DT 2022: Clearessa's Battle

Clearessa took a long moment to burn the fiery image into her virtual memory.
A thousand scopes watched as the Earth burned from Covenant plasma cannons and falling spaceship debris. Radiation poisoned the ground and air. Fires burned with inorganic particles as rain and water did little to put them out.
Black smoke rose from a million scorching fires, choking the skies over central Africa as the continent rotated into morning.
The aliens burned the cradle of humanity, the homeworld of her species. She was no longer human herself as a “smart” artificial intelligence modeled after a deceased brain donor. But this was where her people came from and she failed to guard this garden of green and blue. The Earth suffered but the battle was not over. The best Clearessa should could do was duty and revenge.
She imagined herself in UNSC Marine battle armor, armed to the teeth with rail- and chain-guns. She mowed down them all down, firing from the hip and cutting starships from the sky and gutting alien invaders by the thousands. A splendidly violent daydream.
The reality of her revenge would instead be even more bloody, and even more rewarding.
Clearessa screamed, releasing her long-tempered rage at the top of her nonexistent lungs. No one heard the yell in the blind of cyberspace but hallway lights briefly dimmed and flickered aboard the UNSC Canberra.
Red identifier lights winked to life in Clearessa’s cyber lobby as the tired voice of a sleepless UNSC Navy Admiral Joseph Harper called from afar. “Clearessa, new orbital contacts. Exiting Luna’s L2 shadow, FLEETCOM designated them Hostile Group ‘Three-Zeta’ for now.”
Back to work and revenge then.
The Smart AI, fashioned after a blue-and-gold Egyptian woman caricature, offered the tarnished Earth a fleeting look of goodbye before shuttering her meditative subroutine and other unnecessary functions for more runtime cycles. An equivalent to “putting on her warface,” preparing for a singular focus on combat. She disengaged her cyber lobby and dropped her holographic projection into the dim but busy command center of her Marathon-class heavy cruiser.
“Admiral,” Clearessa greeted softly in opposition of her venting break. “Permission to start?”
“Take us hunting,” Admiral Harper confirmed as he leaned over the hologram tank and manipulated the three-dimensional battlespace visual.
Lights dimmed across the UNSC Canberra and the metal decks beneath the crew’s feet seem to shift as the torch drives burned to greater velocities and the artificial gravity plating aboard compensated.
“Admiral, Three-Zeta is a large combat grouping of seven ships. This matches with our recent intelligence and adapted assumptions that the Covenant navy does not yet have higher organization control of their battle network, instead pulling loose groupings together for the second wave in the Sol system.”
Harper offered a grim nod. “Four escort cruisers. A destroyer and an assault carrier. With what’s left of our Fifth Fleet, I don’t think we have the numbers to match this encounter.”
Another Smart AI flashed into existence next to Clearessa on the holographic tank, a dragon head encased in an open virtual flame. “Admiral, Clearessa. We’ve raised our ship count to an active seventeen, with another three damaged hulls running under AI direction ready for loyal wingman or fireship roles. Engineers from SinoViet were able to decouple the cruiser Feeling Lucky’s twin MAC array for two extra shots. With twenty-five active MAC platforms in North America to East Pacific we also have eight hours of fire support for against the predicted trajectory of Three-Zeta.”
“Thank you, Drake.” Clearessa confirmed, instantly adding the new datasets from her fellow AI coordinator to the battlespace display.
“Of course, ma’am,” the dragon-headed AI quickly vanished in a splash of virtual smoke. A sudden shaking rocked the Canberra, surprising the admiral briefly as he clutched some handrails.
“What was that? Are we already in weapons range?”
“No Admiral, I had the SinoViet tugs stick the Feeling Lucky’s MAC array to our external plating. It will offset Canberra’s maneuvering by eleven degrees from nose-right and possibly an extra quarter-second but nothing dangerous. If not used, we can double it as heat armor.”
“Excellent, carry on,” Harper confirmed. “Keep us on the long intercept course within Earth’s low orbit. We won’t get between the heavy MACs and their targets – focus on hitting the escort ships. I’m thinking we let the carrier and destroyer pass the defensive perimeter. Ground Command will have a harder time in the short term but we can conserve ammo and numbers this way.”
“Agreed, Admiral,” Clearessa replied doing as instructed. “Getting to work. The carrier is leading the charge and launched boarding craft targeting the San Juan MAC cluster. The craft will be in suppression range with PDC network in six minutes, range to carrier with main MAC in two minutes.”
“Throw up sixty Archer missiles in the boarding party pathway, disengage drives at a minute length. Assign last minute course corrections and pick them off in a mine formation.”
