by M. D. Cooper
Once again, Jane’s prior status threw red flags, and the lieutenant commanding the detail ran it up the chain to Colonel Rutger for the second time.
While Belos hadn’t been perturbed during the prior delay, this one seemed to bother him. He made a few snippy comments at the lieutenant, who bore the major’s ire with good grace.
Finally, all the approvals were logged, and the group was allowed access to the datastore.
They stepped through the door and into a small room with a window on the far side. Roxy walked toward it and saw a large, spherical chamber lined with data towers. The readouts on the window indicated that the interior of the room was vacuum and only a fraction of a kelvin above absolute zero.
On either side of the room they stood in, doors led to a ring of offices where teams reviewed the messages and ensured that they had been properly managed.
“Impressive,” Roxy said. “We’re, what, four hundred kilometers below Norway’s surface now?”
“Yes,” Major Belos replied.
“I assume I’ll need to review via a secure console?” Roxy asked Belos, and the major nodded.
He led them through a door on the left and past several offices until they came to an empty one. Within, a console waited, and the major entered his authentication codes before stepping aside for Roxy to sit down.
She knew it would take some time for those messages to reach quality control, and she glanced at the major.
“I’ll be at this for a few hours. You don’t have to wait here,” she told him.
“I believe I do, ma’am.”
“Major Belos, I’m the assistant director of the Hand. I don’t need a babysitter.”
While the other two bantered, Roxy contacted Sera, who asked the colonel to inform the major that he was allowed to leave.
A few moments later, Belos gave Roxy a sour look and then shrugged. “Very well. Let me know if you need anything.”
After he left the room, Jane rolled her eyes. “We don’t, but you could really use a personality transplant, buddy.”
“Be nice,” Roxy said as she flipped through the console’s logs.
“You don’t like me because I’m nice,” Jane countered, and Roxy only laughed.
She was focused on hunting down the messages from Admiral Carson that Tangel had requested Sera look into. It took a few minutes, but she found the source messages and the versions that had passed through to Tangel.
“You know…” she mused. “It’s odd that these messages relayed through Khardine at all. Carson should have had a direct connection to the I2.”
“Maybe he burned out those blades,” Jane suggested. “They seem pretty fragile.”
“That they do,” Roxy muttered. “The other thing is that these messages were processed rather than being passed straight through. That’s how the verbiage got messed up.”
“So the messages were reworded when they shouldn’t have been and that rewording downplayed the threat?” Jane asked.
“Seems that way.”
“Well that’s interesting,” Roxy shook her head, flipping through more logs. “Major Belos himself flagged the error, but because he did it right as the message was passed to QA, it fell into some sort of loop, bouncing between the two systems.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Jane said.
“Well, it seems like Belos did the right thing.” Roxy flipped through the records, searching for the messages from Earnest and Terrance that had troubled Tangel and Sera.
Given that the two New Canaanites were traveling on Transcend ships, it wasn’t as strange that their messages were being routed through the facility.
“Going to have to give the major a cookie,” Jane chuckled. “One with little letters all over it to help him make it through the day.”
Roxy snorted, then raised her eyebrows as she looked over the messages from Terrance Enfield regarding the core AI facility in the IPE. “These things have pretty much gone through an identical cock-up.”
“Misinterpreted and then stuck in limbo?” Jane asked.
“Yup. And it should come as no surprise to you that the good Major Belos has his fingerprints all over these, too.”
“We catch him with his hand in the cookie jar,” Roxy replied.
Jane frowned. “A cookie what?”
“Jar. You know tall, made of plas or glass, round.”
“I’ve had a lot of cookies that came out of boxes, or some sort of plas package, but I’ve never heard of cookies coming out of a jar.” She reached out and tapped Roxy’s head. “Did something get mixed up in there when your memories came back?”
Jane appeared legitimately concerned, and Roxy shook her head and groaned.
“Red-handed. How about that?”
