by M. D. Cooper
Brennen groaned as Iris set him back down, and he glanced around until his eyes alighted on Tangel. The tension flowed out of his shoulders at the sight of her.
He smiled weakly before asking, “Did we all die?” Then he groaned again and lifted a hand to his head. “I’m pretty sure I remember dying.”
“We were Bob’d,” Tangel replied, agreeing with the gist of Brennen’s sentiment.
Her head felt like it had been split open, and she wasn’t certain how much of that was from her attacker and how much from her rescuer.
WIDOWS
STELLAR DATE: 10.03.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lunic Station
REGION: Aldebaran, League of Sentients Space
C139 watched the feeds from the assembly for the seventh time. She had trouble understanding what she was seeing, and multiple viewings were not greatly aiding her.
It was apparent that the one called Xavia was an ascended being, but it also appeared that Tanis Richards—who seemed to be called Tangel—was now one as well.
For a time, it seemed as though Xavia would satisfy C139’s mission parameters on her behalf…but then Tangel’s people saved her using weapons that appeared capable of stopping an ascended being, at least for a short time.
The flood of new variables upended all her plans for how the mission should play out, going so far as to cast doubt on the wisdom of continuing with her orders at all.
That Tangel had survived the assault by the ascended being—with some sort of as-yet undetermined aid from her ship—was reason enough to believe that C139’s team may not possess the means to kill her.
However, from the solid intel her team had managed to glean, there were two avenues they could pursue. The first was further intelligence gathering; simply put, they could capture either of the diplomats, Iris or Amavia. One of them could function as both intelligence source and bait for a trap.
The second was to carry out the attack on Tangel as planned. As unbelievable as it seemed, the woman—if that’s what she still was—was remaining at Aldebaran, still focused on her mission to bring the League of Sentients into her alliance.
C139 nodded to herself as she considered this new information.
She knew that this was not what Unit A1 had planned, but the mission goal remained the same: eliminate Tangel, thus breaking the foundations of the Scipio Alliance.
THE SHARD
STELLAR DATE: 10.04.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: River Station, Styx Baby-9
REGION: STX-B17 Black Hole, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
“Well?” Seraphina asked, as Earnest slotted the shard’s core into an isolated system.
“Easy now, girl. You’re up here,” Finaeus held his hand out above his head, “and you need to bring it down here.” He drew his hand down to waist-level.
Seraphina pursed her lips, and Fina put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’re all anxious. Plan B sucks, so we all want something that uses this shard to work.”
Earnest glanced up at Sera, Seraphina, Fina, and Katrina. “You four are two of my favorite people in the universe, but can you GTFO? I’m trying to activate a ridiculously dangerous shard in an expanse that is crafted to make it think that it’s not in an expanse.”
“So you’re saying you like us, Earnest?” Fina asked with a wink, causing the engineer to groan and wave a hand in dismissal.
“OK, girls,” Sera said, gesturing toward the door. “I guess the grumpy old men will let us know when it’s time to shoot things. Let’s go check out that bar that just opened up on Spire 72.”
“Wait.” Katrina held up a hand, locking eyes with Earnest. “Is the core viable, though? Not damaged?”
“Seems good at first blush, but I’ll know more in a few hours. We need to walk through all her matrices while she’s in a semi-dormant state. If they all pass muster, Finaeus and I will spark her up and pore through every iota of data she has to see if there is something we can use to craft a targeted phage.”
“Right,” Finaeus nodded. “Then we’ll all get to go find out if whatever we come up with will work on the real Airtha.”
Katrina gave a resigned nod. “OK…well, you know where to find us.”
“Spire 72, got it.” Earnest turned away, pulling up a stacked array of holodisplays.
“Wait!” Finaeus glanced back at Sera. “While you’re down there, send up a runner with a platter of wings and a pitcher of beer. The red.”
“Seriously?” Earnest asked, shaking his head.
“Respect your elders.” Finaeus shook an interface probe at Earnest.
The inventor winked at him, pointing at the interface probe that he’d already set into the AI core. “Eat your wings, old man. I’ve got this.”
Out in the passageway, Katrina gave a final worried look at the engineers. “I’ve seen Earnest work miracles, and I should trust him, but if this doesn’t work….”
