by M. D. Cooper
“I’m rescuing him, I just didn’t have the opportunity to convince him.” A1 half-turned and gestured to the datastore cylinder E12 held. “That is all that remains of your other clones. Animus believes that you are all clones, that the original Garza is lost. He’s making a metamind, a non-sentient amalgamation of every version of you. He plans to keep one as a puppet.”
“Again, we’re back to the puppeting,” the man before her sneered, nodding to the clone behind A1. “What did you plan to do with him?”
“Nothing, I’m just taking him away from Animus,” A1 reiterated, her tone almost imploring. “I could tell he wasn’t you, Garza. I of all people should be able to tell. I know who you are, and I know clones. You, though…you are the original, I can see it.”
A1 explained.
As she spoke to her sister, Garza’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “Animus is countering your story quite well. He claims you’re an imposter.”
“Of course he would,” Cary said. “But why don’t you ask yourself why there aren’t any other clones of yourself on the station. I assume you would know by now if there were others. Check the logs. A dozen have returned in the last few weeks, yet none have departed. Where are they?”
She gestured once more to the cylinder E12 held.
“They’re here,” she continued. “And that’s where you were going to be before long. That’s where this other poor copy of you was going to be. Come, we have to go. I’ve tapped the ISF cruiser’s comms, and they’re going to drop a picobomb on the station.”
A1 was glad to see that the use of the word ‘pico’ brought a modicum of fear and worry to the general’s face, though he still held his ground.
“You’re right,” he said at last. “I—there’s no record of them…at all.”
“Secret from who?” Garza demanded. “From me? Does that mean you sent them?”
As he said the words, his fear disappeared, and Garza’s expression was only one of rage. He turned to the company of soldiers behind him.
“Captain. Get to Animus’s core and extract it. Then get to your ship and meet us at Regulus.”
The Orion Guard soldier snapped off a salute, and all but one squad of soldiers exited the bay.
“Well?” Garza nodded at the Widows’ shuttle behind them. “What are we waiting for?”
A1 didn’t like an element of the man’s posture, nor something in the stance of his troops. She knew that she could destroy them all with little effort, but as she looked into the general’s eyes and then back at the other clone behind her, a notion came to her mind.
An idea about how she might still be able to strike the blow she’d hoped to against her enemies.
“Yes.” She nodded to her Widows. “Everyone aboard!”
The Widow placed her hands on her hips, staring down at A1 from her position halfway up the ramp. She held the stance for a few seconds, but then the deck bucked, and the sound of a distant explosion thundered through the passageway outside.
E12 turned without a word and raced up the ramp. A1 followed, standing at the entrance as the last of Garza’s soldiers followed after.
Her hand was about to hit the shuttle’s door control when she saw a station security car race into the bay and slide to a halt a dozen meters from the shuttle. A figure exited, and A1 recognized ISF armor instantly. Moments later, an IFF signal reached her, marking the person as ‘Adm. Joseph Evans’.
A lump formed in A1’s throat, and she held up her hand, turning it and waving it side to side, with her palm toward her face. Then she forced it back down, returning it to the door control to close the hatch.
* * * * *
Joe stared open-mouthed as the shuttle containing his daughters lifted off the cradle and flew out of the station.
The visual of his daughter—who he knew to be Cary, from her wave—was burned in his retinas.
When she was a child, Cary had spent half her life on the back of a horse. Often, she’d be out riding in the pasture when dinnertime came. He’d call her in, and when she gave that wave, it had always been a sign that she wasn’t ready yet and just wanted to spend a little more time with her animals.
A silent demand he’d given in to more often than he should have.
“Fuck!” he swore aloud and turned to the sergeant.
“Stars, Cary…what are you doing?” Joe whispered. “You’re killing me with this.”
* * * * *
E12 was silent for a moment, but A1 could tell that she was less than receptive, by the Widow’s body language.
The silence stretched to a full minute before her sister finally exclaimed,
E12’s tirade cut off as A1 triggered the programming F11 and R329 had created to make the Widows more compliant. It had been designed not to affect the four women masquerading as Widows, but A1 had removed that protection in preparation for an event such as this.
