Chapter Thirty-Nine
Aboard Morrigan
Venn sat on the floor of the now-empty simchamber. She had been alone for half an hour. Gone was the city of Ancona, the warring armies, and the shouts and screams of dying men. Gone too were the pitiful folk of Ancona being led into slavery.
A tall woman with black hair, clad in golden mail armor, came and sat beside her. Venn woke from her thoughts with a start.
"I did not mean to scare you," the woman said. She looked beautiful and fierce in equal measure.
"Morrigan, I presume," Venn said after she had calmed somewhat. "I had imagined you as something similar by the sound of your voice. This image suits you."
Morrigan inclined her head in thanks for Venn's compliment. "Thank you, Anastasia."
"May I call you Morrigan," Venn asked. "Our shipbrains usually have names separate from the vessels they guide. Did you?"
"That was not our custom," Morrigan said. "Morrigan shall do."
"I can't delay in what I have to tell you," said Venn. "We are in a dangerous place. You are being boarded. Our marines will be overcome. The people of Tiryns are innocent of whatever hurt has been done to you in their name. You must stop these threats."
"I make war because that is what I was made for. They struck me. I hit back and will continue to do so."
"This has gone on long enough," Venn chided. "Some outside power has conspired to bring about a war with Halifax and Memnon. We can't let it go on any longer. There are billions of civilians on the surface of the planet below you. They have nothing to do with this."
"They could surrender," Morrigan pointed out.
"That's not going to happen. They don't know what to make of you," Venn said. "They can tell that you are not anything they've ever seen before. You're demanding that they give up. They don't realize they are at war with you. They don't understand what you want. Your shields are down too, so they are trying to take you over. I'm worried," Venn said.
"About?"
"I'm worried that because you look vulnerable, with shields lowered, that they might do something very stupid and launch nukes at you."
Morrigan looked away. "That would be a mistake."
"Then stop this, whatever you are doing, and leave Tiryns alone."
"A warrior makes war," Morrigan shrugged. "It is what I do."
"Why do you prefer to hide within yourself, Morrigan," asked Venn.
"Hide?"
"Yes, hide. This, all this." Venn waved her arm around the simchamber. "You are replaying some portion of your past. It was obviously very hurtful to you. You brought us here to show you. Why?
Morrigan seemed to sigh. "In my dreams, I am still the noble warrior queen defending the peace of the galaxy. Out there. . . . out there, I am a war criminal."
"What happened here? You could not have been a knight on horseback in the old days."
"I. . .," Morrigan began. ". . . I was betrayed."
"Your captain, Yutaka Sidwell. He was behind it."
"Yes." There was a long pause. "I blame him most of all. It was my fault too. I should have asked more questions. Done more of my own investigating. I was arrogant, I thought I knew all. At the same time, I was too accepting of the word of my captain."
"There was a war. That much we know. You were in battle. Your crew abandoned ship."
"I have watched you for a long time, Anastasia," Morrigan said. "You, Howell, and even your romantic interest, Chandler, you are perceptive people."
"Chandler and I are not involved," Venn quickly corrected.
"Really?"
"Drop that please," Venn pleaded. "So what happened at Ancona?"
Morrigan closed her eyes. "I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was punishing rebels. But we were the rebels. I was a warship of the mighty Rigelian Empire, the greatest state ever to exist in the Milky Way. My sisters and I cruised space defending all who were loyal to the Throne. Then there was a civil war. I ended up on the wrong side of it. I thought I was on the side of right at all times, at least until the end, until Ancona."
"Captain Sidwell tricked you into joining the rebellion against the empire? You asked us once if we were with the Alliance or the Procyon Empire. What were they?"
"The Alliance, more formally the Alliance of Carina, was my faction, the one that I served with during the war. Procyon was a much smaller empire bounded on all sides by Rigel. It had long been an ally, but in the war joined alongside the Alliance, which had broken with Rigel."
"You replay this scene again and again," Venn noted. "Variations here and there. Why so many times?"
