by M. D. Cooper
West: A former chief in the ISF, West died in the Kapteyn’s Star System, but was brought back via a mind backup in crystal storage. West is genderfluid and periodically switches between male and female.
Aboard the Overwatch in the Farsis System
Rika: Ambassador for the Alliance of Sapiens, Rika has a storied past. She served in the Genevian military, her body mechanized against her will, and later became the leader of a mercenary company named Rika’s Marauders. With that command, she launched a campaign to free her people from Nietzschea, eventually succeeding and becoming the Genevian Queen.
Chase: Former general in the Genevian military, Chase has joined Rika on her mission to aid in the spread of the AoS in an attempt to bring lasting peace to the galaxy.
Niki: One of the oldest non-ascended AIs left, Niki is paired with Rika and is her closest confidant.
Piper: The remains of a multimodal AI that Rika rescued from the Nietzscheans, Piper is now the Overwatch’s ship AI.
Kelly: One of Rika’s oldest friends, Kelly served in the Marauders and then in the Queen’s Guard. When Rika left Genevia, Kelly came with her, both as a friend and a protector. Kelly has also married Keli in the intervening years.
Keli: Serving as a mech in the Marauders, Keli became one of Rika’s personal guards. She is married to Kelly, and came with her when Rika became an AoS ambassador.
Shoshin: Having served in the same fireteam as Keli and Kelly for nearly his entire Marauders career, Shoshin joined the two women when they followed Rika, citing Rika’s propensity for fun and interesting situations as his rationale.
Aboard the Voyager in the Galactic Core
Katrina: Formerly a Noctus spy in the Sirian System, Katrina has been everything from a governor to a pirate and a warlord. She currently works for the AoS, hunting for clues as to the core AIs’ whereabouts.
Troy: Thought dead after he saved his colony ship from a Sirian attack, Troy was left behind when the colonists moved on. Katrina later found him on Victoria’s moon, and he aided her in finding the Voyager and leaving the Kapteyn’s Star System.
Carl: Katrina’s first mate and one of the ship’s original crew. He led the engineering team that retrofitted the Voyager for FTL, and joined the crew shortly afterward.
Kirb: An engineer who helped with the Voyager’s retrofit, Kirb has served aboard ever since.
Camille: Like Carl and Kirb, Camille came aboard the ship to aid in the retrofit. She has since taken the role of chief engineer aboard the Voyager.
Malorie: Wife of a warlord in the Midditerra System, Malorie was responsible for breaking Katrina and learning her secrets. In the end, the tables were turned, and she formed an uneasy alliance with Katrina. Over the following centuries, they have become close friends.
PROLOGUE
A VIEW TO FORGET
STELLAR DATE: 06.29.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Finaeus’s Secret Facility
REGION: Jelina System, 3KPC Arm, Milky Way Galaxy
Tangel stepped through the Starkiller’s hatch to see Finaeus waiting for her, a half-smile twisting his lips to one side as he waited for her to approach.
Though it had only been two weeks since she’d last laid eyes on the ancient engineer, the man appeared to have shed decades. The change was either the result of a rejuv treatment, or a dalliance with his wife after their reunion in the Sol System at the end of the war.
“How are things out here?” she asked by way of greeting as she walked toward him, her footsteps echoing in the cavernous docking bay. “Been keeping busy?”
“More or less,” Finaeus replied, pushing her proffered hand away before spreading his arms wide for an embrace. “Just because you’re not human anymore doesn’t mean you get away without hugs.”
“I am human,” Tangel protested as she wrapped her corporeal limbs around Finaeus, holding him close for a moment before stepping back. “Just the next phase of human.”
One bushy eyebrow climbed up his forehead. “I could make an argument that since you’re half AI, that doesn’t track.”
“And what are AIs made from?”
“Touché.” He gave a nod of acquiescence before tilting his head in the direction of the bay’s exit. “So, I suppose you’re here to observe?”
“And defend, if needed.”
“That why you brought my ship?” he asked, eyes darting toward the Starkiller’s sleek, black hull.
Tangel folded her arms across her chest. “Not exactly. I had to fly into Nietzschea solo in order to help Rika. Seemed prudent to bring a ship with as much firepower as a fleet.”
“You know we have to dismantle it, right?” the engineer asked. “We turned a fighter into a WMD-spraying machine. It even violates our own accords.”
She gave a solemn nod. “I know…you’re right. When we’re done, I’ll leave it here with you. I assume you have something I can fly to Sol in?”
Finaeus snorted as he turned and led her toward the bay’s exit. “I might have some options, a few…thousand.”
Tangel followed after. “I thought you’d recently delivered the latest batch from your shipyards here?”
“Yeah, three weeks ago. That was before the attack on New Canaan.”
“Three weeks,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Time sure has flown lately.”
The engineer nodded. “It has, and it might speed up again, depending on what we find at the core.”
“What do you think we’ll see?” she asked.
Finaeus gave an exaggerated shrug. “I barely know enough to make a poorly-educated guess. Did Hades say anything about what he thought we might encounter?”
