The first act — Triva
“Logbook start my recording“.
The small glass slab in my hand started vibrating and made a funny noise.
“Bliiip, starting Logbook recording, ERROR, ERROR, authentication missing, …, identify yourself, please“.
I let out a sigh of anger, again the voice recognition was not working properly and I had to verify myself from scratch, how I hated this glass slab… I mean it was handy sometimes, but most of the time I just wanted to throw this AI against the wall.
“Here is Commander Clark Thomson of the Human Exploration Force, currently stationed on the command deck of the Battle Cruiser…“, I stopped and let my eyes fly over the commando deck… “stationed on the Battle Cruiser Hot Banana“.
Some of my crew turned around and started laughing. Oh, how I hated this name, space force command back home wanted to appeal more to the young population now as we needed more recruits than ever and their glorious idea was to make a “find the dumbest name possible“ competition for our new heavy battle cruisers that came out of the shipyard at Saturn.
“Identity verified, do you want me to read the mission goals?“, why was my smart slab always resetting! “No, I already know it god damn I’m the mission’s com…“, “Reading mission objectives now“, “No listen I already…“, “Mission Code AT3416“, “Oh for god sake, this thing is joking around again…“, “The Mission objective is the Triva system, not much is known about this system, it is located between Human and Roboids territory. There was never an exploration mission to the system. The system has a very boring G-type main-sequence star, very similar to our sun, it has 5 companion planets, 2 uninteresting gas giants, two rocky planets outside the goldy lock zone, and one rocky planet inside it, which is called Triva-C. We have not yet discovered any interesting signs of intelligent life in the star system, no toxins, complex molecules, or other elements that point to organic life. The only interesting thing about this solar system is a low-frequency radio burst that was picked up by our nearest research station about 30 light-years ago. It seems to follow some form of logic, some mathematical rhythm and…“.
“STOP“
Yes, this was the faithful day, about 8 months ago when one of our research stations picked up this unusual low-frequency radio burst from one of the Trivan planets. Space command decided to send an exploration mission, test out our new heavy battle cruisers at the same time. They thought that something interesting would wait for us at Triva and in secret, they hoped that the Robiods would also pick up the message and would join us there. To drink tea and eat some cookies. Yeah we all know that this is bullshit, they hoped us to meet our feared Robot rivals in Triva and kick their ass.
Our battle group was stationed one jump away from the Triva system. We were currently finishing the last maintenance cycle before shit got hot. Checking out ship hulls, reactors, jump drives, and all other nitty-gritty details of modern battleships. A little oil change before the fun started. Just that we had to handle a radioactive and exotic matter and we that we had not one little car parked in space but we had 10 beefy battle cruisers. Armed to the teeth, with the best humanities researchers and engineers had to offer.
None of our long-range scout drones had returned to their designated pick-up location, this could only be a hell of a good sign. For sure the Roboids already waited for us at Triva.
But we had a mission and this mission was the highest objective. I turned around in my chair and looked at the ship’s specialist. “Bob ship status please?“.
“Yes sir, coils are calibrated, reactors are at 80%, shields are at maximum, there appear to be no power spikes, we are locked and loaded, the fleet is ready to engage, jump coordinates are already programmed into nav“.
“Then my friends“, I sat up in the chair to look more like a real commander “let’s grill some robot heads, active blue alarm, and engage the preprogrammed jump points.“
Blue light flooded the deck and the rest of the interiors of the ship, a loud voice shouted “Blue alarm, prepare for the jump into the Triva star system, ready your battle stations NOW…“
Shortly after we jumped… into hell…
