by M. D. Cooper
Cary sagged against the bulkhead. She’d frozen a few meters from the room’s entrance, knowing that if she went in there, the confrontation would only be exacerbated.
She’d also, even without using her extra-human abilities, identified all of the speakers. The woman who would be leaving the ship before long was a second lieutenant from engineering, while the other pair were bridge ensigns. The fourth person, the one who had laid down the law, was the XO, Major Lance.
Good to know he has my back, I guess.
Still uncertain whether she should enter, Cary was saved by Earnest calling her down to the Research CIC.
Cary asked.
Thirty minutes later, Cary was convinced. Earnest had applied Gera’s idea to an algorithm that accurately predicted all but two of the existing starshifting locations. Unfortunately, it mapped out over a thousand more across the galaxy.
However, one was relatively close to the Cora’s Triumph’s current position, a red supergiant a little further around the core from Sol, on the outer edge of the Norma Arm.
“Stars, we’re getting so far from home,” Cary whispered as she looked at the location.
“You’ve been to the LMC plenty of times, and that’s further away.”
“I guess,” she shrugged. “Still different, though. I wonder if it’s because we can see the Orion Belt from there? Here, it feels like we’re lost in a sea of stars that we’d have to swim a lifetime to get through.”
Earnest glanced up at her, a twinkle in his eye. “Never took you for a poet.”
“What can I say, gazing at stars brings it out of me.” She pursed her lips, nibbling on the inside of her cheek while considering options. “It’s going to take another week before we get more gates, the TGGN is chewing them all up.”
“Right, we can’t jump the Cora’s Triumph there until we have a return gate available, and we’re even out of probes with gates. However, we could take the Skipper.”
“I’m not sure Captain Beatrice would approve.”
“She’s only the captain for a few more days. We’d head over, check it out, head back.”
Cary almost laughed at how eager Earnest sounded. There was nothing he liked more than testing a theory, and he rarely paused to consider the risks that might be involved.
Which is one of the reasons I’m along.
“The Skipper has a QC blade, right?” she asked, unable to remember if the pinnace had received that upgrade or not.
“Well, it didn’t until an hour ago. Now it does.”
“Earnest.” Cary planted her fists on her hips. “Where did you get a blade?”
The scientist barked a laugh. “You know, I bounced you on my knee when you were just a few months old. Now you’re standing there scolding me, looking like the spitting image of your mother.”
“I do not.” Cary straightened and forced her arms to her sides. “My hair’s not in a ponytail.”
He snorted a laugh. “You know as well as I that your mom lets her hair down from time to time…figuratively as well as literally.”
“Stop trying to sidetrack me, I’m trying to decide if we should really do this.”
“Of course we should really do this. If it proves to be correct, we can reassign half the teams scouring the galaxy for starshifts, and focus them on fixing things. It’s revolutionary.”
Cary heaved a sigh. “I mean, I really want to do it, but I’m worried I already have a reputation for being reckless. I don’t want to make that impression worse.”
“Reckless?” Earnest’s brows furrowed, nearly meeting above his nose. “How, when?”
“Seriously, Uncle. Remember when I roped Saanvi into stealing a starship with me so we could participate in the Defense of Carthage? Or maybe when I decided to subsume Lisa Wrentham’s mind in order to take over the Widows?”
Earnest nodded. “Both of which were smashing successes.”
“You know how close I came to being lost,” she whispered. “That Saanvi and Faleena forgave me is a miracle…and I killed Priscilla.”
“Technically, the shot we fired from Star City killed Priscilla , but I get your meaning. You blame yourself for setting those events in motion.”
Cary nodded wordlessly, holding back tears that threatened to spill from the corners of her eyes.
“What you’re failing to recall,” he rose and wrapped an arm around her shoulder, “is that things were desperate at that point. We were stretched impossibly thin, fighting on so many fronts. It’s only because we had Tangel at the helm that we survived. When your parents sent you in to infiltrate the Widows, they knew the risk. We all knew the risk.”
“But I’m the one that decided to stay in,” Cary said. “What if I’m not fit for this command? What if going with you to do this proves it?”
Earnest shrugged. “Then you and I build a starship and do the mission on our own, or a thousand other options. You’re still so young, Cary, you’re not even thirty!”
“Rika was the head of a revolution before she was thirty.”