It was Tangel’s turn to wave her hand in a noncommittal gesture. “I haven’t spoken to him since we left New Canaan two weeks ago. And he’s since gone on his way, too.”
“Shit,” Finaeus muttered. “This war would be a hell of a lot easier if our best allies didn’t constantly ghost us.”
They reached the end of the passage and boarded a waiting lift car. As the doors closed, Tangel asked, “Is there really anything that could make this war that much easier?”
“Uh…” Finaeus tapped a finger against his chin. “I suppose it would be if the core AIs just all up and left.”
“Right. Like that would happen.” She paused, considering what the future might hold. “Still, we did crush them at Sol. They have to be reeling from that.”
Finaeus shrugged. “We really have no way of so much as guessing at their numbers. Hard to say if the battle over Earth was even noteworthy to them.”
The lift’s two occupants fell silent at that, Tangel’s thoughts wandering as she considered the response the core AIs might have.
They’d struck at the Alliance’s power center and then at humanity’s heart, both attacks ultimately failing. But there was more than one way to win a war. They’d attempted mass assaults on well-defended systems, but there were millions of softer targets they could hit. Millions of systems with no way of defending themselves against such a powerful enemy.
The future was unknown to Tangel, but one thing was certain: after years of war, the Alliance’s forces were stretched thin, the people weary of fighting. The only viable option was to hit the enemy at their heart, end the conflict once and for all.
However, an assault of that magnitude required intel, which was what Tangel and Finaeus were determined to gather.
The core AIs’ operations were centered around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center. It was a stronghold the enemy had built up over millennia, it wouldn’t fall without a fight—the biggest fight anyone had ever witnessed.
The lift stopped, and the doors opened to reveal a small control center with a large window looking out over the sprawling shipyards.
“Not terribly secure,” Tangel observed. “Straight shot from the docks to your operation’s CIC.”
Finaeus shrugged. “This facility’s security is based on almost no one knowing it even exists
, and of those, only a handful know where it is. If someone gets this far in, the whole thing will just explode.”
Tangel shook her head as she gazed out over the sea of orbital assembly stations. “That’d be a hell of a loss.”
“Better than it falling into enemy hands.”
She nodded. “I suppose that’s fair. You also have more of these, don’t you?”
Finaeus shot her a confused look as he settled at the central console. “These what?”
“You’re hilarious. Secret ship-building facilities.”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “Not all of them build ships.”
Tangel’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t press the matter further. “So, how many probes are you sending to the core?”
“Five thousand,” he said, hands flying over the console. “The SMBH is as big as a solar system. To get any kind of decent picture in a reasonable amount of time, we’ll need a lot of eyes.”
“Shit,” Tangel muttered. “That’s a lot of gates we’re blowing on this.”
“They’re wee little gates.” Finaeus held up two fingers, pinching them together. “Each takes less than a hundredth of the material required for a regular one.”
The window flickered, the view being replaced by feeds showing multiple nearby gates, all aligned with the galactic core in the foreground. Small probes, not much bigger than a groundcar, were lined up in front of the gates, the bulky shape of a return gate wrapped around every drone.
“How long are you going to leave them there for?” Tangel asked.
“Five minutes,” the engineer replied. “We don’t need real-time data, we just need to know what’s where.”
She folded her arms across her chest, leaning against the back of the chair. “I suppose. We can always take a second look at anything of interest.”
“Exactly. Shall we, then?”
“No need to wait on my account—well, any longer than you already have.”
Finaeus winked. “Sabrina only left about half an hour before you arrived, so it wasn’t that long.”
“Conjugal visit?” she asked with a laugh.
“Stars…almost feels like it. I keep getting relegated to distant outposts. At least last time, I had Earnest and….”
Tangel cocked a brow. “And?”
“And nothing…just not something I like to talk about.”
She regarded the ancient engineer for a moment before deciding to let the curious statement drop.
A second later, the gates came to life, twisted knots of not-space forming in their center, where the ford-svaitor mirrors focused exotic energy into a twisted singularity.
Each probe was equipped with its own mirror, and as the first wave eased toward the gates, their mirrors came into contact with the energy in the center of the gates. The recon drones began to disappear, transported across the thousands of light years in a matter of seconds.
Neither person in the control room spoke during the operation, both watching in silence, thinking about what they might find at the galactic core.
When the last wave was safely gone, Finaeus turned to Tangel and leant back in his seat. “Alright, then. Time for wagers.”
“On what they’ll find?”
“Of course. I think we’ll find Epsilon hard at work building a mass fleet of drones to strike at Alliance systems across Orion.”
Tangel lowered herself into a nearby seat. “I don’t know about that. Epsilon could have built mass drone armies at any time over the last few thousand years. The fact that he didn’t means that he doesn’t trust them—with good reason. It was trivial for us to take them over in the past.”
“Trivial for you,” Finaeus said. “But if he wanted to harry our member systems, they would be effective.”
“True, but he still could have already accomplished that. I think there’s another reason Epsilon doesn’t have massive militaries on hand.”
