Tanis Richards: Blackest Night - A Military Hard Science Fiction Space Opera Epic (Aeon 14: Origins of Destiny Book 3)
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Tanis nodded as she settled back down onto her bunk. “Makes sense. Like you said, they’re almost always just power grabs. Rarely are they truly altruistic in nature…I mean, it’s war. War is not altruistic.”
“Let them. I’ll show them the altruism of a bunch of people bleeding out in some shit station’s dingy corridors. I get that it’s necessary at times, and I’ll do my part. But I’m not going to lie to myself about what it is.”
She shrugged as she closed her eyes. “I really don’t think so. Now stop yammering, my fragile organic brain needs some sleep after Crantor.”
INTERROGATE
STELLAR DATE: 02.21.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Main Asteroid Belt, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Light flared in Harm’s mind.
At first it was a pinprick in the distance, then it widened; stretching across his vision, spreading until it spanned from horizon to horizon.
Following the light came the roar of static and an acrid smell of burnt metal.
For a moment it overwhelmed him, suffusing all thought, tearing at his very sanity. Desperate to stop the cacophony, he accessed his sensory inputs and attenuated the information flow, dimming the light and diminishing the sound.
The voice came into his mind in a whisper, words mixed with the static, barely perceptible.
Harm replied, adding as much steel as he was able. His mind felt muddy, like he was thinking through sludge.
An analysis of his mental state revealed that, while his defenses had successfully protected his brain from the tetrodotoxin, he seemed to have no access to his body at all. Not only that, but the blood flowing into his brain was laced with a rather unpleasant chemical cocktail intended to weaken his cognitive powers and make him open to suggestion.
His defenses were fighting it, but whoever was attacking him had intimate knowledge of the division’s counterinterrogation techniques.
Which meant he’d found the mole…well, perhaps not ‘found’, exactly.
Harm decided to press with more questions, eager to learn what this person would say—and not say.
A callous laugh came into his mind.
Harm spat the words out.
The laugh came again, followed by a fresh bout of static.
The fear that he was quite literally disembodied had been lingering in the back of Harm’s mind. The nature of the light and static inputs had the feel of direct taps, not information coming through organic sensory systems.
That’s it, then. I’m a brain in a jar.
He was surprised that the realization didn’t bother him more than it did. The chemical cocktail flowing into his mind was likely partially responsible for that.
The other reason being bodiless didn’t bring about anything approaching terror was because it wasn’t the first time his brain had been outside a body.
The light disappeared and darkness came back, a welcome nothing after the blinding whiteness. Then an image came to his ocular interface systems, and he accepted the feed, buffering the visual to ensure nothing untoward lay within the datastream.
Oh, shit…I’m fucked.
The visual was of a lab. The curved bulkheads indicated a ship’s interior. A large shuttle, perhaps. On the left of the area was a tank filled with a clear solution, and within it floated his brain—at least, he assumed it was his brain. It was still coated in its protective nanofilm, blood vessels connected at various points, feeding life into the isolated organ.
Wires connected to the mods at the back of his brain, tapping into those which processed his augmented vision and hearing. A few others connected to other mods, though none penetrated the nanofilm.
While it was certainly disconcerting to know that the entirety of his being was suspended in that tank, it was far from the most alarming thing in the lab.
Sitting next to the tank was an ancient—and incredibly illegal—piece of equipment whose existence and purpose was expressly forbidden by the Phobos Accords.
On the far side of the slightly dingy machine, slotted into a racking mechanism, were a series of ten-centimeter-long tubes that were right out of a history vid.
If that vid were showing one of the greatest atrocities ever visited on humans and AIs.
But the thing that Harm’s focus was continually pulled back to was the name written in bright red lettering on the machine he now knew would be his undoing: Heartbridge.
The person who stepped into his view had never even come under suspicion of being the mole in Division 99: Lieutenant Lane, a low-level analyst who worked in communications on Vesta.
HYPERION
STELLAR DATE: 02.28.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Kirby Jones, approaching Hyperion
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The coffee’s aroma was like heaven launching an assault on Tanis’s nostrils. It sent an encouragement to her br
ain, reminding her that she would be able to pull herself together for the day’s work.
“I hate it when our shift cycle is misaligned with a station just enough that I only get three hours of sleep,” Tanis groused as she settled into her command chair on the bridge.
“I hear you, Commander,” Jeannie replied, half turning from her console to look Tanis over. “Good morning…or afternoon…or whatever it is. We need to go somewhere with sunrise after this…think that’s possible?”
Tanis knew that her crew deserved leave on a world of their choice. Jeannie was Venusian and had dropped several hints that she was itching for a trip home.
“You don’t have sunrises on Venus,” Tanis replied. “Stars, your ‘dawn’ takes a week.”
“That’s what makes me miss it even more. On Venus, we savor our sunrises. I still remember when I was on Ceres for training; if you blinked it was over. I’d go into the commissary to grab a drink in the middle of the day, and come out and it would be pitch black.”
“You’re ruining my story, Lovell,” Jeannie complained. “You get my point, though. I grew up with a hundred-and-twelve-day…day.”
“Seems excessive,” Tanis said before taking a welcome sip of her coffee. “Besides, when it’s nighttime, you have those orbiting fusion suns so all the plants don’t die. For half the year, you get regular-ish days.”
