by M. D. Cooper
“Well, no one other than Cary, when she took the Remnant out of Nance” Jessica corrected.
“Right.” Trevor nodded. “But she’s…not normal.”
Jessica glanced down at her brightly glowing skin. “Well, neither am I. Did you bring me any gear, by the way? Last I checked, there’s a bit of a hull breach on this ship. Some protection against the elements—or lack thereof—would be nice.
Trevor unslung a pack from around his shoulder and pulled out an EV suit. He tossed it to her with a lascivious look as his eyes trailed down her body. She smirked and caught it, noting that the Marines seemed unconcerned with their superiors’ open display of affection.
“Think you need it, Admiral?” Marc asked with a laugh as he knelt next to the containment cylinder, checking over the readouts. “Seriously, though. Don’t leave us hanging. How did you defeat this thing?”
“Uh…” Jessica drew the word out, hoping no one was going to be shocked by what she said next. “I…absorbed it.”
“You what?!” Trevor exclaimed. “It’s inside you now?”
“No,” she shook her head, giving him a frustrated glance.
Jessica rolled her eyes and continued to speak aloud. “I absorbed its energy, drained it of power…and I think somehow that shredded its extradimensional body in the process. Like I drew away the glue that held it together.”
“How did you do that?” Trevor asked, looking only slightly mollified.
“Well, remember back in the LoS how I managed to directly absorb free electrons from plasma that one time? Same sort of idea. Except what I absorbed this time was…different. I think that the energy came with extradimensional particles. Then I fired it all back at our friend here, cutting him down to size.”
Meg whistled, and the others shared a few stunned looks as Jessica finished pulling on the EV suit.
“Yeah, I know, now I can say ‘I eat ascended AIs for breakfast’.” Jessica laughed, but the rest of her team just gave her looks of amazement. “Too soon?”
Trevor lifted a hand, his posture changing as his shoulders came up. She knew it to be one of his ‘you should have known better’ stances, but then he paused, and his arm came back down as he laughed.
“OK,” Jessica fixed him with a level stare. “It wasn’t that funny.”
“Oh, no, it really is,” he said between laughs. “Of all the women I could have met back on Chittering Hawk, I meet the one that not only takes me on the most amazing adventures that most people could never dream about over a dozen lifetimes, but a woman who cracks jokes after taking down one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy. You’re one of a kind, Jess.”
“Often imitated, never duplicated.” She winked at her husband and sidled up to him, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Don’t worry. I’ll have a proper freakout about this later. Right now, I’m just living on an unbelievable high. Going to savor it for a while yet.”
“What are your orders, ma’am?” Corporal Marc asked.
Jessica pulled her arm from around Trevor’s waist. “Well, we’re going to have to go back to Albany now. Or maybe New Canaan. Stars, I wish the QCs were working.” She paused and considered her options. “I suppose that a captured Caretaker here falls under the Homeland Interdiction policy, so it can’t go to New Canaan until it’s gone through…whatever we’d put it through. Albany it is.”
“Once we have a gate set up,” Trevor added.
Jessica nodded. “And a ship capable of safely flying through it.”
“What about this one?” Marc asked. “The Caretakers must have jump gate tech to have gotten their ships out here in time to wait for us—they were waiting for us, right?”
“Seems that way,” Jessica replied. “And yes, I want to take this fishbone back with us, too. But I’m not leaving the Lantzer behind, either.”
* * * * *
A few hours later, Jessica stood on the Lantzer’s bridge, trying to console herself with the fact that they had power and helm control, while ignoring the scrolling warnings and alerts that still filled half the consoles.
The fishbone ship—which seemed to have no name—filled the holotank, an indicator giving its position as twelve kilometers off the Lantzer’s port side.
Trevor, Marc, and Meg were still aboard the Caretaker’s ship. They’d been joined by Chief West and were disabling every system on the vessel and setting up a direct control system in the engineering section. The thing still gave Jessica the willies, but she wasn’t going to leave such an important prize behind.
There was no telling what secrets it held, or what information lay in its databases that could tell them about the Caretakers, or the core AIs in general.
“Stars…what I wouldn’t do for a functional QC blade,” Jessica muttered aloud, catching a glance from Lucida.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the ensign said.
Jessica ran a hand through her hair, noting that her sense of touch still felt strange, almost like her skin tingled whenever she came into contact with anything. “Not your fault, Lucida.”
“Well, yeah, I know that,” she laughed. “Still sorry. Mostly because I hate staring at that thing. It’s gross. Looks like its ribs are rotting.”
“I’m just glad they use tech we can understand,” Jessica said. “I mean…it’s weird shit, but there’s still power generation and systems that require power. Cut off the flow of electrons, and things shut down.”