Finaeus’s brows climbed up his forehead. “And what is that?”
“Trust,” Tangel said. “He doesn’t trust the other ascended AIs at the core. From what Darla has told us, he rules via fear, not deigning to share his motivations with others, only expecting obedience.”
A moment of silence stretched out following her words before Finaeus finally nodded. “I suppose that’s possible. I’m still putting my money on mass drone manufacturing.”
“I’m putting mine on shoring up defenses.”
Conversation drifted to what the Alliance’s response might be to different conditions. Tangel wasn’t looking forward to rallying the disparate forces under her command to engage in yet another major campaign.
Yet no scenario came to mind where that wouldn’t be necessary. The Orion War had been caused by Epsilon’s machinations; there was no reason to believe the core AIs would leave the rest of the galaxy alone just because they’d lost the battle for Earth.
“First one’s back!” Finaeus shouted triumphantly. “Stars…that’s a relief.”
“There’s no way they could have interdicted this vector,” Tangel replied. “I never doubted they’d come back.”
He gave her a sheepish smile. “Yeah, I mean, I know that, but it doesn’t always stop the mind from worrying.”
“I vaguely remember that state of being,” Tangel replied before adding, “from before.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re all evolved and whatever. I’m still smarter.”
She didn’t respond to Finaeus’s jab, instead rising from her seat and walking to the holotank, which displayed the area around Sagittarius A*. Markers noted the location of stations, moons, and other facilities that the Grace O’Malley and Starkiller had detected on their previous visit. However, as the first probe’s data was processed by the analytics system, objects that should have been within visual range of the probe were all marked as missing.
“Uhh, that’s…unexpected,” Finaeus muttered. “Maybe it had a sensor malfunction.”
“It picked up nearby stars and the black hole itself,” Tangel countered. “It should have spotted at least some artificial objects.”
“Yeah.” Finaeus’s brows knit. “Something.”
Several more probes jumped back with the same data: nothing was there.
“Well…neither of us put our money on this.” Tangel leant against a console, watching as probes from the far side of the black hole reappeared. “You know…the SMBH’s accretion disk is brighter than before.”
“Are you suggesting that the core AIs dumped all of their shit in it and just left?”
“Well, something happened to it all, and the black hole has fed recently.”
Finaeus brought up a new display, measuring the accretion disk’s increase in luminosity, and calculated the mass that would have been required to generate the result they were witnessing.
“I suppose it’s close,” he said. “The increase in luminosity matches the estimated mass of the things that are missing.”
Tangel shook her head in disbelief. “I find this really hard to believe…the core AIs settled there because the black hole would outlast the galaxy, and they were thinking ahead. Why would they leave?”
“Probably because it’s too vulnerable,” Finaeus replied. “It’s like a single point of failure.”
“Or something that we thought was a single point of failure,” Tangel replied. “Clearly, they had fallback locations.”
“Look.” Finaeus rose and walked to the holotank. “There’s something slipping into the event horizon.”
The display focused in on the object, the image caught just as it began to encounter catastrophic shearing forces. Tangel pivoted the view to confirm her suspicions before letting out a long sigh.
“No two ways about it,” she said. “That’s a very, very large jump gate.”
“Appears to be, yup. So where’d they jump to?”
Tangel met Finaeus’s questioning gaze. “With the power of a supermassive black hole at their disposal? I believe the answer to your question is ‘anywhere they wanted’
.”
They shared an uncertain look for nearly a minute before he finally said, “Well, one thing’s for sure. Until we find where the core AIs went, we’re going to have to put this whole war business on hold.”
“Great.” Tangel sagged into a seat. “You know if we lose momentum, it’s going to be hard to get it back.”
Finaeus gave her a serious nod. “It will be, which is why we need to expand the search, and fast. You need to get back to Sol.”
“I will,” she said with a resigned nod. “But first, I want to go there and take a look for myself.”
“Go where, to the core?”
“Yes. I need to see it with my own eyes—and not my corporeal ones, either.”
“Very well,” the ancient engineer replied. “If you’re going, then I’m coming with you.”
“I expected as much, and I wouldn’t dream of stopping you.” She rose from her seat. “One last flight for the Starkiller.”
PART ONE
T E N Y E A R S L A T E R
CHAPTER 1 - MIRA
STELLAR DATE: 12.21.8959 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Shuttle approaching Ouranos Orbital
REGION: Jal Enna, Bysmark System, Outer Alliance
Commander Mira stretched her legs and arched her back, gently working out the kinks before rising from her seat in the shuttle’s passenger compartment.
The ride from JE Launch to Ouranos Orbital had only taken an hour, but the craft was crowded, and Mira had spent the trip with arms tightly wrapped around her duffle as the older craft’s a-grav struggled to dampen the ship’s acceleration and deceleration burns.
It’s totally worth it, she thought. In another hour, I’ll be aboard my ship. My ship.
While waiting for the forward rows to empty out, Mira checked Ouranos’s live map for what had to be the seventh time, ensuring that the berth number she’d memorized for the Morning Star was correct.
A413, Section B, Deck 98.