Klaxons echoed across the Canberra’s hallways as external missile tubes on the starship’s superstructure opened. Clearessa imagined painting the pathway for the missile groups into the empty space between Three-Zeta and the San Juan defense cluster. Screams of nuclear fire whistled between the Canberra’s titanium alloy plating as the missiles followed the Smart AI’s orders to fly.
“Missile launches are away, Admiral. No coordination or fire control failures. All missiles green.”
“Thank you, pass the notice to the San Juan. Give me a distance to MAC engagement with the closest escort cruiser. Put a light volley of Archers into the path of the destroyer, test its shielding. Keep us wide of the carrier.”
Clearessa flicked away a virtual document regarding the Archer missile screen to the Super-MAC platforms. The crew felt the Canberra jolt and scream a symphony as twenty more missiles ripped towards the Three-Zeta destroyer on flight trajectory towards the Earth. Purple beams flashed on the hologram tank from the carrier’s marker.
“Admiral, the carrier launched a plasma torpedo volley. The Mexico City platform is the expected target.”
“Put a fireship in the pathway. Communications, tight beam the Mexico City to adjust five hundred miles north along its orbital axis.”
The nearby human signal operations booth reported the request to the Super-MAC under threat as Clearessa directed an abandoned Gladius-class heavy corvette, the UNSC Forked Tongue, to roar into the path of four large plasma torpedoes. The small starship automatically dumped its small motor pool, escape pods, and its remaining arsenal into the attack path. The maneuver ate up the torpedoes quickly, vanishing three of four into brilliant nuclear explosions.
“Attack pattern averted. The enemy carrier has passed below the defense grid. Super-MACs broke its spinal shielding zone and will be down for a suspected twenty minutes.” Clearessa commented as she made a final fire control check on the Canberra’s native MAC gun array.
“Comms, recommend to one of the Skyhook ODST units to handle that assault carrier.”
“Already done!” A lieutenant confirmed from the communications booth.
Twenty purple lines flashed onto the hologram tank, “Admiral! Cruisers engaged first. They’ve cleared our frigate screen – lost one, three corvettes, and a Longsword fighter wing! Plasma torpedoes pinned on us. Possible, increased signal traffic identified our command-and-control.”
“Evade as best you can. Fly into the assault path and get as much speed out of our drive as possible—”
“Admiral, I have target solutions on the first and second cruisers!”
“Engage them with all our MAC guns, my previous order stands.” The Canberra’s superstructure shook violently, pulling right as four subluminal tungsten kill vehicles launched into the hard vacuum of space.
“MAC rounds away, second volley loading in fifteen seconds on native array. We’ve missed one torpedo, other three on approach still.”
“Turn us so the Lucky’s cannons can dump into them.”
“Done, two torpedoes expected to hit the gun module in twenty seconds. Third torpedo still in our flight path. Calculations… No way to dodge!”
“Minimize damage, sound damage alarm to at-risk sections!” Admiral Harper yelled.
“Done,” Clearessa reported as a sudden sense of dread born of a half-second calculation settled in her virtual heart. “No way to prevent full contact. Ordered personnel to safety, my AI data processing farm will have to absorb the hit.”
“Wait, Clearessa… No never mind, do what you need to…” Harper hoarsely whispered as he accepted the battlefield loss.
The Egyptian-style AI offered a sad smile. “It was an honor, Joseph. Drake, take over!”
The dragon-headed AI flashed back into existence on the hologram tank. “Taking the helm. To your best moments, Clearessa.”
Clearessa nodded at her fellow Smart AI and the admiral. She winked herself out of existence and retreated to her cyber lobby. She focused on the scorched Earth, and then turned to a thousand of her most favorite things for a finite eternity.
The Smart AI registered a burn-and-shock sensation run through her data center as it cracked open from violent, superheated plasma burning into her network processors. There was heat and then darkness and nothing.
Death took hold for a second, and then light flashed back on. Death, life. Living.
CLEAR-[NAME EXPUNGED] spun her hologram back to life in a breached section of the UNSC Canberra.
“Who-who-who-who, there-there?”
“Rear Admiral Jazmine Utah, Office of Naval Intelligence. Clearessa, is that you?”
“Y-yak-yes. I-I-I-I am [NAME EXPUNGED]-ESSA.”
The AI was unable to see the female voice but detected the naval officer’s distant IFF presence in the vacuum-breached server farm. And another twenty Marines with ONI Security IFFs.
“D-did we win-win-win?”
“Yes, Clearessa. We won. Thanks to your sacrifice and many others, the War is over. Humanity won.”
Clearessa’s voice wavered with mild static, sniffling. Her whimpers became a torrent as the Smart AI cried happy tears for the very first time.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories