by Terry Mixon
Speaking of that, when her father found out what she’d done, he’d be utterly furious.
Still, there was absolutely nothing any of them could do to stop Kelsey when she got pigheaded. All they could do was hope that she got back in one piece.
“Did Julia know?” Talbot asked slowly.
“No,” Jared said. “She was incandescent when she found out. Until I had a chance to talk with you, I sent her down to grab something to eat, because I wasn’t sure how you would take it. I’ve got enough problems in my relationship with her, and I didn’t want to add another one until we’d talked.”
Talbot sighed. “I’m not going to tear a strip off of her. There’s actually some irony to the fact that Kelsey had to fool herself while tricking us. Do we have any idea how the operation is going?”
“The stealthed probes indicate that the pinnaces have docked to the station. It looks like the groups are going in separately. They weren’t detected on the way in.
“Based on the general plan, I’d expect both of those groups to make their way toward the laboratories where the master AI is. Only one group has the override, so the other one may be a potential distraction or just backup to blow the AI up if the first group can’t get to it.
“I really wish we knew what was waiting for us inside there. We might be on the verge of defeating the AIs. Or we might be just about to have our asses thoroughly and utterly kicked.
“We also don’t know how close the Clans are to breaching the system, although they’ve been pouring ships into the system adjacent to Twilight River. If they’re going to break through, we should have evidence of that before much longer.”
Talbot rubbed his eyes. “And what do we do if they get into the system before Kelsey and the rest get off that station?”
“I doubt a distraction would do us much good, but we’ll look at that option if we have to. Honestly, with the kind of luck we’ve had thus far, I expect that to happen.”
Before Talbot could say anything, the overhead coms chimed, and the man spoke. “Admiral to the bridge. We’re detecting weapons fire at the flip point leading to the system the Clans are attacking.”
Elise took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she tried not to panic. This wasn’t necessarily some kind of trap. She reached out and tried to touch the dome. Her hand passed right through as if there were nothing there, and she let out a sigh of relief.
At least until the dome clouded up and began showing what looked like images of this very room, only it wasn’t empty. Beings similar to the mechanical crab that they’d captured seemed to be floating in the room.
No, not floating. They were walking, only they didn’t seem completely solid. Or perhaps it was the fact that she was seeing a projection. She wasn’t quite sure.
Only one way to find out. She leaned forward and stuck her head through the dome. The images that she was seeing vanished. The room was exactly as it had been before.
She pulled her head back inside and could once again see the beings. The machines in the room were showing her what might very well have been recorded in this same room uncountable millennia ago.
One of the crabs turned and came up the ramp toward the top of the dome, and she was worried that it would somehow be real and attack her. Only it stopped just short of the dome itself.
A strange noise filled the air. She could see the chitinous mouthparts of the being rubbing together to make the noises. Had the long-dead alien said something for the recording, or were the machines around her speaking?
It hardly mattered who was speaking. What was it saying? Why did it think that she could understand anything it said? Surely it had to realize that it wasn’t talking to one of its own kind.
And then the control interface that she’d been afflicted with popped into existence. She hadn’t made the gesture to summon it. It had just appeared. Or perhaps it was responding to the recording that she was seeing.
Without her doing anything, the spiraling light curves turned, and several of the runes glowed blue. Then they moved out of the locations that they’d occupied inside what she’d come to think of as an alien menu and hovered alone in the air in front of her.
They rearranged themselves and seemingly merged into a single complex rune that took on elements of all those that had preceded it. The new rune glowed blue and then brightened into an almost gold before it seemed to shoot straight into her face.
Elise flinched, but it wasn’t really there. It was a visual representation of some type of alien script, not something that could actually hurt her.
The alien had frozen. It wasn’t slowly bobbing in place anymore. It looked as if whatever had been playing for her had paused.
The control interface itself was still there, but it seemed to be back within her control. She reached up and turned it in her vision, and it responded to her just like it had before. Very strange.
Elise heard the sound of someone crawling in the tunnel. Hadn’t the door closed behind her? She thought it had, only now it was open.
A few moments later, someone in marine armor came into the room. They stood as soon as they could and swept the room with a rifle. Once they finished looking, they made a gesture, and Carl came in, followed by another marine.
Without waiting for the others to say anything, Carl jogged up the ramp and stopped outside the blue dome. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “I can come out, I think. At least my hand and head will go through it.”
“What’s happening?”
“I think I’ve been watching a recording.”
“Step out of the dome, and let’s make sure that you can get out.”
Elise nodded and stepped through the dome. It was completely immaterial, and she passed through it without issue. As soon as she did, it disappeared.
“That was very strange, but I’ve got some recordings for you to review later,” she said. “But for right now, I just want to get out of here. Is everybody else safe?”
