Trick Knight Captain Gawain’s battle groups to jump to subspace to avoid the Phalanx. Blow up a fuck ton of bombs at the precise location where you think they’ll reappear.

Several Caerleon ships were caught in the blast; they flickered and stalled, their hulls charred and blackened. As big as it looked, the blast wasn’t intended to destroy any of the ships, just slow them down. The remnants of the explosion washed over Nightwing as she swerved into the fray. The bridge shuddered.

“Shields holding at twenty percent,” this time it was… was his name Vladimir? “The power draw is too unstable. Any more and the engine core is going to start melting the plating.”

“I can vent–,” Stephen started.

“Belay that,” Diane barked. “We need coolant for the guns. Edge of Knight, you are cleared to retreat. That goes for you too, Lancer. Break cover and proceed to AWS.”

Edge of Knight blinked into subspace. On the holographic projector, another ship on the farside of the system dropped off the galactic map. One by one, the rest of the Sunless Fleet followed suit. We were alone.

“Emiko,” Diane said. “You have the gun.”

“We have the gun,” Emiko whispered. “Overloading the Lemmings-Hyder drives. Prepare for rapid fire subspace sequence everyone.”

Emiko’s intentions flowed into my mind, into everyone’s minds. I watched her fingers fly across the navigation console as she keyed in the coordinates for a maneuver I had never seen before. Just the sheer number of commands she issued boggled the mind.

“That maneuver’s–”

That maneuver’s impossible, was what I wanted to say, but I stopped myself. There was no point. I was about to be proven wrong anyway.

Gawain’s battle groups must have thirsted for some payback after the brief beating they had taken. His ships turned to face Nightwing and opened with a heavy volley of missiles.

Nightwing jumped to subspace to evade them.

Then she reappeared behind Gawain's fleet. The ship had decelerated out of subspace in a fraction of a second, an impossible maneuver had I not just seen it happen. The ship’s railgun flashed and a magnetized tungsten round tore through the engines of the nearest frigate.

Nightwing cruised forward and jumped to subspace again, this time reappearing below the Caerleon’s ships. The railgun fired twice and splintered the backsides of two destroyers. The ships with their propulsion systems still intact broke formation. I had seen this exact behavior before, the disarray, the chaos. Haphazard pulse lasers soared over Nightwing along with crooked metal and gas. Two carriers sheltered in place. Tiny crafts spilled out of their hangar bays.

“Autonomous fighters,” Emiko said. “Subspace capable.”

“It’s either the shield batteries or the guns. You can’t have both.” Vladimir’s warning echoed around the room.

“Run them over then,” Diane said.

Silence. Dead. Silence.

“What?” Diane’s laughter broke the quiet. “Twenty percent, remember?”

“Those are Warwick-class carriers,” I observed. “Unmanned. Federation ships. Their control rooms for the fighters should be on deck three. If you can hit them with the railgun, you won’t have to pretend this is gladiatorial combat.”

Another pause. I could feel Diane’s presence mingle with my own. An amused, ticklish sensation swirled around my mind. I felt…curious?

“I noticed you were only disabling the ships, not destroying them,” I said.

“Fair enough. Emiko, make it happen.”

“Venting coolant into the firing chamber,” Stephen said. “The main gun needs ten seconds after the next jump.”

“I’m dumping the excess from the pressure valves,” Vladimir corrected. “That should shave off five seconds.”

“Into the belly of the beast,” Emiko murmured.

Nightwing initiated subspace flight. In the millisecond before its reappearance in normal space, nausea burst inside me like a blister and surged through my body. Something hammered beneath my skull. Bridge Mode synthesized the thoughts, and feelings of the crew on the bridge into one. Was someone really anxious?

No. This felt different. The other emotions came from outside. This feeling came from within. Was I the one that was nervous?

Nightwing reemerged.

Beads of white plasma closed in around us. Had Gawain tracked our exit vector? Ah. Who cared, anymore? Nightwing was hit. Her wings melted. I envisioned a great library. Diane and I walked through it together. The engine core overloaded, which ignited sparks that mushroomed out of the center of the ship and expanded in all directions, a chain of violent detonations until the bridge was consumed by fire and all aboard Nightwing were killed.

Nika Zimt
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Steward McOy
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Kaisei
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