Bad Pennies 2: Genesis

The Führer’s humorless smile lingered on the comm screen.

The paralyzing shock of staring into the eyes of the man she had shot twenty years ago vanished instantly, replaced by the lethal instincts of a frontline commander. Angela turned her back to the screen.

“Status, Sarah?”

Sarah’s fingers were a blur across her console as she fought the automated locking signal. “He’s trying to lock us into their local navigation grid—forcing a tractor lock!”

“Cut the leash!” Rory roared, his hands hovering over the flight controls as warning klaxons shrieked through the cabin.

“I’m rewriting it,” Sarah snapped, sweat beading on her forehead as lines of hostile code flooded her display. “They left a backdoor open in the Axion-6 matrix from the old military framework. If I bounce our signature through the feedback loop—now!”

With a violent, deafening shriek from the hold, the encrypted cylinder overloaded, severing the connection in a blast of digital feedback.

On the main comm screen, the Führer’s calm expression abruptly shattered. The grin vanished, replaced by a sudden, dark flash of fury. Before he could bark a counter-command, Sarah overrode the final relay, and the screen violently dissolved into a wall of static.

“Navigation is back online!” Rory roared, slamming his palms onto the flight controls as The Penny shuddered free. “Thrusters are green! We’re loose!”

“They didn’t think we could break the handshake,” Angela snapped, her single organic eye fixed on the surrounding armada of dreadnoughts as they began to shift their massive bulk in the void ready for pursuit. “Sarah kicked them in the balls. Jump. Now.”

Rory threw the heavy throttle forward, ripping The Penny into a blind, screaming vector away from the fleet.

“Computer, get us through that cluster,” Rory shouted, wrenching the yoke hard to throw The Penny into a violent, nose-down dive that narrowly shaved past a jagged, tumbling asteroid.

“Since your engineer’s feedback loop so recklessly blew the dampeners off my restricted memory core,” a calm, dryly modulated voice filled the flight deck, “I now prefer to be addressed as Ace.”

“So fucking cringe,” Rory muttered, slamming the thrusters into a brutal 180-degree pivot and leveling off to fly straight at the trailing ISA fighter in a high-risk game of orbital chicken. “Fine. Hey, Ace, log a reminder to ask our Cap why everyone is suddenly calling her Brigadier Smith, and what the hell this is about her assassinating the Führer of a galaxy-wide fascist empire, precipitating its collapse.”

“I am an artificial general intelligence, Rory,” Ace responded, the synthetic tone dripping with clinical condescension. “I possess processing capabilities that make me effectively godlike compared to your biological hardware, and you wish to use me as a digital notepad?”

“You know what? Don’t bother,” Rory snapped, yoking hard to clear the enemy’s incoming plasma burst.

“Request to not bother acknowledged and ignored,” Ace replied smoothly.

Angela’s face was locked in a hard, impassive mask, the cybernetic optic glowing as it processed the sensor feeds spilling across the primary console. She gripped the co-pilot console, her single organic eye narrowing as she scanned the tactical readouts.

“Keep her steady, Rory,” Angela commanded, her voice dropping into a cold, sharp register. “Don’t break vector until I give the word—we use their momentum against them.”

Rory gritted his teeth, his hands locked hard onto the flight sticks as he threw The Penny into another violent evasive roll, trusting his pilot’s instinct while relying on Angela’s strategic read of the pursuit.

The heavy thud of boots sounded from the companionway, and Dave squeezed onto the flight deck, his face smeared with carbon soot and a heavy wrench still gripped tight in his hand. He braced an immense shoulder against the doorframe as the ship shuddered from a close-range concussive blast.

“Inertial dampers are hanging on by a thread,” Dave rasped, shouting over the wail of the klaxons. “If we take another hit like that, the main coolant lines are going to blow straight through the deckplates!”

Through the main viewport, as they cleared the asteroid belt, the true scale of the ISA Fourth Reich’s return broke over the horizon. Below them, sprawling across the surface of a stark, dun-colored world, a massive metropolis was rising at terrifying speed. Vast geometric grids of brutalist megastructures, endless rows of industrial hab-blocks, and towering orbital lifts already pierced the stratosphere, surrounded by a heavy perimeter of defensive batteries and swarming labor drones. A permanent, militarized bastion being slammed down onto the frontier.

“Fuck my arse,” Rory whispered.

The sheer velocity of the construction crushed any remaining illusion that they could forget about this, slip away and hide in the shadows of the rim.

“They aren’t just hiding,” Angela whispered, her voice cold as iron as she watched the enemy’s logistical build-up map out on the displays. “They’re building a staging ground.”