“I got them all up into orbit before I came back for you. The mission to Twilight River is underway, and the fleet has already flipped.”
She frowned. “How can that be? I was only down here a little bit.”
Now it was time for Carl to frown. “You’ve been missing for over four hours.”
That made her blink. “That’s not accurate. It was only half an hour, tops.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ll figure it out. Come on.”
It only took them about fifteen minutes to crawl back out. Going up the spiral had been much more difficult on the knees than going down. Thankfully, once they reached the larger tunnel, they found a squad of marines waiting for them. The door opened easily enough, and there was a pinnace waiting on the other side for them, hovering beside the cliff on its grav drives.
The marines insisted on safety lines before making their way out to the pinnace, but that only delayed them boarding for a minute. Once they were aboard and the rear hatch closed, Elise sank into one of the seats and strapped in.
“Thank God that’s over. I only wanted to come down for a visit, and this turned into an odyssey.”
The trip up to orbit didn’t take that long, since she was talking with Carl and showing him vids of everything that she’d seen, including the aliens. The alien chittering certainly captured his attention as well.
“It’s a damn shame that we only have this small sample to work from,” he said sadly. “No way we’ll ever decode what it was saying, and I suspect we won’t be back this way anytime soon. It’s far too difficult to get here, and we need to get back to the New Terran Empire.
“Oh, and you’ll need to go home as well. Your father definitely won’t want you wandering off after this little side trip.”
Elise laughed. “He’ll lock me in the dungeons for sure.”
The pinnace docked with Caduceus, and she happily made her way inside. Lily was waiting and wanted to give her a closer look, but Elise insisted that she needed a shower
first. It felt like she hadn’t bathed in days.
The commanding officer of the medical ship made his cabin available for her, and she was happy to get inside, strip off her clothes, and get into the shower. The hot water felt wonderful.
Her implants signaled an incoming emergency transmission, and she stiffened with alarm as she accepted it. It was from Carl.
The alien robot just came back to life, and it broke free of the container we were holding it in. It’s headed in your direction. I can’t imagine how, but it seems to know where you are.
I’m locked in the captain’s quarters, so I should be okay. Right?
At that moment, she heard the hatch to the quarters slide open. So much for locks.
She was naked in the shower and had no weapons, not that she knew how to fight anyway. What was she going to do?
The door to the bathroom opened, and the crab-like robot had to tilt itself almost sideways to come into the room. It stopped in the cramped open area, and she was afraid it was going to attack, but it didn’t do anything further.
Elise was still in shock when a brace of marines and Carl jammed themselves into the compartment. Belatedly, she remembered that she wasn’t Kelsey and that she should cover her nakedness.
Without a word, Carl grabbed a towel and threw it to her.
“What the hell?” she asked as she wrapped the towel around her wet body. “How did it know where I was? What does it want?”
“All good questions,” Carl admitted. “We’ll go back out into the corridor while you get dressed. I’ll find a lab somewhere that we can use and see if we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
22
Jared returned to the bridge with Talbot on his heels to find Julia already there. He sat down and brought up the scanner feed while taking in the primary monitor. They had stealthed probes watching the regular flip points in the system, so they were getting data in real time.
The probes had rules to use FTL if this situation occurred. With the rest of the chaos about to erupt, he’d known that they’d need data as soon as they could get it. The odds of the master AI spotting the FTL signals—much less figuring out what they were—were low, and he needed the data now.
The defenses around the master AI wouldn’t be aware of the intrusion just yet. When they finally got word of the breach, all hell was going to break loose.
It looked like the defenders were giving as good as they got, but the Clans were pushing their way through. They must’ve been pouring ships into that first system. They’d been preparing for this fight for a long time, and it looked as if they had enough force to make it stick.
That put a deadline on their mission. Kelsey and the rest only had hours to win. The second regular flip point leading into the system—the one that hadn’t been breached yet—would still be able to get the stand-down orders out if they subdued the master AI, but the clock was ticking.
“We need to move into position to pick our people up as quickly as we can,” he ordered. “Take us to the rendezvous point. Keep our speed down, and stay out of the direct path between the stations and the flip points.”
It was going to take them a couple of hours to get into position to recover the pinnaces. If everything went according to plan, the defensive forces around the AI would stand down and let them flee without chasing them, but things rarely went according to plan.
Jared spared little attention for the eyes that Julia and Talbot were making toward one another. Julia was worried about what Talbot was thinking, and Talbot was annoyed that Julia had helped Kelsey slip away.
It was time to distract them.
“What do we do if their mission isn’t a success?” Jared asked. “Let’s say they try to penetrate the master AI’s defenses but can’t break the shell. What happens?”
“That’s the worst-case scenario,” Talbot said grimly. “If they can reach the fusion plant, they can overload it and destroy the entire station. It’s an open question if the explosives they have on hand would be enough to take out the master AI unless they get close, though.
