Serengeti Read Online Free PDF Page A

get a different view on the matter. They’d tell you the Dreadnoughts were thugs. Brutish, unthinking, heavily armed hooligans serving the Bastion without question.
    The Bastion , not the fleet. Not the Meridian Alliance. Certainly not humanity. That too was key.
    Brutus and his brethren wanted soldiers that fell in line, and Serengeti and her sisters asked just a few too many questions. Challenged their leadership a bit too much. So when it came time to design the Dreadnoughts—eleventh generation AI, more advanced, in theory, than the Valkyries—the Bastions subtly influenced the programming of their crystal-matrix AI brains. Encouraged the engineers to tinker a bit. Think outside the box.
    Good idea, poor execution. The engineers tinkered with the Dreadnoughts’ design just a little too much, in Serengeti’s opinion. The Dreadnoughts were larger than the Valkyries, and more powerful, but they lost something along the way. Something important . A sense of community, of being that was essential to an AI’s mind.
    Brutus loves them, Serengeti thought, watching Homunculus and Gorgon— the last two Dreadnoughts—slide into position. He loves the Dreadnoughts for their loyalty, their durability, their unflinching devotion. But the Dreadnoughts are cold, hard, almost indifferent to the other ships. They don’t seem to care about anything, even their own crews. To the Dreadnoughts, everyone but Brutus is expendable. The Bastion and the mission—that’s all that matters to them.
    The Dreadnoughts tightened up their formation, circling Brutus close about. And as they did, the rest of the armada began to appear—dozens upon dozens of hyperspace breaches forming and then dissipating in bright flares of silver-white brilliance, leaving trails of radiation behind.
    No Dreadnoughts here, nor Valkyries either. The bulk of the fleet were grey-skinned Titans with bodies like four-pointed spearheads, and disc-shaped Auroras, rounded bridge pods bulging bulbously at their middle, engines arranged in double rows at their hind ends. They were smaller ships—half the size of the Dreadnoughts that preceded them, tiny compared to Brutus at their center, far less powerful than any of them, including Serengeti and her sisters—but they formed the heart of the armada. The Auroras were sixth generation AI, the Titans eighth, both mind sets known for being quirky, cheeky, often argumentative. Not their fault, really—that was part of their programming, the result of building more and more human characteristics into an AI mind. They’d dialed it back a bit when they designed the Valkyries, and even more so with the Dreadnoughts. And with the Bastions like Brutus they dialed it back even more. Too far back, some would say, though that was a topic of endless debate.
    Serengeti watched the smaller vessels appear one-by one, drinking in ships’ names, sifting through the data their beacons squawked out. But her eyes kept returning to the Bastion. To the hulking ship at the armada’s center.
    Brutus looked nothing like Serengeti, nor the Dreadnoughts either . Nothing like any of the ships it commanded. The Valkyries were smooth and sleek, warships built to kick ass and look pretty while doing it. The Dreadnoughts…well, even they had a certain flare about them, ominous as they might be. But Brutus … Brutus was massive. Monstrous. More fortress than warship, a blocky and brutal-looking, bristling with armaments, comms towers, and sensor arrays that stuck out at every angle.
    If Frankenstein ever designed a warship, its name would be Brutus.
    “God that thing’s ugly.” Kusikov grimaced, studying the Bastion outside. “Ya know, they say the engineers were drunk when they came up with the Bastion design.”
    “Son of a bitch,” Henricksen swore, punching the panel in front of him.
    Kusikov jumped, instantly looked repentant. “Sorry, sir.”
    “Not you, Kusikov. Him. That AI piece-a shit out there.” Henricksen mashed at a comms