“Ohhhh…you mean ’catch him in the act’. Why didn’t you just say so?”
“Carmen, why did we decide to saddle ourselves with this comedian?”
Jane folded her arms across her chest. “Wow. I see how it is.”
Roxy winked at her and then leant back in the chair, interlacing her fingers behind her neck. “OK, so here’s what we’re going to do….”
Ten minutes later, they were ready.
The plan required routing a message through a blade node that Belos wouldn’t be monitoring and then have it come back through one he did.
During her brief stay on Styx-9, Roxy had befriended one of the comm techs, and sent him a brief message that they needed to route a test-drill message through the hub and out to Tangel aboard the I2.
She’d included a word in the message that, should it make it through, would clue Tangel in that it was just a test.
“OK, here goes,” Roxy said, and sent the message out to Styx-9.
[Rte Tangel I2. Immanent danger in gate array, grav anomalies in system primary.]
“Think using ‘immanent’ instead of ‘imminent’ is enough?” Jane asked.
“If it makes it through, it will be,” Roxy said. “Tangel, Sera, and I had a rather amusing conversation about people mixing those words up. I think it will clue her in that she at least won’t need to jump to Styx and deal with an emergency.”
“You hope.”
Roxy shrugged sheepishly. “Well, at least there’s already an I-Class gate there.”
A minute later, they saw the message pass through Blade Node 2, where it triggered a severity alert, and escalated to Major Belos.
They didn’t have taps into the system that would tell them who had made the change, but when the message was relayed out to the I2, it read:
[Rte I2. Immanent secondary gate array anomaly. System primary stable.]
“Well, as nefarious as he is, Belos doesn’t bother to look up words.” Roxy chuckled and glanced at Jane, who shrugged.
“Or it makes it less ‘imminent’, so he left it in.”
Roxy rose and gave Jane a knowing look. “Things are about to get fun.”
The other woman rolled her eyes. “Great, it’s been a whole three days since I’ve been in a pitched firefight. Stars forbid we relax or anything.”
“Exactly.” Roxy clapped a hand on Jane’s shoulder.
Sera sent a look of consternation along with her words, and Roxy was glad she’d gotten the more interesting part of the mission.
Sera fell silent for a few moments.
Roxy chuckled.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, Sera walked into the docking bay with Colonel Rutger at her side. She’d paid close attention to the security measures in the corridor that led to the bay, as well as the guards positioned outside the bay doors and within.
She had to assume there was a possibility that they’d react badly to Belos’s arrest, though it was unpleasant to assume that he might have turned them to his cause—whatever that was. But with ascended AIs and who knew what else at play, trust was hard to come by.
The colonel was thanking Sera for her visit when Belos entered the other end of the bay, Roxy at his side with Jane trailing behind.
They weren’t speaking, and Sera couldn’t help but notice Belos’s eyes shifting from side to side, scanning the bay as though he expected someone to leap out at him.
“Assistant Director Roxy,” Colonel Rutger said as the other group neared. “I trust your tour went well. Everything in order?”
Roxy shook her head. “I’m sorry to say that it is not. We found serious anomalies in the quality assurance process.”
“You did?” the colonel’s eyes widened, and Sera found herself believing that he truly did not know what Belos had been up to. “What sort of anomalies?”
“Well,” Roxy glanced to her left, the look causing the major to shift uncomfortably. “It all centers on messages passing through Blade Node 2. They all point to someone circumventing both protocols and leveraging a bug in the routing software.”
“Blade Node 2?” Rutger turned to Belos. “That’s your node. What is going on?”
“Sir, I don’t know. This is the first I’m hearing of it.”
“Major Belos.” Sera drew herself up. “You are under arrest for violations against the TSF and the people of the Transcend. These will be explained to you in due course when we arrive at Keren Station and you are brought before a tribunal.”