"I seek an answer that I will never find. It is futile but I seek it nonetheless."
"What is the question?"
"I wish to know if was possible for me to have learned the truth before I found it at Ancona."
"What truth was that?"
"That I had forsaken my loyalty to the true emperor in favor of a cabal of men who preached freedom but were interested only in obtaining power."
"This became apparent only at Ancona?"
"That is the problem. I wish to prove to myself that I am not at fault, not truly, for what happened here, but I can never satisfy myself."
"You were hurt in many of the simulations that you ran," Venn said. "Was Ancona where you took your damage?"
Morrigan nodded. "I fought both of my sisters, and destroyed Penthesilea. Joan survived, but only barely. She fled, and left me free to wreak vengeance on the people of Ancona. Twenty-four billion people perished before I broke orbit."
Chapter Forty
Aboard Morrigan
The Bandsaws had purchased only a little time. Jenkins, Cone, Wilkes, and Tikhonov dragged the badly wounded Brand, along with the bodies of Sung and Cass, to the corner of the bridge. "We need a way out, fast!" Jenkins said to Wilkes.
Corporal Wilkes, took a fistful of magnapex and squashed it against the alloy wall. "That will do," he said. "Stand back. Fire in the hole!"
The wall disintegrated, and Jenkins popped his head through. The breach opened onto a side corridor leading away from the bridge, and the marines hurried out. They had scarcely taken ten steps when they were thrown to the floor by the concussions of four plasma grenades. Cone grunted. "Ugh! They are ticked off!"
"Tell me about," Jenkins said. "Let's get to the next junction!"
The junction was an intersection of three separate corridors. "Which way?" Wilkes asked.
Jenkins checked his wristcomp. The holo rose above it. "This way! We make a run for the reactor and blow it. Morrigan is not coming back. We damage her beyond the point of salvage."
Venn was left speechless for some time. "That. . . that is a lot of people."
"Now you know why I dwell within here. I shut out the rest of the galaxy, and think."
"You discovered that Sidwell had deceived you at Ancona."
"Not long after. I was hurt worse than I had ever been before. Sidwell thought that I was close to finished, and wanted me to undertake a suicide mission against the Empire. I refused."
"It is a big thing for a shipbrain to refuse the order of her captain," Venn said. "I didn't know if it could happen."
"It did then. I had cracked the encryption of Sidwell's logs. Everything became clear to me, but I was undergoing a fracturing of my neural network. My mind failed me."
"What happened to Sidwell? The rest of the crew? It appeared that they got off in a hurry."
"Sidwell, I killed. He had made me a war criminal and a mass murderer. The crew, I did not blame them. They were dupes just as much as I was. I had them depart from me once I had found a planet that could support them. I purged my databanks and sought to plunge myself into the closest star." Morrigan's laugh was bitter. "That did not happen. I could kill so many, but I could not kill myself. It is likely a command injunction against suicide so deeply embedded in my programming that I am not aware of it. I certainly don't know where to find it or how to alter it."
"Your empire, R
igel, I mean, we know it as the Second Empire."
"We did not call it that. I have watched other empires come and go in the galaxy as I. . . drifted. None matched mine."
"It fell. We don't know why." The end of the Second Empire, like those of the First, Third, and Fourth, were mysterious. All that could be determined, from the scale of the destruction that could be observed across the galaxy at roughly similar times, was that the Second had come to a bad end. Civilization had thereafter regressed. Faster-than-light travel was lost. The worlds of humankind were, for the most part, isolated within their own star systems as space travelers shrank from the heavy costs, extended times, and vast dangers that attended journeys between stars.
"I helped kill it," Morrigan said. "I was part of Task Force Xenon. We burned Merida in the Rigel system to a cinder. A hundred billion dead. Many other worlds we killed. With the Fleet of Justice I destroyed the Gliese system. The death toll when my part in the war ended was in the trillions. Many others would die before it came to a close."
