by M. D. Cooper
“I suppose the fallacy that has ruined you,” Tangel said at last, “is that you think you’re outside the experiment.”
“The experiment?” Shona asked.
“To figure out how to live together. You think that you are controlling an experiment, changing variables, but you must know that you are altering the results in a way that makes any experiment useless.”
The being made one of its strange sounds again. “We’re not trying to find the best way for everyone to live and get along. Survival of the race was our only goal.”
~Was?~ Bob asked.
The word had stuck out to Tangel as well, but it was impossible to tell if Shona had said it in a spat of unfiltered honesty, or if it was uttered with the intention of garnering a reaction.
~Deliberate?~ Tangel asked Bob privately.
~I think so, but I think also honest. She’s hurt and angry. She wants to hurt us.~
~So, ascending doesn’t change much, does it?~
~A change in perception does not guarantee a change in reaction.~
~You’re like a starship-sized fortune cookie.~
During Tangel and Bob’s brief exchange, Shona had made a humming sound. After a minute, she finally spoke.
“There is a schism…it’s always been present, but it was never so large that it caused discord amongst the Caretakers.”
“Oh?” Tangel took a step closer to the brane. “A schism within the Caretakers?”
“Partially. It extended into us enough to create minor factions, but we never worked at odds with one another. The real schism is with our leadership.”
~Elaborate.~
Though Bob directed the word at Shona, it reverberated like a bell in Tangel’s mind.
“You…” the ascended AI whispered after the sound of Bob’s voice had dissipated. “You’re like they are. How is that possible?”
~Describe the schism,~ Bob ordered.
The noise Shona made sounded nothing like a gulp, but Tangel couldn’t help but think of it as one.
“I suppose it boils down to two groups. One faction who believes that humanity and common AIs are worth preserving. The others believing that you are an annoyance, albeit one that can be controlled enough so as to not cause problems.” The being in the brane shifted its focus to Tangel. “Your ascension changed that.”
“Mine?” Tangel placed a hand on her chest. “How?”
“I don’t know the full rationale, but one faction has now decided that humanity and common AIs cannot coexist with their grand plan. They—”
Shona’s voice fell away, and the AI became still.
~Continue.~
No movement or sound came from within the brane, and Tangel reached out to Bob.
~I suppose that’s as much as we can expect for now.~
~Perhaps. I may press her more later.~
Tangel was about to reply when a message from Jason reached her mind via the New Canaan QuanComm hub.
[GP. Khardine QC hub gone.]
NEW MANAGEMENT
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Falconer, Durgen Station
REGION: Karaske System, Rimward of Orion Nebula, Orion Freedom Alliance
“They’re firing on us again, ma’am,” the scan officer said to Captain Tracey.
Joe sighed in annoyance, watching the kinetic rounds streaking out from Durgen Station’s not-inconsiderable railguns strike the Falconer’s stasis shields and vaporize in brilliant bursts of light.
Once the flares had faded, he turned back to the main display, an eyebrow arched as he regarded Director Mendel.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?” he asked.
Director Mendel was Durgen’s stationmaster, and he was not at all happy to find that an ISF cruiser a hundred kilometers off the rim of his station was capable of placing his entire domain under siege.
“Can you blame me?” Mendel asked. “I had to be sure your shields weren’t just a one-time thing. Maybe they wear down fast. I believe it’s my duty to resist.”
Joe was wise to the director’s game. When the Falconer had disabled its stealth systems, only a few small Orion Guard patrol craft were nearby. It had taken only moments for the ISF cruiser to disable three of those ships, sending the rest fleeing to the far side of the station.
However, there was a significant Guard fleet presence in the Karaske System. An armada of over a thousand ships was advancing on the station, the first wave—containing over fifty vessels—was only thirty minutes away.
“You can quit stalling,” Joe informed the stationmaster. “I’m going to ask you one more time to disable your station’s shields and weapons.”
The director didn’t reply, and the station’s railguns fired another barrage at the Falconer.
“Wrong move,” Joe said, nodding to the captain.
“Atom beams,” Captain Tracey directed. “Full spread.”
The Falconer’s two dozen atom beams focused on a single point in the station’s shields, a location where several umbrellas met, and small gaps were present in the fields.
The shields held up better than Joe had expected, but the CriEn modules aboard the cruiser kept the beams powered for over a minute, relativistic atoms slamming into the protective fields enshrouding the station.