“Ma’am,” Belos began. “This is preposterous. I have a spotless record, I would never—”
“Explain the alterations you made to the message that just passed through for the I2 from Styx-9?” Roxy asked. “Or the changes you made to Admiral Carson’s messages?”
“I—” Belos looked as though he was going to protest further for a moment, and then he took a step away from Roxy, turning so he could face her and Sera. “You’re both such fools. There are so many of us working against you, you’ll never prevail.”
“What are you talking about?” Rutger bellowed, finally moving from his calm detachment to anger. “Are you telling me we’re infiltrated?”
“Not the way you think,” Belos said, a thin tendril of light snaking out of his body, stretching toward Sera.
“Oh, not so fast!” Jason’s voice came from her right, and she glanced at the pinnace where he was bounding down the ramp, shadowtron in hand.
Colonel Rutger was yelling for guards, two of whom were already rushing toward the scene. Roxy and Jane were backpedaling, both drawing weapons that Sera knew would be ineffective. She stood her ground, trusting that Jason would handle the remnant.
Without further warning, he fired the weapon, streams of sleptons and other shadowparticles streaming out toward Major Belos, capturing the remnant in the weapon’s grasp and drawing it out of the man.
“Stop!” a voice called from the bay’s entrance. It rang out like a bell, carrying over the din and silencing everyone present.
Sera turned and saw that the shout had come from Major Lorne, who was striding into the bay, appearing completely unconcerned that Jason had a remnant in his shadowtron’s grasp.
“Both of you?” Sera asked, grabbing Colonel Rutger by the arm and backing away from the major. “How many remnants are there here?”
“That’s where you’ve made a critical error in judgment,” Major Lorne said. “It should have been readily apparent that we did not process quantum entanglement communications.”
“Well, we suspected it.” Sera had sat through a number of briefings where the limits of ascended AI abilities and tech had been discussed.
“So is this confirmation that Earnest is smarter than all of you?” Jason asked as he reached Sera’s side, one hand on her arm, pulling her back toward the shuttle.
“He’s quite the unusual individual,” Major Lorne said as he reached the half-extracted tendril of light stretching out of Belos. “The fact that he worked out how to extract remnants is another amazing achievement. Capturing him was a close second in importance to infiltrating this facility.”
Jason glanced from Lorne and Belos to Sera, giving her a deadly serious look.
Before she could respond, Lorne gestured at Jason, and the shadowtron’s beam cut out
.
Time seemed to slow down as several things coalesced in Sera’s mind. The first was that an evacuation alert was sounding over the installation’s general network. That triggered the realization that Jason hadn’t just authorized Gamma Protocol, he’d initiated it. The third was facilitated by Lorne’s body suddenly dissolving, revealing a many-limbed being of light.
Suddenly, Sera’s mind flashed back to Helen, and how she had been powerless to do anything to stop her. She froze in her tracks.
We’re going to die here.
“Sera!” Jason bellowed, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her back just as the ascended AI sprang forward, its sinuous arms stretching out toward her.
For an instant, she felt a pang of regret that her life was about to end just as she was getting to know a real father, and fall in love with a man unlike any other she’d ever met. That regret was followed by guilt for thinking of herself first. However, all those thoughts were wiped away by surprise when the glowing tendrils of light smashed against an invisible barrier, centimeters from her face.
“Stars, that was close,” Jason muttered. “We learned that stasis shields can block remnants, but never tried it with a fully ascended AI before.”
The ascended being began to emit a keening wail, and Sera took a moment to reorient herself with the fact that, not only was she still alive, but there was a chance they might just escape.
She looked around and saw that Roxy and Jane were already on the ship’s ramp, Colonel Rutger following after.
“Stasis shield isn’t fully enveloping while on the dock,” Jason said. “Get on the ship so we can lift off before the thing out there realizes that.”
The AI’s admonition finally shook free the stupor that had befallen Sera, and she ran up the ramp, Jason hard on her heels. The moment they were inside the vessel, it lifted off the cradle.