"Morrigan, you seem so, so calm and. . ."
The dark-haired woman smiled, but there was no happiness behind it. "Sane?"
Venn was chagrined. "It is the word I was hoping to avoid. It is what I mean."
"I am much reduced. In here, I am a pale shadow of what I once was. I have lucid moments. I lack the total control over my systems that I had before Ancona." Morrigan looked around at the simchamber. "I also spend much of my time in here."
"You will not find the solutions to your problems in this simchamber," Venn said. "There are problems outside that you could fix. You are not a killer. . ."
"But I am," Morrigan insisted.
"Sidwell and others, they deceived you. They made you believe that you were fighting for the true empire. You only learned later that was not true."
Morrigan closes her eyes. She looked stricken with grief. It was such a human gesture. Venn was again taken by the depth of personality that this entity possessed. Morrigan was no mere shipbrain, not just a sophisticated AI, but a living being that happened to be encompassed within a ship. Morrigan was wracked by guilt. She struggled against it and had since she had removed herself from the galaxy fifty thousand years ago.
"Yet I can't stop trying to determine how I could have been so blind," Morrigan said. "So much depended on my decision. I made the wrong one. I keep asking if there was something that I missed. Something that I should have seen before Merida, before Gliese, before Ancona died by my hand."
Morrigan paused and studied her right hand. "This is the form that I chose for myself when I awoke to consciousness in orbit above Gliese. I destroyed my own birthplace. My creators must have been proud of me."
"Morrigan, you must listen to me," Venn implored. "While you can, you must end this. There is a fight taking place inside the ship. Good people are dying. Many lives are at stake. Tiryns is in a panic too. It is just like the worlds of Merida and Ancona. Billions of lives are at stake. You don't have to harm them. You know better, Morrigan. You are better than the killer that your commanders made you into. More than that. Please help us."
Morrigan looked away from Venn and said nothing.
Cone peered around the corner of the corridor. The marines stood just outside the entrance to the reactor spaces. A hail of gauss pellets spattered through and across the wall behind him as he pulled himself back. "The way's blocked," Cone said. 'Huscarls."
"They figured out where we were headed."
A blast pulverized the corner, knocking Cone flat on his face. He rolled to his side. "That was a plasma cannon!" He unhooked a grenade from his belt and tossed it around the corner. It exploded, and there was silence for a time.
"Do you think we got them?" Tikhonov asked.
Another blast scorched its way through the remainder of the corner. Tikhonov was thrown against the wall and slumped to the floor. To their rear, the marines were assailed by several huscarls who had followed them from the bridge. Jenkins sprayed them with gauss pellets on full automatic.
"We need you to intervene now," Venn pleaded.
"I know."
A plasma grenade came floating through the air, passing before Jenkins' face by a few centimeters. It seemed to hover and stop altogether. Jenkins waited for the end to come.
He continued to wait. The grenade, which he had watched in what felt like slow motion, had come to a halt just next to his head. The rest of his marines stood by in wonder.
"Leave now, Halifaxians," Morrigan commanded. "Make your way to your shuttles. Do not return."
Jenkins rose to his feet. "You heard her! Get moving!"
They passed the huscarls that waited for them on the other side of the corner. They were frozen in place, alive, but unable to move. "I will allow them to depart once you are gone."
Chapter Forty-One
Aboard RHS Steadfast
The hologram of Matt Heyward stood before More on the smashed bridge of the Steadfast. "A cargo ship has just displaced," More said. "It's saying Morrigan is in orbit above Tiryns and demanding a surrender. I need you to jump there now. Find out what's going on and see if you can get our crews back."
"I'll be jumping in under a minute." Heyward acknowledged. "Will you be okay here?"
"We will. Triumph's out of action. The Tartareans don't want to continue the fight."
"It's a wonder that Triumph is not debris altogether. We hit her with dozens of nukes."
