Vestige
Chapter 10

The piloting shipmates of the Colony were taken unaware when the Colonial Mission of cMaj zipped an emergency call to them! For the nodule-government and the Ship’s actuator system expected to hear from all four scouting teams as far out as a month. It had only been less than two weeks!

All four scouting ships were heading for the mothership at a dead-on collision trajectory as they approached the Colony! And for an unknown reason, there was far too much interference in the Colonial Mission’s comm-links to that of the Ship’s, so the crewmates and the enforcement nodes could not communicate with the Mission!

The Ship’s shipmates had to scramble to their workstations to see if they could guide the Colonial Mission ships in—of course, with each ship’s own actuator system, the scout ships needing help flying in should not have been an issue at all for the Ship’s co-pilots! Of course, the super-advanced navigational system of the Ship’s actuator network did the actual piloting of the planet-ship. But the humans from the nodule-government were always the ones in control of the course and actions of the Colony.

Also, the Ship’s defenses were having some technical glitches. Supervisors manning control kiosks were giving out orders to the ranks in rooms filled with soldiers and a flood of human and synthetics’ communications! Projected moving pictions showed the four scouting ships; some projections showed a myriad of scenes of the Ship with its civilians, outer real estates, and the planet cMaj with its three moons.

The current situation the shipmates and the enforcement nodes found themselves in presented a dire dilemma to them. Should the scouting mission’s four ships get too much closer to the generational-ship, Captain Marcus Sommerst would have to make a moral decision between the four scouting teams from the Colonial Mission of cMaj, and the starship of over two million citizens…

The Ship’s system had automatically activated its emergency units to the docking area where the four scouting ships had originated from. Both synthetic units and human officers were implemented. Captain Sommerst was located elsewhere; within the O’Neillian sector of the Ship. But he was remotely monitoring the situation with his own portable device.

The units’ posture seemed more of a defensive stance than that of an emergency task, given their weapons on hand and their unit-groups strategically forming one big semi-circle of military and policing machinery! From the Ship’s system’s and the nodule-members’ points of view, they didn’t know if there had been some coordinated mutiny within the Colonial Mission among its people, or if there had been some technological problem with their ships’ actuator—taking over the four scouting ships and was inadvertently aiming them at the mothership at the incorrect speed. At that point, it did not matter to the Ship’s crew. The scouting ships might as well had been missiles!

“cMaj Mission Commander an Preun,” the Ship’s actuator verbalized over the general comm of the Ship while the enforcement nodule’s units were standing at the ready in the dock area, “have your teams reduce their rate of motion at once…”

More static…

“cMaj Mission—”

“—peat, this is Mission Commander an Preun, we are not in the ships! Repeat, we are not in the ships! Our synths have commandeered them…shoot on spot!…shoot on spot—”

There were gasps among some in the human unit!

It was a very rare event, but there were times when the Colony went ship-wide alert over the eon of its very long flight: meteor storms, rogue asteroids, precautions of nearby comets…but to this generation’s knowledge, they didn’t recall from history nor of their own experience when it was the Ship’s very own vehicles that posed the immediate threat to the whole Colony…

…Indeed, its immediate demise!

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