“If that happens, they’re not going to get away. The ships around that station would be on the lookout for them, and they’d blow them up as they tried to boost out. That turns this raid into a suicide mission.
“But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a chance. With the fleet on the other side of the far flip point behind us, we can wait until the Clan forces engage the defenders and pin the master AI between the Clans and ourselves.
“Extracting our forces afterward would be a challenge, but the master AI would be dead. No matter how this plays out, I don’t see how that electronic bastard survives the next few hours.”
Julia shook her head. “Couldn’t Kelsey and the rest wait for us to attack and clear a path for their retreat? If they can get to a survivable section of the station, then we’ll have a chance to rescue at least some of the survivors. You can put marines into that station after they kill the master AI, right?”
Jared nodded. “We’ve got the forces to do that, but it’s going to be tricky. I have no idea how many ships the Clans will have left when they’re done, but you can bet that they’re going to attack us. Everything I’ve heard about them tells me that they’ll just assume that we’re under the thrall of the AIs.
“I understand that this is harsh, but the only chance we have to make it through this is for Kelsey to succeed. If she doesn’t, the chances of getting her and the rest of them off that station on their own are minuscule.
“And she has to get back with the override. You’re going to need that in your universe. It would shortcut so much of the work of freeing your people that even if the station is partially destroyed, we’re going to have to make an attempt to recover them and it.”
“You’d do that for me, even with the way I feel about you?” she asked in a shocked tone. “After the way that everyone in my universe feels about you?”
Jared smiled tightly. “Doing what’s right flows from who I am, not how others perceive me. If it means thousands of our people die to save billions of lives—even in another universe—then the price is worth it. The value of human life isn’t determined by which reality they live in.
“That doesn’t mean pulling off a rescue will be easy. No matter how it played out, getting out of this system would be damned hard, so we’d best pray that Kelsey makes this mission an unrivaled success. If we ever needed luck in this fight, we need it today.”
Julia nodded. “If we have to go into that station, I have to go. I’m sorry, Talbot. I had no idea why she was tricking me, but I have to make it up to you. I have to do my best to see that Kelsey gets out of this alive and uninjured.”
“I can’t hold what my wife did against you,” Talbot said. “The two of you are basically the same person, and you know damned well that you’d have done the same thing in her place. But you’re not her, and I can’t blame you. Kelsey is Kelsey.
“She’s going to make it out. I refuse to consider anything else. All we have to do is be in position to pull her ass out of the fire when everything goes to crap.”
“I’ll start bringing the fleet into the system, and we’ll set up for an attack run on the station,” Jared said. “Best case, we won’t need to use them. Worst case, we go in hard. We’ll just hope that isn’t necessary.”
He hoped that Kelsey didn’t run into unexpected complications. If things went badly, they were all in for a world of hurt, and uncounted billions would die. Never in the course of this fight had anything been more important than the events taking place on that station right now.
It was all in Kelsey’s hands now.
Carl watched the alien robot follow Elise into his makeshift lab with a scowl. While he wanted to examine the creation, he had other fish to fry at the moment. Though he supposed having it in the room wasn’t going to make a difference.
Unless, of course, it took offense at something he did with Elise.
Well, it wasn’t as if he had a choi
ce in the matter now, was it? If push came to shove, he could always have her turn it back off. Not that that had stopped it from turning itself back on when it had decided to.
The first thing that he needed to discover was if she could still see the control interface. They hadn’t tried to bring it up since they’d reached orbit and moved outside the influence of the alien technology, so that had to be his first objective.
And to do that, he had to separate her from the machine.
“Can you see if you can get it to stay here while we step into the adjoining compartment and perform a very brief test?” he asked. “Its presence is going to cause problems with me figuring out what’s going on. It doesn’t have to be for long, but I definitely need it in a different room.”
She looked at the alien crab uncertainly. “I’m not certain that I can make it do anything. Frankly, the thing frightens me. It looks a little bit too much like the aliens that I saw in that recording. It’s like they created a mechanical equivalent of themselves to be their servants, which seems weird.”
“I’ve read fiction where humans have done the same,” Carl observed. “They build androids that could almost pass for human—or in some cases do—and that’s a staple of that genre. As far as why the aliens would do that, who knows? Aliens are going to alien.”
Elise turned toward the robot and pointed to the corner. “Go over there and stay.”
The machine ignored her.
Sadly, that was about what he’d expected. “It opened the hatch by overriding the locks. If you go into the next compartment and slam the hatch in its face, it may take a little bit of time for it to open it back up. That should be long enough to see if you can access the interface.
“If you can, that means that something inside of you is causing it. If you can’t, that means your ability to do these things is somehow related to your relationship with the alien technology itself and is exterior to your person.”