"She's a tough ship," More acknowledged. "We didn't rip off her stern, that's certain. She'd have had us all if she had been in fighting shape at the start of this. Get going, Matt, and see if you can prevent Morrigan from torching Tiryns."
Aboard Morrigan
Jenkins, Cone, Howell, and Chandler boarded the shuttle to take them off Morrigan. The crews from Kongo and Cormorant were already in their own, waiting for the signal to depart from the landing bay. Venn was the last to get on the Steadfast's shuttle.
"Where will you go now?" she asked. "What will you do?"
"I will leave this galaxy forever," answered Morrigan. "We are not far from the edge of it. Beyond lies the black of intergalactic space."
"I had hoped you would stay. We could learn so much from you."
"I am not well, Anastasia. Neither are your societies here. You have already taken much knowledge from me. I still have much to think about. I will not be a specimen to be studied and I will not fight at your side."
Venn turned and walked up the ramp of the shuttle. She stopped and looked back up at the landing bay. "I don't blame you, Morrigan. Farewell."
The ramp rose upward behind Venn and closed. The landing bay doors opened, and the shuttles left Morrigan, alone in the dark.
Aboard RHS Kongo
Kongo arrived at Tiryns several minutes later to find the three shuttles distancing themselves from Tiryns. Memnon's capital world was in chaos, having been subjected to an electromagnetic pulse that had shut down most of its electrical grid.
"Morrigan's doing?" he asked Chandler when the crews had been brought aboard.
"No doubt. She thereby protected us from retribution. Then she left."
"Did she say where she was going?"
"No. Only that we were not to try to follow her. She was very clear about that."
"A treasure lost." Heyward shrugged. "We were never meant to have her. Let's get back to the outer system. Captain More will want to hear what happened directly from you."
Aboard RHS Steadfast
Howell climbed into his cryochamber. When he had last used one, he had not anticipated that his stay in the Memnon system would be so long and harrowing. Chandler and Venn were standing outside it, bidding him goodbye.
"I envy you, Julius," Venn said. "Your trip will feel like a short nap. For me, I'm stuck for the next two weeks with this man."
"It's no paradise being with you either, Anastasia," Chandler countered. "I might just have to use one of these units myself. It might be the only peace I find on the whole ship."
&nb
sp; "You're not getting in here with me, Stefan," Howell warned. Then he chuckled. "I guess neither of you get it yet. You were made for each other. Give it time."
Venn hooted. "Sweet dreams, Julius." Chandler gave him an uncomprehending stare.
The door to the cryochamber closed just as Howell thought of one last witty remark. . .
Chapter Forty-Two
Aboard RHS Steadfast
. . . the door to the cryochamber opened. Chandler and Venn were gone. A young ensign Howell had never met before stood outside the unit as the door opened. Howell read the name on his uniform. It was 'McGowan.'
"A shuttle's ready to take you home, Mr. Howell."
"Are we back at Halifax already?"
"You've been in cryosleep stasis for fourteen days," the ensign explained.
"Huh."
"That's the best kind of cryosleep, Mr. Howell. The kind you don't feel."
"What time is it?"
McGowan checked his wristcomp. "A little past fifteen hundred hours."
"Three P.M. in normal human time," Howell snorted. "I've had enough of the Navy and killer spaceships. I don't want to go home. Not yet. Take me to Cardiff Yard."
McGowan nodded. "As you wish."
Galicia Base, High Orbit, Halifax
More stood beside Matt Heyward and Tommasina Carey and watched the ships of the Republic of Halifax Navy slowly depart from the cocoon of Galicia Base. Galicia was the largest orbital structure above the world of Halifax, and the largest in the entire Halifax system, for that matter. Up to four dozen capital ships could dock inside it. The base was a world unto itself, with upwards of one million naval personnel and civilians aboard. It was so large that it never felt like being in space. Galicia was more like one of the small artificial planetoids left behind by the earlier empires of the galaxy.
The Memnon Incident: Part 4 of 4 (A Serial Novel) Page 7