“It’ll work.” Sera gave Katrina a winning smile. “Earnest on his own may allow for some doubt, but him and Finaeus? They’re going to ace this.”
“Sure,” Katrina nodded. “I just worry that I wasted so much of my life doing Xavia’s bidding, all to get me to kill Tanis…this is the one good thing—”
“Spit it out, then, Jen,” Fina insisted.
Katrina’s mouth fell open, and Sera stuttered in shock, “Ah-I-is Tangel alright?”
“Well, then,” Fina slapped Katrina’s back. “Looks like your day just got a lot better. Let’s go drink to Xavia’s demise.”
“Guess so. I’ll call the crew and Kara down, too. They’ll be glad for the news.”
REPAIRS
STELLAR DATE: 10.04.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Bob’s Primary Node, ISS I2
REGION: Lunic Station, Aldebaran, League of Sentients Space
“Why do I feel like I’ve been called into the admiral’s office every time I come in here,” Tangel muttered as she palmed open the door to Bob’s primary node.
“I don’t do ‘foolish’ things,” she shot back. “I do necessary things. We’ve been over this. For me, dangerous and foolish are not the same.”
“Sure, yeah.” Tangel leant against the railing running around the edge of the catwalk. “You said things may be dangerous, not ‘Xavia can school you like you’re a five-year-old girl’. I didn’t bring the I2 because I was trying not to appear threatening the LoS.”
Tangel glanced up at Bob’s node, and a throaty chuckle slipped past her lips. “Yeah, parking the I2 a few klicks off their capital and then blasting a stream of relativistic particles through it sorta put them on edge.”
“It was a stupid thing for them to think to begin with,” Tangel replied wearily.
Even though she’d had a day to recover from Xavia’s attack, she still felt exhausted. She’d tried to consume raw energy in an attempt to replenish her stores, but it felt as though every bit of strength left her the moment she drew it in.
“I’m not sure. I don’t have any physical injuries…. Well, not anymore. Thank stars I’d gone for that new skin that’s all the rage. If not, I’d be growing a new epidermis now.”
Tangel shifted her vision and looked at the small glowing core that was the remains of her extra-dimensional form. She knew that somehow it needed to regrow and repair, but she didn’t understand how she’d created it in the first place.
“I’m a pretty sorry ascended being,” she muttered. “I can’t even figure out how remake myself. I’m just used to…you know…automatically healing after an injury. Maybe Cary can give me some pointers.”
Tangel gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Maybe I should get her to teach me.”
She looked up at the glowing AI core before her. She’d known that Bob could help her, but the prospect scared her a little. Something about his offer constituted a point of no return.
Then again, another encounter with one of Xavia’s ilk would be a point of no return as well.
“OK, Bob, lay it on me.”
Tangel nodded. That she had understood for some time. The universe was a tangled web of elements and energies that appeared to exist in different planes, but in reality, the disparate planes were simply points of limited bleedthrough of matter and energy from other dimensional spaces.
The dark layer was one such plane, a relatively stable segment of the universe that was easy to transition in and out of. It was also the only other one she knew of that could support ‘normal’ matter—so long as it was contained within a grav shield.
It was always at the edge of her vision. A looming nothing that, if not careful, she could slip into. Tangel hadn’t learned how to create gravitons yet, so she assumed that if she were to transition into the dark layer, it would be a one-way trip.
On the far side of her multi-dimensional visual spectrum were what she thought of as the ‘higher’ dimensions—though in reality, she suspected it was really just overlapping parallel slices of spacetime.
Those dimensions, of which she could directly perceive two, were ones where raw energy seemed to hold sway. The power between atoms—which was constantly pushing space apart—seemed to live there, or perhaps a part of it, at least.
Atoms themselves were not present in those dimensions, though their building blocks were, with more mass and energy than they possessed in normal spacetime.
It was all just layers of the same tapestry.
“Uh, sorry, got lost in thought there. Yes, I get that it’s all part of the same thing, though I suspect that I’m still just seeing a small slice of it all.”
“OK, I’m going to need you to be a bit less cryptic, Bob. See further how?”
A point of light appeared before Tangel, hovering in the space between her and Bob’s node.
“Light. A rather bright, piercing, white light.”