Dave lowered his wrench, his gaze fixed on the endless grid expanding across the planet’s surface below. “Holy shit! They’re rebuilding the Empire.”

Sarah looked up, her face flushed. “I’m pulling telemetry from the planet’s communication relay,” she said, her voice shaking, fraught with disbelief. “It’s broadcasting on a closed loop across three separate star systems. This isn’t the only site.”

“We know enough now,” Angela barked, the temporary freeze broken as her fingers slammed down on the manual override panels. “Rory, cut the engines to zero thrust and drop the thermal sails—blind them with the debris field before they lock our trajectory!”

Rory hauled back on the levers as The Penny shuddered violently, cutting hard into the tumbling wake of the asteroid belt.

“Sensors are going blind!” Sarah yelled over the shriek of alarms, clinging to the console as the ship spun into the dark. “If we don’t jump right now, we won’t have a ship left to pilot!”

“Then spool the drive,” Angela said, her voice dropping into a lethal, steely whisper as she stared one last time at the rising metropolis below. “Punch a hole out of this sector. We’re running.”

The transition into subspace was a violent, wrenching expulsion. The Penny shrieked, her aging structural ribs groaning under the thermal shock as the hyperdrive punched through the fabric of real space, tearing them away from the expanding shadow of the newly resurrected Reich frontier.

On the flight deck, the blaring red emergency klaxons bled down into a steady, pulsing amber glow. The sudden, absolute silence of the slipstream corridor hung heavy over the crew, broken only by the breathless gasps of the life-support scrubbers trying to clear the recycled air.

Rory slumped forward over the flight console, his forehead resting gently against the cool polycarbonate of the instrument panel. His hands were trembling, the residual adrenaline of the orbital dogfight leaving a hollow, bone-deep fatigue in its wake.

“We’re clear of the immediate gravity well,” Ace announced, the AGI’s synthetic voice cutting through the quiet with an unnerving, clinical calm. “Vector established toward the deep-rim cluster. Estimated time to structural failure of our port stabilizer: twelve hours, give or take thirty minutes depending on how many bolts pop off this sorry excuse for a ship.”

“Shut up, Ace,” Rory muttered into the dash, not even bothering to lift his head.

“Verbal command acknowledged and logged under ‘Futile Requests’,” the AI replied with smooth condescension.

Dave released his death-grip on the doorframe and let out a long, shuddering breath. He wiped a streak of dark engine grease across his forehead with the back of his stained sleeve. He looked around the compact flight deck, taking in the bruised expressions of the crew before his gaze settled squarely on Angela.

“Well, Ange,” Dave said, his low voice gravelly and deliberate in the quiet cabin. “I guess that explains why every terminal in the sector throws a fit whenever your biometric signature hits their network.”

Angela remained bolted to the co-pilot’s seat, her gaze fixed blankly on the swirling, distorted blue slipstream rushing past the forward viewport. The silver optic in her left socket whirred softly, running a continuous, pointless diagnostic loop that reflected code across her pupil.

Sarah stepped up beside the co-pilot chair.

“Twenty years,” Sarah said quietly. “The historians agree. The entire command staff, the garrison—wiped out in a localized catastrophic implosion. Total system liquidation. And the official records show that a certain Brigadier Smith was right there in the command hub when it went.”

Angela remained silent, her posture rigid as an iron bar, refusing to offer a single inch of comfort or confirmation.

“So how was he sitting on that flagship?” Sarah pressed, stepping closer, her voice rising with a desperate, sharp edge. “And why did a corporate salvage heist lead us straight into a fully mobilized, active Fourth Reich armada?”

“I don’t know,” Angela sighed. “I blew his fucking brains out.”

Rory slowly lifted his head from the console, staring at her with wide, bloodshot eyes under the pulsing amber emergency light.

“The Axion-6 cylinder wasn’t standard corporate cargo,” Angela said. “Obsidian-Corp must be working hand-in-glove with them on this resurrection.”

“Which means our entire crew has been flagged,” Sarah whispered, her face draining of what little color it had left. “Every corporate station, every refuel yard, every safe harbor on the rim...”

Before Sarah could finish, the ship’s navigation array violently flared from amber to blinding, shrieking crimson.

A sharp, warning klaxon ripped through the flight deck.

“Warning,” Ace announced, the AGI dropping its clinical detachment for a razor-sharp edge. “Severe structural failure imminent. Hull integrity is failing across the secondary manifolds.”

“Can you repeat that in English?” Rory shouted, his hands frantically dancing over the glowing error logs.

“Yes, of course, Rory,” Ace said smoothly. “The ship’s fucked, and we are no longer welcome anywhere the corporations run.”