“Yeah, they do make a sort of dim, half-light day,” Jeannie replied. “But it’s still not like Ceres’ two-hours of light. Heck if it wasn’t for the fact that the ring was close to the surface and stationary, you’d get dizzy looking up at the stars wheeling overhead.”
“Could be worse.” Tanis gestured toward Hyperion spinning on their forward holo. “We could be stationed out here.”
“Sweet black between the stars. No way, Commander, don’t even say that. Place makes Vesta look like paradise.”
“You’ve got the view of Saturn, though,” Tanis replied. “That counts for something in my book.”
Jeannie glanced at the forward holo, which was dominated by a view of the ringed planet, with a small multi-toroid station directly in the foreground.
Once, Hyperion had been a moon of Saturn’s, rich in water and a few other trace minerals. A mining facility had been set up by a consortium, and roughly eight hundred years ago, the moon had been completely consumed. All that remained was a five-kilometer-long spire with a habitation torus on one end.
The mining company had put it up for sale, and the Terran Space Force snatched it up in a heartbeat to augment their facility on Iapetus.
Now, after centuries of expansion, Hyperion was the largest TSF base in OuterSol. The spire was just over a hundred kilometers long, and was encircled by forty toroids of varying size.
As Tanis considered Hyperion’s origins, Jeannie replied, “Well, yeah, Saturn is beautiful, but Hyperion is just so bland inside. Have you ever been there, Commander?”
“No,” Tanis replied. “Never had the opportunity. But how is a station that old at all bland? Every place gets its own personality after a while.”
The lieutenant shrugged. “You’d think. Hyperion seems to have had a string of station commanders who have the personality of a blank sheet of plas. You know that smell new EV suits have?”
“Yeah,” Tanis nodded. “Gotta air them out for a week so you don’t get a headache from it.”
“Well, Hyperion is like that smell.”
“I don’t get it,” Tanis frowned. “It has that smell?”
Jeannie giggled. “No, Commander, the place is the physical embodiment of that smell.”
“That’s really not helping me visualize anything.”
“Well, I guess you’ll just have to find out on your own. But I think you’ll agree with my description.”
Tanis was looking over the Jones’s docking and resupply schedule when the date finally caught her attention.
“Shit! It’s my Earth-birthday today! Look at that, I’m thirty-three Earth years old.”
Jeannie craned her neck, looking back at Tanis. “How the heck do you forget it’s your birthday, Commander?”
“You don’t count birthdays in Earth years on Venus, do you?”
“Well, no, but I do keep track of it, since that’s the calendar the TSF uses. I’m just over forty-five Venusian years old.”
Tanis laughed. “I’m not even eighteen on Mars yet.”
“So again, how do you forget your Earth birthday?”
“Well…” Tanis shrugged. “I was born on February twenty-ninth, by Earther standards. Due to a rather fun bit of normalization that happens between Earth dates and Marsian dates, the TSF calendaring system doesn’t ever note my birthday unless it’s a leap year. It’s a pain in the ass, actually. Every year, I have to go to an admin office deep in Vesta’s bowels to get them to increment my age by a year in the space force’s records.”
“You’d think, right?” Tanis asked. “It was explained to me that it’s a bug in a base code library that no one knows how to work on anymore. It only affects people born in a three minute window on the Marsian calendar during an Earth leap day. For reasons no one can explain, it never happens on any other calendar conversion.”
“Seriously?” Jeannie asked, a hand over her mouth. “So if you hadn’t done that, you’d’ve aged, what…two years since you enlisted?”
Tanis nodded, a smile on her lips. “Yeah. I went three years not realizing I had to deal with this. Then I got this flag put on my record for suspicious promotion behavior given my age. That’s when I learned I needed to make the yearly pilgrimage.”
“Stars, I love the space force. You can’t make this shit up.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Well, happy birthday, Commander.”
“Thanks, Jeannie. No songs or cake.”
The lieutenant only winked in response before turning back to her console.
The pair lapsed into silence before Darla spoke up.
Darla needled.
Tanis tried to remember the cities of Saturn.
Darla let out a laugh that almost sounded maniacal.
TENTH
STELLAR DATE: 02.28.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Main Asteroid Belt, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The white place tore at Harm; again threatening to shred him to nothingness, rending him into diaphanous particles scattered by its tumultuous winds.
No. Now I know what this is. It’s just a lack of sensory input. I remember it from the histories. It won’t hurt me, it’s just an oversight in the system.
Like a switch had been flicked, the white place was gone, and Harm was standing on a featureless plain. Lieutenant Lane appeared before him, a cruel smile on her lips.
“Welcome, Harm.”
He took a step back and folded his arms, only now noticing that he had a body. Though it wasn’t his body—rather, it wasn’t Harm Ellis’s body. It was Elise Hargrove’s.
“I don’t know that I feel very welcome.”
“Harm…or should I say Elise, I’m hurt that you feel this way. It’s taken us some serious effort to get here. There have been some…failures along the way. But I’m now in a place to make proper progress with you.”
“Failures?” Harm asked, wondering what those poor copies of himself had been through. Then he realized that given the nature of the white place—which had been different than what he’d experienced when Lane first woke him—he might very well be a copy now. An AI built from his own neural network, malleable and ready to be used for his creator’s purpose.
Back before the Sentience Wars, when the Heartbridge Corporation had begun their experimentation with creating true, sentient AIs, the seed AIs made by the machine Lane possessed had been known as Weapon Born.