“She’s an exceptional woman, just like you. She ended the Nietzschean threat, you ended the Orion threat. Don’t sell yourself short. The only reason your parents had reservations about sending you and your sisters on that mission was because it was you and your sisters. But they did it because they had to. Because we had to.”
“And I barely survived, I turned my sisters into slaves.”
“They forgave you, Cary. They forgave you a decade ago.” He shook his head, brow knitting further. “What brought this on? I thought you were past doubting yourself over this.”
Cary snorted. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I was A1 for eight months, Earnest. For eight months, I controlled the Widows. I did…I did some terrible things.”
“Did you, by any chance, create picotech and start a chain of events that led to a war that spanned all known space?”
Cary opened her mouth, then closed it, looking up into her uncle’s eyes, suddenly understanding so much more about what drove him.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I never thought of it like that. But so much good has come from you creating that tech.”
Earnest winked. “Almost like what you did, ending the war with Orion, wouldn’t you say?”
A sour laugh slipped past Cary’s lips. “I guess having Lisa Wrentham in my head is my penance for what I did to pull it off.”
“Pardon?” Earnest stepped back. “I thought you’d purged her? I thought Bob said—”
“Bob said what everyone needed to hear,” Cary replied. “I took in all of her memories, all of her experiences. I turned myself into one of her Widows; driven, emotionless, cold. And then I grew as an ascended being. Lisa Wrentham will forever be a part of me. Why do you think I enjoy delving into science so much more than before?”
Earnest’s eyes widened as she spoke, but as the last words fell from her lips, he laughed. “I just figured it was that you wanted away from conflict and to spend time with your favorite uncle.”
The expression on his face was one of such utter innocence that it was all Cary
could do not to burst into laughter.
“Earnest, I was sent here as muscle in case we run into core AIs. Granted, we haven’t, but we’ve still had plenty of conflict, dealing with their automated defense systems.”
The scientist shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s against machines. Not the same thing.”
“Really?” She shook her head, eyes wide. “I seem to remember you nearly dying twice.”
“I back my mind up in crystal at least once a month. I’m prepared.”
Cary didn’t doubt it for a second.
Most of the people who knew of Earnest—which was nearly everyone—thought of him as a mild-mannered scientist; the brains behind much of the ISF’s technology. Cary knew a different version of the man. The man who had braved enemy fire to save others on countless occasions, who had spent a lifetime building the technology to go back in time to fix the worst mistake Cary had ever made. The man who never once looked at her askance, had never once flinched, even when she revealed that she was so much more than human, now.
“Alright,” she nodded. “But we have to clear it with the captain first.”
“Of course,” Earnest agreed, his tone entirely serious. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
* * * * *
Three hours later, Cary and Earnest sat in the Skipper, a fireteam of ISF Marines in the ship’s rear compartment—the only way Beatrice would agree to let them make the jump to an entirely uncharted system.
“Are you ready?” Earnest asked, glancing at Cary.
“Of course, it’s just a jump,” she gave a slight shake of her head.
“No!” He held up a finger. “Not just a jump. This is historic, this could save centuries of work.”
“Oh?” she winked at the scientist. “Then shouldn’t we have Gera along?”
He laughed. “Well, I mean, what if things go sideways and we end up in a firefight? We need trained military professionals, not scientists.”
“And you?” she asked, elbowing him in the ribs. “Which are you?”
“Both, my dear. I’m both.”
He toggled a control on the holointerface, and a kilometer ahead of the ship, the system’s gate came to life.
Antimatter reactors fed power to the emitters that generated specific forms of exotic matter, refracted by specialized mirrors to a point directly in the center of the ring.
To the two-dimensional eye, it appeared as though space itself was twisting into knots, but to Cary, it was something else entirely; a six-dimensional black hole, held together by forces beyond those that governed normal spacetime, bound and harnessed by the rings that surrounded it.
How Finaeus created these without being able to see them…his mind is certainly something else altogether.
“Let’s do it,” she whispered and reached out to her console, triggering the burn that thrust them toward their gate.
The Skipper covered the distance in a matter of seconds, leaping across space to the device that would hurl them a thousand light years further around the galactic core.
The gate grew rapidly. Over five kilometers across, it was capable of jumping nearly any ship in the galaxy, shy of an I-class supercarrier. Then the mirror on the front of the pinnace touched the singularity in the center of the gate, and space disappeared, replaced by the blinding light of transition.