The other Widow didn’t move for a few seconds, then she nodded.
A1 couldn’t help but smile behind her helmet’s faceshield as she turned back to look out the forward display of her ship.
So close. I’m so close to achieving what I’ve always wanted.
WAR CRIMINALS
STELLAR DATE: 10.12.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Core AI C&C Moon
REGION: Interstellar Space, Inner Praesepe Empire
The beleaguered group of humans and the one AI made it to the relative cover of the single low hillock in the lee of the ridgeline without taking any losses. Though that wasn’t to say that they hadn’t been hit.
Every member of the team had taken rounds from the encroaching panthers in the mad dash for cover, and their armor was bent and bloodied.
She tore off one of its legs, and Terrance added h
is own fire to the fray, ripping off another.
No one spoke further, other than to give freedom to cries of rage and anger as they fought a delaying action against the inevitable.
Hundreds of the panthers were advancing on the hillock, their fire only held in check out of care not to hit the leading edge of killing machines that were advancing on the defenders.
Terrance was wondering if he should just suggest to Sue that she detonate one of the antimatter bombs and make it fast, when she shouted a reminder.
Amidst the fighting, he’d forgotten about the counter on his HUD, the timer for when the larger antimatter bomb was to go off.
The squad rolled to the base of the hill, forming a pile of armored bodies, all praying that the panthers wouldn’t top the rise before the blast came.
Terrance saw one of the killing machines appear on the hillock’s crest a second before the timer hit zero. He didn’t bother to fire, only grinned like an idiot as a wall of plasma and rock wiped the panther from view as though it had been an errant smudge on his vision.
He laughed like a fool as the ground bucked and heaved. He was certain they’d all be covered in an avalanche, or be blasted over the ridge, or fall into the inevitable hole in the ground, but somehow, none of those things happened.
A minute later, the last of the debris had come down, and the soldiers pulled themselves free of the half-meter of rock and dust that covered them.
They laughed with wild abandon when they saw that most of the hillock was gone, as was the army of panthers that had been advancing on them. Where the crater floor had covered the cave below, there was now a gaping pit, and a wall of dust and debris rising around it, slowly settling in the distance.
Terrance walked over to her, feeling aches all across his body.
* * * * *
Joe watched from the cockpit of the Marine shuttle as the Perilous Dream eased away from Durgen Station. The closest jump gate was nearly an hour away; he was confident that the Falconer could catch the Widows’ ship and disable its engines before his daughters could make the jump.
I’m not going to watch my girls take another jump away on that damn ship.
He knew that something must have gone wrong with Cary, some part of her conditioning had settled too deeply in her mind. There was no way that the woman he had raised would blindly disregard everything she had been trained to do on a mission such as this.
She just turned away from me.
The thought echoed in his mind, and it took raw force of will to quash it. Worry wouldn’t help him now, only sheer determination.
Joe pulled his thoughts back to the visual on the shuttle’s forward display, and saw something separating from the Perilous Dream’s bow.
“Shit.”
He slumped back in his seat, recognizing the jump gate that was deploying in front of the black ship. It only took five minutes for it to assemble and activate. He watched with mounting despair as the ship bearing his daughters and a dear friend surged forward and then disappeared.
His only hope was to once again follow after his girls and try to get to them sooner, try to keep them from going forward with whatever scheme Cary had cooked up.
He clung to that scrap of a plan while awaiting the captain’s confirmation that they had taken control of the gate…. Right up to the moment that the gate deactivated and broke apart, the disparate segments of the ring drifting away through space.
Admiral Joseph Evans fell back in his seat, thankful that his helmet hid the tears of anguish and frustration that spilled down his cheeks.
PART 6 – FORWARD
REFLECTION
STELLAR DATE: 10.15.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS I2
REGION: Interstellar Space, Inner Praesepe Empire
Three days later, Tangel slowly walked to the end of the dock, savoring the few minutes away from the crushing responsibility of her day-to-day life.
She stood there for several minutes; unable to come up with a good reason to walk back up to her house, she settled to the deck and pulled off her boots before tugging up her pant legs. Her socks fell to the wooden planks next to her, and a moment later, the warm skin on her feet met the cool water of the lake.