Tanis closed her eyes. It wasn’t required for her to perceive transdimensional space, but it helped to keep normal space from creeping into her vision.
“I see waves of photons spreading out from a single point. Though it’s a bit hard to make out. You’re rather luminous yourself.”
A laugh from the AI entered her mind.
“Sort of,” Tangel replied as she tasted the photons coming off the point of light Bob had manifested. “I know things there have mass, I just can’t quite see them as such. It’s like everything is flat.”
Tangel glanced down at the nimbus orb that was at the center of her being. “It has three dimensional qualities,” she said. “I see it radiating out across five separate planes, like a hypersphere of me.”
Tangel discarded the lower dimensions and, suddenly, the core of herself was all around, a two-dimensional disk that seemed to extend in all directions.
“Agh…that’s…I can’t make anything out.”
For a moment, the flat plane seemed to expand…opening up into a landscape of fluid shapes, where solids were liquid, and liquids were solid.
Then it was gone, and Tangel fell to her knees, gasping for breath.
“Fuuuuck,” she whispered in frustration. “I feel like my brain is splitting in half.”
Tangel nodded wearily, not bothering to rise. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the point of light, trying to see it as a three dimensional object, but only in the higher dimensions.
Try as she might, the visual would not come; the point of light remained obstinately flat.
Bob said after a moment.
“What?” Tangel asked in surprise, her eyes opening, and the double vision of normal spacetime with the extra energy dimensions layered on top snapped back into place around her. “I’ll die?”
“OK, OK,” Tangel muttered. “I get it, I was bad, I should have listened. If you’re not going to heal me, what are you going to do?”
Filaments of light stretched out from Bob’s primary core and dove into Tangel’s body. She tensed, fearing the pain Xavia’s assault had brought, but instead of agony, there was bliss. She wondered if Bob was healing her, but then a tingling sensation ran through her, and a switch flipped in her mind.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered, as new perception flooded into her.
Tangel nodded mutely.
Where before Bob’s limbs had appeared to be filaments of light, now they were solid objects, though indescribable in terms she knew. The only thing that seemed apt was that they were rivers, flowing down a mountain.
A mountain that stretched out to the edges of her vision.
She looked down at herself, a small orb hovering before Bob’s tremendous might. Where there should have been sinuous rivers, there was only small vents of gas, as though photonic waves were bl
eeding out into space, dissipating in the gravitational pull of Bob’s might.
-Do you see?- Bob asked, his voice rumbling all around her.
Tangel nodded. -I…I didn’t understand.-
-Welcome to reality. Now heal yourself.-
A minute later—or seconds, time seemed to flow entirely differently when she wasn’t perceiving ‘normal’ spacetime—she was whole again.
Unlike Bob’s mountain, Tangel seemed more like a willow, a strong core with sweeping limbs that drifted around her, shifting in hue and color as they draped across the landscape created by Bob’s presence.
-Good. You’re learning. Now do you understand why you couldn’t stop Xavia? You could barely even see her.-
-Do you think I could have defeated her if I had proper sight?- she asked.
-Perhaps.-
Tangel opened her eyes, allowing the double vision to settle into place and adjusting her perception of everything she saw to her newfound understanding.
-I get the feeling I’ll find out before long.-
UNDERSTANDING
STELLAR DATE: 10.04.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Observation Deck, TSS Cora’s Triumph
REGION: Trensch System, Inner Praesepe Empire
“OK,” Terrance said as he walked into the rear observation lounge of the Cora’s Triumph, an FGT research vessel. “Tell me about this amazing discovery you’ve made.”
At the window stood one of the FGT’s chief scientists in the field of stellar migration, a tall man named Wyatt. Arrayed around him were a dozen other scientists and a team of stellar engineering technicians.
Wyatt glanced over his shoulder at Terrance, and gave a quick nod before turning back to the display.
“You were right to send for us, Terrance Enfield,” the man said. “Things are definitely not normal here in the Praesepe Cluster. What do you know of stellar formation and migration?”
Terrance shrugged as he joined the throng at the window. “I’ve been in the black for a long time, I know that stars primarily form in stellar nurseries and then migrate out. Often, they migrate in groups. The result of that is an open cluster like Praesepe.”