Cary knew that organics didn’t see it; even some lower ascended beings couldn’t. But with sixth-dimension vision came not only the ability to see through reality itself, but to see the reality that lay behind it all.
An instant later, the stars returned, new ones in new positions, the galactic core a little further to their left. They’d reached their destination, oriented nearly ninety degrees to the orbital plane, able to see the entire system in all its glory.
“Stars,” Cary whispered. “What happened here?”
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 43 - ESTEE
STELLAR DATE: 01.14.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Warsaw
REGION: Farsis System, Independent Systems of the Lupus Cloud
“Are you sure we should have tipped our hand with the missile?” Estee asked. “We don’t have many more cards up our sleeves.”
Cimara nodded. “We had to. They were wavering with the hostages. We had to show them that they couldn’t just bring their ship down and rescue them.”
Estee crossed her arms, staring at her wife and wondering exactly when she’d gotten so cold and shrewd. “But we only have five missiles.”
“General Mulke is almost here.” The president’s wife smiled and patted her cheek. “He managed to secure the original components, and with them, we can shield an entire ship—and I know our scientists can replicate the technology.”
“We don’t have long, though, if they reach out for their friends,” Estee said, glancing at the holotable that showed the Overwatch. “Which they can do instantly over the QuanComm network.”
“I know,” Cimara nodded. “But the moment anyone else shows up, we start killing the refugees. We’ll spin it so that the AoS is in the wrong no matter how it goes down—they’ll look like the aggressors. Either way, we’ll band the Lupus Cloud together against them, forge our own path independent of outside control.”
Estee stared into her wife’s eyes, convinced by the certainty she saw there. “Alright. If you’re sure.”
Cimara reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder, pulling her close. “I’m sure.”
For a moment, Estee thought she saw a sliver of white light between her wife’s fingers, but a moment later, it was gone.
I must be exhausted. Stars, I can’t wait till this is all over and we have the gates.
That would be in just a few days, at the most. Just a few days, and she would go from being President Estee to Empress Estee.
All their hard work was coming to fruition…and all because Cimara had come up with the brilliant plan to trap an AoS ship and steal its gates.
She really is something.
CHAPTER 44 - TANIS
STELLAR DATE: 01.15.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Burr, Xalta
REGION: Piiryo System, Scipio Empire
“So, this is where you and Diana had that big showdown shortly after we left the first time?” Tanis asked as she and Joe walked off the Mandy to where Petra waited.
The ambassador’s long, white wings fluttered in the breeze, her white hair trailing behind her head as her lips quirked into a smile. “Stars, that feels like a lifetime ago. We brought half the mountain down on those assholes. Diana really came into her own on that trip.”
“I recall the difference in her,” Tanis said.
Angela added.
Joe shrugged. “I didn’t know her before, but she’s always seemed a little scary.”
Petra chuckled. “She was always scary. Before that, it was an unpredictable scary. After, it was borne of surety.”
“As much as I love talking about Diana, this wind is going to blow us off the mountain. Can we see the gate?” Joe asked.
“Sure,” Petra said. “We locked the place down after that fight. To my knowledge, no one has been down there since.”
Angela said.
“Exactly,” Petra nodded as they reached the entrance, which was little more than a hole bored through the mountain with a high-powered grav shield in front. “Logs look good. It’s not been disturbed,” she said.
Tanis was glad to hear that. A grav shield seemed like a poor way to protect the mountain, but then again, there was nothing of great value inside—at least, not that anyone knew of.
It didn’t take long to make it to the shaft that ran down to the underground labs, but the descent into darkness lasted nearly ten minutes, during which they chatted about Pe
tra and Diana’s work to convert each of the four quadrants of Scipio into independent democratic republics under the empress’s rule.
Tanis knew that, eventually, Diana wanted to retire and disappear to the far side of known space, with the ability to trust her people to govern themselves at least as well as she’d been able to manage.
Living the dream.
The AI chuckled for a moment before her tone sobered.
Tanis nearly snorted aloud.
This time she did giggle.
“What are you two talking about?” Joe asked. “Don’t you know it’s rude to have side conversations?”
A pained look crossed Petra’s face, and Tanis felt a wave of apology from her AI.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Though it’s getting better. I don’t regret anything other than how it had to end, but it was worth it.”
