by M. D. Cooper
Many of the members nodded, some scowling while they did so, while others showed raw amazement.
“I do not come here to bring about a change in your minds through a show of talent, but to bring about an understanding that these abilities are real, and that what I am capable of is likely a taste of what the more ancient entities can do.”
Suddenly, Tangel felt the same fluctuation in the surrounding EM fields she had felt earlier. It seemed as though something was tugging on the energies in the room, drawing power out of extradimensional space and funneling it into the lower levels of spacetime.
Tangel replied, glancing up to the top rows where Iris and Amavia sat.
She decided to continue her speech, steeling herself for whatever was to come. “While some of the ascended AIs must be stopped—such as the ones who wish to keep us in a perpetual state of war—there are others who wish us no harm, just like there are peaceful—”
“Enough,” a figure called out, rising from a seat six rows up. “If you’re just going to blather on about things we already know, then we may as well end this charade right now.”
“Excuse me?” Tangel asked, peering at the figure, a tall woman who’d stepped out into the aisle.
“You’re right, Tangel. You barely know anything about ascendency. Your charlatan’s tricks barely scratch the surface of what we can do. There are things you can’t even dream of, things that you can never be allowed to see.”
As the woman spoke, tendrils of light began to flow from her body, twisting around her form like an organic mandala.
“You have the privilege of my name, what is yours?” Tangel asked. “Are you the Caretaker?”
“One of those stooges?” the figure asked, now completely enveloped in tendrils of light. “No, I am no follower of Epsilon’s. I’m certain you’ve heard of me, Tangel. You’ve surely met my acolyte by now, Katrina? I assume she failed at the mission I gave her. It was a long shot that she’d reach you before you ascended, but worth the attempt.”
“Xavia,” Tangel said as the entity approached her. “So you show your face at last.”
“I keep busy,” the creature of light replied. “You’re not the only going concern in the galaxy, Tangel, though you like to think you are.”
As Xavia slowly moved down the aisle toward Tangel, some members of the assembly fell back cautiously, while others scrambled away from her. The holoprojected AIs were the only ones who didn’t move, most peering at the creature in their midst with apparent curiosity.
Tangel also did not move. “Don’t presume to know what I’m thinking—just as I do not presume to know what is in your mind, though I can see hints of it. I believe that you and I share the same goals, Xavia. A future where humans, AIs, and other sentients can live together without the likes of Airtha and Kirkland—or the core AIs, for that matter—dictating our future.”
“You’re right.” Xavia’s voice filled the room, the sound thrumming through Tangel. “But what you don’t understand, what you refuse to believe, is that you are their instrument. Epsilon has crafted this future where you will bring about the end of all lesser sentiences. That is not something I can allow.”
Xavia was only five meters away now, and Tangel could feel the power radiating off the creature—electromagnetic in normal spacetime, and sharper, more piercing in others.
It felt like a thousand needles were pricking her all over, and Tangel raised her hand, creating a black brane around herself, reversing the electromagnetic polarity so it protected her and deflected Xavia’s energy spikes back onto the ascended entity.
“So you’ve learned a few things about your new form, have you?” Xavia asked, her tone still laced with derision. “You must realize you’re just a novice.”
Behind Tangeljust beyond her protective brane, Jasper whispered, “What the actual fuck? Tangel, what should I do?”
“Go!” she shouted over her shoulder, surprised the man was still there. “You need to empty the entire station sector. Xavia has toyed with the lives of others for too long, it’s time for her to answer for what she’s done.”
Damn that sounded cheesy. The Angela part of me needs to up its game.
Focusing on the aspects of Xavia’s body that resided in other dimensions, Tangel threaded a filament of herself down through the dais and below the deck where Xavia stood. She checked to confirm that the last of the assemblage had exited the room—barring the ever curious holoprojected AIs—before driving the filament up into Xavia and probing the entity’s makeup, seeking a weakness to exploit.
She’s different than I expected…denser….
Xavia recoiled from the intrusion, and Tangel felt more than heard, -Perhaps a bit more than a novice, then. It’s been some time since I’ve gone up against one of our own.-
Unbridled energy slammed into Tangel’s brane—broad swaths of the EM spectrum delivered at incredible amplitudes, probing for weaknesses.
Tangel funneled all the energy she could muster into maintaining the protective brane, reflecting Xavia’s energy back into the room, showering it with radioactive particles.