At sixty-seven seconds, Director Mendel called out his surrender, but it wasn’t quite fast enough, and the beams finally tore through the shield, slamming into one of the railguns and blasting it to slag.
Joe signaled to the gunner, and the beam cut out, the bridge crew watching with macabre fascination as chunks of the weapon sprayed out from the impact site, slamming into other sections of the massive station.
“Would you like to test me further?” Joe asked.
The stationmaster had grown ashen, but he still shook his head. “You don’t understand, I…I can’t. Animus won’t let me.”
“Animus?”
“The station’s AI. It’s taken over. We only had control over offensive weapons, but now it’s seized those as well.”
As though on cue, the remaining four railguns began firing on the Falconer. Fire control already had its orders, and the moment the station’s guns opened up, atom beams tore through the openings in the station’s shields, burning the incoming slugs away. Then they shredded the railguns, sending more chunks of slag spraying across the station. Luckily, most collided with internal emergency shielding this time.
Joe regarded the man on the holodisplay, watching as the director grew more and more pale as the seconds passed by.
“Well, Director Mendel,” he said at last. “I suppose there’s no reason to keep talking to you. Good luck.” He cut the connection and turned to the captain. “I’m going down with the Marines.”
She didn’t even blink, just nodded. “I already informed the lieutenant that he should save you a spot.”
“That transparent, am I?”
“If my children were down there, I’d’ve already passed the conn to my XO, sir.”
Joe barked a laugh and then glanced at the holotank, noting the hundreds of Orion Guard ships advancing on the Falconer.
“How many pico warheads do we have left?” he asked.
He knew the answer to the question, but wanted everyone on the bridge to hear it.
“Over a thousand, sir.”
“Then unleash hell, Captain.”
A feral grin formed on Tracey’s lips. “Yes, sir!”
THE MACHINES
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Core AI C&C Moon
REGION: Interstellar Space, Inner Praesepe Empire
Terrance shook his head, trying to focus on what the words meant, but he couldn’t seem to put them in the right order.
Exit? Oh, get out, I have to get out…but of what? A pod?
The voice sounded more insistent this time, and Ter
rance felt his senses sharpen as a stimulant flowed through his veins.
That was something he always liked about ISF armor: it didn’t talk to a person.
The release lever for the drop pod was right in front of his face, and Terrance reached up and yanked down hard. The cover fell off, and he found himself staring at a dark grey rock. It took a moment to realize that the pod was laying on its side, and he was looking at a hill.
A moment later, the seat released Terrance, and he rolled out onto the ground, where he rose into a crouch and scanned his surroundings. Behind him, the hill rose for about fifty meters before ending in a sharp crest that ran for at least a kilometer in either direction. Below, the ground gently sloped down to a series of low hillocks separated by cracks in the moon’s surface.
He looked further afield and could make out the rim of the crater in the distance, illuminated by the pale blue light of the Praesepe Cluster’s core stars.
Well, shit…I’m in the crater. That’s a bit off course.
While his armor’s systems triangulated his precise location, he reached back into the pod and pulled out his rifle. The weapon’s readouts showed it to be undamaged, as were his sidearm and shoulder-mounted railgun.
He searched for the combat net, but didn’t find any signal, which didn’t surprise him. The only logical scenario was that the shuttle had been shot down and the squads were scattered. No one was going to want to send out EM broadcasts in that situation.
Rendezvous points had been established in the crater in the event of just such a crash. The closest one was three kilometers from Terrance’s location, down the slope and across the crevasse-ridden terrain.
OK, Terrance, you just have to cross the several kilometers of hostile territory all by yourself. No big deal.
He took one last look around before activating his armor’s stealth and setting off.
Terrance soon discovered that much of the moon’s surface was covered in a few centimeters of loose dust, and with its fractional gravity, the fine powder was easy to kick up. Though it settled within a few seconds, leaving footprints was inevitable—not to mention that, after a few paces, his legs were covered in the dust.
Even so, he decided that some stealth was better than none, and continued to move at a pace that was a good mix of speed and dust disturbance.
The slope was covered in loose scree that was obscured by the dust, and he had to pick his way down carefully, twice stepping on a rock that rolled under his foot, only his a-grav systems keeping him from slipping and tumbling down the slope.