“Isn’t it amazing that pretty much everything interesting in the universe is just a flow of electrons?”
Jessica held up her hand, sending an arc of electricity from her index finger to her thumb. “Yeah, it really is.”
“I still can’t believe you beat an ascended AI.”
The ensign had hero worship in her eyes, and Jessica shook her head, smiling at the young woman. “Me either. I suppose everyone’s going to want to get a dose of Retyna now.”
“Umm…I’m not so sure about that.” Lucida twisted her lips as she looked Jessica up and down. “No offense, ma’am, but the idea of a symbiotic relationship with alien microbes…well, it gives me the creeps.”
Jessica laughed and gave the woman a kind look. “I’ll admit, it bothered me for a while, too. But then when I thought they were dead, I got…well…I missed them. I’m glad Earnest and Finaeus were able to bring them back. And it’s more than symbiotic==they altered my DNA. They’re really a part of who I am now.”
“Aren’t you worried that they’ll change who you are?”
“Well, they have, but no, not really.”
“Not really worried that they’ll change who you are, or not worried about the consequences?”
Lucida’s eyes were wide, and Jessica couldn’t help but shake her head at the earnest ensign.
“Oh, they’re changing me, it’s impossible for them not to have. Even so, I think I’m still mostly the same person I’ve always been. Look at it this way. Your body is full of bacteria, Ensign. Phages and viruses too. They all operate in a symbiotic relationship with you. They alter your body’s chemistry, they affect your moods and thoughts. Your emotions, reactions, everything, much of who ‘you’ are, comes from the chemical soup your brain swims in. Mine just has some non-Terran bacteria and other stuff in it…. Actually, at this point, there’s some amount of non-Terran bacteria in pretty much everyone.”
“Not like yours though,” Lucida said. “The bacteria in my body doesn’t have such an overt impact on who I am.”
“Or maybe it does,” Jessica countered. “I mean, have you seen any humans who aren’t filled with bacteria? You’re the product of them as much as anything else. Maybe if humans had formed symbiotic relationships with other sorts of bacteria ages ago, we’d be completely different.”
“You still hav
e entropy in all of your physical components,” Jessica said. “And that’s random.”
“OK, OK,” Jessica waved a hand. “You’re superior, Gil, we all agree on that.”
“And stasis shields?” Jessica asked.
“Well, good thing we’re alone out here, then,” she said with a laugh.
But even as she said the words, Jessica knew how unlikely it was that the Caretaker she’d captured had been alone. Someone had sent it here, and at some point, they were going to come check up on it.
A moment later, Gil groaned over the bridge’s audible systems.
“Shit…really?”
“Well that tears it,” Jessica muttered. “What do we know?”
The main holo switched to show the Lantzer and the fishbone ship, which had the notation ‘F1’ next to it. The two markers were right on top of one another at the current scale of three light minutes. Off the starboard side were two more markers, ‘F2’ and ‘F3’, both at the edge of the display, and each showing a relative velocity of just under one light second per hour.
“So…” Jessica mused as she looked the holotank. “Three hours out if they don’t brake?”
“That’ll come,” Jessica said. “We have to assume that those ships are captained by Caretakers as well.”
“Do you really think there are ascended beings commanding each of them all the way out here?” Lucida asked. “From what I’ve heard, they always seem to operate alone.”
Jessica considered the woman’s words for a moment. “You’re right, but then again, we’ve never encountered their ships, either. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”
“What are we going to do?” the ensign asked. “From what Gil says, our stasis shields won’t hold long enough for a battle with one of those ships, let alone, two.”
“Ever flown an ARC fighter before, Ensign?”
* * * * *
“I thought this ship was freaky from the outside,” Trevor said as he led Chief West through a slick passageway beneath the main engineering control center.
“I hear you,” West said as she slipped around a conical protrusion in the deck. “It’s almost like this ship was made by aliens…everything feels just off enough that it’s like a sea of uncanny valleys.”
“Makes our ships feel organic by comparison.”
“Yes! That’s it,” West nodded emphatically. “I would never have thought that, but yeah…we connect things in patterns that are logical to our organic minds, our versions of efficiency. But this ship, it’s like an entirely different logic is at play. Yet somehow there’s still symmetry…mostly.”
“I noticed that too,” Trevor replied as they reached a barely-visible door set in the bulkhead. “OK, so the CriEns should be in this chamber, right?”
West shrugged. “I don’t know, Commander. I thought that about the last four chambers we checked. Amongst other things, the CriEns provide primary power to the fusion drive startup systems and the weapons, so putting them in close proximity to those makes sense, but here we are at the furthest possible location from both. It’s illogical, but so far, so is everything else on this weird-ass ship.”