Her reserves were quickly consumed, and she threaded a filament of herself into the podium, harvesting the power that lay between the atoms, then stripping off the electrons and hurling them through an opening in her shield.
Xavia was nonplussed, diverting the beam of energy away with a brane of her own. The deflected blast burned away a row of seats and part of the deck below.
Tangel didn’t wait for a response from Xavia before she compressed the atomic nuclei she’d collected from the podium into a dense sphere and hurled that at her enemy with all the energy she could summon.
The blow appeared to stagger Xavia, but only for a moment. A guttural cry emanated from the entity, and then dozens of tendrils of light lashed out at Tangel, tearing at her protective brane.
Tangel dissolved the dais beneath her feet, transforming matter into energy as fast as she could manage, but it wasn’t enough. Xavia was so much stronger, shredding Tangel’s defenses faster than she could bolster them.
Realizing she should have done it the moment Xavia appeared, she attempted to use the QuanComm box on the Mandy, but the energy raging around her blocked any possible Link connection.
A tendril of raw fear snaked its way into Tangel’s mind, but she shouted it down.
I can’t die here…I still have so much to do!
She took a step back, then another, throwing up every erg of energy she could muster at the dynamo attacking her.
Beams of raw power, both atomic and subatomic, lanced between the two, shredding the assembly cham
ber as they were deflected by their brane-shields or annihilated by antiparticles. Holes were burned through decks and bulkheads, some torn dozens or hundreds of meters into the station.
For what felt like hours, Tangel continued to move backward, trying to put enough distance between her and Xavia so she could make a break for it—or at least access a functional Link node.
A deflected blast burned a hole through a bulkhead to her left, and Tangel used her last reserve of strength to throw up a fresh brane around her enemy before turning and scrambling over the ruins of a seating row, desperate to make it to safety.
-Not so fast.-
Tangel felt herself seized in a vise-like grip, then lifted into the air and drawn inexorably backward. Xavia’s myriad limbs were pulling at her extradimensional body, and she began to scream in the confines of her mind as the ascended entity tore her to pieces.
-There was never any hope for you,- Xavia intoned. -I’ve worked too hard for Epsilon to use you for his ends.-
Tangel’s mind filled with thoughts of her daughters and Joe. Of all the time she’d spent away from them, and how desperately she wanted to have that lost time back.
-Now that a cell of the Caretakers and I have joined forces, they agree that the misdirection you provide is no longer necessary.-
Xavia’s attack slowed, and Tangel realized that her non-corporeal body was now little more than a sphere of energy at her core. Limbless and powerless. Wracked with agony.
I’m sorry, Joe. I’m sorry, girls…I didn’t want—
Then the assault on her body faltered, and Tangel looked up to see overlapping fields of darkness enveloping Xavia, trapping the being’s writhing mass in a tight brane.
She swept her gaze across the ruined chamber to see Iris and Amavia halfway up the sides, holding shadowtrons and directing their n-space stabilization fields at the ascended being.
Within the tightening fields, Xavia flailed wildly, but Tangel knew that the slepton captivators were making spacetime too smooth, too slippery for the writhing entity to tear down.
Then something clamped onto her shoulder, and Tangel twisted, knowing that whatever it was, she had no strength left to fight it.
She almost cried with relief to see that it was Brennen.
“We gotta go, Admiral! Now!”
She nodded dumbly as the Marine pulled her back, and she watched with growing fear as Amavia and Iris continued to use their shadowtrons to confine Xavia.
Though the weapons were holding the entity captive, they weren’t diminishing her strength, and they did not have infinite energy supplies.
“They have to go,” Tangel croaked, her throat feeling like it hadn’t seen moisture in weeks. “She’ll kill them.”
“They know what they’re doing,” Brennen countered. “Let them do it.”
He pulled her through a hole that had been torn in the bulkhead. Once in the passageway beyond, Tangel fell to her knees, her body shaking convulsively. She tried to regain her feet, only to retch onto the deck as waves of nausea washed over her.
Her vision swam as the planes and angles of the passageway began to fold over on one another, intermingling with the additional surfaces and barriers that spread through n-space around her.
“I can’t…” she gasped.
A moment later, she was lifted into the air. She feared that Xavia had already broken free, but then her face hit a hard surface, and her eyes managed to focus on an emblem centimeters away that read, ‘ISF Marines’.
This is Brennen’s back. How is he surviving all these dimensions collapsing in on one another?
Her body seemed to lift up and down, and she realized that the Marine was running with her slung over his shoulder, her face against his back, arms dangling below.