A slow breath left her lungs, and she closed her eyes, imagining that she was back on Carthage, that the house behind her was on a planet’s surface, not inside a habitation cylinder attached to a massive starship.
The feeling was comforting for a moment, but the longer she imagined it, the less satisfying it felt. She realized that Sera had been right about where her home really was; it wasn’t back at Carthage, on Knossos Island. It was here in Ol’ Sam, at her lakehouse where she’d spent over half her life.
“Stars, I’m starting to feel old,” she whispered.
Her words met with silence, and she laughed softly.
“I can see the stars through a ship’s hull, Jessica. Trust me, I can see you no matter how quiet you are.”
“Seriously?” the lavender-skinned woman said from a meter behind Tangel. “You can see through the hull?”
“Told you that you can’t sneak up on her,” Sera said from further down the dock. “Not sure why you wanted to.”
“She was going to push me into the lake,” Tangel replied, craning her head around to look into Jessica’s eyes. “Weren’t you?”
“It had crossed my mind.”
“Then I’d be the one in the lake,” Jessica said as she settled next to Tangel and pulled her shoes off, her feet meeting the water a moment later.
the AI said with a laugh.
Sera settled on Tangel’s left, her boots taking a moment longer to get off, and then her red feet joined Tangel’s pink ones and Jessica’s purple ones in the cool water.
“You know that you two clash, right?” Tangel asked. “Purple and red just don’t go. I don’t care what anyone says.”
Sera’s feet changed color to match Tangel’s, and Tangel glanced at the former president in shock.
“Stars, Sera, I can’t remember the last time you looked natural.”
“Just trying it out. I like variety, you know. Even ‘normal’ is a type of variety.”
Tangel glanced at Jessica, who shook her head.
“Core, no. You’re not getting me to go pink. You have no idea how silly you all look, being fleshy all the time.”
Sera snorted, and Tangel laughed, shaking her head at the delightful absurdity of Jessica’s statement.
“What a week,” she said after silence had fallen and held for a minute. “The freaking epitome of ‘you win some, you lose some’.”
“Sorry for being the loss at Khardine,” Sera said. “I wish we’d done that better. Everything else would be a lot easier if I hadn’t screwed that up.”
“Fucking Caretakers are popping up like cockroaches,” Jessica replied, reaching around Tangel to place a hand on Sera’s shoulder. “Not your fault one was at Khardine messi
ng with the QC network.”
“A huge pain in the ass, though,” Tangel said. “Good thing a lot of ships had blades connected to the backup hub at New Canaan—though we have to assume that the Caretakers are going to strike there next.”
“And that they have quantum communication systems now, too,” Sera added dismally.
“Well, Sue got a lot of data from them as well,” Tangel said, looking for silver linings. “And we’re going to be able to use their own tools to correct the star’s positions in the cluster.”
“And we bagged a number of Caretakers,” Jessica said.
Neither of the other women spoke further, and Tangel felt the silence settle over them like a blanket.
She knew they wanted to support her but just didn’t know what to say—something which she found no fault in them for. She didn’t know what to say, either.
It was Sera who finally spoke up.
“We’ll find them. No matter what.”
“Yeah,” Jessica nodded. “Top priority.”
“Joe’s killing himself over it.” Tangel sighed. “He wanted to give them free rein, not have a knee-jerk ‘dad’ reaction, but now he thinks we went too far…. Maybe we did. I blame myself, I should have been there.”
“You can’t be everywhere,” Sera said, and then she gave a rueful chuckle. “And don’t you even think about cloning. Look where that’s gotten us.”
Tangel nodded, knowing that Sera was trying to be supportive—in her own way. “They’re not dead, they’re just gone. In fact, the biggest problem is that Cary’s too much like me. Running off without a plan, getting herself in trouble.” She said the words in an effort to convince herself, uncertain if it was having any effect on her state of mind.
“I call that a good thing, then.” Jessica kicked a foot out, sending a spray of water across the lake. “Because last I checked, Tangel, you kick a lot of ass, and no one has ever taken you down.”