Trevor chuckled while applying the breach kit to the door. It still amazed him that the systems Angela had built for Jessica’s team twenty years ago were capable of defeating even this ship’s security. He wondered if a large part of the breach kit’s efficacy was due to Angela’s wealth of knowledge, or because she was well on her way to being an ascended being when she’d devised it.
His musing was interrupted by the door sliding open, revealing a room that was filled with silver stalagmites and stalactites. It took him a moment to realize that the silver protrusions were in motion, though they were moving very slowly.
“Careful,” he said, easing into the room and sweeping his rifle across the space.
Several times thus far, they’d encountered very aggressive defensive systems, though he hoped that that wouldn’t be the case in a chamber with CriEns.
“There!” West said, gesturing to Trevor’s left. “That’s gotta be one. Looks weird, but what else could it be?”
Trevor saw a black cylinder sticking partway out of one of the stalagmites, and followed the chief toward it, still waiting for an unseen attack to come.
“Do you think that all of these could have CriEns in them?” he asked the engineer, gesturing to the three dozen gleaming stalagmites rising out of the deck.
“I sure hope not,” West said. “That’s spacetime-ripping amounts of zero-point energy harvesting. I can’t imagine the ascended AIs are that dumb.”
“What if they worked out a way to limit the effects?”
The engineer shrugged. “Then this ship is even more valuable than we thought. Can you imagine an I-Class ship that didn’t have to worry about critical energy draw?”
“Ummm…no?”
“Well, let’s just say that it would be unstoppable.”
“I thought they already were unstoppable.”
Chief West looked over her shoulder and chuckled. “Good point.”
“So how do we get the module out of its silver socket there?” Trevor asked.
“Well, like everything on this ship, there aren’t any physical interfaces. I’ll have to tap into the holo that’s here.”
Trevor looked around at the unadorned room. “There’s a holodisplay here?”
“Yeah,” West nodded emphatically. “It’s all around us. This ship is bathed in interfaces, but they’re weird. I thought that’s why you were wigged out by it.”
“No.” Trevor shook his head. “It was just the general structure that got me, not the fact that I’m walking through augmented reality. I guess I never accessed that system.”
“You want to tap into it?”
“I think one of us should stay grounded in plain ol’ unaugmented reality.”
“Probably best.”
West fell silent as she crouched next to the stalagmite and began to manipulate an invisible interface. Trevor watched she for a minute before turning his attention back to the slowly moving room, wondering if the stalagmites were constructed from the same sort of flowmetal that the ISF used, or if it was something different.
Though they all had appeared to be in motion when they’d entered, now the gleaming protrusions were still with no visible change in their height and girth. A second later, the movement all around them was so obvious, he wondered how he could ever have doubted his eyes in the first place.
It seemed almost like a trick designed to drive him mad.
Well, it’s working.
“How long?” he asked
“Almost there,” West replied. “I wound down the draw on this module and have disconnected it from the main power web. Now I just need to dis—”
A strange metallic sucking noise came from the stalagmite holding the CriEn, and then the flowmetal fell away from the module, revealing it entirely. A second later, there was a sound from behind them, and Trevor spun to see the door slide open and two one-meter balls roll into the room.
“Down!” he hollered and hit the deck, pushing West to the ground in front of him as beams of light slashed through the air above them.
“The hell?” West exclaimed. “They can’t seri
ously be shooting in here!"
Trevor didn’t reply as he grabbed his last sticky grenade and rolled onto his side to get a clear line of sight. Taking quick aim, he tossed it at one of the drones and ducked back down. There was a dull thud, and when he looked up, the silver ball was only half there.
But the other one was gone.
“Shit!” West cried out. “You trying to kill us too?”
“Them,” Trevor replied, not taking the time to explain to the engineer that the grenade fired its blast toward the target, not omnidirectionally. “I think it’s trying to flank. Grab the module, we’re falling back to the door.”
Chief West nodded wordlessly as she reached out and pulled the module from its socket. Trevor directed her to the bulkhead while sweeping the area with his rifle and watching the feeds from the nanocloud.
Somehow, there was no sign of the other drone.
They continued to ease toward the door, the engineer in the lead, when suddenly it occurred to him why they didn’t see the thing anywhere in the chamber.
Trevor let out a small groan.
Trevor groaned, wondering why he always got stuck with the comedians.
Trevor sent back an affirmative response, and then directed his microdrones to move into the corridor. At first, he didn’t see the enemy drone, but then he realized that there was a bulge in the corridor that had not been present before.