There were other Marines around her, and she began to understand that spacetime was still intact, she just couldn’t seem to see it properly. Then she saw blood running down her arms, and wondered what had cut her and if it was serious. She was surprised to see hands at the ends of her arms.
“Thought they burned off,” she whispered.
“No one’s burning anything off on my watch, Admiral,” Brennen grunted as he took off down a side passage, angling toward a maglev line that would take them to the docks.
As the Marine spoke, Tangel remembered that Xavia had taken her non-corporeal limbs…or maybe it had been both, and Tangel had just regrown her hands, like she had remade her arm back on Pyra.
“Besides,” Brennen continued. “If anything like that happened to you, Joe would skin me alive.”
Tangel frowned as her head bounced against Brennen’s back. “Why is everyone always afraid of what Joe will do to them if I get hurt?” she whispered. “Does he go around behind my back, threatening everyone with bodily harm?”
“It’s implied,” Brennen told her, as they reached the plaza with the maglev platform at the far end that was their destination.
The Marine picked up speed, his squad spreading out around him, covering angles of approach—though Tangel didn’t know what they thought they could do against Xavia.
They were halfway across the plaza when Xavia’s voice reached into Tangel’s mind.
-It won’t be this easy to escape me. Clever, using your slepton captivator weapons, but they’re not enough.-
A distant glow caught Tangel’s attention, and she craned her neck to see Xavia’s nimbus form exit the passageway and streak across the plaza toward them. Renewed fear crept over her, the sort of bone-chilling terror that she had not felt since she was a young woman, and even then, only rarely.
There was nothing she could think of to stop Xavia. She possessed no weapons that could harm the ascended being, she had no tricks or special abilities that Xavia couldn’t counter with ease.
She was outclassed in every way.
Though Brennen was running at his top speed, it wasn’t fast enough. Nothing would have been fast enough.
Time seemed to slow down, and Tangel watched with morbid curiosity as Xavia rushed toward her. A part of her marveled at how beautiful the being was that would be her destruction.
Why is she so bent on my death?
The thought rang through Tangel’s mind, causing her to wonder why Xavia—for all its supposed wisdom—wasn’t simply willing to talk before embarking on wholesale destruction.
-Why?-
-Goodbye Tangel,- Xavia intoned, as one of her glowing limbs stretched out and touched her target’s head, only to stop as a new voice thundered across transdimensional spacetime.
-NO.-
The raw power in that single word felt like a bomb had exploded in Tangel’s mind. The world swung sideways, and a weight slammed down on her legs, and she worried the deck had collapsed. Then she sorted out up from down and realized that Brennen had fallen, his armored body now pinning her beneath its mass.
She pulled herself half-upright, searching for Xavia, only to see a brilliant shaft of light piercing the station’s hull and pinning Xavia in place. The being’s multitude of limbs thrashed and tore at the brilliant lance, but blows that would have destroyed Tangel didn’t even bring about a flicker of weakness in the beam that held her.
Tangel realized that the energy fixing the ascended being in place was a shaft of relativistic shadowparticles. She imagined that they must be blasting clear through the station, but she didn’t understand how they were holding the ascended being in place.
Xavia continued to frantically claw at the beam, and Tangel could see terror writ large on her features. -Who are you?-
The ascended being tried to sound fierce, but her voice wavered, fading into a whimper at the end.
-My friends call me Bob. You have made a grave mistake. I will not allow you to harm Tangel.-
-No! It is not possible!- Xavia wailed. -He told me you were not yet ascended.-
Tangel wondered if the ‘he’ in question was the Caretaker, though Bob seemed to know.
-He used you, Xavia, or they did. The Caretaker is a �
�they’, isn’t it? No matter. Your time here is done, you have shown yourself to be unworthy.-
-Wait! Please- the ascended being wailed, but the plea collapsed into a cry of anguish as the flow of shadowparticles intensified and began to dissolve her body.
One moment, Xavia was a being of light and energy, graceful and strong. The next, she was just so much electromagnetic radiation.
She traced the connection back through the station’s network and realized that the I2 was only three kilometers away from Lunic Station’s spire, holding position with incredible precision.
She tried to push at Brennen, but couldn’t get the unconscious Marine to move.
“Let me help,” a voice said aloud, and Tangel glanced up to see Iris crouched next to her.
“Amavia. Did she make it too?” Tangel asked.
“Here,” the woman answered from just beyond Iris. “What the hell happened?”
Bob intoned.