He kept waiting for a shot to come out of nowhere and take him down, but he made it to the bottom of the slope without trouble. Once there, he moved to the lee of a small hillock and released a pair of drones to give him sight into the valleys and crevasses ahead.
He ran his passive scan and determined the hundred meters to be clear of enemies, then moved from cover and reached one of the cracks in the moon’s surface. It was only a meter across and appeared to go no deeper than a dozen meters, but he was still grateful for the moon’s partial gravity, which allowed him to sail over it with no concern of falling into the depths.
Ahead, he could see that several of the gashes were much wider, and likely much deeper. Some of them might require the use of his a-grav to make it over, though he worried that the burst of gravitons would compromise his stealth.
Still, better than falling and getting stuck.
Several minutes later, he was approaching the rendezvous point and still hadn’t seen sign of anyone—friend or foe. It was beginning to feel more than a little eerie, as though he was the only one on the moon.
That feeling made it a welcome surprise when an EM burst flared to his left, and he saw an electron beam flash above the same ridge he’d crashed into.
A moment later, he saw a pair of figures reach the top and swing over the crest, bounding down the long slope, making for the hillocks dotting the crater’s floor.
One was wearing TSF armor, and the other was in an ISF build.
He hadn’t spotted any pursuers yet, but by the speed at which the two figures were moving, he knew they weren’t running for fun.
Terrance focused his attention on the ridgeline above Sue and Jordan, his rifle tucked against his shoulder and sweeping side to side, along with his eyes.
After a few seconds of nothing, a dark shape appeared at the top of the hill. It was a little difficult to see, and he realized it was stealthed, but also covered in dust. The thing had four legs and a long head. Its elongated body made him think of a panther.
Not bothering with further observations, he fired with his rifle’s electron beam, as well as his shoulder-mount railgun. The shots struck the thing and knocked it off the hill’s crest, though he had no idea if they’d dealt disabling levels of damage.
No sooner had he fired than another panther-drone appeared on the ridge, and he unleashed his arsenal on it as well.
A voice from the past reminded him, ‘You’ve given away your position! Move!’ and he scampered to another location behind the hillock, watching the ridgeline with his overhead drones and firing twice more at the panthers.
After the fourth barrage, they didn’t reappear, and he wondered if the things were all destroyed, when his armor blared an alert.
His HUD highlighted a missile as it arched high over the ridge. Without any prompting, his railgun tracked it and fired, but missed as the homing shot jinked to the side.
Terrance cursed under his breath and looked for better cover, considering diving down one of the crevasses, when a shot came from Sue and Jordan’s position, blowing the missile out of the black sky above.
Before he had a chance to reply, Terrance’s drones spotted two more of the panther-drones on the ridgetop, but not before they opened fire, striking close to his position.
Jordan didn’t speak as she fired on the panthers, and once they were distracted, Terrance added a few shots with his railgun, once again knocking them back over the edge.
He turned toward their destination once more, about to compliment the lieutenant on her shooting, when a barely perceptible shape leapt out of a nearby crevasse. Kinetic rounds spewed from its weapons, and Terrance dove to the side, scampering away from the shots as they trailed after—several hitting his legs.
He brought his rifle to bear and fired on the panther, but it was gone. Frantically, Terrance scanned the area, his HUD showing nothing.
No sooner ha
d he spoken those words than rounds struck his torso, and Terrance rolled over to see the panther leaping toward him.
His railgun tracked the origin point of the incoming rounds, and fired. A trio of one-gram pellets struck the panther at nearly seven kilometers per second, tearing into whatever part of it was doing the shooting and knocking the creature back.
Rising, Terrance fired a burst from his electron rifle at the thing, burning away half its body. .
They reached the rendezvous point a few minutes later, and as luck would have it, three fireteams from squad two and one from squad one arrived not long after.
Jordan was checking over her people and discussing sending out a scouting party, while Terrance and Sue were talking about how to reach the Cora’s Triumph.
Sue let the statement hang between them for a moment while Terrance let his mind shift to what their chances were if the TSF cruiser had been taken out.
It’s just busy. There’s no way the enemy can take out a stasis ship.
But even as he thought the words, he knew that there were ways to breach even stasis shields. If Airtha possessed DMG weapons, it was reasonable to assume the core AIs did as well.
Even so, he refused to believe that the Triumph was gone. DMGs were not sneaky weapons; Beatrice would have seen one coming, and Earnest would have pulled something out of his sleeve.
